A Tribute to Sirone

News has just emerged that the bassist Sirone (Norris Jones) died in Berlin on Wednesday, at the age of 69. So, another one of the great free jazz musicians has passed away; warning that it's more urgent than ever not to rely on those early pioneers still being around and still keeping their music fresh. With Leroy Jenkins' passing a few years ago, this now means that, of the Revolutionary Ensemble, only one surviving member, Jerome Cooper, remains.

In tribute, I've put together a playlist of some of the Sirone performances in my collection. In some instances, I've excerpted bass solos from longer tracks (often when the bass isn't so well recorded, probably a legacy of the traditional jazz notion that the rhythm section is only a backdrop to the horns); in others, I've kept the whole track, as Sirone's accompaniment plays such an active role in the whole texture.

Sirone appears on albums with (to list just a few) Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Noah Howard, Sonny Sharrock, Clifford Thornton, Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor, and Dave Burrell, and collaborated with many others throughout his career. Born in Atlanta, he played with John Coltrane in the last year of the saxophonist's life, and became highly in-demand on the emerging 'fire music' scene: one might almost describe him as a free jazz session bassist, though that wouldn't do justice to the quality he brought to each session. Free jazz allowed him much more leverage than traditional routes; he was less an accompanist, a 'rhythm section' player, more an active participant, goading on the saxophones and trumpets and contributing sometimes pithy solo statements of his own. In these, he could be heard to take on something of Charles Mingus' very physical approach to the instrument, whereby the sound of fingers on strings had a real snap to it, the sound of slapped and struck vibrating gut; something, too of Jimmy Garrison's flamenco-flavoured strumming; and he developed, more than either player, a trembling higher register sound which would stand him in good stead for his later collaborations with the violinist Leroy Jenkins. In fact, even at this stage, he was the sort of player who meshed very well in unusual instrumental settings, especially with other stringed instruments to work or contrast with; on Gato Barbieri's 1967 ESP Disk recording, 'In Search of the Mystery', his pizzicato playing forms the turbulent backdrop to the piercing, near-anguished melodies played by Barbieri and cellist Joel Friedman.

1/ La Sorrella (bass solo)
from ‘Why Not’ (Marion Brown, 1966)

2/ Domiabra (bass solo)
from ‘The Black Ark’ (Noah Howard, 1969)

The first track in the playlist is a bass solo from 'La Sorrella', the opener on Marion Brown's 1966 album 'Why Not'. This is the longest solo Sirone is allocated (he solos on most tracks, but only for half a minute or so), and a good example of his interaction with Rashied Ali's drums, and their restless refusal to remain rhythmically stable. Following that, a solo from ‘Domiabra’, the opening piece on the 1969 Noah Howard classic ‘The Black Ark’; after the howling fury of Arthur Doyle, a bass solo might seem like respite, but Sirone’s springy jumps and bends round high and low registers are just as exploratory.

3/ Communications Network Part 1
from ‘Communications Network’ (Clifford Thornton, 1972)

Clifford Thornton, a trumpeter and trombonist (as well as cornet and electric piano player on this date) recorded some fine albums in the early 70s, probably the best known of which is the ambitious large-ensemble suite ‘The Gardens of Harlem’, recorded with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. For the first two tracks of ‘Communications Network’, Thornton features an unusual small group which, given the presence of Sirone and Jerome Cooper, is pretty much The Revolutionary Ensemble, with L. Shankar (of Shakti) replacing Leroy Jenkins on violin. This group has a very different sound, though; Shankar’s ecstatic raga lines over Thornton’s electric piano create a fusion feel which sits oddly – but very nicely – with Sirone and Cooper’s free jazz rhythms. Thornton’s cornet playing (he’s presumably overdubbing the electric piano) is declamatory and dark-toned, and, even if he and Shankar are very much the lead voices (bass and drums are way down in the mix, often obscured by the electric piano), it’s an interesting context in which to hear Sirone.

4/ Spring of Two Blue-Js Part 2 (excerpt)
from ‘Spring of Two Blue-Js’ (Cecil Taylor Unit, 1973)

Perhaps the greatest challenge for a jazz bass player is the immense stamina required: whereas a saxophonist can take a breather after blowing hard, bassists will most often play for the entire duration of a piece. Call this problem exacerbated in the music of Cecil Taylor, his pieces stretching to lengths that surpassed even those of John Coltrane, and whose fundamental characteristic was what Ekkehard Jost termed ‘energy’ (as opposed to ‘swing’), though of course Taylor has a lyrical streak which has grown more pronounced in recent years (sounding almost Debussyian at times). Robert Levin recounts one occasion where Taylor’s ‘Unit’ was playing in a jazz club; towards the end of the piece, his bassist at the time, Buell Neidlinger, had become so exhausted that he stopped playing, propped up by his instrument, his eyes closed as if, for all the world, the music had drained so much energy out of him that he had simply expired on the spot. If anything, Taylor’s music had grown even lengthier and more energetic by the time Sirone joined his Unit. An extreme example of this is the triple-LP (now double-CD) ‘One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye’, and to get a real sense of Sirone’s contribution to the music, one would probably have to listen to the whole thing – the cumulative intensity and accumulation of detail into a kind of trance-like block of sound is something that has to be experienced in the listening, rather than the describing – to be experienced as something total, complete. So I’ve chosen a short excerpt from the second piece on ‘Spring of Two Blue-Js’ (1973), an album recorded live at Town Hall in New York (at a concert dedicated to Ben Webster). We’ll hear the tail-end of the energy rush ridden and spurred on by saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, followed by Sirone’s solo, and a brief interaction with Taylor on piano ending the piece.

5/ Seeds and Deeds
6/ Meditation Submission Purification
7/ Joie de Vivre
8/ Qow
from ‘Coincide’ (Dewey Redman 1974)

Next, four complete pieces from Dewey Redman's 'Coincide' (1974), one of my favourite Redman recordings. Sirone and drummer Eddie Moore appear on all tracks (apart from 'Phadan-Sers', a Redman zither solo), and the other players are violinst Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Ted Daniel. 'Seeds and Deeds' opens the album with some 'hard-driving jazz' (to borrow the title of the John Coltrane/Cecil Taylor collaboration), Redman and Daniels blasting away, Sirone and Moore skittering all over the place to create an exceptionally jittery, energetic feel. By contrast, 'Meditation Submission Purification' has its tone set by the otherworldy sounds of Redman's zither, Sirone's arco harmonics, and Eddie Moore's 'bowed and struck idiophone'. The arco playing of Jenkins and Sirone was one of the finest things about the Revolutionary Ensemble, opening up textures and sonorities which had previously been thought of as the province of 'classical' music (and still are, to some extent, despite the work of John Edwards, Barry Guy et al), and, with the zither coalescing into hanging clouds of sound rather than taking a lead role, Sirone's playing is perhaps the most dominant voice here. It's an entrancing piece with a very special atmosphere. 'Joie de Vivre' shows yet another side to Sirone's work: after the free jazz of 'Seeds and Deeds' and the 'extended techniques' textural work of 'Mediation...', he proves that he can play very fine pizzicato straight jazz ballad bass on 'Joie de Vivre'. It's the same trio as on 'Mediation...' (Redman, Sirone, and Moore) but with a very different use of space: whereas on the previous track the effect was of time standing stil, here it just moves very slowly, in graceful and unhurried comfort. All three musicians sound supremely relaxed. Beginning with an equally relaxed sound, but at a faster tempo (a brisk, happy walk, rather than a slow stroll), ‘Qow,’ the longest of my four selections from this album, opens with Redman playing off Sirone’s catchy repeated riff before his rough-edged smears move things further ‘out’, Sirone switching to fast walking bass and then taking a popping, bubbling solo.

9/ Manhattan Cycles, Side A
from ‘Manhattan Cycles’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 1972)

10/ Ponderous Planets
from ‘The People’s Republic’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 1975)

Sirone’s probably best-known for his work with violinist Leroy Jenkins and drummer Jerome Cooper in The Revolutionary Ensemble, which formed in the early 1970s. Jenkins had moved to New York from Chicago, where he had been an important member of the AACM. Given the realities of being a jobbing musicians in the Big Apple, the Ensemble was formed partly to fulfill the need for a regular group which could explore some of the subtleties that had characterized the AACM – the so-called ‘chamber jazz’ carried over from the Creative Construction Company, in which Jenkins had played with Anthony Braxton. A long period of practice prefaced the Ensemble’s official emergence. as testified by the flowing interaction of the music – in some ways a contrast to the ‘blow as loud and hard as you can’ school of free jazz. Cooper’s drumming never asserted itself so much as rolled into being, repeating in slowly developing waves, or cells of sound, and Sirone meshed with Jenkins’ melodically assertive violin, rather than trying to sound out as a lead voice. It was this quality in particular that made the Ensemble such a special group – for though, as we’ve heard, Sirone could be an assertive player, he was perhaps at his best when creating a textural thread that altered the whole sound of a group without one quite realizing that, or how, it had been. The Ensemble’s first album came out on ESP-Disk (it’s just been re-issued under the title ‘Vietnam’) and has been criticized for the sound quality, which failed to capture the subtlety of the groups’ quieter, spacier moments. In fact, though, the tape hiss and drone comes to seem almost a part of the music at these times, something entirely appropriate as the ensemble would make use of tape recordings and other non-standard sounds to supplement the basic violin, bass, drums line-up. Thus, on ‘Manhattan Cycles’ (the entire first side of which I’ve included in the playlist), Billie Holiday’s voice floats out, muted, Jenkins picking up on the ghost memory and turning it into living, flowing improvisational lyricism. ‘The People’s Republic’ (apocryphally supposed to have invoked the ire of Quincy Jones over dinner with Herb Alpert, and the subsequent cancellation of A&M Records’ jazz sub-label Horizon) is one of my favourite of the Ensemble’s recordings; the tracks are shorter than on the long-form ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Manhattan Cycles’, with some particularly gorgeous melodies (such as the beginning of ‘New York’) , a spacey, African-flavoured piece for vocals and percussion (the title track), and much atmospheric use of gongs, cymbals, musical saws, and the combined arco playing of Jenkins/Sirone (‘Ponderous Planets’).

11/ Berlin Erfrahung
from ‘And Now’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 2004)

During this time, Sirone made a few recordings under his name (it would be more than 20 years before he did so again). The Revolutionary Ensemble split in 1977, and, like many American avant-jazz musicians, he settled in Europe, finding the climate there much more receptive than in his home country. Based in Berlin, he nevertheless to maintain a presence in America as well, going on to work with Charles Gayle, Billy Bang, Cecil Taylor, and the George Adams/James Blood Ulmer group Phalanx. In 2004, the Revolutionary Ensemble, which had been dormant since the late 70s, unexpectedly reunited, releasing an acclaimed album on pi records which demonstrated the same virtues as their 70s work, as fresh as ever. Each member of the group contributed two compositions: Sirone’s ‘Berlin Erfrahung’ offers a strongly melodic approach to composition.

Sirone was still working in the years leading up to his death, recording a couple of albums under his own name with European musicians as well as with the violinist Billy Bang. Needless to say, his music lives on.

Download link for Sirone Tribute Playlist: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1o1mozmvn0n

Woe Betide Records

News of a new venture: I've just set up an internet-based label called Woe Betide Records. The label will be dedicated to improvised and experimental music of various descriptions. Each album will be available in CD-R format – complete with artwork, tracklisting and enclosed spontaneous hand-drawing – for £6.00 (this price includes postage, UK and international). Sales will take place over at the website: http://woebetiderecords.wordpress.com/

The first three releases are:

WB001: David Grundy - Unbidden
WB002: Mark Anthony Whiteford - Zariba
WB003: The Cambridge Free Improvisation Society In Hell

Head over to the website to have a look. And if anyone wants review copies, drop me an email (dmgrundy@gmail.com).

Gannets + Waschmann/ Stubbs in Oxford

GANNETS + PHIL WASCHMANN/ CHRIS STUBBS
Folly Bridge Inn, Oxford, Tuesday 29th September 2009

The duo of Phil Wachsmann (violin, with electronics) and Chris Stubbs (percussion, also with electronics) took a while to hit its stride (though stride isn’t really the appropriate metaphor, given the particular logic of incident which was in play). Wachsmann bowed violin lines in ‘modern classical’ vein, often repeating one note with bowing variations, playing rather piquant, attractive melodies, then scraping the bow below the bridge or dissonantly plucking: a succession of sound techniques in which flow wasn’t quite adjusted, as yet. That said, what the set revealed as it went on was that flow was often not the order of the game; incidents followed one another in blocks rather than lines, though single areas would frequently be examined at length, especially by Wachsmann.

Things were settling in by the time the first piece reached its latter stages, and Stubbs’ percussion in particular was really coming into its own. Rather than a ‘kit’, he utilised a ‘junk’ set-up: tubs, household implements, and a sheet of metal with stones and coils attached, connected to a small amp and an electronic device which was hidden away behind the upside-down box on which the metal had been placed. His playing was busy, clanging, clattery: a delectable kitchen-pan style approach sure to break things up and keep them moving, though the amplified metal elicited more drawn-out variations, arising no doubt from a delight in the sonorities which were being lovingly drawn from the scrape of a knife or the rattle of a stone.

Waschmann took a closing violin solo (something that he had been building towards for a while, it seemed), and after brief applause, it was Stubbs who went solo, to his surprise as much as anyone else’s – it just felt right, and Wachsmann, eyes closed as ever, concentrated hard, soaking it all up and waiting for the right moment to enter. It came, and soon, with the aid of pedals and resultant effects, he was creating the effect of an entire string section, without this sounding gimmicky – in fact, it was texturally quite delightful, thick and crumbly but with a tautness to it that seemed as though it could break at any point. He even got into some Henry Flynt/ Tony Conrad-style folk-tinged melodic drone, in a section lasting minutes which was really quite pretty, almost pastoral, until Stubbs’ stormclouds of foghorn electronics pushed him into engine effects, bowing up and down the string, and thence to texturally sparser but more actively eventful extrapolations.

Gannets played LOUD from the off, and didn’t stop: the sheer force of their entry took me by surprise, as Steve Noble’s drums and Fyfe Dangerfield’s massively amped-up and distorted keyboard vibrated the floor. It’s impossible really to describe the whole performance (which I guess must have lasted around forty minutes) step by step: though there were definite narrative segments, the overwhelming power and loudness made it hard to remember what had gone before. Paying attention to particular lines or areas or segments would be like concentrating on the individual bricks which made up this monstrous wall of sound. I say ‘wall of sound’, but, on reflection, that well-travelled metaphor seems inappropriate given the relentless propulsion of the thing. This was not a solid construction that sat still on solid foundations; rather something had somehow been set in motion that just would not stop. Indeed, it was almost as if the music had moved beyond the conscious control of the players. I don’t mean that they weren’t in control of what they were playing, but that what and when they chose to play (mostly, sounds full of timbral harshness and buoyant, abrasive energy, all the time) were decisions into which they were pushed by force of circumstance, being made to think and to act simultaneously, to play something before they’d caught up with what was involved. It’s an approach which, of necessity, skimps on detail, or seems to do so, though the make-up of this sound mass is clearly very complex (anyone attempting to analyse the minutiae of what was going on would find enough material to keep them occupied in a research hole for months).

When things threatened to quieten or turn more melodic, one player would be sure to squall or bang or pluck away and up the ante once more, compensating for any drop in volume and tempo. Thus, a slamming riff section or a burst of ‘fake jazz’ from Dangerfield’s suddenly tinny keyboard would soon be dropped for more collective lung-busting, even if Noble did often keep up a fairly pronounced beat, as well as making his customary journeys round his kit with sticks and with various percussive accessories.

Despite the emphasis played on the band as a band rather than as a grouping of showy individuals, each musician’s approach had something distinctively out-standing about it. Dominic Lash’s amplified bass, even with one broken string, gave a real deep end to the band’s sound. Alex Ward’s shards of altissimo wail on saxophone and clarinet were Marshall Allen-like in their scrawly magnificence, and his melodic leaps, as ever, were endlessly fascinating in their absurdly quick-thinking, mellifluous flow. And Chris Cundy played a mean free jazz bass clarinet, alternating low honks, growls and parps with high yawps and cries, and leaping up the registers even more with piercing soprano sax – though his playing on that instrument was often more melodic, if you were able to pick it out of the collective ferment.

At times one wished not so much for ‘subtlety’ (what’s the point in imposing criteria on the music which it was manifestly not attempting to, and not going to fulfill?) as for a slight reduction of volume in Dangerfield’s corner. The utter loudness of his set-up could be seen to have hindered a more dialogic approach between the other musicians which would have produced some textural variety: but then again, the turbo boost of his floor-shaking rumbles and police siren whooshes isn’t something you come across in every improv band. As a whole, the group displayed a nicely collective and layered approach to noise-making: with no ‘leader’ and no ‘solos’, anyone could shape the music’s direction, though that seemed to generate itself much of the time, as an unstoppable current against which the musicians had to swim with ever more frantically powerful strokes. For a good forty minutes, then, Gannets transformed the function room of the Folly Bridge Inn into a profane temple of unholy textured noise.

One Step Beyond Special Edition: Rashied Ali Tribute (September 2009)

Photograph of Rashied Ali by Francis Wolff

I put this show together a few days ago (hence the 'September' reference, even though we're in October now I've finally got round to posting it). The track with James Blood Ulmer is particularly interesting, though I was only able to play part of it in order to keep things down to two hours. Try and track down the whole record if you can: MP3s can be downloaded from Rashied Ali's official website.

ONE STEP BEYOND SPECIAL EDITION – RASHIED ALI TRIBUTE (September 2009)

* To listen to the show, click on the blog-post title, which should take you over to the relevant site. (Free registration is required for streaming and downloading.)*

Drummer Rashied Ali died last month. Most famous for playing with John Coltrane’s late groups, and for performing on the only duo album Coltrane ever recorded, ‘Interstellar Space’, he went on to appear on many fine free jazz recordings of the late 60s and to play a key role in the ‘Loft Jazz’ scene in New York during the 70s, establishing his own performance space, Ali’s Alley, and his own recording label, Survival Records. Playing until just a few weeks before his unexpected death of a heart attack, he always remained a superb duo player, as witnessed by recordings and performances with Frank Lowe, Leroy Jenkins, Sonny Fortune and Henry Grimes. In addition, he continued to perform the music of John Coltrane with the group Prima Materia, and was part of the explosive trio By Any Means, alongside William Parker and Charles Gayle. Whilst seeking to honour his legacy, this programme is also intended as a reminder that, while the music of Ali and so many great musicians like him still remains endlessly rewarding, it will not do simply to look back with nostalgia and fond regret at the music of those who have passed on; for Ali embodied a spirit of discovery, of experimentation and of deep commitment, which is first and foremost a living spirit, a conception of music as a life force and as a part of lived life, of music as organic and flowing and never-ending.

song is a bolt of light –
being messenger of that light
is no task for those not in touch-
ing distance of all that weight-
less weight, their pasts as now,
worn so lightly, the cloak thrown
not away, but draped to conduct
energy, past prisms of tradition into
light, radiant unsmiling, grave
laughter that will rise again,
ascend always
out of the earth.

PLAYLIST

FIRST HOUR

Rashied Ali - Solo Drums Improvisation, Moers Festival, 1979 (excerpt)
ALBUM – Unreleased Live Recording

John Coltrane – Venus
John Coltrane (tenor sax, bells) Rashied Ali (drums)
ALBUM – Interstellar Space (Impulse Records, 1974 (recorded 1967))

John Coltrane – Expression
John Coltrane (tenor sax) Alice Coltrane (piano) Jimmy Garrison (bass) Rashied Ali (drums, percussion)
ALBUM – Expression (Impulse Records, 1967)

Alice Coltrane – Via Sivanandagar
Alice Coltrane (piano) Ron Carter (bass) Rashied Ali (drums)
ALBUM – Huntingdon Ashram Monastery (Impulse Records, 1969)

Marion Brown Quartet – Why Not?
Marion Brown (alto sax) Stanley Cowell (piano) Sirone (bass) Rashied Ali (drums)
ALBUM – Why Not? (ESP Disk, 1966)

SECOND HOUR

Frank Lowe/Rashied Ali – Duo Exchange, Part One
Frank Lowe (tenor sax) Rashied Ali (drums)
ALBUM – Duo Exchange (Survival Records, 1972)

Leroy Jenkins/Rashied Ali – Swift are the Winds of Life
Leroy Jenkins (violin) Rashied Ali (drums)
ALBUM – Swift are the Winds of Life (Survival Records, 1973)

Rashied Ali Quintet – Address (Adrees) (excerpt)
Earl Cross (trumpet) Bob Ralston (tenor sax) James ‘Blood’ Ulmer (guitar) John Dani (bass) Rashied Ali (drums)
ALBUM - Rashied Ali Quintet (Survival Records, 1973)

Touchin’ On Trane, Part A (excerpt)
Charles Gayle (sax) William Parker (bass) Rashied Ali (drums)
ABLUM – Touchin’ on Trane (FMP, 1991)

This Must Always Have Happened (excerpt)
Henry Grimes (voice, violin, bass) Rashied Ali (drums)
ALBUM – Going to the Ritual (Porter Records, 2008)

Bristol Improvisors Zariba & The Public Piano Project: September 2009

In September 2009, a number of upright pianos were installed in various public spaces around the city of Bristol, as part of a project entitled 'Play Me, I'm Yours.' A few days before they were due to be taken down, members of Bristol Improvisors Zariba spent a day travelling between several of the instruments for a series of collective improvisations, recordings of which can be listened to at http://freeimprov.multiply.com/music.

Free improvisation, a supremely interactive music, is too often restricted to taking place in environments that are either closed and private or simply too hidden away for most people to be aware of what's going on just round the corner: in small rehearsal cabins or pub back-rooms, rooms whose size precludes attendance by much more than a small crowd of accolytes and enthusiasts, or maybe even just the musicians themselves. The 'Play Me I'm Yours' project thus seemed the perfect opportunity to take the music to the streets and parks of Bristol, in a situation which was more part of the continuing unfolding of city life than a foregrounded 'performance' or 'event'; as joggers and cyclists and skateboarders came by along the pavement, a few people would be clustered around a piano, sometimes leaving so much silence and playing so quietly that people thought they had not even begun, at others more obviously playing what one passerby called "weird modern music." As well as the pleasure of simply playing, improvising outside came with the added benefits of opportunities for interaction with environment (birdcalls, gusts of wind through trees, police sirens) and for people within that environment - whether the reactions involved were bemused, vaguely hostile, or even intrigued. One teenager came over with his mates just as we were finishing one piece; we offered for him to sit down and play something, which he did, at first in an attempt to mock it, but then really getting into it, at which point his two friends slapped him on the face and headed off. Anything outside the normal patterns of existence quickly gets slapped down; even the piano project, something of a social experiment, was managed within certain limits. Thus, playing after certain hours was prohibited in some cases, despite the sound of the piano being quieter than the constant sound of the city nightscape, with its sirens and helicopters, or the jazz band playing in a trendy bar.

Below is a video of one of the Zoriba Improvisations: this one took place at the Castle Park piano sometime after 2pm. The performers are Mark Anthony Whiteford on saxophone and David Grundy on piano. Also below, a short clip of Bristol Improvisors Zoriba performing inside a regular rehearsal cabin, later the same day: the performers are Mark Anthony Whiteford (saxophone, electronics), David Grundy (percussion, flute), Stuart Chalmers (electronics) and Donovan Hawley (trumpet).

Cobra Verde (1987)

Starring: Klaus Kinski
Music: Popol Vuh
Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
(based on the novel 'The Viceroy of Ouidah' by Bruce Chatwin)
Director of Photgraphy: Viktor Růžička

A slow pace has been established from the outset, yet, as the film continues, this pace becomes so predominant that narrative becomes more and more irrelevant. In another film about the fate of mad white men in mad foreign continents, this might in fact be part of a narrative process: the descent, illustrated by means of greater chronological incoherence and focus on the hallucinatory power of the image (as in ‘Apocalypse Now’), of the white man losing his soul and journeying into the heart of darkness. Herzog is not interested in making such sweeping ‘human condition’ statements – or, he is, but they are of a different kind, and his whole methodology seeks to embody rather than merely to illustrate them. Thus, though he is decidedly not making a historical film, a film ‘about’ colonialism and its evils, neither is he using the situation as a springboard to make points about the human condition: rather, through means above all of images, a ‘message’, or what he might call an ‘ecstatic truth’, emerges in a symbiotic manner, partly from his own egocentric volition (and that of leader actor Klaus Kinski), partly from those elements of the film which, by weight of circumstance and presence, remain out of his control (which is precisely what he wants).

Having said that, the hints at a kind of preaching – the sort of thing which any other film-maker would have assumed mandatory in a film which depicts the slave trade – do half-imply the ‘heart of darkness’ trajectory: most notably, the scenes in which Kinski writes a letter home bemoaning his lost soul, the growing frostiness of his heart in an unbearably hot country (although of course this ‘coldness’ recalls his dream of the land of cold white snow he discusses with the barman in Brazil, the white utopian realm he cries out for when, ironically enough, his face has been painted black in preparation for his execution, the snow which seems to finds its visual echo in the rows of white flags waved in great signalling lines across the African landscape).

The prologue suggested otherwise: a line-faced old musician half-speaks, half-sings his announcement that he will sing a song of Cobra Verde, alternating this with scratchy near-melodies, bowed on the violin which he holds adjacent to his head, oddly angled towards his ear rather than under his chin. You will now hear and see fantastic tales, Herzog, through this old man, seems to be saying; and indeed we do, but not in the straightforwardly narrative and heroic manner which the song might lead us to expect.

Defeating expectations is an important part of this film: while it contains many Herzog trademarks – the manic Kinski performance, the tale of the downfall of a man driven to excess, to push his limits in opposition to hostile natural forces and to hostile cultural forces alien to his own background, the focus on startling images, the use of a dreamy and barely-present Popul Vuh soundtrack – its historical scope is more complex, perhaps more muddled than something like ‘Aguirre’ or ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (though, like both of those films, it has as its milieu a colonial world). In a way, it’s several films at once: the main portion of the story, in which Cobra Verde struggles to control the slave trade in Dahomey, the story of how he became the bandit Cobra Verde (pretty much skirted over – his first murder is barely registered, a brief glimpse of torches against an otherwise entirely black backdrop, a snarled Kinski threat), the story of how he infiltrated a rich plantation and impregnated the master’s daughters, and a wider story of the end of slavery, the end of an era.

Particularly intriguing in this regard is the early scene with Euclides, the dwarf bartender, which can perhaps most obviously be read as a tribute to the spaghetti western bar scenes in which Kinski played his part (most memorably, that in the Dollars Trilogy where he attempts to get Clint Eastwood to light a match on his hunch back), hints of the western appearing in the immediately preceding scene, with his stylised appearance in a town square. “It’s the bandit Cobra Verde” the townsfolk scream, as he strides out emblazoned with bullet-belts in an X across his chest, the badge of honour of the Mexican bandit, everyone fleeing inside the church, and Herzog focussing more than half the short scene on a barrel which rolls slowly across the cobbles, almost in a parody of Leone’s focus on excruciatingly drawn-out detail, but a focus in this case which, unlike Leone, does not lead anywhere. The scene simply ends, Kinski’s entrance and the rolling barrel almost but not quite symbolic moments, generic homage, mere ‘atmospheric’ scene-setting, or – most convincingly – part of the myth-making which surrounds Cobra Verde/Kinski throughout the film. By contrast, Eastwood’s ‘inscrutable’ or, as it might be more accurate to put it, amusedly amoral ‘Man with No Name’, seems as flimsy a protagonist as the ridiculous Segals, Stallones, and Van Dammes of 80s and 90s action movie lore; for Herzog is not setting up his bandit as a man whose cunning and violence set him out above others, generating the fear and respect both of those characters with whom he interacts on screen and the audience on whom his image is impressed, but as something at once more mysterious (as I’ll try to suggest below) and more obvious (Kinski’s alternations between horrendous rage and prolonged, still calm).

Of course, given that this is Kinski (and Kinski filmed by Herzog, rather than Kinski content to chew the scenery in a dodgy B-movie), such mere movie myth-making as that of Leone/Eastwood could not be part of the picture, even if it was intended. Dollars Trilogy Eastwood remains an actor cultivating a persona (though, of course, this persona would come to be identified with ‘Clint Eastwood’ himself, with the subsequent modifications of the Dirty Harry phase lending him a greater vocabulary which made the transition more convincing). It could be said that he barely acts at all – for acting, in a conventional sense, wouldn’t really fit with Leone’s construction of personality from visual detail, from formal camerawork rather than the more observational style of Herzog. Rod Steiger found this to his cost when he brought his Actors Workshop approach to ‘Giu La Testa’; Eli Wallach’s salt-of-the-earth peasant bandit, the obvious predecessor to Steiger’s Juan, and Gian Maria Volonte’s heavies, play their roles with an excess crucial to Leone’s use of commedia-del-arte-flavoured types, but this excess, which might be mistaken simply for an ‘OTT’ style, is of a less ‘motivated’, more elemental kind than Steiger’s, to which it superficially seems similar. Wallach and the heavies are inhabiting their roles not by dogged psychological research and preparation, but are conceiving motivation as a spur-of-the-moment form of being, an instinctual and above all honest approach to life (at heart – for the characters are of course far from honest, engaging in all the double-crosses, swindles, lies and sentimentalities that would come to be the spaghetti western standard). Yet such ‘being’ should not be confused with ‘not acting’, with ‘simply being yourself’; if, watching the Dollars Trilogy now, Clint Eastwood retrospectively comes to seem as if he is just being Clint Eastwood, he is still retrospectively being the Clint Eastwood film persona, the almost ridiculously artificial and pared-down version of a human being that, again, became a spaghetti western standard, with armies of expressionless Djangos and Sartanas committing cold acts of violence.

No Eastwood then, Kinski is, once more, the man pushed to extremes, the man who attempts to take on the vast indifference of nature (an indifference which seems to be cruelty to most humans, or is sentimentalised away, as in the case of Timothy Treadwell from ‘Grizzly Man’, but which Herzog is determined to face head on, as in the latter film) not by challenging it with his human sophistication or intellect or fine-tuned emotion, but by testing the limits of rage, living in bursts of furious physical action, ecstasies of violence and fury (watch the scene where Kinski announces to his ‘amazons’ that they will now attack the king; as they chance ‘fight! fight!’ over and over, waving their weapons, chanting and dancing in the intoxicating rhythms which are so much a part of the film’s visual and aural texture, he is at once overwhelmed by the mass frenzy surrounding him and its centre, a prime force if not its instigator (particularly given the way in which he stands out visually, the white face with the long blonde hair among a sea of brown and red)). What’s so unnerving is that this really is the persona which Kinski lived: thus, we are not only watching Cobra Verde (or Aguirre, or Fitzcaraldo, or even Nosferatu) but the man, Klaus Kinski, so identified with his role that it becomes a kind of super-reality transcending even his own ‘actual self’ (I’m reminded of something Artaud writes about the necessity for an actor to completely inhabit his role in this way, but I can’t remember the exact phrasing or context).



Given the way Kinski constantly spills over in this manner, it often seems that Herzog wishes to vanish completely from his own film; the opposite of the Godardian mentality, always trying to force the viewer into some new consciousness of the artificial nature of the film in which they try to lose themselves, the rejection of celluloid as escapist drug. I’m thinking of the long takes in which the camera is held on one viewpoint, a shot in which a person or an object moves (or even stays still), held in a kind of suspension generated from the anticipation of the cut-away to the next scene (for these takes are rarely directly related to the film’s narrative thrust). The camera becomes an unblinking artificial eye, the dispassionate observer reflecting nature’s dispassionate observation back on itself, that dispassionate indifference illustrated most strikingly in footage not Herzog’s own – when Timothy Treadwell’s camera catches a bear looking directly into it, Herzog’s commentary transforms the moment into perhaps the most blatant statement of this creed, this notion of indifferent nature.

One senses that Herzog would like the idea of the dispassionate eye, would like to achieve the same quality himself; for, however breathtaking his visions, he is hardly the most compassionate or ‘human’ of film-makers. Think of such moments as that opening sequence in ‘Aguirre’, where Kinski, the prime human subject in so much of the director’s work, is not even glimpsed; the deserted landscapes of ‘Fata Morgana’; or, in the same film, the skeletons of animals, victims of drought, all life vanished, heads that once contained movement and even intelligence now simply grotesque white boulders. One might ‘justify’ this approach – if such an approach needs justification – by arguing that, if one wishes to depict something – some fact of non-human earthly existence, of, to use a word which gives only a rough approximation of what I mean, ‘nature’ – something beyond the grasp of human minds (or at least, emotions), one cannot constantly reduce it to the human scale to which it stands in opposition, or in mere indifference.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Olaf Stapledon’s two great works of philosophical science-fiction, ‘Starmaker’ and ‘Last and First Men’, and Stapledon’s intentions seem to me actually quite close to Herzog’s, even if the ideological and even polemical thrust of his works far exceeds Herzog’s. Consider the rejection of the form of a conventional novel, the return of narrative to its epic roots as a collection of tales relating the actions of men and women, whose ‘inner life’ is pretty much irrelevant in comparison to what they do; the long-form, quasi-historical approach, the gradual widening of scale until one reaches minds whose scope far exceeds even the most intelligent homo sapiens, whether these be the ‘cosmic mind’ which the 18th race of men briefly achieve through the telepathic communication of the entire race, or the mind of the Starmaker, the creative/destructive force with whom the whole universe exists in a reciprocal relationship, dependent on the Starmaker for existence just as he is dependent on it for his. Stapledon’s intention was to create a modern myth, to reject the errors of both scientific and religious dogmatism, to restore a sense of scale and wonder at the inexplicable and vast nature of the cosmos without reverting to primitive or sentimentalised religion – to accept the Real for what it was with a kind of detached and even joyous fatalism, modified by an existentialist or even humanistic assertion of opposition to the invincible oppressive forces of the indifferent universe.

Herzog might not go as far to stake his claim, with Stapledon, with “the forces of life as embattled against the forces of death” – though I’m struck by the way in which he seems reluctant to afford the moment of death itself much sway. In ‘Cobra Verde’, most of the deaths take place off-screen, despite the fact that pretty much the entire second half of the picture revolves around plot-lines in which death is a factor (Kinski’s threatened execution, the attack on and deposition of the king). Furthermore, Kinski’s titular characters, in both ‘CV’ and ‘Aguirre’, are afforded last scenes which are not death scenes, though they have the feel of death scenes: they are the moments of fever which will inevitably lead to death, but which are not death itself. It’s as if Jim Jarmusch had extended the final scene of ‘Dead Man’, when Nobody pushes Blake out onto the lake, into the sun; had shown the barely-living Blake in close-up as he drifted beyond any other human living beings, into a world of water, light and sky. In these scenes, Aguirre and Cobra Verde exist in a kind of daze, Popol Vuh’s music offering a mystical suspension highlighting the sense of unreal reality, Kinski’s staring eyes (in ‘Aguirre’) or motionless body (in ‘Cobra’) the point to which his journey has taken him, the shattered endpoint of all his raging and raving and unrestrained fury – a moment of nothingness occurring at the moment limit has been reached, the stunned realisation of being able to go no further and the complete inability to comprehend this, the surrender to a state of mere being, more in the moment than ever before but totally lost in it, so that this extreme presentness, this awareness of the self existing at this place, at this point of culmination, becomes more like an absence, but an absence to nowhere, the moment abstracted to its inexplicable essence.

Such moments would be impossible without the histories of Herzog and Kinski’s relationship, both on the sets of the films and in their lives away from film production – the energies and antagonisms have been well-documented, perhaps most notably in Herzog’s own ‘My Best Fiend’ – and thus they are supremely human, though the fact that they portray the human at its weakest and most numbly inactive makes them seem as ‘dispassionate’ and ‘indifferent’ as the unblinking long-takes of the camera’s artificial eye.

It is not so much a case of Herzog wishing to vanish from his films, then; one is, however, tempted to say that he becomes possessed by the images unfolding under his ‘direction’, that it is they which speak almost independently of the film-maker who trains his camera on them in order to make them speak, or for their silence to prove eloquent.

Perhaps what I’m trying to say might become clearer if we compare Herzog to James Benning, whose takes are even longer than Herzog’s and whose films are even more often absent of the human (’13 Lakes’, for instance). Benning is always aware of the ideological problems and possibilities behind the shots he’s setting up – primarily, environmental or political considerations, as in the use of Che Guevara’s texts in ‘Utopia’ (even though titling a film ‘Utopia’ which depicts near-deserted landscapes could be interpreted as verging on misanthropy). For Herzog, though, this is simply not interesting: any ideology which does come through is implicated in method in a way that is far more subliminal (I’m not sure one could quite call it symbiotic) than Benning’s more theorised, studied formal approach. That’s not to say that he simply films striking images in a haphazard way, like a kind of film-maker Jack Kerouac, stringing together the spewed products of his brain in the hope of finding some jewel of truth among the morass. Indeed, one thing I kept noticing, particularly in the first half of ‘Cobra Verde’, was the painterly attention to mis-en-scene, the near-Kubrickian attention to ordered shot composition. Even those images which appear quite haphazard because of the way they do not really flow with those which precede and proceed them are, on their own terms, formally exquisite.

Bearing in mind that Herzog is not Kerouac is also an important qualification for my next point: at times, the camera almost becomes human itself, becomes the subjective viewpoint of Cobra Verde himself – I’m thinking of the entrance, late on in the film, of the grotesque priest’s ‘choir of nuns’, a dozen teenage girls surrounding their leader, who, smilingly and suggestively, seems to perform direct to the camera. Herzog is clearly taken with this whole sequence, for it is reprised over the end credits, and one could view it as a celebration of vitality, of elementality, of a strong human spirit that survives the cruelties perpetrated to it and around it and from which it is generated (just as even the slaves continually sing their great choruses), in contrast with the mesmerising wave-bound end, or limbo, of Kinski/Cobra Verde. But I think it would be too simple to say this: the ‘subjective camera’ suggests, almost as a kind of idle speculation, that this is Cobra Verde’s fantasy, or his perception of this experience: the lead singer addresses the camera because the camera has become Cobra Verde, something which his sudden appearance among the ‘choir’ jolts us into suspecting. Such a moment is outside the film’s narrative, in essence, because Cobra is now really Kinski, fascinated by what he’s watching; and because we, too, are watching with relief what we perceive as an interlude from the brutal business of slavery (a few scenes before, women have been made to crawl up out of a hole to provide sexual favours, and, immediately preceding the ‘choir’ moment, Kinski has ‘stock-taken’ some chained male slaves as if they were cattle). Yet it’s still bound within that narrative, acting as ‘commentary’, if one require it to do so, on the hypocrisy of the priest (although this is retrospective, as the group is only revealed as his ‘choir’ after their performance), all of a part with the film’s view of white religion, white Christianity as a grotesque incongruity in native Africa (as in the scene where the priest feeds a communion wafer to a goat, or where he offers his daughters to Kinski as he is a white man); acting also to illuminate Kinski’s fascination with these women, which has seen him father 62 children.



Hopefully this last sentence may have indicated some of the complexities of this moment of representation. Is it mere exploitation? As so much in the film, it’s uncomfortable and seductive, Herzog’s freedom from dogma leading him (and us, the viewers) uncomfortably close to a racist mentality (hence, perhaps, to make up for this, the slight moralistic tone which creeps into a couple of scenes towards the end, and the enigmatic final title – “the slaves will sell their masters and grow wings”). One ponders his decisions to seek out ‘weird’ and ‘strange’ images and then to simply film them, to let them unfold at their own pace, a bizarre kind of freak-show which lacks the outlandishness of Jodorowsky’s use of cripples, of the physically-deformed, and which therefore seems harsher, more exploitative.

This always nags me when I watch Herzog’s films: what do these images constitute? Is his insistence on finding a new visual language to refresh our culture, his famed desire to capture an ‘ecstatic truth’, merely a front of some sort, a means of avoiding the necessity of facing up to moral, to ethical responsibility? Is he merely explaining things away by claiming that there is actually no explanation, using the ‘inexplicability’ of his images as a defence in all cases? Of course, I wouldn’t want to swing the other way and fall into the trap of the ‘accountant’s truth’, whereby detailed theoretical justification for every shot would need to be drawn up, whereby a stringent moral code would censoriously deprive the films’ of the risks they take and the beauties they generate.

And it’s all very well arguing in the abstract, but the images themselves so frequently strike me– yes, even move me, despite what I’ve said about Herzog’s lack of a human touch – that I find it hard to maintain this position for long. Thus, despite the presence of problematic, borderline-exploitative or merely vacuous shots, there are moments of just exquisite rightness, one of these being Cobra Verde’s final scene, attempting to drag the boat away off the beach, into the sea, and finally lying prone, washed forward and back by the waves. It’s not just the way that Kinski moves beyond acting, into that state of limbo described above, nor the way that Herzog’s camera films unwaveringly; but it’s the presence of the crippled African boy, further up the beach, turning this moment of solitude not so much into a shared moment, but into a moment which nonetheless contains the possibility of human relation. The way the boy moves, turns his head slightly, whether out of curiosity only, or curiosity tinged with sympathy, the sympathy of the outsider for the outsider, the deformed for the deformed – the way this gesture, probably entirely spontaneous (though, given Herzog’s attitude to staging documentaries, one can never be too sure) doesn’t scream out what it is, the way it offers possibility, potentiality, as a truer ‘fact’ than certainty. If there is love in this scene, and I want to think as well as feel that there is – and perhaps I do think it as well feel it – it is my love, it is that of the viewer, rather than of Herzog; and perhaps that is the sacrifice he has had to (willingly) make, to lose a too-close sentimental involvement, to adopt the broader and more distanced perspective in order to present the possibility of human insight, of human empathy, far greater than that which is obviously signposted.

Eartrip 4 - Out Now

Includes an interview with guitarist John Russell. Head over to http://eartripmagazine.wordpress.com to download.