Monday 30 November 2009
"Concierto de Aranjuez” performed at Carnegie Hall New York on May 19, 1961
Sunday 29 November 2009
Hashashan - Unreleased Songs
Hashashan is Fritz Catlin (AKA Fritz Haaman, Jackie Chanalogue, Firebomb Fritz etc.) who was a founder member of 23 Skidoo and also played with Last Few Days and Laibach in the 1980's. In the 90's he did various production/remixes including "Real Sugar" with Paban Das Baul and Sam Mills . Recent projects include mixing Susheela Raman's 33 1/3 cd, working on Siouxsie and Grace Jones remixes and various fashion shows for Mekon and a live music project with Michael Joseph called Skintologists. In the pipeline is an international coollaboration with DJ Retroblast and other virtual jammers.
Tracklist:
Claret 'n' Blues (Harmonica by Sketch)
Claret 'n' Blues (Harmonica by Sketch)
Early (Scratching by Deckwrecka)
Hausmixdown (Guitar by Sam Mills)
Honeymixxa (Sax by Adam Pretty)
On Mi Way
Check out Hashashan's MySpace page for more music.
(My thanx to Fritz for this 'Exile' exclusive)
Saturday 28 November 2009
Record of the year..?
St Kilda - EP
Label: Phantom Channel
Catalog#: PHCD001
Format: CDr, Mini, EP, Limited Edition
Country: UK
Released: 2009
Drone, Ambient
Tracklisting:
1 This Small Boat 5:19
2 You Are In Every Dream 4:06
3 Clutching At Straws 5:15
4 The Sirens 6:14
Credits
Music & Photography - Graham Richardson
Notes
Limited to 70 copies.
Probably not, but very close.
It is that time of the year when I try and work out which records rocked my soul.
A difficult task as there were SO many great releases, and do not let anyone tell you otherwise.
As for the records of the decade?
Well two records to my ears stand head and shoulders above the rest...To be continued...
Adele Bertei - When It's Over (featuring Green)
Produced by Adele Bertei, Fred Maher and David Gamson.
Steve Goodman (Kode9) on 5 years of Hyperdub
The label that brought Burial to the world is now celebrating five years of these mutations with a double-CD compilation of new and classic material, called simply Hyperdub 5 – spanning the various genres mentioned above, as well as lots of gloriously twisted electronic music so new that it has yet to take a street name.
Originally from Glasgow, Goodman moved to London to be closer to the music he loved at the end of the 1990s, and started Hyperdub as a web magazine in 2001. "The main editorial remit was the Jamaican influence on London electronic music," he says. Under the name Kode9, Goodman has been making music since 1995, and turned Hyperdub into a label to put out his own Sine of the Dub in 2004, after prompting from Kevin Martin, aka the Bug. "I was interviewing him for XLR8R magazine and he said, 'You should release it yourself,'" Goodman says. There's never been any grand plan though: "The whole thing's been a series of accidents."
Without an A&R policy, an office, or even any employees, Hyperdub is a remarkably successful one-man empire, although that does have its drawbacks: he gets sent a lot of music. "It's just painful," he says, "I'm really drowning in it. Especially now I've broadened out the remit of the label, so it's not just one genre of stuff I'm being sent."
Key among the series of accidents that has seen Hyperdub championed from the NME to the New Yorker, presumably, was releasing Burial's music, and it becoming unexpectedly popular. "Yeah, that was completely unforeseen," he laughs. "I was worried about putting his album out – I didn't think anyone would be into it. It was quite a weird take on garage."
Goodman was "hugely relieved" when Elbow pipped Burial, who had been the bookies' favourite, to last year's Mercury Music Prize, so protective is he of Will Bevan, the man behind the music, who was desperate to avoid the full glare of the media spotlight. "There are certain tunes on there that are obviously not that sophisticated," Bevan told me self-deprecatingly in a Film & Music interview prior to the album's release, when he was still able to protect his identity. "I'm just pretty defensive about it, because I was never really expecting so many people to hear the record."
With Bevan clear that all he wanted was a quiet life, Gordon Smart, editor of the Sun's Bizarre gossip pages, started a campaign to unmask Burial last summer. That forced Bevan to reveal his identity – he was not, as Smart had suggested, Fatboy Slim working under an alias – and triggered a litany of revenge fantasies for Goodman. "I went through how each one of these scenarios would play out, and they all seemed to result in me imprisoned for the rest of my life – you know, 'Sun Journalist Kneecapped' – it's not a good look," he sighs. "So it was just me quietly, in the privacy of my own home, cathartically burning a copy of the Sun. That was as close to voodoo as I could get on a Wednesday afternoon."
A more positive effect of Burial's success was that it meant Goodman could plough the money Hyperdub made off the album back into the label – into releasing more regular vinyl releases, into compiling Hyperdub 5, into imminent albums by the likes of Darkstar and Ikonika, who grew up on dubstep and garage, but are now taking it into bold, bright new directions. It's a mutation Goodman has been eager to incubate.
'It's like hearing circuitry cry'
By about 2007 I was getting left a little cold by the greyness of dubstep: stuff that is literally just drum and bass, with no tone colour. That minimalism felt fresh at the time, but that freshness doesn't last, it leads to stagnation, and gets predictable." So the virus mutates? "Yeah, your immunity to it increases. And like any drug experience, your response becomes, 'I don't get high off that anymore.'"
The new Hyperdub sound is all about synthesisers: sci-fi melodies as the host for this restlessly progressive London dance aesthetic. "It's like hearing circuitry crying," Goodman has said of this recent output, and for new signings Darkstar this idea of computer love is a real fascination. The duo talk with gusto about studying film post-production, about 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Carpenter, and the "robot dialogues" on their forthcoming album. Their new single Aidy's Girl Is a Computer is one of the stand-out tracks on Hyperdub 5, and the pair tried to use a particularly robotic vocal on it: "When we were making it we did actually spend a lot of time trying to get our Mac to sing to us … but it started to get a little bit too strange," says Darkstar's James Young.
As with Burial's new contribution to the compilation, Fostercare, you can hear discernible syllables in the distorted, chopped-up vocal that Darkstar eventually used, and your brain tricks you into thinking you're singing along; but listen more closely and you realise the vocals have been tuned just beyond recognition. The sense you get from Aidy's Girl is that the human, physical world has revolved ever so slightly out of reach. It's heartbreakingly beautiful.
For Goodman, the way forward seems to be akin to taking a set of felt-tip pens to dubstep's blank, monochrome outlines. "It's the tone colour of synths that's become important to the sound, how to fill in the mid-range without becoming annoying." For him – and for so many of this new generation of Hyperdub artists – synths are there "to create euphoria, or to create hooks, or to create something that's colourful and memorable and catchy, that's maybe slightly unsettling at the same time. I've always been fascinated by these little squiggly synths, whether it's been in jazz funk, or gangsta rap, or 80s synth-pop. That's what I love most about grime, too, that hyper-coloured sound."
'I've always been fascinated by these little squiggly synths …that hyper-coloured sound'
Sometimes this relationship with colour and art takes on a truly vivid quality: one can find blogs where the parallels between Hyperdub's music and abstract art are discussed in detail. One of those cited in such discussions is Zomby, another maverick, anonymous producer. "It's quite an odd sensation," he tells me about his occasionally synaesthesiac relationship with music. "The colours are intermittent," he says, "but the chemical that shoots through your body is the same." He cites the tonal language and "colour representation of scales" explored by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin as an inspiration.
Hyperdub artists make dance music that is hedonistically enjoyed in clubs – but with an undeniably cerebral approach that comes from the man at the top. As well as teaching the music culture BA at the University of East London, Goodman has just finished writing a book, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, which will be published by MIT Press in December. This covers the use of the Sesame Street theme tune as a military torture device, worrying new police technology such as Long Range Acoustic Devices ("they're like acoustic water-cannons"), and the "infrasonic hum" the planet has endured since the dawn of time: "We live in the echo of the Big Bang, so the heat death of the universe is the dying out of this echo."
Another mysterious strain of the Hyperdub virus is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), which Goodman helped create in the late 1990s, while studying at Warwick University. "We were all graduate philosophy students, but writing about jungle and philosophy, or Cronenberg films and philosophy, for example. We were told it didn't fit into the discipline – it never really got acknowledged by Warwick.
"It was an attempt to look at popular culture, cyber culture and rave culture, and bring it together with difficult French philosophers. We were treating popular culture as serious cultural production because it has inherent value, not just as pop …" he pauses, and self-corrects. "But that's not fair on pop – it's exactly because it was pop that it was interesting."
Despite having DJed in more than 20 countries, and having signed tracks by artists from America, Japan and Denmark, Goodman emphasises that London is still very much the heart of the label. "Even when you leave London, you don't really leave London – you still carry it with you, like a thin layer of grime on your skin. London music culture is so strong because every few years it manages to refresh itself, and rejuvenate what has become staid. Just as you're getting bored, the elements twist in a different way."
Musical mutations ... five essential Hyperdub recordings
Burial: Etched Headplate (2007)
From the Mercury-nominated album Untrue, this encapsulates Burial's unique and astonishing ability to turn an emotional breakdown on a London night-bus into six minutes of absolute musical transcendence.
Ikonika: Please (2008)
Sara Abdel-Hamid grew up on Pretty Girls Make Graves and R&B, rather than weary cliches about the greats of the UK dance music canon. This utterly addictive single combines the urgency of the former with the hooks of the latter to take electronic music to strange, punch-drunk new places.
Kode9: Black Sun (2009)
With Steve Goodman's early releases drawing deep on the well of Jamaican dread, it was his boredom with dubstep's monochrome landscapes that prompted this new direction. It's the sound of a true auteur donning the cloak of house music for the first time: but only after deliberately putting it on too hot a wash, so that all the colours run into one another.
2000F + Jkamata: You Don't Know What Love Is (2009)
A one-off by two Danish producers, this is arguably the greatest example of the "purple funk" that is currently steering dubstep towards the sexy and psychedelic, featuring a towering vocoder-treated vocal with synths straight from the west-coast G-funk of Nate Dogg and Warren G.
Darkstar: Aidy's Girl is a Computer (2009)
The newest Hyperdub 12in vinyl release, an NME favourite and one of the singles of the year. Remember in the 1990s when cyborg theorists talked about our increasing dependence on technology, about post-physical humans, and about computers with emotions? Well they only sounded slightly silly at the time because their soundtrack had not arrived; it has now. DH
@'The Guardian'
Rumour: New Australian festival w/ Massive Attack in March or April?
There are rumours that Michael Coppel Presents and Modular are set to collaborate on a new national festival. Mooted to take place in late March/early April – the space previously reserved in the calendar by V Festival – this venture is said to boast Massive Attack in the headline spot, with a strong line-up behind them.
With Modular’s annual summer party NeverEverLand a notable absentee in 2009 and Michael Coppel Presents cutting its ties from V Festival, the timing and fit seems right. In an interview with triple j, Massive Attack revealed an Australian tour was planned for the new year. The esteemed Bristol outfit has also just finalised details of its much-anticipated fifth album Heligoland, which will surface at last in early February.
With Modular’s annual summer party NeverEverLand a notable absentee in 2009 and Michael Coppel Presents cutting its ties from V Festival, the timing and fit seems right. In an interview with triple j, Massive Attack revealed an Australian tour was planned for the new year. The esteemed Bristol outfit has also just finalised details of its much-anticipated fifth album Heligoland, which will surface at last in early February.
RePost - Dudu Pukwana
Dudu Pukwana & Spear
'Flute Music'
Here.
As already mentioned here I was lucky enough to live in London when Dudu was playing around town.
In fact I saw him in London, Glasgow, Liverpool & Amsterdam.
I also worked at a jazz club in London for a while (100 Club) and when he would play there we would have a few ales...
At the end of the night we often found ourselves catching the same bus and Dudu would play his sax to me and whoever else was there at the bus stop.
Wish that I had thought to record those impromptu sessions on my walkman.
This music is just perfect as the weather starts warming up.
There is a Dudu Pukwana discography to be found here.
Interview w/ Derek Bailey from 1973
Due to the fact that when I was living in London in the late 70's to early 80's I was often to be found at the London Musicians Collective and through that got to know a lot of the prime movers of the improvised music scene of the time and one of the highlights of every year was the Company week of concerts that were instigated by Derek.
There is no doubt that improvised music to my mind polarises people like no other style but please do yourself a favour and dip your toe into it. If you do like it you will be rewarded by hearing some of the most invigorating music of all time!
Quicksilver Messenger Service - Mona
Quicksilver Messenger Service with an outstanding outdoor performance in 1969. From Ralph J. Gleason's "Go Ride the Music" produced for KQED.
Friday 27 November 2009
The Black Dog - UR We Are Mix, Resident Advisor (RA.123)
01. Underground Resistance - Antimatter
02. Voice Of Electrifying Mojo
03. Underground Resistance - Afrogermanic
04. Underground Resistance - Mirage
05. Underground Resistance - Windchime
06. Underground Resistance - Talkin2Z
07. Underground Resistance - Final Frontier
08. Underground Resistance - In Or Out
09. Underground Resistance - Maroon
10. Underground Resistance - Death of My Neighbor
11. Underground Resistance - Baghdad Express
12. Underground Resistance - Inversions
13. Underground Resistance - Technology Gap
14. Underground Resistance - Antimatter
15. Underground Resistance - I Am UR
16. Underground Resistance - Tazumal
17. Underground Resistance - Hunting the Program
18. Underground Resistance - Toxic Broadcast
19. Underground Resistance - Detonate
20. Underground Resistance - Orbit (The Black Dog)
21. Underground Resistance - Riot
22. Underground Resistance - Base Camp Alpha 808
23. Underground Resistance - Entering Quadrant 5
24. Underground Resistance - Adrenalin
25. Underground Resistance - Gamma Ray
26. Underground Resistance - Ambush
27. Underground Resistance - Sea Quake
28. Underground Resistance - Kill My Radio Station
Welcome to the wibbly, wobbly, techno world of The Black Dog!
Welcome to the wibbly, wobbly, techno world of The Black Dog!
The ’00s: How ‘Idioteque’ explains a decade
In October, 2000, months before the year that would come to define much of the next decade, Radiohead released Kid A, the first part of what was, essentially – along with its successor, Amnesiac – a two-part album. In his 2005 book, Killing Yourself To Live: 85% Of a True Story, Chuck Klosterman posits that when people talk about 9/11, it’s like they’re talking about a dream they had, and they’re telling you about it because they want to say something about themselves without doing it overtly. Then he writes,
So what then, do we do with a song like “Idioteque” – number 8 on the Kid A track list, and one that Klosterman passes by quickly in his analysis? We discuss it as an analogy for the entire decade, because the last ten years have felt like a dream, and the only way we can wrap our stupid heads around it is to let Thom Yorke do it for us. It’s nice to look back at a piece of music that seems now to have predicted the future, because we always like to assume that someone, somewhere, knows what’s coming. That’s never true.
Evaluating the 00’s objectively is impossible because they’re not really over. We still lack the context or the hindsight that can only come with another decade or two of living with the consequences of our recent actions. “Idioteque,” like any decade-in-review, lacks the capability to understand the things we did, it only points out that we did them. So what were they?
We panicked through Y2K and 9/11 (Who’s in a bunker? Who’s in a bunker? Women and children first/ And the children first); we became distracted by something called “reality” television because we couldn’t deal with our own (I laugh until my head comes off); ate like moron kings (Swallow ‘til I burst/ Until I burst); watched some more T.V. (I’ve seen too much/ You haven’t seen enough/ You haven’t seen it/ Laugh until my head comes off); and panicked some more (Women and children first/ And the children first).
Then we embraced the Internet (Here I am alive/ Everything all of the time).
And then there were the arguments. First, the never-ending debate over climate change (Ice age coming/ Let me hear both sides/ Ice age coming/ Throw them all in the fire). And also about the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the on-going threat of global terror, whether in London, Madrid, India, or at home (We’re not scare mongering/ This is really happening). Not to mention the collapse of the economy, and the questions we’re still asking to find where to lay the blame (Mobiles quirking/ Mobiles chirping/ Take the money and run/ Take the money and run/ Take the money and run).
And always – always – the Internet. The blogosphere and social media furthered our alternate selves, projecting a persona that exists in a meta-reality, both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously (Here I’m alive/ Everything all of the time), while the bodies in front of the keyboards are still always ready for the next panic – maybe a pandemic, or a fear for the world we’re leaving for future generations (this one is for the children…).
And while it all might seem a bit depressing, the greatest thing that “Idioteque” tells us about our decade was that it also contained moments of ingenuity, complete magic, and great beauty. It was the decade of Banksy and LeBron James. Of finding evidence of water on Mars, Mad Men, iPods, and completing the human genome project. The decade of Alexander Ovechkin, the Royal Tenenbaums, and a guy who can draw the New York City skyline by memory; of football in HD, an airplane landing on the Hudson River, Usain Bolt, legalized gay marriage, TED talks that are available to everyone, Jon Stewart, etc. etc. And it’s the decade when we heard Is This It, Stankonia, Funeral, Elephant, Takk, and yes – Kid A.
Kid A has no gaps in logic, perhaps because its logic is never overt; it almost seems like a musical storyboard for that particular day.Now in 2009, TIME magazine is calling the ’00s “the Decade From Hell.”
[...]
The first song on Kid A paints the Manhattan skyline at 8:00 A.M. on Tuesday morning; the song is titled, “Everything in Its Right Place.”… You can imagine humans walking to work, riding elevators, getting off the C train and the 3 train, and thinking about a future that will be a lot like the present, only better.
So what then, do we do with a song like “Idioteque” – number 8 on the Kid A track list, and one that Klosterman passes by quickly in his analysis? We discuss it as an analogy for the entire decade, because the last ten years have felt like a dream, and the only way we can wrap our stupid heads around it is to let Thom Yorke do it for us. It’s nice to look back at a piece of music that seems now to have predicted the future, because we always like to assume that someone, somewhere, knows what’s coming. That’s never true.
Evaluating the 00’s objectively is impossible because they’re not really over. We still lack the context or the hindsight that can only come with another decade or two of living with the consequences of our recent actions. “Idioteque,” like any decade-in-review, lacks the capability to understand the things we did, it only points out that we did them. So what were they?
We panicked through Y2K and 9/11 (Who’s in a bunker? Who’s in a bunker? Women and children first/ And the children first); we became distracted by something called “reality” television because we couldn’t deal with our own (I laugh until my head comes off); ate like moron kings (Swallow ‘til I burst/ Until I burst); watched some more T.V. (I’ve seen too much/ You haven’t seen enough/ You haven’t seen it/ Laugh until my head comes off); and panicked some more (Women and children first/ And the children first).
Then we embraced the Internet (Here I am alive/ Everything all of the time).
And then there were the arguments. First, the never-ending debate over climate change (Ice age coming/ Let me hear both sides/ Ice age coming/ Throw them all in the fire). And also about the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the on-going threat of global terror, whether in London, Madrid, India, or at home (We’re not scare mongering/ This is really happening). Not to mention the collapse of the economy, and the questions we’re still asking to find where to lay the blame (Mobiles quirking/ Mobiles chirping/ Take the money and run/ Take the money and run/ Take the money and run).
And always – always – the Internet. The blogosphere and social media furthered our alternate selves, projecting a persona that exists in a meta-reality, both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously (Here I’m alive/ Everything all of the time), while the bodies in front of the keyboards are still always ready for the next panic – maybe a pandemic, or a fear for the world we’re leaving for future generations (this one is for the children…).
And while it all might seem a bit depressing, the greatest thing that “Idioteque” tells us about our decade was that it also contained moments of ingenuity, complete magic, and great beauty. It was the decade of Banksy and LeBron James. Of finding evidence of water on Mars, Mad Men, iPods, and completing the human genome project. The decade of Alexander Ovechkin, the Royal Tenenbaums, and a guy who can draw the New York City skyline by memory; of football in HD, an airplane landing on the Hudson River, Usain Bolt, legalized gay marriage, TED talks that are available to everyone, Jon Stewart, etc. etc. And it’s the decade when we heard Is This It, Stankonia, Funeral, Elephant, Takk, and yes – Kid A.
Colin Horgan @'True Slant'
Courtney Love Cobain on Facebook
"IF something happens to me, NO my will is NOT at Greenberg Glusker, that will is FORGERY…i created a new one per lISA FERGUSONs attorney who cannot be FOUND
but that needs altering as it has Edward in it and Norton doesn’t have a CLUE how evil his own BM is he wont fuck a future Senator/Film Actor but hell purposfully refinance Kim Cobains Property i bought her cash outright, for the 12th time using a phony address due to some fuck up on some Bogus “ART FORM OF THE CH 13” R TODD used, leavng KIM COBAINS PROPERTY REPOS…SESED< “you have an hour to get your things” wtf did Kim Cobain do to YOU… so its best to never tell let alone kiss and trell i m shcoked at myself i never kiss and tell unless im really mad at an ex for like LOSING 300,000$ of my kid hes supposed to be paternal abouts money, oh yeah Norton just LOST 300k"
britneys dad molested her , imagine the father that molested you owning you for slavery while your forced to sing songs picked for thier sexual content every night, insane right? i have it on First had authority, and fight as hard as she is and does she still didnt pull that card, its a pride thing i can relate to, However they want to play dirty, lets go, Im SO not affraid of the little trolls who hit this when i was fucked up who are called lawyers. lets GO.
Grrrr...
Men who do not openly express their anger if they are unfairly treated at work double their risk of a heart attack, Swedish research suggests.
The researchers looked at 2,755 male employees in Stockholm who had not had a heart attack when the study began.
They were asked about how they coped with conflict at work, either with superiors or colleagues.
The researchers say their study shows a strong relationship between pent-up anger and heart disease.
Writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the researchers called the various strategies for keeping things bottled up, covert coping.
The men were asked what methods they adopted: whether they dealt with things head-on, whether they let things pass without saying anything, walked away from conflict, developed symptoms like headache or stomach ache or got into a bad temper at home...
Freedom, Rhythm & Sound: Revolutionary Jazz Cover Art 1960-78
Review by Kevan Harris
Freedom Rhythm and Sound: Revolutionary Jazz Original Cover Art 1965-83
Compiled by Giles Peterson and Stuart Baker
Soul Jazz Records Publishing, 179 pp.
Compiled by Giles Peterson and Stuart Baker
Soul Jazz Records Publishing, 179 pp.
In the early days of African political independence, Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and then President of Ghana, used to tell a story to the crowds in Accra who gathered to catch a glimpse of him. In the 1930s, Nkrumah had received a scholarship to attend Lincoln University in Philadelphia. He arrived in D.C. and traveled by bus to Philly to begin his studies. The bus stopped halfway between, in Baltimore, for a break. Nkrumah got out, headed into a diner, and asked for a glass of water. The waiter behind the counter pointed at the spittoon and said he could get his drink from there. Nkrumah went on to teach classes in Greek and African philosophy at Lincoln University, before he headed to the U.K. and began his career as a political activist championing de-colonization and Pan-African unity.
The year that Nkrumah became Prime Minister, in 1957, the US government organized a trip for Louis Armstrong to play a concert in Moscow. This was on the heels of several successful jazz tours of Africa the U.S. had sponsored for artists such as Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie (along with racially integrated jazz orchestras). After President Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce integration in schools in accordance with Brown v. Board of Education, Armstrong cancelled the trip. Long adored in the public realm for his gentle and unthreatening persona, Armstrong is quoted to have said, “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.”
The year after Nkrumah became Prime Minster, securing Ghanaian independence, Ornette Coleman released his first album, Something Else!!!!
While jazz is often celebrated as the only sui generis American art form, especially in the hidebound version that ends up in a Ken Burns documentary, we tend to forget that it had quite an internationalist bent. And unlike rock n’ roll, which mostly flowed in one direction from First World countries to the Second and Third, jazz depended much more on ideas and identities from extra-American sources. Why?
After the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans, the media liked to remind us that jazz has creole origins – a descent and mixture of African and European ancestry. What could be more American than that? But “creole” comes from the Spanish “criollo” and the Portuguese “crioulo,” meaning a black person born in the New World, and pushing the etymology back further one reaches “criar” – “to produce” or “to breed.” Creole culture in pockets of the U.S. South, though it might have been a bit more permissive in its social codes, was by no means egalitarian. How could it have been, when many of the French creoles that populated New Orleans came there having fled the Haitian Revolution as slave-owners themselves? Not to mention that when the hero of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson, extended the vote to all white males under his “populist” presidency, the vote was taken away from property-holding blacks. During the most brutal periods of Jim Crow rule in the late 19th and 20th centuries, white southerners were legally allowed to commit acts against blacks that few European colonial powers would have sanctioned in their own African colonies. When a South African pro-segregationist visited the U.S. South in the early 20th century, he described the treatment he saw of African Americans “appalling.”
Understandably, many Americans have been led to believe that what I have just written has little to do with jazz. If they spend a few minutes glancing through Freedom Rhythm and Sound, a compilation of jazz album artwork from the late 1960s and 1970s, they might change their mind. Soul Jazz Records’ first foray into print (Exile Ed - er I think that would have been 'New York Noise'), Freedom is a pictographic overview of an artistic world that is long overdue.
As George Lewis points out in his social history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), A Power Stronger than Itself (2008), writing and criticism on jazz is “dominated by autobiography … [and tends] to avoid addressing issues of intellectual development, social context, racial conditions or the subjects’ view of culture, history, and philosophy.” Who played the alto solo on “Stolen Moments” in the second set at Birdland in 1961 is the kind of information that jazz writers and collectors seem to fetishize, putting individual players on pedestals, then, later on, often ghost-writing their memoirs. Jazz and improvisational music is supposed to be a collective endeavor, but a corporate and celebrity driven culture will have none of that. We need stars, dammit! This is why, for the last 20 years or so, it has been very difficult to tell the difference between the cover of a bestselling jazz album and bestselling country album – both feature a sexually alluring and clean cut individual who is always smiling.
It used to be different; indeed, it was so different that self-appointed keepers of “official” jazz history worked hard to efface any trace of most of the music seen in Freedom. The AACM members – Muhal Richard Abrams, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, George Lewis himself – took a harsh view of the standard improvisational approach of “cutting,” where each soloist tries to top the previous one. In fact, what probably seemed the most disconcerting to the jazz nomenklatura of the 1960s – many of whom didn’t mind the “new thing” as long as it was loud and alpha-male – was the powerful use of silence and constraint on many of the records displayed in this collection. Silence requires confidence, and this art exudes confidence in both aesthetic and political forms.
Much of this music was embedded in local black working-class communities, eschewing traditional jazz clubs and creating new autonomous venues, record labels, and allies. The AACM in South Side Chicago, the Black Artists Guild (BAG – Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Joseph Bowie) in St. Louis, Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS – Leroi Jones/Amira Baraka) in Harlem, Tribe (Wendell Harrison, Phil Ranelin) in Detroit, and Horace Tapscott’s Underground Musicians Association in Watts are a few of the collectives discussed in sidebars in this collection. (Tapscott’s building in L.A. was shared by the Black Panthers, “with weapons and meetings upstairs, musicians in the basement.”)
The DIY aesthetic went along with the very local politics of creating experimental music, with Sun Ra’s El Saturn Records and 1950s black-owned R&B labels providing the model. Sun Ra kept his politics utopian, the Marcus Garvey of avant-garde jazz. Garvey did organize a Back to Africa cruise line, Black Star, but it failed. Sun Ra had a spaceship built for the movie Space is the Place, which successfully launched, albeit onscreen. Others opted for a more down to earth perspective, and identified with (and participated in) Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements of the day. We must remember that by the late 1960s, the liberal Cold War U.S. consensus (under which Ornette Coleman and a Jackson Pollack cover could come together on Atlantic Records with Free Jazz and the CIA probably thought it worked as anti-Soviet propaganda) had come undone. The assimilationist ethos of the 1950s civil rights movement had been largely replaced by projects to create new black subjectivities outside of the mainstream, which required new identities, myths, histories and art. This meant reclaiming the past and, by doing so, forcing others to confront it. These albums are often militant, but not bitter; optimistic, but not nostalgic; reflexive, but not narcissistic.
It also meant taking control of the means of musical and symbolic production. This was not simply a hodgepodge appropriation of pyramids, ankhs and dashikis, though if you’re in the market, this book has plenty of that too. At its most innovative, thoughtful, and, therefore, threatening to the jazz bought and relaxed to by mainstream America, black experimental music in this period could act like an unwanted détournement – a derailing of the expected modes of behavior that equaled any Fluxus performance. Here is how George Lewis describes a 1968 performance of Joseph Jarman’s Bridge Piece at the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall:
A woman hung aluminum wrapping paper on audience members while a Top 40 station blared on a portable radio. The first night consisted of a live band and a tape of that band, playing simultaneously the same composition. The variation came in the mistakes . . . the musicians made playing the composition. After the notated parts, those spaces where improvisation occurred were different. It sounded like two of the same person playing a solo . . . The audience was given a sack that they would have to put over their heads. They were directed into areas where they would have to sit down or stand up. There were two people walking through the audience with portable radios. There was a juggler . . . and a tumbler who had to tumble over people. The place was super-packed, crowded with strobe lights, smoke, all kinds of stuff happening . . . The following night was complete formal attire. The band was in complete tuxes and you could not get in if you were not formally dressed . . . a lot of people were turned away. That turning away was as much a part of the performance as attendance. The demand for formal conformity . . . turned a lot of people off.
Marginalized, many of these musicians ended up in France, Germany, or North Africa by the early 1970s, while Psychedelic Miles and Herbie’s Headhunters sold millions on Columbia (not that this was a bad thing – after all, ABC-Impulse started putting out Sun Ra records in the early 1970s). Working in college radio in Chicago in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I had a chance to meet a few AACM members in person over the years, and none of them were bitter or angry. They were still performing revelatory music to a generally young audience, and unlike most musicians, they probably knew what they were getting into when they started. To its credit, there is a lot of music in Freedom I had no idea existed, much of it leading well into the 1980s, and it deserves wider attention. Hopefully this book – issued by a British record label – will form one part of a small new reclamation of American history, sitting by someone’s stereo (or laptop) instead of on one’s coffee table.
Writing this piece from the periphery of the United States’ world reach[1], I cannot help but read this collection as a book that is anti-Obama, though this is assuredly not the editors’ intention. After all, given what has occurred in the U.S. between January and now, it seems we are experiencing the fastest unraveling of a liberal consensus since the Weimar Republic. In 2008, the Obama campaign was astonishingly able to get 18-24 year olds from around the country to knock on doors in poor neighborhoods, engage strangers in debate, go sleepless nights occupied with political action that many had told them was futile and impossibly naïve (I know, because they constantly were skipping my classes to go to places like Iowa and South Carolina). These individuals have the rare experience of being involved in a social movement that actually wins what it sets out to accomplish.
Did it, though? It was recently reported that Obama’s staff had to get the President “fired up” to take on his critics before his recent address to Congress on health care. The passage from New York Review of Books is telling: “Obama, whose high self-esteem is well known among close observers, had previously assumed that a ‘following,’ a ‘movement,’ would be there without his having to do much to stimulate it.” Frankly, the movement is already gone, so someone should let him down easy. But it was Obama and his technocratic centrism that demobilized it, and the guy’s just too damn charismatic for anyone to admit it.
What if we lived in a world where all that youth energy, filled with utopian visions, knowing that history was on our side, foregoing the established routes of behavior, was directed into something other than the amnesia-inducing process known as an American presidential election? Something more locally and globally minded than simply a re-branded nationalism? Maybe, it would have produced something comparable to the arts, movements and lasting social resonance that underlie this book.
Inverz - Slow (2009)
Inverz is Thessaloniki-born Savvas Metaxas, who runs the excellent Granny Records stable. Influenced by the
likes of Fennesz, Pan American, Alva Noto and My Bloody Valentine, Metaxas utilizes acoustic &
electric guitars and an arsenal of pedal effects and field recordings, to create a sound rich in texture and
panoramic in depth.
‘Slow‘ is the third Inverz release to date, a suite of four meticulously crafted long-form compositions that transcend
the standard notions of Ambient/Drone.
‘Everything In Order‘ bathes in dreamy reverb, like Labradford or Chihei Hatakeyama at their most thoughtful.
The title track tantalizingly weaves fretboard scratches, human breath and flickers of static round cut and
spliced guitar recalling Fridge at their most experimental. The slide-rule attention to detail of both book-ending
pieces ‘Home End‘ & ‘New Found Lands, New Found Sounds‘, on the other hand, shows why Metaxas was
hand-picked to collaborate with Greg Haines and perform with Machinefabriek.
A very fine piece of work indeed.
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Thursday 26 November 2009
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