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“So a few weeks after the sessions where Elori and I had produced the pieces that were going to be coming together in this album,” the saxophonist/bass clarinetist Henry Solomon was recalling for me the other day, referring to his frequent collaborator, experimental electronic composer Elori Saxl, “she and I were trying to come up with titles for the various movements, and Elori was just shooting off possibilities. One of which was ‘Seeing Is Forgetting.’ Now, I hadn't actually read, let alone heard of, the book. But I just gravitated towards that phrase. I was like, Wow, that'd be a really cool title. It felt like it kind of represented or at any rate related to the music in an interesting way. And then Elori was like, ‘Well, funnily enough, there's this book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, and it's a conversational biography book about the artist Robert Irwin.’ And Irwin was somebody I did know about. I'd been seeing his work everywhere, and invariably loving it. And in fact his work also feels like it relates to the album in a remarkable way.”
As it happens, I was the writer, over forty-five years ago, of the book in question, which is why Elori and Henry first contacted me about contributing these notes. That title phrase, incidentally, derived from a remark by the French poet Paul Valery (1871-1945), but it had always seemed to me distinctly evocative of Bob Irwin’s own artistic trajectory, suggesting all the things he’d had to forget or at any rate get over, one after the next—figuration, abstraction, line, focus, frame, gallery-placement, and eventually even objecthood of any sort, down to the piece’s very name—before finally arriving at what he took to be the true subject of art, which is to say unmediated presence in the world, or perception itself. “Simply helping people to perceive themselves perceiving” having been the point all along, as he used to say by the end.
“And that’s part of what’s so uncanny about that title in terms of this specific project of ours,” Elori now chimed in. “Because this time out was unlike any of our earlier collaborations in which we’d each arrived with prepared material to share with the other person, who’d then respond, we’d discuss and discuss things and things would evolve, before we actually started recording anything. But this time, arriving at the studio in LA, we didn't even talk at all before starting to play. Henry and I have played together a lot, but we've never improvised in that way together. And before we knew it, it was like hours had passed and that was where this album came from: I mean subsequently we sort of edited it down and found the parts we liked most, but everything had been completely improvised with no conversation and, for me anyway, I've never made music in that way before and to do so was almost earth-shattering, completely changing my sense of where ideas come from, where music comes from, like if you even need to have ideas about something before you just start playing. So that's what that phrase “seeing is forgetting” and Irwin's work and you guys's conversations all tap into for me, just that sheer sense of physicality and presence.”
Perhaps presence especially, I hazarded, which isn’t so much about the immediate present as duration, about staying present. About being lost to both past and future, yes, but being and staying in the present over a period of time, which sounds like, from what you’re describing, happened with you two there in that studio in LA.”
“Exactly,” Henry now joined in. “But what I’d add is that just the way Elori played, just the rate at which her ideas were happening was far slower than I am used to. I come from a jazz background, and usually when I’m playing with others, it’s very intense and urgent and fast. Whereas I feel like playing with Elori, she just really slowed me down and I started thinking more about just the way my instrument sounds playing, like one or two notes at a time, what it feels like to hold a note for thirty seconds, just to experience that resonance. Without that sense of urgency, I was able to play very differently. And it also feels like, when we were listening back, that I had to slow down there too, simply in order to be able to emotionally connect with the music. And I feel like since then, I've developed a way broader spectrum of attention with all my other music listening and music making.”
It's interesting in this context, I suggested, that there’s a countervailing phrase that one sometimes hears about how in order to listen, to really listen, one has to blur one’s sense of visual acuity, or even to close one’s eyes, such that, in a way, to truly listen is to forget to look.
Incidentally, I went on, I didn’t know whether they knew that Bob Irwin himself had only just died several months back, at age 95. (They had not.) And one amazing thing about that was how during his last several years, he had virtually completely lost any short- or intermediate-term memory—which was obviously quite extraordinary in a man whose biography had been called “Seeing Is Forgetting.” But the one thing that had survived completely untrammeled in Bob was his exquisitely calibrated aesthetic judgment and, unlike, say, Willem de Kooning, whose work got more and more simple as he drifted into Alzheimer's, Bob’s work was getting more and more complex and ornate, positively rococo—rococo minimalism! For, ironically, in those last years he’d achieved the very thing he’d always been after, which is to say, pure presence, no past no future just immediate presence to the task before him.
We were all silent for a moment, pondering all that.
By the way, I asked, when exactly did you have those sessions in LA recording this album?
Henry seemed to have a good memory for that sort of thing and instantly replied “October 19th and 20th, 2023.”
That is remarkable, I countered. Because after a week or so in the hospital in San Diego, Bob Irwin himself passed on October 25th, 2023.
Make of that what you will.