Pat Posey publishes “they/beast”, which includes Philip Glass’ thirteen “Melodies for saxophone” arranged for tubax.

The American saxophonist, clarinetist and tubax player Pat Posey (Columbus, Ohio, 1978) -founder of LARQ (Los Angeles Reed Quintet) and member of Le Train Bleu, as well as guest saxophonist for Wild Up on the recording of the third volume of Julius Eastman’s anthology If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? – has just released an album entitled they/beast – published by the British label Avie Records – on which he has recorded Philip Glass’s thirteen Melodies for Saxophone and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 in C major, BWV 1009, arranged for tubax (a modified saxophone, developed in 1999 by the German instrument maker Benedikt Eppelsheim).

Glass’s thirteen Melodies for Saxophone were composed in 1995 as the soundtrack to Jean Genet’s play Prisoner of Love – the French writer’s last play, published in May 1986, just weeks after his death – in its New York premiere in a version by Glass’s ex-wife, the theatre director Joanne Akalaitis. The pieces are brief, usually no longer than two minutes, in the form of sketches or simple studies, but they are appealing and are among the Baltimore composer’s lesser-known works, although some of them were incorporated into the themes of Glass’s Concerto for Saxophone Quartet.

The deep, rough sonority that the tubax’s sonority imparts to the melodies contrasts sharply with the sweetness of the only previous recording of which I am aware – the Saxophone album recorded in 2002 by Andrew Sterman, with four pieces for tenor, three for soprano, three for alto and three for baritone.

Apart from the six movements of Bach’s Cello Suite, the disc is completed by a work, MO’INGUS – by the young saxophonist and composer Shelley Washington, composed for baritone saxophone in 2016 and inspired by the music of Charles Mingus, known as “the angry man of jazz” – and Posey’s own piece, Hymn, in which he explores the multiple timbral possibilities of the tubax.