Harold Budd
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"A lot of nice things have been written on here about Harold Budd since his recent death. The first time I met him he spoke with such awe and enthusiasm about playing drums with Albert Ayler when they were in the military together. This deep connection between Budd's compositional aesthetic and the emollient, spiritual dimension of so-called free jazz is often overlooked, the place where the emotion of the Black churches met investigations into Islam, Hindustani and Carnatic music and visionary Afrocentrism. There's no better illustration of this than Marion Brown's own recording of "Bismillahi 'Rrahman' Rrahim", recorded in 1975 with Budd playing celesta and gong, Reggie Workman on bass, Stanley Cowell on piano. So beautiful."--David Toop, FB, Dec 2020 |
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Harold Budd (May 24, 1936 - December 8, 2020) was an American composer and poet working in the minimalist and avant-garde tradition. He is known for compositions such as "Bismillahi 'Rrahman' Rrahim".
He is also known for his work with Brian Eno and for what he called a "soft pedal" technique for playing piano.
Composer and recording artist
In 1972, while still retaining his teaching career, he resurfaced as a composer. Spanning from 1972–1975, he created four individual works under the collective title The Pavilion of Dreams. The style of these works was an unusual blend of popular jazz and the avant-garde. In 1976 he resigned from the institute and began recording his new compositions, produced by British ambient pioneer Brian Eno. Two years later, Harold Budd's debut album, The Pavilion of Dreams (1978), was released.
Budd developed a style of piano playing he deemed "soft pedal," which can be described as slow and sustained. While he is often placed in the Ambient category, he emphatically declared that he was not an Ambient artist, and felt that he got "kidnapped" into the category. His two collaborations with Brian Eno, The Plateaux of Mirror and The Pearl, established his trademark atmospheric piano style. On Lovely Thunder, he introduced subtle electronic textures. His thematic 2000 release The Room saw a return to a more minimalist approach. In 2003, Daniel Lanois, a producer for U2 and Bob Dylan, and occasional collaborator with Brian Eno, recorded an impromptu performance of Harold playing the piano in his Los Angeles living room, unaware; it was released in 2005 as the album La Bella Vista.
His album Avalon Sutra from 2004 was billed as "Harold Budd's Last Recorded Work" by David Sylvian's independent record label Samadhisound. Their press release continued: "Avalon Sutra brings to a conclusion thirty years of sustained musical activity. Asked for his reasons, Budd says only that he feels that he has said what he has to say. With characteristic humility, he concludes, 'I don’t mind disappearing!' A farewell concert retrospective was performed at The Walt Disney Concert Hall/REDCAT in Los Angeles in September 2004, with Budd playing both solo and with guests Jon Gibson, Clive Wright and more. It featured music from Budd's Avalon Sutra, and as far back as "Lirio". A second farewell concert, featuring Budd and guest-starring many of the musicians he had worked with throughout his career, was presented at Brighton Dome in May 2005, also billed as being Budd's last public performance. In spite of this, Budd's soundtrack to the film Mysterious Skin (a collaboration with Robin Guthrie) and Music for 'Fragments from the Inside' (with Eraldo Bernocchi) were both released in 2005.
In February 2007, Samadhisound released Perhaps, a live recording of Budd's improvised performance at California Institute of Arts from December 6, 2006, in tribute to his late friend (and associate teacher at the then-newly formed CalArts) James Tenney.
In April 2007, Samadhisound released a podcast of Harold Budd in conversation with Akira Rabelais. In this (Samadhisound Podcast #2), Harold said that, although he had believed at the time of recording Avalon Sutra that it would be his last album, he no longer felt that way. "It was a time in my life when things weren't just falling together for me, and I thought that I was just going to let it all slide ... and I was sincere about it but if I had been more conscious of my real feelings and had explored my inner sanctum more I would've seen that it was a preposterous thing to do ... I was dreadfully lonely; I was living alone in the desert and had been for too long, really, and I felt that isolation very severely after a while, and it's probably a version of self-pity, I'm sorry to say, to have publicly said something like that, but there it is, I said it, turns out I wasn't telling the truth – I didn't know it at the time."
In June 2007, Darla Records released two CDs by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd: After the Night Falls and Before the Day Breaks. Recorded in spring 2006, each features nine tracks with linked titles, e.g. "How Distant Your Heart"/"How Close Your Soul" and "I Returned Her Glance"/"And Then I Turned Away".
In October 2008, Darla Records released a collaboration with Clive Wright entitled Song for Lost Blossoms. It includes recordings that were done live and in-studio at different locations, including both artists' homes. The album features some of their work done together between 2004 and 2006. A second collaborative effort with Wright, Candylion, followed in 2009, again on Darla Records.
In February 2011, Darla Records released a CD album by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd entitled Bordeaux, recorded in the summer of 2010 in Bordeaux, France and mixed in Guthrie's studio in Rennes, France.
In November 2011, Eraldo Bernocchi's RareNoiseRecords released a CD album by Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie entitled Winter Garden, recorded in the summer of 2010 in Tuscany, Italy and mixed in Guthrie's studio in Rennes, France.
In March 2012, Budd appeared as one of the featured composer/performers at San Francisco's Other Minds festival.
In 2014, he collaborated with Robin Guthrie while working on the soundtrack for White Bird in a Blizzard. The actual score used in the film was not released. Lakeshore Records released an album with the original score, except for the piece "The Affair".
See also
