Anthony Braxton has been up north of the border a fair bit lately: he’s been a guest at both the Victoriaville and Guelph festivals, and has forged an alliance in this city with the AIMToronto collective. The live double-CD Toronto (Duets) 2007 contains two 45-minute performances of his Ghost Trance compositions in the company of saxophonist Kyle Brenders. Composition 199 is a jogtrot quarter-note spiel that’s very much in the mode of Braxton’s early GTM; indeed, a glance at Jason Guthartz’s discography suggests that, though it seems to be previously unrecorded, it must date from the mid-1990s. The other piece (Composition 356) is an “Accelerator Whip” GTM piece that already received an airing on the mammoth Iridium set from Firehouse 12, its constantly shifting proportional rhythms sending the players on a bumpy rollercoaster ride. Both performances leave the GTM tramlines fairly quickly, leaping off into a forest of contrasting episodes; the players are particularly good at playing foreground/background games, so that you’re constantly shifting from hearing their interaction as mutual dialogue or as solo-with-accompaniment. When he’s on soprano, Brenders sometimes mimics Braxton’s skittery loopdeloops but more often tends towards a melodic forthrightness out of Steve Lacy (in town, he frequently plays with The Rent, a Lacy covers band); on tenor he’s more of an Evan Parker man, his tone gruff and grainy. A few of his licks are distractingly derivative (especially his recourse to Parkerish burblings), but what matters is his great ears and his wholehearted response to the very plastic character of Braxton’s music, the way it seems to be buffeted by strange gusts of anger and hesitancy and delight or to suddenly become soft and languid. Given that this year has been even by Braxton’s standards a prolific one for releases — an amazing nineteen Braxton CDs and one DVD were reviewed in the Fall 2008 issue of Signal to Noise alone — there’s some danger of this one falling through the cracks, which would be a shame: there are passages here that are among the most enjoyable I’ve encountered in latterday Braxton, like the deluge of slithering arabesques that occurs near the end of Composition 199.