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Edgy Listening: Evan Parker and Jean-Luc Nancy

August 24, 2015 6:27 pm / Leave a comment

[This is the draft text of a paper I am set to present at the 2015 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, on Wednesday, September 16.]

The collective trajectory of this year’s colloquium links practicing various forms of improvisation to nurturing various forms of intersubjective well-being. By attending—carefully, critically and briefly—to solo and to collaborative electro-acoustic performances by the British saxophonist Evan Parker, I want to gesture at the nascent work of remediation that Lisbeth Lipari has recently called “an ethics of attunement,” a close listening that cultivates compassionate alterity within an attentive body: an akroasis—an audition, an audience—that provides a resonant and differential basis for the possibility of what Jean-Luc Nancy has provocatively named an “inoperative community,” a version for me of what Alphonso Lingis calls The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, of our conflicted and diverse human species. Nancy’s philosophical interrogation of listening to music (as “the art of the hope for resonance”) offers contingent conceptual support with which it’s possible to assess the sensibly vibrant sounding of interstices, both between and within each human frame, that constitutes Evan Parker’s improvising.

Claims about well-being and health tend to presuppose an uninterrogated sense of what constitutes a proper, well-ordered body. Rather than extend a critique of what Michel Foucault might have called the “care of self” and its biopolitics, I am going to premise my remarks on improvisation and well-being by assuming that corporeality may also be understood as porous and conflicted instead of individuated, discrete or holistic, and that this porosity is a founding condition both of co-creativity and of lived community. Reworking a Deleuzean pluralism, Annemarie Mol writes of a medical practice that addresses and heals the “body multiple,” which she presents as an “intricately coordinated crowd” that “hangs together” through “various forms of coordination” (55). Following on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, David Abram describes “the boundaries of a living body” as “open and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorphosis and exchange” (42). I’m interested in pursuing with some rigour those “forms of coordination”—or the textures of that porosity—at the level of acoustic experience, as a humane and ethically preferable set of cultural interactions.

Lisbeth Lipari proposes “interlistening” as a term for “the multiple dimensions of embodied consciousness that vibrate in the dance of conversation between [among?] people talking” (161). Her aim is to delineate discursive practices that listen otherwise, that attend to the presence of others, even as they enable speech.

“Listening otherwise,” she writes,

challenges the ego and the illusion of control and sees how the distortions that arise from our insistence on innocence, certainty, and understanding damage our capacity for compassion. . . . [L]istening otherwise . . . suspends the willfulness of self- and foreknowledge in order to receive the singularities of the alterity of the other” (Lipari 185, 186).

Heavily influenced by Emmanuel Levinas, Lipari also models her auditory ethics on the music theory of Hans Kayser, whose concept of akroasis(the Ancient Greek word for “hearing”) articulates a “theory of world harmonics” as a holistic gestalt-series rooted in Pythagorean acoustics (Lipari 27). Kayser appears to mitigate dissonances in attunement, and prefiguresby several decades R. Murray Schafer’s disciplined “ear-cleaning” of European music . I’m less sanguine about what I know of Kayser, however; without refusing the hopeful tenor of his thinking, I worry that he only re-instates a cult of primeval innocence, a re-tooled Ptolemaic naïveté. It helps me, instead, partially to recover the etymology of akroasis, which occurs in Aristotle as a term for audience and hearing: notably, not in The Poetics nor in the sections of his Politics focused on music, but in his Rhetoric. The ἀκροατής (akroates), frequently translated as “hearer,” is actively implicated in discursive exchange: “Now the hearer (akroatēn) must necessarily be either a mere spectator or a judge (kritēs), and a judge either of things past or of things to come.” That is, listening—at least, to speech—is inherently active and deliberative, and those deliberations, within a polytemporal reciprocity, include critical intellection. Akroatic listening, close listening as thinking, becomes more agonistic than syncretic, more unsettling than epideictic. (Compare George Lewis: “In its marginalization, its often-unseen, intangible presence, which generates new discourses, in its mobility and facility with hybridization, and in its locus, the contestatory space where difference can [be] and is enacted, improvisation’s general importance to the underlying health of the musical ecosphere and the public commons must be recognized, valued and protected [138].”)

In a 2014 interview, Sonny Rollins repudiates any sort of reflexive intellection as disruptive to improvising, invoking the demanding temporality of playing: “I don’t want to overtly think about anything, because you can’t think and play at the same time — believe me, I’ve tried it (laughs). It goes by too fast.”
http://www.npr.org/player/embed/309047616/309304660Rollins appears to be suggesting that, when you listen to yourself as you play, you lose your through-line, lose the formal sense of your music. But his point, I think, isn’t to romanticize or mystify his artistry—he focuses on his lapses, not his genius—but to assess the cognitive velocity at which that agon, that deliberation, can even occur. What Lipari calls compassionate openness wants to happen not as immediacy but on the fleeting lip of the present, closer to reflex than reflexive. Jean-Luc Nancy refers to “sonorous time” as “a present in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on” (13). The challenge, the risk posed by such a hysteresis, is not merely the neglect of what is other—and this is perhaps why thinking about solo music, about the improvised solo, helps us to re-conceptualize otherness as such, not as a condition of the co-presence of individuals but even as a porosity of self, of voice—but also an issue of technique, of the virtuosic coordination of enharmonic singularities as they pass in and out of our membranous bodies. Listening, writes Nancy, “—the opening stretched toward the register of the sonorous, then to its musical amplification and composition—can and must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access, a reality consequently indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other’ . . .” (12).

I want to read Evan Parker’s solo saxophone technique as a crucial instance of this intensely vacillating subjectivity (if that’s the right term for a solo voice), of the surging disavowal of self sounding itself. Here is an excerpt of the solo music, recorded without overdubbing, from his 1989 album Conic Sections:

Writing in the early 1990s, John Corbett describes Evan Parker’s seemingly linear, monophonic instrument as more of an “assemblage” of body—“[f]ingers, mouth, tongue, teeth, lungs”—and horn—reed, ligature, keys, pads, bell—“constellated in such a way as to break the seeming unity of melodic expression” (82). But in Evan Parker’s solo playing, both live and on recordings, those fractures are not ends in themselves, and rather initiate—as what Lipari describes as “challenges” to passive listening—the possibility of tonal and linear multiplication, of what the reedist calls, with measured self-deprecation, a form of “polyphony”: “There’s a more complex sense of linearity,” he says, “to the point where the line folds back on itself and assumes some of the proportions of vertical music, and some of the characteristics of polyphonic music” (qtd. In Corbett 83). Combining circular breathing, cross-fingering, tonguing and biting the reed, Evan Parker is able to generate layers of overtones and nearly-simultaneous contrapuntal arpeggios at high velocity, effectively producing a continuum of cascading choruses from a single breath. But while Corbett is keen to endorse Evan Parker’s virtuosity and instrumental mastery, he also notes, as the saxophonist himself does, how accident and uncertainty find their way inevitably into any performance, subverting claims to absolute technique or intention and undermining the “notion of the unitary, intending subject”—that is, of self-expression—in improvisation. As Evan Parker puts it succinctly in a 1997 interview with Martin Davidson, “It’s to do with layering stuff that I don’t know on top of stuff that I do know.” Here, I think, is exactly the looping of self and other, of expressive intention and unruly, noisy sound, that Jean-Luc Nancy describes as listening. Evan Parker’s descriptions of his improvisatory practice align remarkably closely with Nancy’s philosophical investigations of listening:

It’s clear to me that if you can imagine something, you can find a technical way to do it, but if you can’t imagine it, whether or not there is a technical solution never occurs to you because there’s no need to. So it’s very necessary to listen closely to what happens when you try to do things, because usually at the fringes of what you’re producing is something that you’re not really in control of – that there is a central thing that you are fully in control of, and then a kind of halo of suggested other possibilities which have to come with the central thing that you’re in control of, whether it’s a wisp of breath escaping from the side of the embouchure, or an overtone that you could push harder, or some key noise which you can’t escape. There’s always something there, and if you’re listening at the fringes of the sound as well as at the centre of the sound, then you can be led to other things and other possibilities.

The collision of self-possessed declamation and open-eared deliberation in what he calls “trying”—and what I’d suggest in fact takes the form of a musical essay—points up the irresolute multiplicity at the edges of extemporaneous sound, its tensile present tense.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/83893846
Roulette TV: EVAN PARKER from Roulette Intermedium on Vimeo.

Gently pushing back at Sonny Rollins, I hear Evan Parker—playing at velocity, going by too fast—as negotiating between an organic immediacy and an akroatic self-scrutiny, as both listening to himself and not in the same breath. Corbett calls this tensioning a form of “research” (85), a science or an intellection, and I’m inclined to agree: this music is, it’s my contention, one instance of practice-based research into the possibility of inoperative community. So, to think about community, and to close my remarks today, I want to listen to a recording of a recent performance of Evan Parker’s electro-acoustic septet at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville in May, 2014. Evan Parker supplies a typically ironic sleeve note: “My art of composition consists in choosing the right people and asking them to improvise.” He playfully refuses the “rampant egomania” both of the improvising soloist and of the composer, preferring an unregimented collectivity. At the same time, the consistent spatial arrangement of the septet onstage—which can be seen both in the inner sleeve of the VICTO cd and in the video taken of a performance at Roulette in New York City, positions Evan Parker at the centre and apex of the group, facing out like the others but occupying the conductor-leader’s chair. There’s much to note about this music, but I want to make just a few points. The three laptops to Evan Parker’s left are able both to sample and re-figure the live improvisations and to contribute other electronic sound textures—this is the key concept of most of Parker’s electro-acoustic groups—which means that the instrumentalist is displaced across the ensemble. On the Victoriaville recording, Evan Parker doesn’t initiate the performance, and—if my ears are right—doesn’t even enter as an contributing voice until the six-minute mark: not through diffidence or even deferral, necessarily, but as an audible disavowal—silence amid sound—of egocentric voicing: he starts by listening rather than playing. A version of his own solo practice emerges into the swirling sonic layers of the ensemble around eighteen minutes into the performance, combining both self-parody—inserting his long-established unaccompanied voice into the group dynamic, which both pushes the tutti back, but also opens up a series of interstices into which other voices might enter. As a model of community, what the group manages around this moment of solo horn is what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “a mutual interpellation od singularities prior to any address in language,” a corporeally-based multiplicitous nudging that, despite the reflective stillness of many of the players onstage – particularly the three at their laptops, who enact the reflexive, deliberative aspect of the music, as opposed to the apparent organicism of the improvisers to his right: the point, for me, is the co-creation of a virtual in-coherence, a playing apart together that inheres in the shared differences among the ensemble members, the byplay between egocentric voice and a yielding to the voices of others. Community, Nancy writes, is not the panacea of delusive “communion . . . nor even a communication as this is understood to exist between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others” (IC 25). Well-being, as listening otherwise, means neither self-satisfied holism nor ludic conflict, but a sharing that nurtures our mutual unknowing.

Works Cited

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and

Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York:

Vintage, 1997.

Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John

Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an

Ethics of Attunement. University Park: Pennsylvania

State UP, 2014.

Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical

Practice. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. 2002. Tr. Charlotte Mandel.

New York: Fordham UP, 2007.

———. The Inoperative Community. Tr. Peter Connor.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Dave Douglas HIGH RISK at Performance Works, 28 June 2015

June 29, 2015 10:59 pm / Leave a comment

Dave Douglas’s electro-acoustic quartet HIGH RISK offered a dynamic, edgy and intense set at Performance Works (in Vancouver) yesterday evening. Fusing layered, pulse-driven techno with Douglas’s Freddie-Keppard-meets-Freddie-Hubbard, fiercely clarion trumpet lines, HIGH RISK collectively muster an infectiously celebratory and powerful improvised music that’s as danceable as it is creatively provocative. While Douglas has composed a seven-tune repertoire for this new band – which recorded together for the first time on October 10, 2014, in Brooklyn, a session that resulted in their just-released CD on Douglas’s Greenleaf label – and while each member of the ensemble (Douglas on trumpet, Jonathan Maron on electric bass, Mark Guiliana on drums and Shigeto on electronics) contributes heavily to the collaboration, for me the group concept seems to rest on the innovative, wonderfully fractured loops, samples and laptop conjurations of Shigeto, who bopped, leapt and shimmied with joyful abandon behind a tabletop covered in rheostat boxes and circuitry. The sound palette and rhythmic patter he managed to conjure never obscured its synthetic origins but managed amid the electronica to engender a vibrantly zoetic feel: amazing, richly affective sonorities. At one point, he played in duo with Douglas and the intricate immediacy of his approach became apparent, as he built vibrant whorls and cascades of joyful noise. Mark Guiliana’s drumming is brilliantly propulsive, deep in the pocket yet consistently pushing forward; his multidirectional, quickly syncopated incisions through a four-on-the-floor backbeat were nothing short of genius. Jonathan Maron seemed to remain calm and steady throughout the concert, but his bass-lines – by turns warmly lyrical and darkly palpitating – kept the band centred and present. Early in their set, I thought I heard echoes of the bluesy melody of Miles Davis’s “Jean Pierre,” and Douglas definitely quoted the four-note tag from the Miles Davis-John Scofield line “That’s What Happened”: in some ways, HIGH RISK makes a music that might have emerged from Davis’s more progressive or edgy moments in his later years. But this is a music that’s of its own present tense. Some of the most powerful and moving moments came during the last tune, “Cardinals,” an elegiac homage Douglas dedicated to the memory of Michael Brown. “This is a music that’s about love,” he told the audience. Love names the high risk this music wants to take. In the brief liner notes to the CD, Douglas writes that “improvisation transcends barriers between people and genres. Improvisation models the way the world can work.” My colleagues and I in ICASP and IICSI have been thinking, and trying to produce various forms of practice-based research, along these exact lines. The improvised music of HIGH RISK offers one instance of a hugely successful, motivated and engaged co-creativity, laying the contingent and extemporaneous groundwork for a viable human community yet to come.

Sheila Jordan and Cameron Brown: Tuesday Night at Ironworks, 3 March 2015

March 4, 2015 7:22 pm / Leave a comment

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.

Extraordinary Presences: Women, Poetry, Art Song

October 11, 2014 2:54 pm / Leave a comment

Following the performance of The Muted Note: Songs Based on Poems by P. K. Page by Scott Thomson and Susanna Hood, the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation is convening a colloquium called “Extraordinary Presences: Women, Poetry, Art Song” from 2:00 to 5:00 on Thursday, 16 October 2014 in the Dodson Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia. Two panels of poets, composers, performers and scholars will talk about their own work and their collaborations. Presenters will be investigating the cultural politics of contemporary composition and performance by women: are there particular constraints or challenges that contemporary women artists face? Are there specific musical, textual or performative strategies that women employ in their creative work when faced with such challenges? Is it still necessary or even possible to address artistic work, as performers, composers and listeners, with attention to the complex cultural politics of gender and sexuality? In addition to the two discussion panels, there will be a performance by Lisa Cay Miller of her text-based improvisations for piano, “Lessing Stories.” Admission is free, and the colloquium is open to all, students, artists, academics and the general public.

Colloquium Schedule

2:00-3:00 Panel: Extending the Poetics of Song

Scott Thomson, composer and improviser, Montréal and Toronto

Susanna Hood, vocalist, choreographer, Montréal and Toronto

Sandra Djwa, P. K. Page biographer, Vancouver

Phanuel Antwi, Department of English, UBC

3:00-3:30

Lisa Cay Miller, “Lessing Stories”

3:30-4:30 Panel: Collaborations and Challenges, Sounding Out

Rachel Rose, Vancouver Poet Laureate

Jacquie Leggatt, composer, Vancouver

Bronwyn Malloy, Department of English, UBC

A downloadable PDF version of the colloquium schedule can be found here: Extraordinary Presences schedule

Short Take on What I Like Most about The Avett Brothers

October 19, 2013 4:30 pm / Leave a comment

Go back a little more than a year and a half ago, and I hadn’t even heard of The Avett Brothers. My wife had started listening to their music on the recommendation of a friend, and she found something they’d done earlier on for NPR, maybe a Tiny Desk Concert. I’ll have to look this up. Within a few days, and after a few repeat listens, she was definitely hooked, and so was I. We bought and/or downloaded a stack of their albums, and their tunes were on heavy rotation on the stereo. Their sound is obviously based in Carolina roots music and bluegrass; their core instrumentation – to which they strip down in concert, or else around which they build their band – is a trio of banjo, acoustic guitar and upright bass, played by Scott and Seth Avett and Bob Crawford. Joe Kwan’s cello has also added a key texture to their aural palette since the early days of the group’s existence, and when they perform the four of them tend to position themselves in a line across the front of the stage, Seth and Scott at the centre, flanked by the other two.

We were given tickets to an Avett Brothers concert in June 2012, when they appeared as a headliner for the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival. (Their music has little to do with mainstream jazz, apart from a few commons threads in Americana and the blues, but most jazz fest programmers these days rely heavily on non-jazz acts to bouy up revenues and draw in audiences. I actually ended up missing a Wayne Shorter gig to hear their show, but it turned out to be worth it.) We had great seats, a few rows from the stage. From the moment they hit, the energy in the house was through the roof. This was a couple of months, I think, before the release of The Carpenter, and they were testing out some of the more rock-oriented material from that album. It was my first experience of them live, and I have to say that I was unprepared for the exultant, keen and impassioned drive of their performance. They blew us wholly away.

In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, Scott, Seth and Bob talked at length about the band’s evolving sound, positioning them amid what Scott calls “the changing form of somewhere between rock and country and folk.” They refer back to a phrase coined by Scott – “young wonderment” – to describe the tenor of many of their lyrics, their music’s message maybe, but “young wonderment” also encapsulates the impact of their performances on an audience. There are certainly moments at an Avett concert of entrancing delicacy, something of “sparkly-eyed” grace and artful “shine” that their songs often both embrace and disparage: it’s what they want to make happen, but they also articulate a suspicion of being taken in by it, seduced by phony glitter and stagecraft. Still, despite the relentless apologies and self-recriminations in those songs – the admissions of failure and loss that seem pervasively to inform their writing – their performances take up a genuinely hopeful and affirmative trajectory. The youthfulness to which Scott refers isn’t a nostalgia for innocence or naïveté but a raggedly passionate energy. On Thursday night, seeing them for a second time at the Orpheum in Vancouver, I could feel the force of their convictions, their belief in what live music could accomplish. They jumped and thrashed, they caressed and kicked, they stroked and stomped. Sometimes rough, sometimes intimate, they drew from their twangling instruments a tangible sense of commitment, of being right here, in the moment, that moment, giving it whatever they could. The wonderment of the Avett Brothers has nothing to do with passive awe or amazement and everything to do with vitality and vigour, a fierce and embodied poetry. One review noted the “joyful buzz” they produced in the audience emerging onto the street after the show had ended. That feeling, that liveliness, the life-force they and their music seems to offer us as a gift, keeps going.

Audio: Jillian Christmas and Chris Gilpin at Play Chthonics

September 19, 2013 3:25 am / Leave a comment

Jillian Christmas and Chris Gilpin read tonight (Wednesday, 18 September 2013) to a small but captivated audience, as part of the Play Chthonics poetry reading series at Green College, U. B. C. I have included an audio recording of their reading in this blog post, below. They alternated performing their own poems, and interspersed their readings with comments on poetics, and answered questions about spoken-word poetry and poetry slams. This was a warm and engaging reading, and it’s a real privilege to have been able to present their work.

This is a vérité-style recording, but their voices come through very well. It’s just a little marred, just a little, by a noisy ventilation system, and — just to let all potential listeners know — by an overly enthusiastic cleaning person picking up coffee mugs near the end. Other voices you hear include mine and other audience members (among them Andrew McEwan and Carmen Mathes). Copyright for the recording remains with the artists.

Thanks to Green College, to the U. B. C. Department of English and Faculty of Arts, and to the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice research initiative for their support.

Double Short Take on Two Guelph Gigs: Indigo Trio and KAZE

September 12, 2013 3:32 am / Leave a comment

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.

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.

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.

Shortish Take on Neil Gaiman, Reading Live and In Person

August 13, 2013 8:20 pm / Leave a comment

During a question and answer session between readings from his most recent books (one just published, one to appear in September), Neil Gaimanconfessed to a sold-out Vogue Theatre in Vancouver last Thursday that he seemed to have graduated into some next level of fame, when people who hadn’t actually read his work still knew something about who he was and what he did. I have to confess, too, that I haven’t actually read too much Neil Gaiman (some Sandman and a little Coraline,— and I have watched the two Doctor Who episodes he scripted in the last three years), although I’m keen now to read much, much more. I was there not so much as a fan, but just to see and hear him. What started to become compelling about this public appearance were the ways in which he both enlivened and managed his fans’ expectations. They adore him, and every time he (pretty expertly) name-dropped the title of one of his books, at least two-thirds of the audience hooted and cheered. He’s now much more than a cultish comic book and fantasy writer, but he assiduously and warmly cultivates connections with his readership, with his audience, around their willing buy-in to his myth-making: the mythworlds of his fiction, yes, but also the myth of Neil Gaiman, author and impresario of a set of collective subcultural imaginings.

His performance was excellent, and well worth the modest ticket-price. It combined reading from recent work, as I said, with him answering questions audience members had submitted on cards ahead of time. (He told us our – Vancouver’s – questions were the best he had had for the whole tour, probably an untruth, but a nice appeal to our west coast intellectual vanity.) He stayed after the reading for at least three hours, signing books and chatting – briefly, given the numbers – with his keen readers. And that extra willingness to stay on, which was anticipated in media build-up to his appearance, is the first part of his myth: he gives you the sense not of distraction but of caring engagement with his readers, making sure that they have some modicum of contact with him, that they feel that he’s present to them. Neil Gaiman takes considerable pains to offer his audience a feint of intimacy, disclosing what felt like private details of his life particularly around his relationship to femrocker Amanda Palmer – Amanda Fucking Palmer (“No Neil Fucking Gaiman tonight,” he joked) – which were the kinds of details he also occasionally lets slip via Twitter. (He recently tweeted about his happiness waking up in bed beside her, for example.) Now we all do this kind of thing on Twitter, mingling public and private idioms for an indiscriminate readership, but given the extent of Neil Gaiman’s following, as it shifts from cult to mass, it’s this feeling of access, of closeness, that seems to firm up his fan-base, to keep them attached to, immersed in, his writing.

This autobiographical myth-making particularly both frames and informs his new book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which bears the dedication “For Amanda, who wanted to know.” (Indeed, it’s precisely I’d say the idea of an intimate knowledge – or of a knowing intimacy – that started to become an issue here, as Gaiman read to us, in person. What exactly was it that Amanda wanted to know? How much access were we, as listeners, as over-hearers, being given to that knowledge? Something is described in the book, he told us, about his past, his childhood. This book, he said, came about because he missed his wife and wanted to make her love him by giving her a short story (which developed into a “novelette,” then a novella, then a short novel) with “something me-ish in there,” some small “slices of real life and one slice of imagination when I was a child.” Slices, maybe, like the slices of burnt toast in the passage that he read from the second chapter, which begins with the narrator’s depiction of his detachment from the world – “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else” – but which, through the slow careful accumulation of descriptive detail (like that toast), gradually reconnects the observer to what seems to be going on around him at a remove, even without him.

The narrator’s doubled perspective – a forty-year-old man recalling what he experienced as a seven-year-old – reinforces the essential interestedness (as opposed to detachment, objectivity or disinterest) of the narrator, his being-with as opposed to standing apart-from, those around him, which is how he’s positioned, or positions himself, at the discovery of a corpse (I’m trying to avoid any spoilers) in his father’s car:

I don’t remember who said what then, just that they made me stand away from the Mini. I crossed the road, and I stood there on my own while the policeman talked to my father and wrote things down in a notebook. (18)

Writing, here, is limited to sparse note-taking, and the limitations of perspective and memory are candidly foregrounded; we can’t even read over the policeman’s shoulder to see what he has written down. Intimacy or closeness, in other words, remains denied to us, Gaiman’s committed readers. He’s withholding, through the device of an unreliable juvenile focalizer. Generational dictions meld throughout the chapter (adult vocabulary often mingling with childish self-interest, for example), but you can also hear, even in this short excerpt, Gaiman’s inclination toward austerity and directness: how committed to the matter being described here is the voice doing the describing? How involved or how removed?

This point-of-view feels like objectivity, but during his presentation Thursday, when asked about the differences between writing for adults and for – or perhaps about – children, Gaiman asserted that what makes for good writing around children is to “make every word count.” (I’d suggest, too, that there is something of that directness cultivated in his writing for television and especially for graphic texts.) What we might take for empirical distance here, in other words, is shaped by close child-like observation, by the directness and directedness of a child’s eye and ear (not just for descriptive detail, but also for details of speech, of words themselves). While our narrator waits, he thinks back on his father’s constant burning of toast:

At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. “Yum!” he’d say, and “Charcoal! Good for you!” and “Burnt toast! My favorite!” and he’d eat it all up. [The American spelling is original to the edition I have.] When I was much older he confessed to me that he had not ever liked burnt toast, and had only eaten it to prevent it from going to waste, and, for a fraction of a moment, my entire childhood felt like a lie: it was as if one of the pillars of belief that my world had been built upon had crumbled into dry sand.

The doubled age of the voice in this passage, audible in the mixed diction, also maps onto a personal mythopoeia around burnt toast and the simultaneous demythologizing of those intimate patrilineal memories, as his whole childhood begins to feel “like a lie” (although likeness, it’s worth asserting, isn’t the same as it’s being a lie). The with-ness of interest, of the narrator’s and the reader’s inter-esse, is caught up in this double movement of Gaiman’s narrative, which both intimates and debunks.

I mean to approach, just so briefly, something of the dynamics of fandom that inhere in Gaiman’s own writing, and in his performance – his reading – last Thursday. The declarative clarity, the confessional candour that circles through his speaking subjects, his voice(s), isn’t so much a masterful feint as it is a self-conscious address to the capacities of language itself to disclose, to tell. Or, perhaps more clearly put, to give us what we want to know. Gaiman’s success, in this terrific new book, strikes me as in part enmeshed in a virtuosity of disavowal: the well-honed verbal craft of making his readers keep wanting, even as he gives them more of the feeling of intimacy, of personal proximity, that they crave. In a very peculiar and particular sense, what Neil Gaiman offers us all is a species of mythical close reading, a closeness both inand as reading. It’s what must keep us coming back to his work, even if it’s for the very first time.