Album Review: John Butcher – Away, I Was (2026; Relative Pitch)

(originally published at Avant Music News)

John Butcher’s latest set of solo performances, Away, I Was, feels like something of a retrospective. The pieces span 17 years. They include improvisations and written pieces, tenor and soprano saxophone, bare horns and overdubbing. Yet a true retrospective of the Butcher solo oeuvre would require much more. Away, I Was documents more than a moment, but less than a career: Call it the record of a phase.

The Englishman is responsible for much of what it means to play solo saxophone. His experiments in the form date back to 1991’s 13 Friendly Numbers, and he has added many more in the years since. His unaccompanied horn is a regular feature on the European free-jazz circuit, and he has sought out unique venues as collaborators, such as a variety of off-the-track sites in Scotland on 2008’s Resonant Spaces.

What has always been striking about Butcher’s solo playing is his restraint. He develops ideas carefully, slowly. Sometimes even quietly. His virtuosity makes the discipline even more effective. Some of his improvisations could almost be written etudes. I can’t help but think of Oliver Nelson’s bookish solos on Blues and the Abstract Truth; Butcher delivers the extreme avant-garde version of that.

The strongest example on this collection is “Fujin’,” on unaccompanied soprano. Recorded last year in Oslo, it begins with sounds that teeter in the balance between simple breathing and bird calls through the mouthpiece. Lesser instrumentalists would be tempted to start on a different horn (perhaps an actual bird call) and move to the sax. Butcher doesn’t need to. As the piece develops, he lands on pattern of long tones, alternating with silences. It’s the kind of music he might play to explore one of those resonant spaces, yet this venue has no evocative echoes. It is solo saxophone stripped to its core.

Butcher’s preoccupations are even more evident on “Fragile Thread,” a shorter piece on tenor. This one is composed, dedicated to Eliane Radigue and Lester Young--honorees who surely have never been paired before. Yet in these hands it makes sense. Radigue is an inspiration to composers and improvisors who want to explore the extremes of extended organic development. And while the sax sound is hardly Lester, the examination of what a tenor can sound like is just what the Prez set in motion.

Many of these observations would have applied to 13 Friendly Numbers, 35 years ago. Yet in that time, Butcher has gone further on almost every dimension. The earlier work has little that is so calm or deliberate. Few of the improvised pieces came so close to the coherence of a fully composed work. Now the line is fully blurred. Away, I Was is unaccompanied Butcher at his best.