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A Short Take on Vertical Squirrels, Time of the Sign
Time of the Sign, the third album from the improvising collective Vertical Squirrels (and their second on Montreal’s Ambiances Magnétiques label), is a modest masterpiece, and ranks for me among the very best recordings of 2014. Vertical Squirrels formed as a quartet in 2008 in Guelph; its core members are faculty at the university there, three of them researchers with the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice (ICaSP) research initiative. Pianist Ajay Heble is the founder and (until this year) Artistic Director of the Guelph Jazz Festival, and his academic and curatorial work have brought him into close contact with some of the finest free improvisers in contemporary music. Guitarist Daniel Fischlinhas collaborated with Heble on key works in improvisation scholarship (including The Other Side of Nowhere [Wesleyan, 2004] and The Fierce Urgency of Now[Duke, 2013]) and is an eminent Shakespearean. Electric bassist Lewis Melville taught in the Department of Botany (now Molecular and Cell Biology), and the quartet’s original percussionist Rob Wallace was an ICaSP postdoctoral fellow. In the years leading up to the recording of Time of the Sign in June, 2012, Wallace moved on to other academic employment, and was replaced by drummer Ted Warren.
The band is expanded to a septet for this recording, and includes Jane Bunnett(on flute and soprano saxophone), Scott Merritt (on guitar) and Ben Grossman(on hurdy-gurdy), with contributions from Larry Cramer (on trumpet) and – not, perhaps, to be underestimated – Dave Clark (improvised conduction). Many of the musicians double on miscellaneous electronic and little instruments, an echo of some of the performance practices of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago. The Vertical Squirrels’ electronic press kit suggests that the group was “initially conceived as an informal outlet to get Heble back into playing piano after years of curating the Guelph Jazz Festival (but rarely performing himself),” but the music doesn’t centre on Heble. Lewis Melville also (on this and the other recordings) is credited as the principal producer, and seems to be something of the instigator for the group. (A recording of his composition for foghorns at the Sound Symposium in St. Johns Newfoundland is also used as a sonic underlay for the last track on the album.) But I think it’s important to emphasize the decentred character of this music: not that it’s ever incoherent, but that no single voice ever predominates or directs. There are no solos on this record, which is partly why I wanted to emphasize something like its modesty: not to say that any of the players is ever diffident or deferential; if anything, each contributor’s line or instrumental texture only adds to the gathering energies, the obvious vitality and shared dynamism that every track evinces. But there is also a proactive humility, a thoroughly engaged mutual practice of listening, that informs this music: each player seems instinctively to know when to sound and when to lay out, and what results is a set of warmly shifting, variegated accretions, folds of resonance and dehiscence, an electro-acoustic version of what Byron, of all poets, once called “voluptuous swell.”
By saying that there are no solos, I don’t mean to indicate as absence of melodic line or improvisational drive, but rather that this music emerges from simultaneous reciprocities, layers of polymorphic call-and-response but also of departures and excursuses that loop in and out of the general, generative flow. (The music was recorded live, open to the public, over the course of two days: the session announcement is still on Facebook.) The press kit, again, compares their music to some of the improvisational jams of Frank Zappa, and I can hear that, certainly, in their communal emphasis on rock ostinato, riff and groove. But I hear a collation of influences, closer at times to, say, Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time group around Virgin Beauty (1988) – without the insistently spiky harmolodic angles of the leader’s alto – or, at other moments, echoes of the audio-Americana of Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny. (Ted Warren’s electronically treated vocals on the title track closely recall Mark Ledford’s melodic doublings with the PMG.) The compiled electric pianos of Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way sometimes feel present, and the opening track, “Falling from the Ground Up,” recalls as it unfolds McCoy Tyner’s work from the early 1970s, while Lewis Melville basslines fall at several points into a Tinariwen-like pulse. None of these audible influences ever quite settles or takes hold for more than a minute or two, however, and what emerges as each cut builds is a buoyant, unstable and living audio organism, a porosity. Each time I listen, I hear new things, other textures: the shifting mesh, for instance, of Fischlin’s and Merritt’s guitars set against the phasing, metallic stringiness of Grossman’s hurdy-gurdy and Heble’s roiling and gangly piano makes for a rich differential polyphony. This music is essentially collaborative not because it demands agreement but because it honours co-creative multiplicity, a coming together apart, not to produce community in difference, not to overcome a plural and sometimes unruly lived humanity, but a community of differences, a soundscape that embraces and welcomes the open auditory field of the many, of disenclosure, of more. Time of the Sign is one of the great recordings of committed collective improvisation.
Occupations: Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers
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| Wadada Leo Smith speaking to the audience in Guelph after the performance of Ten Freedom Summers |
The citation accompanying the announcement that Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music stresses its monumentality: “An expansive jazz work that memorializes ten key moments in the history of civil rights in America, fusing composed and improvised passages into powerful, eloquent music.” He was also voted “Composer of the Year,” in Downbeat magazine’s critics’ poll, for this same work – as well as for his compositions for large ensemble, recordings with the Finnish orchestra TUMO issued as Occupy the World (TUM) earlier this summer. His comments on the Downbeat award, published in the August 2013 issue, stress more than history and canon, more than monument making, although Smith remains deeply conscious of his enmeshment in the continuum of African American musics. Smith points to community-building and change as key principles both in the historical self-awareness promoted by the AACM, through which his compositional and instrumental practices were first nurtured and supported, and in his own compositional practice, which stresses collaboration and mobility.
Those principles suggest, if not enact, a powerful cultural politics: a politics both invoked and put at issue in Ten Freedom Summers. His music, in many respects, offers aural analogues to grass-roots participatory democracy – mutual resonances that come together in practices of sounding and of sounding out. As Franz A. Matzner’s liner notes for Occupy the World put it, “Smith has long inhabited the space where political and artistic movements converge.” Matthew Sumera’s notes for the Cuneiform 4-cd recording of Ten Freedom Summersargue that Smith’s work produces much more than programmatic musical echoes of real-world engagement: “[This] music was not simply about the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. It was part of them.” He quotes Wadada Leo Smith’s assertion that the performances of the suite invite a proactive and imaginatively engaged audience: “They poetically suggest what can be done. . . . None of these pieces [is] meant to simply be listened to.” Sumera pushes this claim further: “Rather, they are meant to be lived.” Extending the reach of Smith’s music beyond the aesthetic (as merely music) into the political (as music that makes a difference, that matters) isn’t liner-note hyperbole, but gestures at the core impetus of his improvisational and compositional practice, of his fusion – as the Pulitzer citation puts it – of these two seemingly incommensurate conceptual frameworks.
In an interview with Daniel Fischlin published as an appendix to an article by Fischlin in Critical Studies in Improvisation, Smith still calls what he does a “model” for political engagement, retaining the idea of an aesthetic analogue: “I strongly feel that the most beautiful model that we have of the practice of democracy is in fact expressed through the workings of a musical ensemble when it is improvising. That experience is a microcosm of those same democratic principles.” But I also hear echoes of Walter Benjamin’s call, in the last of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, for a refusal to aestheticize the political – to convert engagement into spectacle or artful mimesis – and, more importantly, for a creative practice that politicizes the aesthetic, that makes art matter. And it seems to me it’s worth testing, at least a little, how Smith’s work delivers on its claims, how it refuses the dilution of its vital human energies and seeks to reanimate a commitment to positive social and cultural change.
I’m already sounding like I’m on board with the broader project, and I have to admit that I am. But it’s important, I feel, still to retain a certain level of skepticism in order to assess the critical potential of this nascent utopianism, addressing what I feel is a persistent need for colliding artistic and political ideals, but doing so in as open-eyed and keen-eared a manner as I can manage. This exact idealism certainly coloured my expectations when I bought a ticket for a scaled-down performance on Saturday September 7, 2013, at the River Run Centre in Guelph by Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet (without accompanying chamber ensemble) – which included Anthony Davis on piano, John Lindberg on bass and Anthony Brown on percussion. I was jazzed. This concert had the potential to be transcendent, epochal, monumental. The suite contains creative music – I had been listening at some length to the recording – of the highest order, and I really wanted it to deliver on its implicit promises of raised and altered consciousness – a promise that, in my earphones and on my stereo, I felt as if it had already abundantly kept, in fact. It sounds as if I was setting myself up for a disappointment, but that wasn’t the case. The quartet’s music was eloquent, deep, and uplifting. However, in performance, the often stringent demands of Smith’s conception and of the score itself also become a bit more tellingly evident. (A review of the performance by Alayne McGregor can be found here.) The Golden Quartet arranges itself in a semi-circle, with Smith stage left, rather than in the horns-to-the-front configuration of the typical post-bop ensemble. (Smith has often in his recordings worked with the spatiality of sound; on the ECM record Divine Love, for instance, he uses proximity and distance from the microphone to reshape the texture of multiple improvising trumpets.) While at first this spatial configuration might suggest a quasi-democratic leveling, in performance it makes Smith more visible to the other members of the quartet, leaving him able to direct the music more cleanly and organically.
During the Guelph concert, their eyes moved only from score – much of the music looks like it has been through-composed, though its sounds highly spontaneous – to Smith, closely attentive to the demands of structure and direction. In this particular instance, the rhythm section (all of whom are masterful composers, improvisers and bandleaders in their own right) appeared at times a little anxiously bound to the page, which gave the music at a very few points a brittleness, a slight strain that was out of keeping with the committed attack that the composition demands: it needs the instrumentalists to be on, fully inhabiting any given sound moment. While the musicians clearly share in the responsibility for carrying the larger design forward, Smith is still in charge; at several points in the Guelph set, when the collective energy seemed to lag, he strode to centre stage, pumping his right arm as if to impel the rhythm more vigorously forward. He frequently cued the quartet as to which of the nineteen movements they were playing next; rather than establishing a running order ahead of time, it appeared as if he were allowing the dictates of the moment to establish where the music would go next.
The larger design was always there, marked by definitively firm fragments of melody; I recognized (from my earlier listening to the recording) the In a Silent Way-like line from the second part of “America” (section 15) and the loping dirge of “September 11th, 2001” (section 16). (According to the review I’ve linked above, they didn’t play “America,” but I’m sure I heard it.) Jesse Gilbert’s video projections (of photographs of various civil rights activists, for example, marking several evocative moments in the suite) are also meant to suggest certain diegetic moments, when the music speaks its politics definitively. In the May 3, 2013, edition of The New York Times, Ben Ratliff reviewed the first of three nights of a complete performance of Ten Freedom Summers at Roulette in Manhattan, remarking on its simultaneously resonant and frustrating narrative aspirations:
This piece has stories to tell, or rather to refer to. It’s not meant to suggest a narrative but a series of images, evoked mostly through sound. It’s never obvious or literal, which is both very good and sometimes problematic.
A little of that frustration appeared to me to find its way into the urgency of Smith’s efforts to conduct the ensemble on stage in Guelph, visibly driving the music toward making it communicate, making it speak.
In the interview with Daniel Fischlin, Smith suggests that this tension is deliberate, and that speech – as democratically motivated debate and discussion – comes more as an after-effect of the listening experience, rather than as any expressive content of the music itself:
But the quartet still enacted a key aspect around the idea of productive debate, of musical performance as a thinking-through of the politics of voice and voicing. Smith still retained something like mastery over the set. His horn tone, for example, was magisterial, brassy, Armstrong-like, with a southern rawness to it: his own sound guided the ensemble fairly firmly. At the same time, Smith’s compositions aspire to what he calls multiple-dominance, a negotiation for aural space within the shifting dynamics of an ensemble:
I’m not sure I saw – although I may still have heard – a great deal of this sort of collaborative compromising during that set in Guelph; instead, it felt as if Smith were urging the other players toward a more definitive and confident co-participation in the music, but that the urgency and commitment still originated with him, with his instrumental voice.
In a very real sense, Smith wants the other performers in his groups to occupy his compositions. The liner notes for Occupy the World take an epigraph from Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience that speaks to a link between aesthetics and politics, a link that Mr Smith has pursued musically, improvisationally, for more than four decades: “Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?” The aesthetic dimension might not leap at first glance out of these lines, but if you look again closely at what Thoreau says, it does begin to locates itself in the crossover between a phenomenology of recognition and the craft of organization: how, we could ask, does Smith’s music activate and intensify participatory attention as it organizes and re-organizes itself? The coincidence and dehiscence of individuated lines, the fluid rhythmic geometries of his conception, the resonant potentialities of diversely intersecting timbres are all for him avenues, in performance, for occupying music. There are, he has said, two crucial aspects to his “concept for composing,” which he calls (in the liner notes for Occupy the World) rhythmic and polylinear:
Firstly, my composition are non-metric designs in regards to their rhythmic and sonic construction. The horizontal flow of the rhythms and sonic elements of a composition [is] achieved through a proportional structuring of the music’s geometric forms that, in performance, is realized by the shape f the music’s properties and not by its metric count. [. . .] [Secondly,] when I compose, I do not change the tonality of the instruments being used. . . . I do not believe in reducing the sonic field to a singular tonal spectrum, where one could have a multiple sonic spectrum hat shares the same musical grid without losing the large world of possibilities inherent in the sound universe.
The sometimes clashing sometimes consonant textures of the given timbre and tonality of instruments enacts a dynamics of argument, of compromise and self-assertion that, for Smith, has the potential to achieve what he calls a “higher level of realization,” as both performers and listeners, audience members. I am not sure if this realization happened during the hour or so I witnessed The Golden Quartet perform Ten Freedom Summers: Smith has set the bar very high for his collaborators. The music, taken on its own terms, was wonderful, powerful, moving: playing of a very high order that I was privileged to hear live. In the Downbeat piece, Smith admits that his project remains necessarily utopian, a figuration of human potential. He evokes the Occupy movement in New York, and globally, as a vitally nascent politics in which his music, he hopes, might participate:
“That was a great re-imagining of the possibilities of our society and possibility for radical change of our society,” Smith said. “It has not achieved it as such, but nevertheless, the idea is still there and not going away.”
And that persistence suggests something of the feeling of monumentality, of significance, that Smith’s music evokes: its moment.
Steve Lacy’s Tips: Scott Thomson and Collaborators at Guelph (2011)
A unit of tactile measure: the foot, the arm, the thumb. [from Le Jour et la Nuit: Cahiers de Georges Braque (1917-1952)]
When I took up this blog in earnest – well, more in earnest than I had before – in 2011, one of the pieces I meant to write but didn’t manage to get down on paper was my reaction to a workshop-performance of Steve Lacy’s suite Tips by a trio called The Open (Scott Thomson, trombone; Susanna Hood, voice/dance; and Kyle Brenders, soprano saxophone), augmented by dancer Alanna Kraaijeveld, at the Guelph Jazz Festival in September that year. The trio is a sub-configuration of The Rent, Thomson’s excellent quintet dedicated to performing Steve Lacy’s music, one of a number of significant repertory bands – including Ideal Bread and The Whammies – to have emerged after Lacy’s death. (Lacy’s collaborator, trombonist Roswell Rudd, who has also been Thomson’s teacher and mentor, has written a promotional blurb for The Rent’s 2010 recording praising their many virtues: “The Rent has done the world a solid favor by rendering a bouquet of Steve Lacy’s compositions with precision, imagination and love. Thanks so much.”) Gratitude is also something I feel when I remember, even now, the powerfully moving reading of Tips the quartet gave that September afternoon in the foyer of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre at the University of Guelph. It was one of the highlights of the festival, and continues to be, to my mind, one of the most artistically engaged and engaging moments I have experienced as an audience member, as a listener.
In the autobiographical essay he wrote for Daniel Kernohan’s anthology Music is Rapid Transportation(2010), Thomson describes a shift in approach and attitude he underwent as he began performing demanding improvisational music like Lacy’s:
[B]efore I started playing music, while I certainly listened deeply, passionately and, indeed, differentlythan most people I knew, I listened as an ostensible outsider and as a kind of passive consumer. […] Since I started playing, however, the tangible experience of playing collaboratively (improvisation, composition, or both, it doesn’t matter) has taught me how to listen as a participant in the music making process whether performing or not, a change that has been profoundly rewarding. Fundamentally, it’s the difference between listening to and listening with.
The shift in prepositions is significant, because it speaks to a practice of listening as active engagement; Thomson is careful to note that this practice isn’t limited to musicians, but that in his case collaborative musical performance is how he felt enabled to begin to produce a bridging of intersubjective detachments through co-creative experience, through some kind of shared aesthesis. It’s a sharing that appears to consist, as well, both in and through not identification but mutual difference – as opposed, perhaps, to mutual indifference.
What I think I found truly uplifting about their version of Tips was that it seemed as if I had shared in a bit of that bridgework; as an audience member, I felt as if I were somehow taking part in the unfolding, present tense of sound and movement in front of me. The “open” in the trio’s name suggests an openness – in approach, in conception and in realization. Both despite and through their virtuosity, their “precision” as Rudd puts it, these performers offer each other and their listeners genuine, tangible openings onto a temporal and spatial immediacy, onto the textures of what happens, of happening itself. (A video of the workshop performance, with question-and-answer session about their work, can be viewed here, on the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice website. If you look carefully, you can even catch me, on the left hand side, asking a question.) It may be a bit hard to sense or to glimpse this collaborative vitality in the video recording that was made that afternoon: we’re held at something of a remove by lens and electronic screen, by the interface. The presence that informs a palpably successful live performance is sometimes hard to catch second-hand. For me, there was something powerfully affecting in the mesh of the instrumental lines, of Susanna Hood’s voice and of Alanna Kraaijeveld’s kiltering, edgy movements that drew me in and that held me, for a while. I wish I could explain it better. (“In art,” writes Georges Braque in his diaries, the source for all the aphorisms and tips in Lacy’s brief suite, “only one thing counts: that which cannot be explained.”) Lacy’s music can sometimes seem a bit detached, a bit incisively formal, but when this quartet took up Tips that day they uncovered in its firmly unresolved tone-rows and intervals, in its fricative melodic eddies and currents, a fleeting means to touch the all-too-human fabric of our uneasy time. “Emotion,” writes Braque, “cannot grow nor be imitated; it represents the seed, the work of art represents the bud.” A pathos.
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.
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.
Improvising Diaspora: Fred Ho, John Coltrane and the Music of Radical Respect
Here is the principal part of the text of a fifteen-minute conference paper I delivered in September 2007 at the University of Guelph, speaking at the colloquium of the Guelph Jazz Festival, entitled that year “People Get Ready,” and focused on the community-building and political engagements of improvised musics.
Fred Ho wants a music that speaks, and he wants to speak through music: “The music,” he writes, meaning for the most part jazz-derived improvisation, “has to and will embody messages, either explicitly (in the form of lyrics and/or song titles) or implicitly (in the sound and in its spirit).” To start out, I think, there are at least two things to note in such claims, of which Ho makes many. The foremost is almost unremarkable for its transparency, as it’s probably intended to be: Ho writes and speaks about improvised music as much as he composes and performs. The series of manifestoes, polemics and mandates that he has delivered, in essays and addresses over the last two decades, are instances of musical embodiment, not just statements about what he thinks his music does, but language forms representing the state to which his own music aspires: it wants to say what it means, directly and transparently, to its audience, “the people.” Second is a stylistic and grammatical point, really, a feature of his characteristic language that tends to be read back, by listeners of various persuasions, onto his music, often as stridency or brashness: Ho’s language, if we mean to treat it as in any way poetically shaped, is inevitably cast in an imperative mood. My question today, which I want more to pose than pretend definitively to answer, is how concretely music works toward what we might take for meaning. I want to take Fred Ho at his word. Can a baritone saxophone solo, for example, of the sort you’re hearing now, be said to speak? [Fred Ho’s arrangement of “Naima” was playing in the background, as I presented.] How does music aspire, beyond obvious programmatics, to the condition of speech? What exactly is being declared?
Jazz journalist Bill Shoemaker has written, perceptively and with a somewhat troubling accuracy, that
There are many musicians throughout jazz history who have been labeled revolutionaries, but that’s usually because of their musical accomplishments. Fred is a revolutionary who uses jazz as his medium.
The presumption, coming out of Ho’s work as much as Shoemaker’s well-attuned audition, is that sound can carry political and social meaning directly, formally; that revolution isn’t a trope but an aesthetic practice, enacted both for and with audiences. Ho describes the reaction he wants from listeners as akin to those of a child, who can “be both spellbound and revolutionized” by a given performance; music at once enthralls and enables, two countervaling states of raised consciousness – piety and critique, mimetic wonder and diegetic detachment, in a sense – that inhere in his populist claims. To play for the people, if you think about it, is both to invite mimicry and to call for unruliness, to refuse that same invitation. How, if music means to speak, can “people” be empowered by the cultish image of the inspired soloist, by his polemic force, exactly to speak out, not to be silenced by the verbal or expressive force of that declaration?
There’s a deeply embedded formal contradiction here that speaks to the nature of a musical politics, and to the ways in which music operates, I think, as a cultural pedagogy, as instruction in democratic or revolutionary forms of critique. In a talk at the triennial conference of ACLALS on 19 August 2007, Henry Giroux spoke with some dismay about what he called “the politics of disposability” among American young people, calling for a renewed and hopeful cultural pedagogy, following Paolo Freire, a radical futurity that dignifies people “so that they can become fully free.” This is Fred Ho’s vocabulary. Not only is it necessary to foster critical engagement among students with the cultural materials in which they find themselves immersed, teaching how to “read critically,” but there is a pressing need, Giroux argues, “to prepare students to function as critical agents capable of understanding, engaging, and transforming those discourses and institutional contexts that closed down democratic public life” (119). They need to take part. Despite his deep suspicions of aesthetics, which he suggests is tainted by “the residue of nostalgia and elitism” and also “seems particularly out of date, if not irrelevant” given the pervasiveness of a largely debased popular culture (are there echoes of Adorno here?), Giroux insisted on moving beyond critical thinking toward enabling students as “cultural producers,” as makers, as co-participants. But what do such arts sound like? Should we still be cautious of aesthetics, given the barometers of taste and technique that tend to manifest in such contexts? How do we face up to the demands of a democratic or popular art, of its audience? We’re negotiating a tension over the declamatory and the formal here: the expressive and the well-made. Addressing the rigour of our engagement depends, if you think about it, on a set of standards against which the openness of that participatory dynamic mitigates.
Fred Ho’s music operates, I think, on versions of this tension, negotiating the uncertainties and challenges between naïve, expressive directness and aesthetic detachment. As a composer and improviser, Ho has pursued remarkable and effective fusions of Asian heritage and folk forms with African-American avant-garde jazz, and many of his ballets, operas and suites – as extended idioms adapted from their “legit” Eurocentric counterparts and re-imaged as culturally porous, collaborative events – have been realized in complex, poly-dimensional, multi-media productions. These structural and conceptual pluralities have become hallmarks of Ho’s creative enmeshment in the unsettled and unsettling irresolutions of his diasporic cultural status, as an Asian-Pacific American. Difference and contrariety are, in Ho’s work, not problems to be resolved but constitutive elements through which liberation, both as a raising of consciousness and as tangible political transformation, might be sought. At the same time, Ho openly acknowledges his debt to the social polemics of Black Nationalism of the 1960s. His work as a writer (represented, for example, in his contributions to the anthology Legacy to Liberation, 2000) remains seemingly bound up in identity-politics and Marxist apologetics, an often fiercely uncompromising discourse that appears, as I’ve noted already, stylistically and theoretically at odds with his radically destabilizing musical practices. At the same time, if you’ve been able at all to listen to the baritone solo and now to his arrangementof John Coltrane’s “Naima” playing in the background, you realize that his music, on the surface, is not premised on inaccessibility or difficulty, consistently, but repeatedly seeks out – through riffs, repetitions, allusions to popular idioms – to involve listeners in its unfolding. The baritone solo, while offered up as an extension of the lineage of Sonny Rollins, Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, doesn’t aspire to Gunther Schuller’s musicological complexities or to radical serialism. Similarly, Ho’s admiration for poets such as Amiri Baraka or Kalamu ya Salaam appears to have much more to do with the verbal directness of their political interventions, with their emphasis on declarative immediacy, than with their linguistic or formal innovations. The title of the suite from which this music is taken bespeaks the politics of verbal directness and transparent engagement that Ho craves: “Yes Means Yes, No Means No, Whatever She Wears, Wherever She Goes.” Meaning, while at issue, wants to be denuded equivalence, unmarred by subtleties or doodads. The lyrics by Ann T. Greene, Andrea Lockett and others for the suite, a pro-feminist anti-patriarchal work commissioned in 1993 by WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization) and BWARE (Brooklyn Women’s Anti-Rape Exchange), pull no punches. While resolutely opposed to sexual violence, the work, for Ho, has its roots in reactive physical confrontation: “My mother is a survivor of domestic violence, and as a young teenager, I physically fought my father to stop him beating her. I now see this as my first
revolutionary insurrection and challenge of patriarchal authority.”
Still, when Ho asks, in a recent artist’s statement, “how does music free us?” he draws attention to sonic texture and to poetic structure as inherently, crucially political, focusing our ears on how that challenge occurs, physiologically and consciously, rather than simply what it might be about. Ho’s apparently naïve preference for uninterrogated declamation – what some critics have dismissed as crude stridency – actually involves him, along with his listeners, in a difficult dialectic, a deeply rooted tension over the nature and practice of expression itself: of the interconnections between doing and saying. Paul Gilroy’s discussion of jazz and diaspora in Against Race – where he argues for “new possibilities and new pleasures” enabled by the fundamental dislocations of diasporic non-identities – provides a starting point for re-thinking Ho’s indebtedness to racial nationalisms, and for a more careful and attentive reading of his mesh of sounds and words. Coming to Gilroy might seem problematic in this context, given Ho’s overt attachment to what Gilroy dismisses as raciology, but Ho’s frequently discussed but still largely uninterrogated adherence to black nationalism – particularly as a non African American – finds one of its moments of coherence in the context of diaspora. How can a Chinese-American seriously compose a Black Panther suite, for example? There’s no reason why he shouldn’t of course, but the racial politics explicit in this work certainly trouble that allegiance, although trouble is exactly, I think, what Fred Ho might be about.
Working to define “the distinctiveness of diaspora poetics” (335), Gilroy cites Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka’s (1967) poetic formulation of “the changing same”:
This changing same is not some invariant essence that gets enclosed subsequently in a shape-shifting exterior with which it is casually associated. It is not the sign of an unbroken, integral inside protected by a camouflaged husk. The phrase names the problem of diaspora politics and diasporic poetics. . . . Invariably promiscuous, diaspora and the politics of commemoration it specifies, challenge us to apprehend mutable, itinerant forms that can redefine the idea of culture through a reconciliation with movement and dynamic variation. (“Diaspora and the Detours of Identity” 336; Against Race 129-130)
James Clifford, among many others, criticizes this formulation inasmuch as it tends to abstract and to diffuse collective political and social agencies, the possibility of there even being a “people”:
diaspora discourses such as Gilroy’s refuse to let go of a “changing same,” something endlessly hybridized and in process but persistently there-memories and practices of collective identity maintained over long stretches of time. Gilroy attempts to conceive the continuity of a “people” without recourse to land, race, or kinship as primary “grounds” of continuity. What, then, is the persistent object of his history? How to circumscribe this “changing same?” (Clifford 320)
This is a serious issue for a version of what I’ve heard here start to be called social aesthetics, I think: how effective to locate and to speak to a popular audience.
Ho’s recording of John Coltrane’s “Naima” (1998) – with lyrics by poet and journalist Andrea M. Lockett – offers listeners an opportunity to address Ho’s deliberately conflicted relationship to the radical sixties, and also suggests how a dynamic critical relationship between Ho’s work and his multiple cultural and musical heritages – what he names a practice of radical respect – has the potential to enact a model for new and liberated human communities, an arduous and challenging idealism he calls, following Sun Ra, embracing the impossible.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 