they/beast
Works by JS Bach, Philip Glass, Shelley Washington, Pat Posey
Pat Posey (tubax)
Avie AV2638 68:55 mins
The beast in they/beast is the tubax, a modified contrabass saxophone developed by German maker Benedikt Eppelsheim that has been around since the early 2000s. Pat Posey has played the tubax on various recordings (including the soundtrack to the 2023 film Transformers: Rise of the Beasts); this is the debut solo album for both instrument and instrumentalist. The growling, guttural timbre and harmonic overtones are perfectly showcased in Mo’ingus, the 2019 piece by Shelley Washington. Deep bass notes splinter, a groove fractures; the upper register flutters its eyelashes, broken by a climatic vocalisation. Posey displays colossal lung power and technique – presumably self-developed, given the newness of the tubax.
Almost everything here takes the listener into unchartered territory: the instrument appears well suited to multiphonics, including the more dissonant spectral multiphonics that are produced when notes drawn from one overtone series are sounded simultaneously (the tubax behaves more like a clarinet than saxophone in this aspect). These are central to Hymn, the fiendishly virtuosic 2021/22 piece by Posey. It’s rather like hearing Liszt play his early pyrotechnic works for the then newly invented piano – a dazzling, unsettling spectacle by a musician pushing the creative envelope. More familiar is Philip Glass’s 1995 Melodies for Saxophone: on the tubax, the compact, varied micro-series are spoonfuls of chocolate mousse. It’s perhaps too rich for Bach’s Suite No. 3 in C, which is virtually unrecognisable in this transcription. Claire Jackson