Taylor Ho Bynum Plays Full Circle

It starts with a wheezing shudder, a note, another note. A fragment of melody. A roll from the drums. A guitar that sounds like sonar. This lurching improvisation rises in intensity with a long, arcing squall of white noise from the cornet. The drums fall into a rhythm that fades away. A clarinet unleashes a flurry of notes like the call of a dinosaur. A rhythm emerges, a melody, forlorn but not entirely sad. And the thrill of the improvisation never goes away.

So goes ​“mm(pf),” from 2007’s The Middle Picture, the first release of the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet, made up of Bynum on cornet, Matt Bauder on tenor saxophone, clarinet, and bass clarinet, Mary Halvorson and Evan O’Reilly on electric guitars, Jessica Pavone on viola and electric bass, and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. It came out in 2007 from Firehouse 12 Records — the recording studio/concert space/barNew Haven-based music label — and marked a kind of turning point for Bynum, who had moved from New York City to New Haven and has built an international career as a player, composer, and bandleader since.

“It’s mm, then parentheses, and then pf,” Bynum explained in an interview on WNHH radio’s ​“Northern Remedy on Tuesday.” ​“I called it that because the first two notes of the bass line, I stole from a P. Funk tune,” he said. ​“The mm stood for minimalist materials.”

“The jazz standard tradition is that you play the melody and then improvise off of it. With that tune I wanted to start by improvising as minimally as possible and build into a melody,” Bynum added. The analogy he used for the musicians was to liken the piece to a film of a windowpane breaking, but in reverse. ​“That’s what we want to do. We want to start shattered, crystallized dust, and then re-form back into a full pane of glass.”

The Middle Picture was the second release for Firehouse 12 Records. ​“A couple years before I had reconnected with Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12,” Bynum said. ​“It’s funny because Nick and I had gone to elementary school together and were neighbors, but hadn’t seen each other for ages. I was in town maybe five or six years before that, playing in the band for a show at Yale Rep … and we hit it off again.”

“‘You’re doing weird music, I’m doing weird music! We got to hang out!’” was how Bynum summed up the rekindling of the friendship. Bynum brought his sextet up from New York to record at Firehouse 12. About a year later, Bynum and Lloyd decided to start Firehouse 12 Records. The first release was 2006’s 10-CD Anthony Braxton box set, 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006, ​“because that’s the normal way to start a record label — with a 10-CD deluxe box set,” Bynum said with a laugh.

But the choice of Braxton wasn’t an accident. A MacArthur ​“genius grant” recipient, Braxton is an internationally recognized artist who is also a local hero and mentor for many of New Haven’s improvisers. And Bynum had met him years ago at Wesleyan, when he arrived as an eager freshman with chops for straight jazz on the cornet, but already an itch to do something different.

Cool As Ice Cream

Bynum was born in Baltimore but grew up in Boston. He started playing piano at the age of 7 or 8 and switched to trumpet when he was 10. He was drawn to the sound of the instrument. And his next-door neighbors happened to be really close friends with Roger Voisin, former principal trumpet player of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

“When I was 6 or 7 years old we would go over to our neighbor’s house for the holidays, and Roger Voisin would be there,” Bynum said. Voisin ​“would play Christmas carols for people because he was a really good friend of theirs, and he let me play his trumpet. I remember thinking that was super-cool.”

Lessons followed, and by high school he was serious. ​“I never played jazz right. I was already making too many weird sounds,” he said. But apparently it was enough for his boss at the ice-cream store where he worked. He let Bynum do a weekly jazz series there.

“At first it was always my group and then I started actually booking other people. I was 16 or 17 years old,” Bynum said with a laugh. ​“I literally paid all the musicians in ice cream…. My boss said, ​‘this is probably the best job you’ll ever have,’ and I said, ​‘you’re right! This is the best job.’” And one of the musicians who played at the ice cream was Tomas Fujiwara, who Bynum reconnected with years later and still plays with all the time today.

Bynum’s high school lost its music program to budget cuts, but a friend of Bynum’s who was attending college nearby told him the school’s big band needed another trumpet player. The professor let him sit in. That was Bill Lowe, a trombone player who had begun his career in the 1960s and worked with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to avant idol Henry Threadgill. ​“He was a really interesting musician, and my first primary mentor, moving me into improvised music, creative music, jazz, whatever you want to call it,” Bynum said. Lowe saw that Bynum was ​“bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” and started hiring him for professional gigs, as well as getting him into composers’ labs and smaller ensembles to explore what music could do, and what he could do with it.

Bynum’s musical world in Boston was so big that going to Wesleyan — at first — seemed like a letdown, ​“too much of a bubble,” Bynum said. He dropped out after one year. He biked down the West Coast and worked on a construction crew. He went to a jazz conservatory for a semester, and then realized, ​“you know, I really liked that Braxton guy in college. I’m going to go back.”

Braxton And The Firehouse

For Bynum, Braxton had ​“this approach to creativity that is universal and empowering and global…. As he always says, he calls himself a professional student of music. It’s never about finding the answer. It’s about finding the questions, and always there being a search … he’s utterly brilliant, but also eternally curious, and that was so inspiring.”

Braxton, other professors at Wesleyan, and the community of musicians around him helped Bynum to think about music across genres and to explore what they all had to offer. Bynum grew to see Duke Ellington and Miles Davis as being more similar to the free jazz movement than others might argue; for him, all of them were about exploring individual creativity and expanding the forms of their genre.

He moved back to Boston to cut his teeth as a working musician. He played big band, New Orleans brass band stuff, rock, and salsa. He dove into Boston’s improvised music scene. His community expanded, and pulled him southward, to New York. He worked for an arts organization and played more gigs. He formed the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet, which involved Fujiwara and Mary Halvorson. 

“That someone of her creativity can get recognized in a New York Times story gives one hope,” Bynum said. But Bynum and Halvorson discovered they also had a shared history. ​“We grew up in the same town,” Bynum said. ​“We went to the same high school. We went to the same summer music camp. We went to the same university. We both dropped out of that university to go to the same conservatory and then ultimately returned to that university. And we actually lived in the same apartment in Brooklyn — all before we met each other. Because I’m five years older than her. So we never overlapped.” And it was Anthony Braxton that introduced them to each other.

New York was ​“fantastic” for Bynum creatively, but he hated living there. ​“I hated not seeing trees. I got very stressed out by the stresses of the city, taking three hours to go grocery shopping and taking half a day to go to the laudromat … I’m really glad I was there. The relationships I cultivated and the music I got to do still carries me to this day, eight years later. But I needed to move.”

His wife, Rachel Bernsen, agreed. So they came to Connecticut, and settled in New Haven; they moved into their house in Fair Haven Heights in 2008. Bynum started hiking and biking a lot again. Not coincidentally, he found his composition chops reinvigorated. He reconnected with Lloyd, Braxton, and the scene here, still kept his relationships with musicians in New York and Boston. He ​“proselytizes” for New Haven now, telling his bandmates they should move to the Elm City.

In addition to being a mentor, Braxton is now one of Bynum’s closest friends and collaborator. Bynum helps run the Tricentric Foundation, which, as Bynum describes it, ​“is explicitly devoted to promoting [Braxton’s] work and legacy.” He also travels extensively for gigs across the United States and to Europe. This month will see him in Seattle, and in February he’ll travel to Italy for a string of shows with the Emanuele Parrini Quartet before doing a show in Brooklyn with his own group in March.

And he continues to develop his own vision as a musician and composer, striking a balance between improvisation and composition — or creating music that, following in Braxton’s big footsteps, seeks to question whether there’s really much of a difference.

“At its best, the creative music that I’m interested in has the best of capitalism and the best of communism, in that it totally respects the collective,” Bynum said. ​“One individual can’t improve without raising the collective. And yet it opens up a space for individual initiative and individual entrepreneurial instinct, and risk-taking. Unlike most things that we do these days, which are kind of the worst of capitalism and the worst of communism, with horrible bureaucratic structures and wild inequality and injustice.”

“You want the art you make at the very least to present an alternative model for human interaction,” Bynum added. ​“One that shows that … humans from different generations, different races, different genders, can interact beautifully and constructively, with a little bit of guidance and leadership and with individual initiative, and create something great. If nothing else, I feel that message is why I follow the music I follow, and why my heroes are my heroes, and why I try to do what I do.”

He appraised his own statement. ​“That does sound pretty high-falutin’. I also just like to make weird farting sounds on brass instruments. So.”

Click above to download or listen to the full interview with Taylor Ho Bynum.