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Ches Smith, Mat Maneri, Craig Taborn: The Bell at the Western Front
Last night at the Western Front, Ches Smith’s trio (with him on drum kit and vibraphone, Mat Maneri on electrified viola, and Craig Taborn on piano) offered two sets of provocative, engrossing and powerful music drawn from The Bell, their recent album issued by ECM. Each set consisted of extended suites of Smith’s compositions; his writing practice sounds to me typically to involve a logic of serial disjunction, assembling each piece from layered rhythmic and melodic cells—emerging in the recording as fractal loops, insistent frittered ostinato, reminiscent at times of Steve Reich’s music for percussion—conjoined in distinct, contrasting sections. In performance, those assemblages—close to coruscating, unfixed fragments of wordless art songs—link up, often with turn-on-a-dime jump cuts, to produce a compelling admixture of meditative resonance and hard-driving, impactful disturbance. The music feels both openly improvisational and exactingly through-composed, as it moves from the intimate lyricism of chamber-jazz to—I’m not exaggerating—bone-shaking heavy-metal thrash. The first set emerged as a single suite, gradually ramping, like “I Think” and “Wacken Open Air” do on the recording, toward a propulsive, drum-driven wall of sound; the recording itself is quieter, with the drums mixed down a little, while in performance Ches Smith will build a thunderous and gleeful abandon. (I don’t know which compositions were played in which set, although I think they began with “The Bell”; they may have played extended version of the album tracks in order, since the second set—which featured two more compact suites instead of one—closed with “For Days,” the final cut on the recording.) Craig Taborn’s lines concentrated principally on repeated motifs, either locked chords or looped shards of melody, but he also provided an insistence, a fierceness, that introduced a provocative and—if this is the right word—actively contemplative energy into the potential stasis or fixity in such unwavering recurrence to push the sound forward. Gilles Deleuze names a philosophical version of this practice, simply, the imagination: “The role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition, to draw difference from it. . . . Between a repetition which never ceases to unravel itself and a repetition which was deployed and conserved for us in the space of repetition, there was difference, . . . the imaginary. Difference inhabits repetition” (Difference and Repetition 76). Mat Maneri’s contributions on viola either established electronically-enhanced bass drones, or, more frequently, negotiated the interstices of upper-register tonality, pulling at the spaces between notes, microtonally fraying and re-stitching phrases. All told, it was a truly powerful gig, the trio collectively laying down a spate of compelling trajectories through variegated tensions and multiplicities: overlapping lines that attend on, that sound, I’d say, the “barely intervallic” collisions and differences inherent in present-tense collaboration, to grant an audience moments of shared, unsettled, and imaginatively rich listening.
Book
Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. 1968.
Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP,
1994. Print.
Sheila Jordan and Cameron Brown: Tuesday Night at Ironworks, 3 March 2015
Still a jazz childat eighty-six, Sheila Jordan – who performed in her duo with bassist Cameron Brownlast night at Ironworks in Vancouver – has a vitality and playful joy that show no signs of abating. Her two sets consisted of well-developed material – medleys of standards and classic bebop, peppered with a few originals – that she’s been performing for decades, emerging primarily out of her work with Harvie Swartz. That said, every song sounds thoroughly fresh, immediate and compelling. Her lower register has taken on a little grain, but her lilting scat lines, the chirrup and purl that are hallmarks of her vocals, are undiminished: the lightly off-kilter cadences of her improvisations are as intimately compelling and as warmly engaging as they have been since her stunning 1962 debut record, Portrait of Sheila (where she defines close relationship to the bass – in this case, Steve Swallow – that comes to shape her music for the subsequent half-century).
We all have our favourite Sheila Jordan records; aside from Portrait of Sheila, which is an indisputably essential album for any collection, I love The Crossing (1984, on Blackhawk) and her performance on Steve Swallow’s settings of Robert Creeley poems, Home (1980, ECM): I often find myself unexpectedly humming “Sure, Herbert . . . ” out of the blue. Despite what can sometimes feel like a timbre of quiet restraint, Sheila Jordan’s voice attains a peculiar resonance; it stays with you, softly plangent and quickly sonorous. The performances last night closely matched the material on Celebration (2005, High Note), which is I think the first live recording of her work with Cameron Brown, but you could never tell that this music was over a decade old. This is late work, for Jordan, certainly, but it’s also vivacious and exuberant; aside from some street noise coming through the club walls, the audience was so quiet and intensely focused on the music you could hear Cameron Brown’s fingers brush along the strings of his instrument.
A Sheila Jordan gig offers enraptured attentiveness, a focused close listening, but she’s also just so infectiously happy, laughing and larking through each song. Commenting on the flubs she sometimes makes in her “old age,” she said there was no need “to get uptight about it. As long as your heart and soul are in it, it doesn’t matter.” She and Cameron Brown started off with an introductory blues – “And so I’ll sing of joy and pain for you / With all the happiness this melody brings” – followed by a standard, “Better Than Anything.” A version of “It’s You or No One” came next, which Brown had also recomposed by adding a new, boppish melody to the changes, and re-naming it “Sheila, It’s You.” Cameron Brown is an extraordinary bassist, his fleet and virtuosic lines emerging from a depth that recalled Charles Mingus. (Shelia Jordan opened the second set with an anecdote about singing in duo with a bassist for the first time when she was sixteen and Charles Mingus called her onto the stage to do a version of “Yesterdays”; they also offered a take, amid a tribute to Billie Holiday, on Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.”) There was a medley of dance-themed tunes dedicated to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire (“I loved this cat, I’d walk two miles to see him dance . . .”), and another medley of songs associated with Oscar Brown Jr. that included her wonderful version of Bobby Timmons’s “Dat Dere” (which also appears, in tribute to Sheila Jordan, on Rickie Lee Jones’s Pop Pop). To set up her “Blues Medley for Miles” (“Blue Skies,” “All Blues” and Jon Hendricks’s transcription of the trumpet solo from “Freddie Freeloader”), she told a story of Billie Holiday sitting in a dark corner of a club warbling out “Miiiiiiiiles, Miiiiiles” while Davis soundchecked in a basement club in New York: he apparently asked if a stray cat had got into the room, which she thought was hilarious. Sheila Jordan – her music and her persona – is all about jazz history, recounting stories of her encounters with musicians in the 1950s, especially Charlie Parker. She did versions of what might have been “Yardbird Suite” – I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes – and what was definitely “Scrapple from the Apple”; Bird, sixty years after his death, was still a keen and powerful presence. She also gestured at her own Seneca heritage, vocalizing in an American Indian style to frame a version of the Jimmy Webb country ballad “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress.” She acknowledged that the Seneca Queen Alliquippa was her great-great-great grandmother, – and so, she said, if it hadn’t been for Columbus she might have been royalty. The second set closed with an invitation to guitarist Bill Coon to join Jordan and Brown for a trio version of her anecdotal “Sheila’s Blues.” She offered her healing, restorative song of recovery, “The Crossing,” as an encore. As she left the stage, she laughed and called out to everyone: “Have a beautiful life, and if I don’t see you again, I’ll meet you in heaven.” Her music and her voice offered us all a gift of affirmation and of colloquial joy.
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.
All Good Possibles: Ken Babstock, On Malice
Ken Babstock read last Tuesday evening at Book Warehouse on Main St., for the Vancouver launch of his latest collection On Malice, which appeared a little earlier this fall from Coach House Books. The book gathers three extended pieces and a skewed sonnet sequence: “Perfect Blue Distant Objects,” “Deep Packet Din,” “Five Eyes,” and “SIGINT.” The emphasis falls variously in each agglomerated text on distraction and noise, on riddled and riddling semantic textures, on versions and variorums. A little like Tom Raworth, Babstock inclines his ear closely to the saturated, thickened flows of mediatized language — “the streaming of form from the machine” as the closing line of “Deep Packet Din” puts it — catching at and contingently arresting on each page those overlapping currents, those soupy waves of vestigial sense. Each poem presents itself as a species of media drill core, a striated section of repurposed data-packets, reconstituting voice as shifty aggregates of sedimentary, lexical samples. Reading these lines, I rarely know quite who or where or how I am meant to be, or to be positioned: “The excess space junk making / prayer beads of morning’s screaming / party.” Speech cannot settle into consistency, and the speaking subject asserts itself as verbal ragpicker, as audio splicer. “May we become / noises,” somebody eventually does pray in “Perfect Blue Distant Objects.” Just so.
Over the past year and a half I have heard Ken Babstock read three times: at Tuesday’s launch, in late October at the Vancouver International Writers Festival (as one of eight featured in the Poetry Bash), and last spring at the Play Chthonics series at the University of British Columbia, which I was coordinating. At each reading he concentrated on presenting slices from “SIGINT,” the opening sequence from On Malice. Given the complexities of this poetry and my own limited space here, I’m going to concentrate on making an initial foray into reading “SIGINT,” rather than attempting to come to terms with the book as a whole. Even as networked arrays, each of the extended poems of On Malice is constructed and derived from a principal source, an originary pool from which its draws much of its noise; “Perfect Blue Distant Objects” refigures an essay on optics by William Hazlitt, while “Five Eyes” “mines vocabulary” (as Babstock puts it in his own notes, without which — or at least without a thorough Google search — I would have a pretty hard time figuring this out) from John Donne’s tract on suicide, “Biathanatos.” “SIGINT” is a set of thirty-nine hybridized sonnets, which seem to gather voices at an abandoned surveillance station atop the artificial Teufelsberg in Berlin, but are also built from translations of Walter Benjamin’s manuscript notes about his son Stefan’s language acquisition – records of a preschooler’s various word-games, puns and whimsical infelicities. The choice of the sonnet form may have a little to do with Benjamin’s own posthumously published Sonette, a Jugendstil-ish sequence he began composing after the war-protest suicide of his friend, the poet Fritz Heinle, in 1914 — a segment of literary history that may also link to the Donne piece. Despite any gestures at late modern formalism (Benjamin’s sequence, for example, uses Shakespearean and Rilkean sonnets as formal models), Babstock’s poems tend to be fractured both metrically and structurally, hacking their generic/genetic source-codes. Each poem consists of four tercets, substituting a hypermetrical thirteenth line for a couplet, an imaginary “incident report” of collisions between birds and aircraft, animal and machine, in Soviet airspace between Siberian and Berlin. Place names invoked in these seemingly arbitrary last lines are also ordered, approximately, alphabetically, another gesture at factors of thirteen: twenty-six letters divided by two. The sequence itself is broken symmetrically into three parts of thirteen poems. Thirteen, not quite fourteen: these are sonnets gone to pieces. But rather than collapse, the form also suggests reconstitution — not teleology or closure, but asymptote, approach. These are sonnets in the process of self-acquisition, self-fashioning, assemblage.
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| Teufelsberg, from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsberg |
The Teufelsberg station, haunted by Cold War spectres, figures in the poems as a listening post that attends to human aftermath. The poet, in Babstock’s sequence, takes on a role derived from Benjamin’s reading of Charles Baudelaire, a cultural ragpicker: “’Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste.’ . . . Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.” Babstock’s poems collate by listening to mediated human noise, attending to the “rattle again of splintered waste” that aerials, ears and dishes manage to pick up. The poems both catalogue shards and orts of discourse and aspire to regenerate meaning tentatively from semantic refuse: “It is, I’m afraid, a symbol, dear rubble.” Writing wants to devolve, fearfully, into replicant transcription, copy-editing: “I can only read out / what we get back.” What those fractured symbols might impart to us remains in abeyance, the mechanics of representation still fraught and insufficient. “What gets learned,” our frustrated ragpicker asks, “from all this listening?” “One can listen all night,” we’re told, without imaginative gain. Yet traces remain, nonetheless amid what feels like aleatory jumble, of a “devotional commerce,” a vestigial lyric religiosity, a texture of sense; or, what the poems at one point name “a surplus of negative affect” onto which the voice opens, as a prayer to language itself, a call to recover from informatics welter — by what the poems call merely thinking, by cognitive and creative effort — whatever might be left to us of singing: “in the post-informational gloaming” we “can never not finish reading it as song.” Melopoeia prods readers, as listeners, into affective involvement: “I have just thrown / the feeling into your mouth. Now you tell it.” What Babstock offers as poetic throwing — and even as throwing up, an abjected language that also frames itself as “desiccated scat” and refuse —hangs in the hiatus, as the small lurch of the line break here suggests, between repression and disclosure, like the uneasy stall of a double negative (“never not finish”). “There will be no clarification,” our collator notes, so we need, even at this late moment, to”[t]hink of a good reason not to quit listening,” so that we might somehow move past reiterative stasis. ”I am practicing dead songs,” the poet aggregator declares, but, amid “constant surveillance,” swallowed in “the knowledge industry,” the first person singular, the speaking subject, still inclines to sing: “I’m repurposing myself.” The call to listening shifts reading away from semiotic anxiety (“I’m afraid”) toward an aesthetics of mouth texture, of shared speech and permeable selves, a remaindered eros: “Because you involved me.” The hiatuses, the fractures and absences onto which these poems open, are also — as linguistic surplus, as negative tropes — spaces of desire, of human longing:
Because I am sleeping in love’s room
now, the moment will have
received a promise to wait.
At such moments Babstock’s sonnets become sonnets, although the trimmed tenth syllable of the pentameter in the first of these lines, “now,” thrown forward into the next line, also marks a disjunctive temporality, an abeyance: passionate stall.
Listening to Ken Babstock read these poems out loud — briefly, quietly, even undemonstratively — gestures, despite their apparent recalcitrance as texts that might be decoded, clarified or understood, at reciprocity, at shared affect:
Perhaps you truly don’t own it but it’s
in your mouth now so take it
for a walk.
(Again, a pair of skewed pentameters, sonnet shards.) At the Book Warehouse reading, like a poetry nerd, I found myself taking notes, transcribing stray lines, a little like the ragpicker of these texts. It turns out, perhaps, that I was inadvertently answering that call, getting involved, pulling a few good possibles from what I thought I heard, taking his words for another brief walk. Just so.
Taylor Ho Bynum on Wreck Beach, 28 August 2014
Sunset on Thursday, August 28, was supposed to happen, according to my smartphone app, at about 8:00pm – although sunsets are attenuated diminishments, not sudden closures of the light, so the timing was no doubt loose enough. But I was still running a bit late, and cutting it close. It was about 7:45. Taylor Ho Bynum had announced that he was beginning his west coast bicycle tour this evening with a sunset fanfare on Wreck Beach, Vancouver’s famously clothing-optional strand, at the tip of Point Grey on the University of British Columbia campus. I wanted to be there to hear him play. Getting to the beach involves descending a fairly steep set of 400-odd wood-framed earthen stairs. I had rushed past some former students at the top, saying hello but that I was headed for what I thought was to be a solo concert of improvised cornet music on the beach that was about to start so I was sorry but I had to go. At least, that’s what I think I said. I took the stairs two-at-a-time as I started down, but that soon proved to be too dangerous a tactic, so I dialed the urgency back a little and settled into a one-by-one descent. Tanned and mellow, loosely garbed nudists and dreadlocked dudes passed by me on their way up from a day of sunbathing in the heavy, bronze August light. The staircase itself is shadowed and cool, snaking along a gully in the cliff-side amid stands of west-coast cedar, poplar and the odd birch. Clumps of oversized ferns open in the various cusps of hillocks a few metres off the south side of the path. As I made my way down, at speed, I was pelted by what looked in the dimness like scissor-winged dark moths, small meandering swarms of them newly airborne, a sign of the oncoming night. One or two clung to the folds of my t-shirt. I brushed them off, and, passing the green plastic Johnny-on-the-Spot, emerged from the trees onto the beach sand at the foot of the stairs.
I couldn’t see anything that looked like a concert. It took a moment to orient myself. Scattered beach-goers were still perched against logs, facing the Georgia Strait, watching the sunset in the west across the water. A naked, deeply tanned old man nodded and passed me. Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. I thought I might have missed Taylor Ho Bynum.
And then I heard what sounded like a Harmon-muted horn, a little faint, off to the right of the stairs. Perched against one of the many driftwood logs that serve as breaks and that define limited privacies amid this reach of open public space, Taylor – shirt off – was playing to some seagulls who had waddled up to him, curious. I came over and sat on the log next to his. There seemed to be a few other people around the space, at their own chosen logs, who were listening, too. Most of the folks around us were couples, however, out for some kind of romantic postcard moment. The seagulls squawked at Taylor’s playing, and he engaged in a little playful conversation with them, before they wandered off. The couple I took for lovers looked over, once, then went back to themselves. The Harmon mute on the cornet gave his sound an intimacy, a hush that was a little swallowed in the rhythmic wash of ocean on sand, and in the wide-open air. You had to be sitting close by to hear.
Taylor finished what he was playing, set down his horn, and put on his shirt. I came over to him and said hello. He’s a very affable, open person, and chatted for a few minutes, telling me how on the very first leg of his bicycle tour – what would probably amount to 1800 miles over the course of five or six weeks, from Vancouver to Tijuana, playing concerts and ad hoc gigs along the way – he had fallen and cut his leg and arm; he had just been washing his cuts in ocean water, which he told me he hoped would work as a kind of natural antiseptic. (Taylor’s own account of his accident, and of playing on Wreck Beach, can be found in his on-line journal for his Bicycle Tour.)
Another listener, whom I recognized from jazz festival gigs this past June and whose name, if I remember right, is Michael, sat down on the log opposite, and joined in the casual talk.
Taylor noticed that the sun was beginning to set in earnest, and said he ought to play some music, like he’d intended. He was concerned that he might be too loud for the thinning community of beach-goers around us, so he placed a soft hat over the bell of his cornet. He improvised an angled fanfare for a little under ten minutes, eventually removing the hat and letting the horn sing out a bit more fully. Michael and I sat a few feet on either side of him as he played, facing the water. The open ocean seemed more or less to swallow up the sound – I don’t think there was a danger of him being too loud here – while the cedars lining the embankment behind us occasionally bounced a cluster of notes back toward us, gently resonant. He was recording himself on an iPad that he had placed to his right, against the log. He put both performances on Sound Cloud – they’re called “Gulls” and “Wrecked at Sunset” (the latter presumably in honour both of Wreck Beach and his crash) – and you can easily make out the ways in which he shifts from counterpointing his lines with the aural textures of the local biosphere through a form of call and response, leaving space for those ambient sounds to overcome his notes before reasserting his voice in tandem with that soundscape, shifting foreground and background, and finally, to my ear, melding his voice into that variegated chorus. You can hear at the close of “Wrecked at Sunset,” if you listen closely, the trees returning his melodies like ghosts.
For those few minutes, it felt like Taylor had begun to initiate a musical ecology: situated and embodied, even a little wounded, this wasn’t a “concert” but a shared auditory space, or better: a temporary entry into the layered networks of place, a kind of sonic reciprocity. The inescapably linear monody produced by the cornet gains depth and polymorphous heft by combining expressive assertion with attentive deference, by concocting instances of responsive, correspondent exchange. A conversing. Not playing for so much as playing along, playing with.
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| Actual sunset with which Taylor Ho Bynum was playing on Wreck Beach– including a couple in the right foreground. |
After Taylor finished, and we chatted a little more, one of the RCMP officers who patrol the shore strolled past, and politely suggested that the beach would be closing at dark, and it was time to go. Taylor picked up his horn, and played the Miles Davis outro tag-line from “The Theme,” a light-hearted nod to the historical spectres of improvisers who inevitably haunt our musical memories and an acknowledgement, by quirkily twisting jazz convention, of the ways in which this was no concert, no outdoor club date. He packed up his horn, and picked up his bike, which he had carried down to the beach and which he would have to carry back up the stairs with him. And that was that.
Possibility Abstracts: Taylor Ho Bynum, Nathaniel Mackey and Discrepancy (Audio)
Here is an audio capture of “Possibility Abstracts: Taylor Ho Bynum, Nathaniel Mackeyand Discrepancy,” a paper I delivered in Prague, in the Czech Republic, on 18 July 2014 as part of the vs. Interpretation symposium, sponsored by the Agosto Foundation. The text riffs on the epistolary form of Nathaniel Mackey’s serial novel, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, particularly the fourth volume, Bass Cathedral, on which Taylor Ho Bynum draws for his modular composition Navigation, versions of which he recorded with his sextet for release on Firehouse 12 records late last year. (See firehouse12records.com/album/navigat…12-recordings.) For me, this music is a contemporary masterpiece, negotiating the liminal zone – the discrepancies – between the improvised and the composed, and doing so in such as way as to creatively undo that rather careless binary. There is an excellent review of Navigation by Stuart Broomer in Point of Departure.
Double Short Take on Francois Houle, Alexander Hawkins and Harris Eisenstadt Trio Live at Ironworks
Late Sunday night, June 29th, for the last concert of this year’s TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival’s Innovations Series at Ironworks, I caught the first performance by an extraordinary new trio – Francois Houle, clarinets, Alexander Hawkins, piano, and Harris Eisenstadt, drums. “On fire!” one member of the audience called out at the conclusion of their vociferous and strident opening number, an annunciation of gathering energies. I heard the trio again at a fantastic afternoon gig at Performance Works on Granville Island for Canada Day, and it felt as if, in the intervening hours, the group had transformed from a brilliant summit meeting of next-generation improvisers into a coherent and organically responsive ensemble.
The set list for both performances was the same, as far as I could tell: an array of original compositions from each of its three members, along with two art songs by Steve Lacy: “Esteem” and “Art.” Aside from paying tribute to their avant-jazz lineage, the inclusion of the Lacy material offered their audience some sense of the dynamic historicity of the trio’s present-tense music-making. A previous project by Houle, for instance, engaged with the compositions of John Carter, himself an improviser deeply cognizant of the complex and conflicted history of jazz; Houle’s music seems to me often to negotiate creatively between the expressive and the given, to find its contingent voice at the interface between a virtuosic performer and a motile tissue of echoes, sounding and refiguring its liminally audible past. In fact, a version of this presencing informa the playing of all three. This trio co-creatively takes up each member’s disparate instrumental and aesthetic lineages, and finds points of tension and intersection, prodding their collective sound forward along the shared leading edge of their on-stage, real-time encounter, something Herman Melville – from whose poem “Art” Lacy’s composition took shape – names “pulsed life” that emerges from the creative and attentive collision of unlikenesses:
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
Eisenstadt, Houle and Hawkins fuse audacity and reverence in their music, which enacted during those two performances a generative wrestling with its angelic forebears and also with the immediate living context of its realization. (Lacy says in his own notes to the song that the poem seems to him to frame “the exact recipe for this activity,” for improvisational music-making.) This trio’s instrumentation (reeds/ piano/ drums) recalls the grouping that recorded Steve Lacy’s The Flame (from 1982, with Bobby Few on piano and Denis Charles on drums), but I have to say that I didn’t recognize either of the Lacy compositions at first hearing, and that Hawkins’s style is very different from Few’s, and that he draws out a more orchestrally thick and layered sound from the piano. His occasional use of wide, ringing intervals in his left hand recalled another of Lacy’s piano cohorts, Mal Waldron, but despite the inclusion of Lacy’s compositions, the Hawkins/ Houle/ Eisenstadt trio’s approach and textures were markedly different from this particular precursor.
Instead, especially during the second performance, when Hawkins launched into an extended solo passage of fractal stride, it felt to me, at least for a few minutes, as if the spectre of Teddy Wilson were somehow in the house, and that the drive and sustained ebullience of Eisenstadt’s drumming called up the impeccable abandon of Gene Krupa – whose fierce swing feel sometimes surged and ebbed from his brushes – who played alongside Teddy Wilson in Benny Goodman’s famous trio, whose instrumentation this current trio duplicates exactly. Or to go even further back I thought I could hear some of Johnny Dodds’s playing with Jelly Roll Morton, maybe with a hint here and there of Baby Dodds’s rolling tom-toms or Sid Catlett’s demiurgic rumble (to poach a phrase from Nathaniel Mackey). Still, this music isn’t in any sense neo-trad, and remains decidedly experimental in its orientation, extemporaneously free. But its approach also isn’t non-idiomatic – after Derek Bailey concept of “free” improvisation – so much as poly-idiomatic, a version perhaps of what Steve Lacy called, in the early 1970s when he composed “Esteem,” “poly-free”: a music that’s multivalent, iterative, recombinant. At one point during the first gig, for example, Houle’s circular breathing and quick-fingered looping lines recalled Evan Parker’s solo soprano technique, a sonic gesture that, more than mere homage, lent a contingently historical sense of form even to a doggedly contemporary musical avant-grade. It was as if, for each member of the trio, clusters of aural vocabulary and figments of style were simultaneously activated, cross-purposed, undone, imaginatively remade and even transubstantiated in the crucible of any given moment into a kinetic and differential accord: an alchemy of sound that I hope they managed to record, or might record soon, because, well, I’d like to hear it happen again.
George E. Lewis: Afro/Eurological Collisions
Here is the text of my colloquium paper presented this morning (Saturday, 21 June 2014) at “Improvising Across Boundaries: An Unconventional Colloquium” co-curated by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) and Coastal Jazz, as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival. (Given the time constraints, some of the transitions are rather abrupt, but I wanted to counterpose Paolo Freire’s “critical” pedagogy with Lewis’s approach to improvisation, for example, so I just went ahead with it as a kind of provocation.)
In the nascent, polymorphous field of what we can now call Critical Studies in Improvisation, the creative work and the scholarship of George E. Lewiscontinues to play a crucial role. A justly celebrated composer and performer, he has also become a key voice, both as public intellectual and as pedagogue, in recent academic and aesthetic debates around the cultural and social roles of improvisation. His accretive, open-minded forays into the improvised emerge from what I am going to characterize as collisionsamong subject positions, methodologies and conceptual arrays associated with a diverse aggregation of thinkers and artists, of improvisers, whose practice-based research – interventions, performances, and reflections – both shapes and interrogates this field. To put it as succinctly and as abstractly as I can, improvisation tends to emerge from and to inhere in its own creative undoing, and George Lewis’s music and writing want to address and to inhabit that liminal space, that contact zone, that edge. For a few minutes today, I want to test out the trope of the collision to try to explain a little of what his work on improvisation and his improvised work undertake. How and what does his practice-based research teach us? What forms of knowledge and of knowing do his improvisations produce and collide?
I only have space to sketch one such collision today, around what Lewis calls “ethnic and racial identifiers” in contemporary music. Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Nina Simone, among others, preferred to characterize the continuum in which they situated their playing as “Black Classical Music,” yoking their work to popular, soul, church, blues and folk lineages and streams, as well as to what gets marketed, now as it did then, under the label “jazz.” This name-change is more than merely personal preference, and more than loosely salutary. It opens up a deep wound, a problematic around reception and legitimation of racially-marked artistry, but also seeks not to heal, however provisionally, or to suture or even Band-Aid that wound, necessarily, so much as to take issue with and even to subvert such glibly remedial tactics.
In his 2004 essay“Gittin’ To Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination,” Lewis refigures this collision of “Black” and “Classical” music-making by offering a provisional history of the performance of Lester Bowie’s 1969 composition “Gittin’ to know y’all” at the “Free Jazz Treffen” in Baden-Baden that December, a performance that orchestrated a form of summit meeting between “two avant-gardes”: members of Chicago’s AACM and a set of European “free jazz” musicians. Lewis demonstrates how a presumptive binary that emerges from critical stereotyping around African-American and European cultural heritage grossly mischaracterizes the conversations and negotiations that actually occur within the music, not to reconcile differences but to sound them, and to approach them creatively. What I’m provisionally calling “collision” may sound like another name for dialectic, for a conflict of artistic interest, but I’m trying to name a set of relations among practicing improvisers that is agonistic, plural and networked rather than merely antithetical.
Lewis refers at the outset of his account of Lester Bowie’s composition to an earlier essay in which he distinguishes between what he calls Eurological and Afrological “musical belief systems and behavior”; rather than reinstitute a sweeping critical binary – which, at first glance, the pair of terms might obviously seem to do – Lewis wants to theorize exemplary and particular aspects of musical logic linked not to genetic or cultural phenotypes but to situated, historically-emergent social narratives. This conceptual move, he argues, can enable both scholars and practitioners to reflect on the “possibilities for artists to move across, transgress and possibly erase borders.” In his 1996 essay, Lewis is more specific about his deliberately contingent, complementary terms:
my construction of “Afrological” and “Eurological” systems of improvisative musicality refers to social and cultural location and is theorized here as historically emergent rather than ethnically essential, thereby accounting for the reality of transcultural and transracial communication among improvisers. For example, African-American music, like any music, can be performed by a person of any “race” without losing its character as historically Afrological [. . .]. My constructions make no attempt to delineate ethnicity or race, although they are designed to ensure that the reality of the ethnic or racial component of a historically emergent sociomusical group must be faced squarely and honestly.
Lewis’s materialist distrust of abstracted binaries informs his assessment of Lester Bowie’s music and of his own. “I wanted to explore,” he says in the liner notes to the recording of “Sequel . . . (For Lester Bowie),” a composition closely linked to his essay,
this hybrid conception that allows the free flow between the two spheres with musicians that are equally at home in the so-called acoustic and so-called electronic world. This faked binary, which has sprung up over the years, has become completely useless today.
Other “faked” binaries – between composition and improvisation, between score and text, between the individual and the collective – are also refused and refigured in what Lewis here repeatedly names “hybridity.” I’m challenging that term a little here – pace Lewis himself – by insisting on “collisions” rather than hybrids because I want to reconsider how the fusion of interests implied by the trope of the hybrid might invite us to gloss over the persistent creative divergences that also emerge from this refusal; it feels a little too synthetic, in other words, a little too compliant.
Within Lewis’s conceptual frame, the Afrological is deliberately privileged, if only because Afrological improvisative practices and traditions have been consistently devalued and underrepresented, and their recovery represents a significantly politicized gesture within the cultural politics of music. Afro-diasporic musical practices connect improvisation and community building (Lewis evokes the genre of the “ring shout,” for instance, to describe collective interchange) neither accede to nor supplant the Eurological aesthetic and social genres, but to supplement, challenge, appropriate, subvert, and remake.
The individual, expressive voice of the cogent, virtuosic performer, for example, is neither accepted nor discarded in this conception, but refigured as a subject position within a dynamic network of voices. In his notes to “Sequel: A Composition for Cybernetic Improvisors (For Lester Bowie),” Lewis gestures at what he values as an :inherent instability” within improvised performances:
My experience of the people here as well as many other people is that if they do have a personal style, it’s going to take you a long time to figure it out, probably as long as it took them to create it. I see people as creating more from a sort of multiple-voiced way. And to me that’s different from personal style. I think, because of that multiple-voiced nature and the inherent instability which goes along with it that’s where interchange and these new ideas really become possible.
We need to ask ourselves if, in the recording or especially in the live performance of a Lewis composition such as “Sequel,” we can hear the situated, historically specific character of this interchange, and what this reconceptualized practice of an active and engaged audition means. (Consider the complex circumstances informing Miya Masaoka’s innovative koto playing, for example.) But I do want to insist that in the audible collisions, transitions and even transgressions among the various, unsettled instrumentalists in this recording don’t manifest conflict but what sounds to me like productive conversation – and by productive, I don’t mean politely deferential, but closely responsive, reciprocal, attentive.
There is what I’d call an improvisational pedagogy in Lewis’s work, but not a pedagogy of lectures and informatics. Instead, the kind of knowledge-production in which Lewis interests himself is the recovery of a dynamic situatedness, of an interchange, of multiplicity. It seems to me that the radical pedagogy of Paolo Freire might provide a helpful supplement to Lewis’s music and scholarship around his agonistic sublation of cultural binaries through situated, reflexive education. “Responsibility,” Freire asserts in “Education as the Practice of Freedom,” an intervention that coincidentally appeared in 1969 around the time of Lester Bowie’s “Gittin’ to know y’all,” “Responsibility cannot be acquired intellectually, but only through experience” (16). Freire isn’t dismissing intellection – he’s engaged in it as he writes, after all – but arguing that thought needs to be coupled to practice, rather than opposed to it, if it is to have any transformative effect, any meaning:
Critical [that is, actively self-aware] transitivity is characteristic of authentically democratic regimes and corresponds to highly permeable, interrogative, restless, and dialogical forms of life . . . . (18-19)
In Lewis’s “Sequel,” and in his other compositions, performances and even lectures and essays, I hear this active permeability as a restless and audible collision of voices.
Reading
Paolo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness. 1969. New York: Continuum, 1973. Print.
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print.
—, “Gittin’ To Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination.” Critical Studies in Improvisation 1.1 (2004). http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/6/14
—, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 16.1 (Spring, 1996): 91-122.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 