"Chris Burn is one of the great innovators and deserves far more recognition for his work," declares harpist Rhodri Davies. A kind of total musician, Burn is a pianist, trumpeter, improvisor, composer, arranger, transcriber, concert organiser and ensemble leader. A vital figure at the core of London improvised music since the mid-1980s, he has worked closely with genre-defining artists such as saxophonist John Butcher, violinist and electronic musician Phil Durrant and guitarist John Russell, as well as younger generations of creators like Davies. He's also a unique instrumental voice. "People would ask why I didn't play more inside the piano," says pianist Pat Thomas, "and I'd say, well, Chris Burn has that taken care of."

Both Davies and Thomas have worked with, and recorded, Burn's remarkable transcriptions of free improvising pioneer Derek Bailey's guitar music. Yet Burn's work and influence remains somewhat concealed. Perhaps his humble presence, the way living performance spaces have changed (and closed), and how publishing certain things at certain times makes history (or not) have all led to his work being a little buried by time. His music is slowly becoming more present again, online, thanks to labels like Confront, scatterArchive and Weight Of Wax, but vital key early releases remain hard to find.

“Folk Tunes – Hungary: India: China”
From A Fountain Replete
(Acta) 1988

A Fountain Replete was Burn’s first solo release. A 1988 cassette on the Acta label, it is a remarkable, explorative repurposing of the piano (and percussion), opening with a selection of folk songs, adapted and strummed, harp-like, from the reimagined piano’s innards. Music from three cultures (and traditions of string instruments – tuning systems, instruments, attacks and decays, combinations of sounds) transposed, or perhaps transplanted is a better word, into the body, frame and ‘tradition’ of the piano.

“Sinister Resonance”
From A Henry Cowell Concert
(Acta) 1993

Burn’s realisations of Cowell’s (weird and mysterious) music document Burn’s very particular engagement, through his own inside-pianistic excavations, with the techniques and technologies at play. He’d worked out many of these techniques himself before coming to Cowell’s pieces and there is a sympathetic, kindred celebration of this stuff that makes for a particular, enriching freshness.

“Music For Three Rivers”
From Music For Three Rivers
(VICTO) 1997

From its rasping opening 30 seconds to the stages that follow this is a grand grand piano solo statement. Perhaps most striking is the steady, fluid variety of the sounds that Burn moves us through as he tours the body and techniques of the piano. The variation in tones, attacks and detail, the shifts of scale and proportion, is remarkable. Swipes, donks, clunks, gnocks, glonks and hammered stops and openings make up this riparian music of ebbs and flows, swirls and eddies, complex buoyancy, crunchy attack and wobbly, queasy vertiginous depths.

“as if as”
From as is as
(Confront) 2008

Burn’s solo piano compositions (here dating from 1999 to 2005) played by another pianist (Philip Thomas) are a very different proposition to the other solo piano stuff. Not the organic, total-piano ecosystem of his solo work, but keyboard-centred, pitches and harmony ripple, tap and (w)rap at the listening space, peppering it with nutty-ictuses and crystalline knuckles-of-keys.

“Fissile Totems”
From Cultural Baggage
(Acta) 1990

The Chris Burn Ensemble was formed in 1984 and released its first music at the end of the decade. The group was important: from it emerged a scored-and-structured approach to improvisation that developed British (and European) improvisation in new, patient ways. The group’s original octet formation featured Burn alongside saxophonist John Butcher, guitarist John Russell, Brazilian Marcio Mattos on cello, bass and electronics, Matt Hutchinson on synthesiser, Phil Durrant on violin, and Australians Jim Denley on flutes and Stevie Wishart on violin and hurdy-gurdy. Cultural Baggage was the Ensemble’s first release. A piece like “Fissile Totems” is a set of combinations of names and combinations to be moved through. A list of who plays with who, and when. Not what or how. There is no information (on the score) about who should play what or how, just when and in combination with who. “Certainly from my standpoint,” Burn recalls, “they were ways of organising, sometimes more but above all they were ways of initiating who played in a piece at a particular moment in the piece”.

“Piano Ate Card”
From The Place 1991
(Emanem) 2001

With the Ensemble often a single musician would be invited to play throughout a composition. Stevie Wishart’s hurdy-gurdy brings a particular quality to the Ensemble and on this piece she was asked, Burn tells us in the sleevenotes, to “play for the majority of the piece”, creating a buzz of shimmering repetitions, as the rest of the group swell, rasp, and bubble in parallel and perpendicular play.

“Cropped Rotation”
From Navigations
(Acta) 1998

Recorded in 1997 over two days in West London’s Gateway studio, Navigations saw the ensemble expanded to an eleven-piece group, including harpist Rhodri Davies, cellist Matt Wastell, and trumpeter Axel Dörner – the sound yet more complex.

John Butcher Group
“vi”
From Somethingtobesaid
(weightofwax) 2008

“John [Butcher]'s large groups have kind of taken over [the Ensemble] mantle in a way, which I’m very happy about. I was delighted to be part of somethingtobesaid,” Burn suggests. In 2008 he performed at HCMF as part of a Butcher octet working with these methods. Section “vi” of the performance includes a remarkable duet passage of Burn improvising with Dieb 13’s turntable (playing piano records). It’s an oddly wobbly thing, like a roll-up keyboard – and a superb example of Burn’s keyboard (not-inside) piano playing.

Alongside these Ensemble recordings Burn worked in various other sub-groups with Ensemble members. Often, these doubled up aspects of the instrumentation, for example twin woodwinds on Embers and prepared piano and harp on Assumed Possibilities.

“Subtitles”
From Fonetiks
(Bead) 1984

I wrote about Chris Burn and John Butcher’s cuspid, searching duo LP Fonetiks in the John Butcher Primer (The Wire 488): “The first sounds we hear on “Subtitles” on the A side of Fonetiks are Burn’s spacious, inside-piano pluck-struck-percussed and rung-chimes, and Butcher’s (already) unique saxophone voice.”

“Nite Bites”
From EMBERS LIVE
(Acta) 1988

Embers the group was a quartet: Jim Denley’s remarkable flute-voice and Butcher’s saxophone spark, slurp and sizzle a weave with Marcio Mattos’s cello and sampler and Burn’s piano and percussion – two pairs of strings and two pairs of breath instruments. A half-the-Ensemble ensemble. A photograph of Marcio Mattos’s ceramics and pottery glaze features on the cover and there’s something about the implications of this earthy, wet transformation at the core of this anciently weird and playful music. There’s potential for abandon and wilderness here in the working out of this music not afraid of excesses or reference slipping to and from instrumental normality in rich, surprising ways.

“For Robert Motherwell”
From Assumed Possibilities
(Confront) 1998/2021

Ten years later, and another half-the-Ensemble ensemble made a very different kind of chamber music. Mark Wastell and Rhodri Davies met Burn attending concerts in the later 1990s; invited into the Ensemble they began working in this quartet. A group that slowly shaved away into an increasingly spare, pared aesthetic.

“Twilight Enclosed”
From Untuning The Sky: 10 Improvisations
(Bead) 2012

Burn has played trumpet since his childhood, and it has featured on his recordings since Fonetiks (and even makes an appearance on Music For Three Rivers for a single note). Recorded here in 2005 at The Red Rose, he plays trumpet exclusively in the duo with Matthew Hutchinson’s analogue and digital synthesisers. The electronics sound a virtuosic organicism, spongy-squelch and oozing-porosity that sits and sticks warmly with Burn’s gravelly, bubble-some trumpet port(ion)s and pistons.

Pat Thomas
“Extract 4”
From Plays The Music Of Derek Bailey & Thelonious Monk
(FMR) 2008

Chris Burn/Philip Thomas
“from ten, two and three III”
From as is as
(Confront) 2020

Cranc
“Cranc – Three”
From from ten, two and three+improvisation
(scatterArchive) 2021

Burn’s early 2000s transcriptions for other instruments of Derek Bailey’s solo guitar improvisations are fascinating. The performance outcomes sound remarkable, and pose all sorts of intriguing questions about the fabric of improvisation and instrumental voice.

These three piano and trio ‘readings’ of Burn’s transcription of a 1991 Bailey solo (“three” from Solo Guitar Volume 2 beginning around the 34:03 point) are very different: Pat Thomas (who worked with Bailey) uses the material as something to improvise with (and against) in a version recorded in 2007; Philip Thomas performs the written transcription. The contrast of these two very different piano approaches to this material is fascinating. Equally so are the two very different string trio readings of this solo by Bailey. The first by the trio cranc, Angharad and Rhodri Davies and Nikos Veliotis, was recorded in 2006. An unreleased the trio of Ruby Aspinall, Hannah Marshall and Satako Fukuda also recorded several of these pieces.

Seymour Wright speaks to Chis Burn about his multifaceted career in The Wire 499. Pick up a copy of the issue in our online shop. Subscribers can read the full interview in the digital library.