Battle Trance Green of Winter

battle trance

green of winter

On August 26, 2022, “the unusual quartet Battle Trance, comprised of four wildly talented tenor saxophonists” (NPR), releases Green of Winter, the followup to 2016’s Blade of Love, one of the “20 Best Avant Albums of the year” (Rolling Stone), a record featuring “three adventurously dense movements … that maintain a focused sense of restraint and melody throughout” (Pitchfork).

On Green of Winter, Battle Trance—a quartet that lives and works and plays in the seams between contemporary classical and avant-garde jazz—delves deeper into their signature musical language, working intimately with the connection between the human body and the human breath, a connection that composer Travis Laplante hones as a Qigong practitioner; by using the technique of circular breathing to create hypnotic waves of sound and layered saxophone multiphonics, or chords, Battle Trance weaves intricate, ancient textures that shed fresh light on the saxophone as an ensemble instrument. Green of Winter, the third album in a NewAm trilogy featuring both Blade of Love and 2014’s Palace of Wind, is a work of beauty and mystery, a musical harvest cultivated from the deep friendship between Battle Trance’s four members, Travis Laplante, Patrick Breiner, Matt Nelson, and Jeremy Viner as they celebrate their tenth anniversary as an ensemble.

“Deciding how to make the most of 2020, while still being responsible and safe in relation to COVID, I spent the spring and summer finishing the composition process of Green of Winter,” says Travis Laplante, composer for Battle Trance. “Using our lack of performance opportunities during the autumn of 2020, Battle Trance created a 20-day rehearsal retreat, consisting of rigorous eight-hour rehearsals in southern Vermont, and culminating with the recording of Green of Winter on the final day at the Big Barn in Putney, Vermont.”
After performing over 150 times in spaces ranging from concert halls to abandoned grain silos, Battle Trance came to value a room’s acoustics nearly as much as the music itself; over time, they found the ideal acoustic properties for four tenor saxophones.
“When the level of resonance in the physical space is optimal, we listen to each other more deeply, we dissolve our individual sounds into the collective sound,” says Laplante. “This produces a much more subtle, vibrant performance and recording”
After recording the trilogy’s first two albums—Palace of Wind and Blade of Love—in recording studios, Battle Trance found the perfect sound in the Big Barn, a warm and resonant structure, where the quartet spent hours experimenting with the old post-and-beam building’s tones before uncovering the best possible acoustical responsiveness for Green of Winter. The result is three painstakingly composed tracks—each ranging from 11 to 23 minutes in length; each focusing on tonal harmony, melody, and counterpoint; and each born from Laplante’s rigorous, decade-long compositional studies with Harmonic Experience author, W.A. Mathieu. On Green of Winter, the Battle Trance quartet offers extreme extended techniques, disassembling their tenor saxophones in numerous ways to create the band’s most wild and otherworldly album to date.
“It is my hope that Green of Winter depicts this time in the world, a time which is full of despair, destruction, chaos, and cold,” says Travis Laplante, “but is also full of great beauty, love, thawing, and coming together. People coming together to live the truth that we are are not separate from each other, nor are we separate from nature or the Earth.”
*Kenny G did not call Battle Trance “America’s favorite tenor saxophone quartet.”

Tracklist:
1. Green of Winter I
2. Green of Winter II
3. Green of Winter III
Credits:
Composed by Travis Laplante
Produced by Travis Laplante
Engineered by Dave Snyder
Mixed by Eli Crews
Mastered by Ryan Streber