Unpacking Big Ears, Part V: The Harold Budd Sets

Photo by Jake Giles Netter from The New York Times

(Instructions: To properly read this post, scroll down to the bottom and start the video, then scroll back up and let the music play as you read.)

"Harold Budd’s compositions are often sparse and meditative," music critic John Parales wrote in the NY Times, "contemplating a handful of notes reverberating into silence."

Harold Budd performed three times during Big Ears 2019, and we attended two of those performances.  It's impossible to overstate the exalted position Harold Budd holds in our imagination.  We first heard him in 1980 while we were still in graduate school studying geology at Boston University and Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror came out, a collaboration with Brian Eno and the second album after Ambient 1: Music for Airports in Eno's ambient series (there were four releases in that series altogether). Budd's glacially slow and extremely elegant approach to the piano and the way he let the long sustained tones of the piano strings reverberate fascinated us, and it didn't hurt that the album covers for the Ambient series were composed of collages of bits and pieces of topographic maps and we were studying cartography at the time.

It didn't take long for us to become fans and soon we were collecting Budd albums, a marked departure form the free jazz and post-punk/new wave records we were otherwise listening to at the time.  It was great late-night music for studying or for covering up the sound of one's college roommates without the music becoming it's own distraction, but beyond its utility, it was also breathtakingly beautiful in its own right.  More than the other ambient musicians of the time, Harold Budd's music wasn't just for background but could be listened to on its own, and it immediately rewarded the listener for their effort. Throughout the 80s and 90s, we bought Harold Budd LPs and CDs whenever we saw one for sale, and in the 00s and 10s, the age of file sharing, we were able to fill in gaps we didn't even know existed in our collection as music distribution went digital.

But not only did we never see Harold Budd perform live, we had never even heard of Budd performing live and in fact, we didn't even conceive of him as a live performer.  Even though we knew he was alive and active, he was primarily a composer and it seemed no more likely or appropriate to see him perform in person than it would have been to see, say, Bach or Edgar Varese. It never occurred to us that going to a Harold Budd performance was something that people could do, so we were literally in jaw-dropped astonishment  when Big Ears announced its 2019 line up and Harold Budd was listed as the headliner and composer in residence.

On Friday afternoon, after we saw Lonnie Holley at The Mill & Mine, we took the long walk over to the Church Street Church on the other side of town, where Harold Budd presented several new compositions.  The pieces were performed by a small ensemble of instruments including orchestral chimes, keyboard and gongs (Knoxville's nief-norf ensemble) and the harpist Mary Lattimore, who we've seen play before with musicians as diverse as Juliana Barwick, Lonnie Holley, and even Thurston Moore.   According to Parales of the Times, Budd's pieces in that performance "shared momentary clusters of notes or fleeting motifs, like bits of crystal briefly catching the light."

Harold Budd (conducting) and Mary Lattimore at the Church Street Church, Knoxville

To us, Budd's music sounds like highly-specific but long-forgotten fragments of memories, like the play of light from a mountain lake on a summer day, the touch of a lover's hair, or awakening from an afternoon nap.  He can evoke a meditative state without resorting to Eastern instrumentation or motifs.  There's power to it, and few composers get more from the "less-is-more" ethic than Harold Budd.

We missed Budd's Saturday afternoon concert but the buzz on the streets of Knoxville, at least what we heard, is that it was terribly disorganized and seemingly unplanned, and the musicians only played about for about 60 minutes of a two-hour time slot and most of that seemed to be just some sort of holding pattern waiting for some sort of direction from the composer that never came.  But we weren't there, so we don't know.  We only know what we were told.

Fortunately for us, his Sunday night show at the Bijou Theater was both revelatory and triumphant. An ensemble billed as "Harold Budd & Friends" included his son Terrence Budd on acoustic guitar, the keyboardist Tim Story, and Sean Conners on percussion.  The entire two-hour performance consisted of an extended version of a single piece, As Long As I Can Hold My Breath from the 2005 album, Avalon Sutra.  The different sections of the ensemble, which included strings, woodwinds and piano, all played different motifs and passages repeated over and over, but at different intervals, so that different sections were overlain by other  different sections throughout the course of the performance, creating new and different moods and emotional contexts for the music as the piece progressed. From time to time, the younger Budd's guitar or Tom Story's piano would ever so lightly ripple over the soundscape.  Percussionist Sean Conners added near-comic relief at times by laying small bits of different percussion over the music with stone-faced, mock solemnity, including, at one point, a ludicrously oversized cowbell, and at another, a  triangle solo.  Yes, we literally had a triangle solo, but it wasn't anything like this:

The over-theatrical, mock pretentiousness of his performance even elicited smirks and smiles from other  members of the ensemble, even the younger Budd, but the concert was far from a comedy routine.  It was a sublime meditation on sound, emotion, and sustained concentration, and while much did not happen during the course of the two-hour performance that didn't already occur during the first 10 minutes, this listener never found it boring, and although it was repetitive it was never repetitious. 

Harold Budd & Friends (l. to r.): string section, unknown pianist, unknown (but remarkable) oboist, percussionist Sean Conners, guitarist Terrence Budd, and pianist Tim Story. Composer Harold Budd off stage.

Not that it mattered at all, but other than a short piano part at the beginning of the performance, Harold Budd himself was nowhere to be seen on stage, leaving the piano parts to the two other pianists in the ensemble.  He did return to the stage for the standing ovation at the end of the piece, although briefly and seemingly reluctantly (he only came out at the insistence of his son, and then he merely hovered a moment in the wings behind everybody else).

Ovation (l. to r.): Sean Conners, Terrence Budd, Harold Budd, Tim Story 

Here's the extended studio version of As Long As I Can Hold My Breath from Avalon Suta (the album has a shorter, 4-minute version of the piece, as well as the CD-long version below) for you to enjoy, ideally as you read this post and hopefully to carry you through the rest of your day.

Bonus points: the morning after, before we checked out of our Knoxville hotel to return home, we heard a lovely sax recital by somebody (we don't know who) practicing in the next room, and then later we saw Harold Budd himself having breakfast in the hotel lobby with Tim Story.