Audio: Jillian Christmas and Chris Gilpin at Play Chthonics
Jillian Christmas and Chris Gilpin read tonight (Wednesday, 18 September 2013) to a small but captivated audience, as part of the Play Chthonics poetry reading series at Green College, U. B. C. I have included an audio recording of their reading in this blog post, below. They alternated performing their own poems, and interspersed their readings with comments on poetics, and answered questions about spoken-word poetry and poetry slams. This was a warm and engaging reading, and it’s a real privilege to have been able to present their work.
This is a vérité-style recording, but their voices come through very well. It’s just a little marred, just a little, by a noisy ventilation system, and — just to let all potential listeners know — by an overly enthusiastic cleaning person picking up coffee mugs near the end. Other voices you hear include mine and other audience members (among them Andrew McEwan and Carmen Mathes). Copyright for the recording remains with the artists.
Thanks to Green College, to the U. B. C. Department of English and Faculty of Arts, and to the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice research initiative for their support.
Wisdom of William Parker, Musician
In the late afternoon of Thursday, September 5, at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre at the University of Guelph, composer and bassist William Parker delivered a keynote talk for the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium (this year’s theme: “Sound Knowledges: A World Artist Summit”) called “Sound as Medicinal Herb: Creative Music 61 Years in Transition.” (The “61 years” refers to his age, he told us.) He was introduced by drummer and musical compatriot Hamid Drake, who spoke about “an energy of compassion and understanding that exudes from Mr Parker” and who acknowledged the important role that William Parker has played in fostering “my own artistic potential and awakening.” For about 40 minutes, interspersed with video clips of Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Don Cherry, William Parker offered what was essentially an extended set of aphorisms, reflecting on his philosophy of music and on the social impact of artistic practice. If it works, I’m going to reproduce my transcriptions of key sentences from William Parker’s largely improvised remarks; this, for me, is an example of one form of improvisational pedagogy, a gathering of reflections and provocations. Any errors or infelicities are my own.
Sound acts as a medicinal herb.
The core of music cannot be taught, the self-sound of a musician’s playing.
Why does the musician exist? Save, elevate, inspire and heal.
Muse plus physician equals musician.
As soon as you are born you become part of music.
Music is not something you learn. Music is something you are.
We need to redefine musical terms.
No one owns music. Nobody. Nobody owns music.
Music is the possibility of a miracle occurring.
It is a medicinal herb that heals.
You are responsible for your own self. You play the changes you want to play on a tune.
Sun Ra: “I didn’t know anything about music. It came from someplace else.”
What is the difference between knowing and feeling? You can know all of the answers, and you still can’t get anything right.
You don’t have to understand it, you have to feel it.
You need to be flowing with the spirit.
Jimmy Lyons was a shaman. Shamans heal and move us through sound. The have the juju.
Part of it comes from the blues. You can hear it. All of the musicians from Chicago, where’d they come from? Not Chicago. From the South.
They play extensions of Afro-American Improvised Creative Music.
If you play for three hours with Cecil Taylor and Jimmy Lyons, that’s some magic. And I played eleven years with those cats.
How can you play music and not know anything about it? You don’t need to know anything about it. What’s important is whether your music works.
We have to have a revolution in the world. The music has to step it up a notch. We have to play revolutionary music so that we can enter into the tone-world.
You take a tone, you vibrate it enough, and then you’re in the tone-world.
Each room in the tone-world is a secret of life.
It’s not about making money, but to make music and to heal people through sound.
Don Cherry knew something about music. But at the same time he knew when not to let it get in the way.
Everybody can be an accidental shaman, a shaman for the day.
You don’t want to be a shaman for a day. You want to be a shaman every day.
The listener is also a musician.
The sound of what you say and what you do is so very important.
You are your instrument.
You have to find the Don Cherry in you and the Sun Ra in you.
Wear your colours.
We can all be brighter and bigger than what we are.
What’s the difference between a musician and a shaman? You wouldn’t hire a shaman to play at your wedding.
Music in America is more about entertainment than inner attainment.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk had a composition he called “Volunteered Slavery.” Now what we’re dealing with is a system of volunteered slavery. You just have to go along with the system and enslave yourself.
The best musicians never get recorded because they’re left out of history.
The Guelph festival is very very important because it brings the people who want to hear, to be fed, to rejuvenate, to be inspired.
“It’s as serious as your life.” [Or, “It’s as serious as a laugh.”]
What’s the future of jazz? In one sense jazz is dead, it has no future. Don’t cry. But: music has a future. All your major players are dead: Jimmy Heath, Johnny Griffin. For me, I don’t hear anybody playing any jazz. Jazz has moved on. We just find something else. But hope goes on.
“In order to survive, we must keep hope alive.”
There is a universal tonality.
Boom. Let’s go. Let’s play. Boom.
Juju is in every country. It’s universal.
It doesn’t make any difference what you call it but it will go on.
Texture, Line, Frissure: Kathleen Jamie and Birgid Collins
In addition to reading her newest volume, Frissure, which is a collaborative set of mediations on healing and attention, I have been re-reading Kathleen Jamie’s 2005 gathering of essays, Findings, to prepare for a set of first-year lectures on prose non-fiction I am set to deliver over the next few months. The earlier volume appears to lay some of the groundwork for her more recent prose poems. In the pages of Findings, Jamie consistently demonstrates a palpable gift for perceptive clarity, an attunement to visual and auditory detail: the eleven mediations on the “natural and unnatural world” – “world” meaning contemporary Scotland – that make up the book reflect on her own all-too-human need to accrete what she sees and hears, to hold and remember it, to catch something of her sensory drift and document it on paper before it skitters beyond her field of view. She listens and watches, she notes and collects. And what she often ends up attending to, in each piece, are the gaps and uncertainties in the apparatus of her own consciousness. She comes to observe herself wanting to observe, trying to see and hear her way toward a sublimity, a sense of the near-absolute alterity of nature, that keeps refusing her any absolute access. She often directs her creative energies toward collection and preservation, picking up souvenirs and compiling wrack and flotsam from shoreline scrapheaps, a tactic that recalls the poetic salvage of “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead.” (“Do we save this toolbox . . .?”)
Salvage is also self-directed, when she visits, for example, the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and peruses the formaldehyde-filled anatomical specimen jars: the human form, a late version frittered from Da Vinci’s homo mensura, becomes a collation or an assemblage of posthumous, scattered parts, bottled samples and amputations. “At certain shelves,” she writes, “you have to bend and look closely, without knowing what you might see. It will be pale and strange, and possibly quite beautiful. It will be someone’s catastrophe and death” (from “Surgeon’s Hall”). Bodies are catalogued, labeled, textualized; she sees them as particular, uncanny artefacts, almost art-objects that, with their vestigial humanity, still resist the aesthetical gaze. Medical and representational objectivity is mitigated by empathy, by the traces of human suffering and of feeling – not affect, but feeling – that persist in these fissured bodies, at once remembered and dismembered: “a stranger’s arm with his [not ‘its’] corroding carcinoma, a diseased breast, a kidney taken from a man gassed on the Western Front, all call forth the same plain tenderness, “ for Jamie.
“Pathologies,” the first essay in her subsequent collection, Sightlines (2012), develops this empathetic scrutiny further, when Jamie describes her visit to a pathology lab to observe clinicians performing biopsies. What she thinks of, plainly, are the people with whose tissues she has gained, as she scrutinizes samples through a microscope, a strange and unbidden intimacy, an impossible closeness. This complex ethic in which she finds herself implicated had already been hinted at in Findings, in the essay I’ve been citing, where she offers a précis of one of the earliest accounts, in “an Edinburgh book” from 1863, of a Victorian surgery: a certain “Mrs Ailie Noble, suffering terrible pain from breast cancer[,] is taken into theatre, and in full view of the young medical students undergoes a mastectomy.” Jamie’s writing practice is often highly iterative – texts embedded into texts, marking the retreat of an abyssal subjectivity – and she quotes her source text to close her own essay; but her point is not to remark a futility, so much as to emphasize the shared pathos of loss even in the seeming detachment of patriarchal science:
He says “Don’t think [the students] heartless . . . they get over their professional horrors and into their proper work, and in them pity as an emotion ending in itself, or at least in tears and in a long drawn breath, lessens — while pity as a motive is quickened and gains power and purpose.
Pity converts from romanticized, narcissistic amour-propre into viable empathy for others, an intersubjectivity of care (to borrow a phrase from Julie Livingston), a call to feeling that Jamie seems to discover somewhere between the jars she observes and the archive she re-reads: reminder and remainder.
Frissure emerges from Jamie’s collaboration with visual-tactile artist Birgid Collins. When she turned 49, Jamie notes in her preface, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent a mastectomy. For her, she writes, “it seemed ironic: a case of life imitating art.” She had written extensively, as I’ve just noted, on pathology labs and breast cancer, and now her own body was subject to medical scrutiny and intervention. Redirecting her own attention selfward, negotiating the now intimate collision of observer and observed in her own physiology, seems to come to mean, for her, finding some kind of balance point between the aesthetic and the lived, a means of sensible transcription that would become part of her healing. She ended up approaching Birgid Collins to draw her mastectomy scar, to try to find a means of inhabiting this intersubjective tension; collaboration entails both deferring to perspectives outside of your own, and simultaneously voicing yourself against that deference: both seeing closely and being closely seen, in this instance. The scar is an unruly line, not only in the literal sense of a mark on her skin, but also in both the visual and the poetic senses: “Whatever it was, it was a line, drawn on my body. A line, in poetry, opens up possibilities within the language, and brings forth voice out of the silence. What is the first thing an artist does, beginning a new work? He or she draws a line.” She and Collins, in their various media, begin from a contingent, shared understanding of line.
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| “With that, a line of Burns arrived in my head. ‘You seize the flo’er, the bloom is shed.'” |
Jamie composes a number of prose-poems during her recovery, which become part of their collaboration; Collins pastes fragments of text into her constructions, and incorporates found matter and textiles described in Jamie’s texts into her compositions, which she comes to understand not as drawings but as dimensional constructions she comes to call “Poem-Houses,” which she creates in “conversation” or “exchange” with “K’s fragments.” Line here becomes a trajectory of intersections, an empathetic give-and-take (though not without difficulties and uncertainties). Collins begins with drawings, then introduces “natural” matter onto her paper, then builds dimensionality beyond the surface of page or sheet. The resulting hand-sized sculptures, if that’s the right word, have a raw, stunning beauty, an intricacy and a delicacy of texture that suggest an uneasy balance between the found and the made, the fractal and the formal, the aleatory and the intentional, the natural and the unnatural, that informs much of Jamie’s best writing. (You’ll have to buy the book to see photographs of these Poem-Houses; Collins’s website also has plenty of images of similarly-realized constructions.)
The sense of line in these prose poems, for example, is more latent than manifest: the rhythmic shape of each sentence remains insistent but not (yet) fully differentiated from the rhuthmos, language’s unruly cadence, its natural flow: there are no clean lines, but, like Collins’s art, an attention to the besmirched, the impure, the incipient. “What is a line? “ Jamie asks in “Line”: “A border, a symbol of defence, of defiance.” But a body, such as hers, isn’t healed by being defended, medically or poetically, against its own enmeshment in the natural world, by the surgical repair of its boundaries and limits. Rather, healing for Jamie involves a return to the permeability, to the interpenetration, of body and world: “To be healed is not to be saved from mortality but rather, released back into it: we are returned to the wild, into possibilities for ageing and change” (“Healings 2”). The textures of Collins’s work derive from this enmeshment, emblematized at a number of points in economies of reciprocity, mutuality and interchange, as healing gifts mailed to Jamie from friends, and passed on to her, like letters written in natural scraps, from the landscape around her: “Spilling from an envelope, a get-well gift of silverweed, bog-cotton and thrift.” (The brief catalogues of found matter in these texts recall the collected flotsam of “Findings.”) To heal, for Jamie, is not to protect or to defend herself in art, but to open up her language to the textures of the inhuman, of the given, and to listen carefully for a “music at the edge of sense . . . the sound of the benign indifference of the world.” (“Healings 1”). Tacitly, and amid its contingent stillnesses, Collins’s work performs this same close attentiveness both for and with Jamie, and both for and with us.
Audio: Embouchure, Guelph (2011), with Eric Lewis
Here’s a recording from two years ago. In Guelph for the colloquium and jazz festival, on September 9, 2011, following a talk and a reading by Jayne Cortez, I read a suite of poems from Embouchure, which was then pretty hot off the press, accompanied by Eric Lewis improvising on trumpet and cornet. The introduction is by our good friend Sara Villa. You can visit my Sound Cloud page for more audio, or check out the audio section of my web page.
Improvisation, Text and Media: Research Questions
At the final meetings of the research team for the “Improvisation, Community and Social Practice” research initiative, held on Monday September 2, 2013, at the University of Guelph, we had an opportunity to divide into our various research streams and interest groups, and to reflect on achievements and outcomes over the past six years of the grant, around the establishment of the interdisciplinary field of Improvisation Studies. (Co-ordinators for each of the seven clusters were invited to present at a panel during the upcoming colloquium, on Wednesday morning.) Rather than catalogue books, performances, courses, etc., what many of us elected to do — to reflect the on-going and open-ended aspect of research on and around improvisation — was to produce and hone a set of research questions that had come to inform the work being done by our group.
Here are some of the questions we collectively arrived at, in the “Improvisation, Text and Media” stream, for which I have served as co-ordinator.
How do improvisatory practices affect the production, dissemination and reception of new media art?
What are the impacts of electronic and social media on poetry, literature and other textual practices? How is the study of print culture impacted by a critical emphasis on improvisation?
How can methods and approaches that have emerged from improvisation studies be deployed to assess the velocity of information, and the pace of the transformation of the human archive? What are the emerging temporalities of writing?
How do new media offer a means to investigate the permeability of the academic and non-academic worlds?
What are the key tropes around which inquiry into text and media in improvisation takes place? (Some of the tropes we mentioned included membrane, network, fractal, pod, articulation, mix, polyphony, voice, texture, ear.)
How does improvisation both expose and re-instantiate inherent social power structures, especially around concepts of authority and expertise?
How do social and electronic media influence reading and reception?
How do text and media studies articulate with improvisational pedagogy across the disciplines?
What does the study of improvisation, text and media bring to the understanding of canon, of expertise, genius and orthodoxy? How are we to accept or to resist the tendencies for improvisational tactics to becomes orthodoxies or ideologies?
How are practices of appropriation, borrowing, imitation, representation and revision managed through improvisation?
Our hope was that these questions, and others, might serve as contingent focal points, both to understand the work that has been ongoing in this sub-field and to provoke and urge the development of new work.
Double Short Take on Two Guelph Gigs: Indigo Trio and KAZE
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| Robert Kerr introducing Indigo Trio, with Hamid Drake and Harrison Bankhead |
There were a number of standout performances at this year’s Guelph Jazz Festival, but for me two gigs in particular really made something happen, small concerts by Indigo Trio and by KAZE. I’d like provisionally to map my own reactions, even at this slight remove in time, to those moments, because they have stayed with me, and will for a while. (These sets both took place last week – one on Thursday night, and one Saturday morning.) Both performances modeled and enacted improvisational listening practices, modes of attention not only to aesthetics – the practiced formal tactics of shaping sound into music – but also to the sociality of audition, to how human beings empathize with one another, sense each other’s embodied co-presences, at the level of texture, resonance and pulse. The kinds of immersive listening into which an audience is invited by both of these ensembles are not, for me, a way of losing yourself, of becoming absorbed into and overwhelmed by their music, but present instead opportunities and openings for intersubjective moments, as our ears focus and refocus on the interplay and divergences of line and shape that occur as each performance unfolds, live and spontaneously both before us and with us.
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| Indigo Trio, from the back of the room: Nicole Mitchell, Hamid Drake, Harrison Bankhead |
Indigo Trio –Nicole Mitchell, flutes, Harrison Bankhead, bass, and Hamid Drake, drums – offered two extended extemporaneous suites Thursday night, September 5, in the re-purposed hall of St. George’s Anglican Church in Guelph. I have been avidly listening to them since their first album appeared, on Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf label, in 2007, a recording I think of their first performance as a trio in Montreal in 2005. As then, their music remains rich, warm, flexible, free, accessible and dynamic: a paradigm for collaborative co-creation. I don’t know which composition is which, but each suite gave the impression of morphing or evolving forms, particularly around the loping, deep grooves Harrison Bankhead set up on his big upright. I thought, as did a few others there that night, that we could hear traces of the firm, warm sound of Wilbur Ware or of Malachi Favors Maghostut in his playing, echoes of departed mentors and colleagues, but also of a Chicago sound-palette that imbued his playing with a powerful historical dimension. Harrison Bankhead’s predilection for danceable lines, for groove, coupled with Hamid Drake’s strong sense of rhythmic pockets – what I’d describe as his sanguine, organic feel – drew the audience into the trio’s playing, and kept them rapt: toe-tapping, hip-swaying and happy. Nicole Mitchell played a shattering solo on piccolo, but rather than disrupt the flow, it only intensified the room’s commitment to what was happening. Each improvised “suite” concluded with Nicole Mitchell singing, in a bell-like soprano, what seemed like Afro-futuristic lyrics – two song forms, the first of which I think was a hymn of praise to Gaia, while the second, concluding piece affirmed the entwining of strength of purpose and of the embrace of difference that shape Indigo Trio’s music:
When you find the truth you will realize
You’re a stranger in a strange land
But you’re not alone
You’ve got to stand strong
What I hear, here, is a call to community in difference, community of difference: strength among strangers, audience.
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| KAZE: Satoko Fujii, Natsuki Tamura, Christian Pruvost, Peter Orins |
KAZE is a collaborative quartet that has been in existence since at least 2011, pairing the longstanding duo of Satoko Fujii on piano and Natsuki Tamura on trumpet with two members of the French MUZZIX (sounds like “musiques”) collective, trumpeter Christian Pruvost and percussionist Peter Orins. Nominally (on the programme) Satoko Fujii’s band, the group operates more as a collective, showcasing compositions and concepts from each of its four members. I had never heard them play, either live or on CD, before Saturday morning at the River Run Centre in Guelph, although they have already recorded two albums as an ensemble: Rafale (2011) and Tornado (2013), both released by Circum-Disc in collaboration with Fujii-Tamura’s label, Libra Records. I have to say that I was blown away by their collective virtuosity and by their kinetic interaction, from the first notes they played. The two-trumpet line, in some ways, hearkens back to Louis Armstrong and Joe Oliver, and there are echoes of the playfulness and smart-aleckry of early music, although there is little in their work, in my view, of the subversive. They play with sounds, the trumpeters ebulliently incorporating “little instruments” and percussive sound-makers into their arsenals of sound-sources, but the idea is never to undermine or interrupt: disruptions are creative, centrifugal, happily unruly, both provocative and strangely supportive. All four appear to celebrate and to uphold each other’s contributions to the collective: no cutting, no ego. At the same time, both trumpeters self-evidently have technique – extended technique – to spare. Tamura and Pruvost are masters of their instruments, and then some. And, well, if you like your trumpet by turns limpid and wicked, seductive and fierce, this is the music for you. Satoko Fujii’s virtuoso piano formed an integral part of the ensemble, negotiating between polydirectional rhythms and entwined melodic lines, sometimes subtending the performance harmonically, sometimes offering percussive counterpoint. Her playing is dynamic, ever-present, but also open and responsive; she is never at a loss for something to add in, but also never crowds at her cohorts: a paragon of give and take, of response listening. Peter Orins’s drumming was, for me, a revelation: he has a way of propelling a performance forward, while striking each tympanum with an attack that somehow individuates and momentarily savours, pulse by pulse, the elastic beat-patterns he conjured. His style of improvising at the drumkit reminded me at times, if this makes listening sense, of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s definitive touch.
The group played two or three extended suites – akin in structure, though not in idiom, to the Indigo Trio’s set – combining, I discovered afterward, most of the compositions featured on their recent disc. (I think they recombined “Wao,” “Tornado,” “Imokidesu” and “Triangle,” although I’m relying on memory here.) Each of their forays began with quiet hiss and suck from the horns, breath feeling its way into tone, gradually ramping toward more organized thematic statements or unisons, then negotiating a series of polyglot interchanges and exchanges toward the next composition way-point. The group operated as a living assemblage, an organism pursuing not so much coherence or closure as open-edged symbiosis, a generative, sustaining autopoeisis. Each piece did, of course, reach a tenuous end, but it felt that, even after the concert was done, KAZE’s generative soundscapes still kept roiling and resonating in our minds’ ears.
For me, hearing both of these groups had an epochal aspect, an impact not unlike, say, hearing the Parker-Guy-Lytton trio, or Wayne Shorter’s recent quartet, or Charles Lloyd’s “New Quartet,” or one of David S. Ware’s quartets; they seemed to represent something of the power and possibility of distinctive new directions in creative improvised music. A greatness.
Breakfast, Nearly, with Pharoah Sanders
I think I’m more than a fan, much more than a fan, of what people in my various small circles of friends and fellow listeners would call The Music. Not just music, but The, with a capital T. What my colleagues and I usually mean to indicate with this definitive and emphatic article is a certain lineage or a set of lineages in recent jazz, lineages that can trace their origins to consciousness-raising performances and recordings in the mid 1960s around the civil rights movement and the emergence of Black cultural nationalism in the United States. I am neither Black nor American, but I know that I have had a powerful personal investment in this music since my mid-teenage years, when, and I have no idea how to explain this objectively, my friends and I started buying jazz records. The Music has – again, powerfully – helped to shape who I feel I have become, who I think I am and how I think. For some reason, across a number of tangible cultural and social boundaries, this music came to speak to me: it’s an experience that’s not unique to me, but it does seem a bit strange that this feeling of connection occurred in small-town Nova Scotia in the late 1970s, in a place that still feels remote from the contexts out of which this music came. The Music was not in the air very much, at least not where I come from. But that’s not exactly true, either: there were people around us who knew things, there were kids like me who wanted to know, and there was the odd record that arrived in the bins of Kelly’s Stereo Mart that we could buy. The first jazz-like record I ever bought – copying what my friend had done – was The Vibration Continues, an Atlantic two-fer that appeared in 1979 two years after the death of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. It was an album that would change everything for me, or at least cause as much change as any one record can. The sense of tradition as well as of extemporaneous experimentation that vitally energize the tracks on that compilation epitomize what Mr. Kirk called “Black Classical Music,” and help me to consider the collisions and intersections of the creative and the critical, of music and poetry, of history and innovation, that seem to me to make cultural performances of all types come to matter.
Listening to Rahsaan and to Miles Davis and others soon led me outward – tracing the networks of connections and sidemen they deployed – to John Coltrane, of course, and especially to his later, more tumultuous post-1964 music: recordings that had become established, by the time I could have encountered them, as touchstones of The Music, fierce beautiful classics. In the summer when I was seventeen, I bought a copy of Meditations. The opening track on that album, “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” with the stuttering, surging and entwined tenor saxophone lines of Mr. Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, was transformative for me, at once devastating and profoundly moving. I don’t know how many times I have played that first side over; I can hear it in my mind’s ear even now. There is nothing like it. I think I read an interview some years ago with Carlos Santana, where he said that he tries to listen to Coltrane every day – for “spiritual nourishment” – and he mentions “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” in particular. I know what he meant, what he means.
I have been in Guelph, Ontario, for the past week, attending at the university there an academic colloquium about, among other things, The Music. The colloquium is tied to an ongoing research initiative called “Improvisation, Community and Social Practice,” and to a yearly Jazz Festival, programmed for twenty years now by Ajay Heble, who is both its Artistic Director and the Principal Investigator for the grant-funded academic initiative. Because of the relatively small size of Guelph, many out-of-town attendees end up staying at the Delta hotel there, which is where most of the musicians playing the festival stay, too. So you tend sometimes to cross paths. This year, the festival headliners included Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet, performing a scaled-down version of his Pulitzer-nominated suite Ten Freedom Summers, and Pharoah Sanders, collaborating with an amalgam of Rob Mazurek’s Chicago and Sao Paulo Undergrounds. (I’ll say something about these performances in another piece.) I was returning alone to the hotel by taxi after a wonderful concert by the Indigo Trio on Thursday night. As I came through the sliding glass doors into the lobby, there in front of me, leaning over the front desk trying to check in, was Pharoah Sanders. I knew him immediately, from photos on LP jackets I had poured over and scrutinized while I listened, headphones on, in front of the stereo downstairs in my parents’ house years ago. It was Pharoah Sanders. And for a moment, I had no idea what to do.
Of course, I didn’t have to do anything. I felt as if I ought to approach him, ought to say something. I have been immersed in his music for decades, and feel a kinship, because of the effect that it has had on me over those years, that of course he couldn’t have shared. He has no idea who I am, or how his music has changed my life, the way Rilke once said all great art ought to do. My impulse was to try to walk up and tell him something then and there about my own story, the story of my love for his music. But, it would have been pretty rude to bother Mr. Sanders while he was trying to sort out his arrival. So I got into the elevator, went up to my room, and put up an excited jazz-nerd blurb on Facebook and Twitter about having just passed The Pharoah Sanders in the lobby.
Along with Mr. Smith, he was doing a public interview the next morning, which I was going to attend, so I would get to see and hear him anyway. And I had my ticket to the concert the following night. Great.
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| Wadada Leo Smith and Pharoah Sanders, after the interview Friday morning, 6 September 2013 |
At the interview Mr. Sanders wasn’t especially voluble. (A video recording of the interview ought to appear on the ICaSP website sometime in the near future.) What might appear as reticence in that interview could also be an after-effect of all of this public adulation and esteem, this spiritual fandom. Not that he shouldn’t be rightly and justly praised for what he has done, for the lives his music has affected, but he may have been a bit wary of the kinds of closeness that listeners like me seem to need to claim and to feel. It’s easy to forget to accord the person, the human being, the dignity and the respect, the personal space, that they deserve – and that every human being deserves. Listening, even as closely as many of us do, needs still to be kept at a remove from entitlement. And this distance, around historically significant and culturally transformative artists such as Mr. Sanders, can sometimes present a very difficult line to walk. (“He became his admirers,” says W. H. Auden of the passing of W. B. Yeats: such appropriations have a moribund aspect, I think. They objectify the living, and reify their creative energies, often without intending to, as real people get turned and admiringly calcified into their own self-representations, their myths.)
There was another great concert Saturday morning, by KAZE. I was up a little later that morning, but still had some time, so I decided to treat myself to a warm breakfast in the hotel restaurant. As I stood by the please wait to be seated sign, waiting, Pharoah Sanders was suddenly there, coming out of the restaurant towards me; he had obviously been eating breakfast. Okay, I thought, now was my chance to say something, anything. “Mr. Sanders,” I said, “I’m a great admirer of your music.” And I held out my hand to shake his. “Thank you,” he said, and then put his own hands together in a gesture of prayer.
“My hands,” he said. “Of course,” I said, though I didn’t know exactly what he meant. (I have spoken with musicians and others who have to shake hands with strangers often when they’re on the road: they tell me that folding your hands this way is a good practice to keep from having viruses spread to you.) And then a waitress showed me to my single table, at an extended curved bench along the restaurant’s far wall.
Someone had been eating at the small single table next to me. I looked down at the menu, to figure out what I wanted to order, and then looked up again. Pharoah Sanders was coming back into the restaurant towards me. I had been seated beside his table. It turned out he hadn’t been leaving at all, but had been making a second visit to the breakfast buffet, which was located just the other side of the please wait to be seated sign. He sat back down next to me. I was becoming a little concerned he might think that somehow I was following him, so I didn’t want even to try to pester him with small talk. We ate side by side quietly at our separate tables, together. I took no photographs. I don’t know why it would even have occurred to me as something I could so, and it’s embarrassing to admit that I even considered it, so intrusive, so disrespectful of someone else’s space. When I left, I did manage to wish him a good day, and to say I was looking forward to his concert that evening. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”
The concert was tremendous. As I said, I’ll post something more detailed about it soon. It ended around midnight, and I managed to flag a cab back to the hotel, amid what turned out to be masses of partying students newly arrived in town for the University’s boozy Frosh week. (None of them had anything to do with the music, with The Music. It’s a coincidence that the Jazz Festival and the academic colloquium happen simultaneously with the first week of classes.) I got back late, and went to bed.
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| Pharoah Sanders (and Chad Taylor) performing at Guelph on September 7, 2013 |
I had to be up early the next morning to catch a shuttle van to the Toronto airport. I came down to check out at 6 am, and the desk clerk asked if I had got the message that the shuttle was postponed until 6:30. (I hadn’t, but it didn’t matter.) The idea, it turned out, was to fill all seven seats on one shuttle, rather than have to send two vehicles. So, fine, I took my bags over to the hotel foyer, where coordinated brown and beige couches had been arranged to look something like a furniture showroom at The Bay.
As I sat down to wait, someone else appeared at the desk to check out. It was Pharoah Sanders. He did what he needed to do at the desk, and then came over to join me on the couches. I thought at this point that if he realized I was this same guy who kept appearing wherever he was, he might have started genuinely to worry. But he smiled and nodded at me, and started to chat. Like me, he was headed to the airport to catch a flight west. He asked where I was headed. He said he found it a bit cold in Guelph. He told me he’d had trouble with the air conditioner in his room, which kept coming on at night, and I told him I’d had exactly the same trouble, which was true.
Others arrived who were taking the same airport shuttle, all of them musicians who had performed the night before, including Wadada Leo Smith and Anthony Davis, both of whom are indisputably major composers and performers in contemporary music. The shuttle arrived; I told Mr. Sanders it was here, and he went to stand over in front of the sliding glass doors at the hotel entrance.
The doors opened, and the shuttle driver, clipboard in hand, came through, and walked right up to Mr. Sanders. “Who are you?” he asked bluntly. Mr. Sanders gave his name. “Right,” said the driver, “one of the jazz musicians.” I thought, oh, maybe I’m not on this shuttle, so I went up and asked. It looked like there wasn’t going to be enough room. “Nope,” said the driver, “this is your shuttle too. You’re the one non-musician.”
He managed to load all the bags, and told us to climb in. I ended up in the front pair of passenger seats, sitting next to Pharoah Sanders, again. I hope he didn’t mind. There was some confusion about airlines and paperwork. Pearson airport has three terminals, each of them linked to different domestic and international carriers. The driver got in, turned around in his seat to face Mr. Sanders and the rest of us, and said: “Don’t worry. I have a master plan.” I thought I heard a few chuckles, though maybe not. I don’t think the driver was deliberately making a kind of joke – he genuinely had no idea that one of Pharoah Sanders’s most praised and beloved recordings is called “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” But in that moment, what started to emerge was a troubling irony, one that creative musicians such as these must have to confront on a fairly regular basis.
“Say,” the driver said, as he started the engine and pulled away, “I’ve got the radio tuned to the jazz station.”
“No, please,” said Mr. Smith. “No music.” It was still really early, and no one had had more than a few hours of sleep.
“I thought you might want to hear some jazz,” the driver kept on. “You know, I like Billie Holiday.”
“We all like Billie Holiday,” said someone from the back of the shuttle. The driver tried to play the radio a little lower.
“No, please,” said Mr. Smith. The driver finally obliged.
The 40-minute drive east along the 401, with a fine reddish sun emerging from the clouded horizon in front of us, was silent. Most people just dozed in their seats, the way people do.
When we arrived at the airport, the first three let out included Mr. Sanders. He said goodbye, and wished everyone and was wished a safe journey. He smiled and waved, and that was it. When the driver climbed back into his seat, he turned around and asked those who remained – except for me, the one non-musician – what kind of music they played and what clubs in Guelph they’d been playing in. (I don’t even think Guelph has a jazz club: the downtown as I’ve experienced it seems to be full of bars catering to students.) “Clubs?” said Mr. Davis. “It’s been a while since I have played in a club.” “No clubs,” said Mr. Smith.
The driver seemed mildly surprised that their performance had taken place at the city’s opera-house style concert hall, the River Run Centre. I asked if they liked the venue, and both of them said yes, and talked a little about acoustic space, about spatial acoustics. Then it was my turn to go. I wished them a safe journey, too.
After we pulled up at the terminal, the driver came around to help me unload my bag. Out of earshot of the musicians, and feeling some kind of mistaken kinship with me, he told me: “I expected this trip to be more hilarious, more fun, with, you know, those kind of . . . jazz musicians.”
Why was it, I wondered, that he waited until we were both outside of the van to tell this to me, like some kind of secret. Like I might understand him.
And then realized I knew why.
And then I knew: when he said “non-musician,” I don’t think he was talking about music. He may not have known himself what he intended. But I think I hear it now.
Pharoah Sanders, Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Davis, and the others who happened to be on that shuttle, are among the most forward-thinking and brilliant musical geniuses of their, of my, generation; they perform and compose, for those who want to hear, a life-altering, profoundly moving music, coalescing jazz, art music, folk, and other styles and practices into their own idioms and sound-worlds, but all drawing on the creative impetus of the wide African diaspora. “If you have to ask,” Louis Armstrong is purported to have said, “you don’t need to know.”
Maybe so. But at the end of their interview on the Friday morning, Wadada Leo Smith made a point of encouraging listeners, simply, to try to speak to our neighbours, to connect with other human beings. “Consider the fact,” he said, “that someone else is important, and make that work in your life.” And it’s hard work, for sure, to overcome even a few of the complex barriers presented by ignorance and, strangely, by adulation, and instead to try to find the human gesture, both besides and beside ourselves.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 