I come home to find out that Louis Moholo-Moholo died, this Friday 13th, listen to recordings of what I guess was his last band, with Alex Hawkins on piano, John Edwards on bass, the twin saxophones of Jason Yarde and Shabaka Hutchings, on a European tour in 2019.* Free jazz, yes, and music never more free, but freedom, entirely within melody, with the way melody is treated, as, for the first six minutes they do nothing but play the melody, over and over; however many variations are spread around it, how many patches of atonal fights and flurries, at any one point during that time, one person will be playing the melody. And this music above all the music that survives of the twentieth century, perhaps, because of the extremity of its conditions in which it emerged, because of the unshakeable faith and unceasing struggle of the movement with which it was already, whether at home or in exile, in solidarity, this has music has something about it of the quality I can't help name as anything other than truth: where hope is not just an alibi--the fear of facile hope as betrayal--but a present and necessary reality, a utopia and a reality all at once.
Moholo-Moholo's is music that knows life because it knows death, and isn't afraid to face up to that, but that finds a way, in itself, in the spirit it is, not in a spirit external to the music, but within the music, and from that, the music can move out into the world, into the (freedom) movement that made it and the movement it maintains. It was like that when I saw Abdullah Ibrahim last year, however old he was and however slowly he played. Each touch of each note weighted with grace. (And in the video we see Alex Hawkins lead the already 80 year old Moholo offstage, up from the drumkit, by the hand, as Ibrahim, too, was guided by the hand, to and from the stage.) So often, as we see in the music of those in their last years, the late performances of Cecil Taylor, say, or, Hal Singer, or whoever you care to name, music strains beyond the limits of a body that would slow down beyond its speed, spirit pushes at the limits where it would usually part from the body. For isn't that what sound and music is, or what we make of it, as it takes on a life of its own and survives its makers? And so often the most moving music played by Ibrahim, Moholo, the Blues Notes--Feza, Dyani, McGregor et al--was a record of loss: most movingly of all, the Blue Notes' records for Mongezi Feza, then later for Johnny Dyani, where the studio becomes a place for a gathering, a wake, a way to put to rest and release the spirit of the individual, collectivized, collectively held in the memory of song.
So, too, this music from 2019 is lament and celebration at once: it is never not both, the one that cannot exist without the other, their constant dialectic, their co-existence, that struggle of being alive. On Pule Phuto's piece 'Zanele', a Xhosa name meaning "they are enough", they are sufficient, the band hold their instruments and sing Zanele, Zanele, over the piano's gently rocking chords and the crisp crackle and splash of Moholo's snare and cymbals, his whole playing contained, wound-up tight and sharp, propelling the music's hugeness of heart and soaring song precisely through its containment. Music that always exists in and emerges into the condition of singing, the act of singing: to repeat the melody over and over, whether in instrument or to open our mouth and sing it, means we're still alive, we're still alive, we're still alive, and they are enough; and when the band emerge into 'You ain't gonna know me cos you think you know me' and play the melody over and over like a hymn, a benediction, all those words for which the usual designation of 'ballad' is entirely insufficient, for the second time watching the video I burst into tears. What is the point of anything without hope.
(*This is the 'Five Blokes' band that recorded Uplift the People(Ogun, 2018), but to really witness the band's joyous, flowing dynamic, you have to see the videos. Another full-length concert from a few days before the Bimhuis performance above took place at Church of Sound, with Shabaka Hutchings replaced by Byron Wallen and Steve Williamson is here: Part 1, Part 2)
Los Angeles, 9th June 2025: for a third day, people come together to fight immigration deportations, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, to fight ICE with fire, flames and bodies on the street, Mexican flags. The movement of the people everywhere is beautiful, necessary. And though it's what comes after that matters, how it plays out, it's what comes before, too the whole thing. Setting self-driving cars on fire inserts the human, the worker, the saboteur back into the abdication of agency to the hands of tech-bro-billionaires. The protestors put up make-shift barricades, purple tables and benches block the streets, preventing the destruction of community in the name of the greater national body, and its policing of which bodies can or cannot make up a part of that body.
The President seems to want to declare civil war on the state of California. The state calls in the LAPD and tries to suppress the riots while also resisting the entry of the National Guard and other federal bodies. The protestors say fuck the police, all of them. This is perhaps best understood, not so much as an 'insurrection'--the language the government uses--but as a war of defense, an ongoing rearguard action that gets portrayed as a 'riot'. Or, it actualizes what is already a civil war, as mayors are arrested when inspecting ICE detention centres, as judges try to block presidential orders invoking emergency powers only meant to be used for times of open conflict: a civil war declared by the government on its own people, in their name, or in the name of some of them.
Later on in the day, the state of California takes the President to court, the President threatens to arrest the governor. What happens next, if someone is killed, how this plays out, the balance of forces, who sits on what fence, is anyone's guess. But when the state turns authoritarian--turns more authoritarian--to fight. And we've seen this before. First there's the democratic election of the fascist, and then the fascist street gangs, or first it's the fascist street gangs and then the democratic election of the fascist, or the two are two heads of a hydra, and the street gangs are not only the street gangs, but the police, and the fascist vigilantes, and they are ICE, and the army. To fight, to fight fire with fire, judging the situation, burning the self-driving car.
*
There's a riot going on.
Sly Stone died today. As his career spiralled, collapsed, he would re-record the parts, the mixes, record entirely different versions of albums that had already been released, accumulated hours, potentially hundreds of unreleased tracks, multi-tracks, turning the self into an orchestra, drum machines, overdubs, as if to take everything up into himself, the inflated grandeur of addiction, its hubris, perhaps, but also the splitting and impossibility of the collective the band as the Family envisaged in its heyday. His cover of 'Que Sera, Sera' on Fresh: a song which he apparently performed in private sitting at the piano with Doris Day. What does that mean. The unexpected, gentle beauty of its fatalism. Lament at the heart of celebration, but perhaps, too, celebration at the heart of lament: giddy, out of control, manic, the kind of grim celebration of holding on and of not giving a fuck, teetering on but never quite entering the state of nihilism, redeemed--redeemed?--by its gospel background, by the collective life in music it emerged from in the church, by the upright stance of 'Stand', or the woozily beatific romance of 'You caught me smiling', for all its pain, its fear of going insane, or the literally childlike chants of 'Everyday People' and its idealized collective beyond hatred and discrimination.
And Sly and the Family Stone were always missing the gig, never showing up--but the possibility that he might, that they might, and that the show might be great, transformative, catharsis, release: an image of what we (who?) might be. Making stars into emblems of our hopes, holding them over us, despising them when they fail us, elevating them: this is the practice of celebrity, the altar on which, willingly or unwillingly, Sly Stone sacrificed himself, was sacrificed. The singer channels the collective only at the wealth-excessive cost of becoming a king, a king who then falls, living in a campervan, fed by a local retired couple: that drama of rise and fall, so that what could have been collective aspiration--the Black Panthers' reported demand that he politicize his music, politicize those nascently political hopes--falls by the waysides of addiction and excessive wealth, gold paint sprayed over the walls of the mansion, marble floors scuffed beyond recognition. And what more is there to say. A singer for whom--as for all singers, perhaps--words fail.
The title track to There's a Riot Going On is famously silent. And on 'Just like a Baby', on 'Poet', the vocal is present, but receding, just another textural element amidst the instrumental wooze, the bass and drums seeming to become the lead instrument, wah wah whooshes, whether from guitars lifting and dropping pedals or from a chorus opening and closing their mouths, music as a kind of amniotic fluid, or lighter fluid perhaps, ready to be lit: the same oceanic drift, vast energy at a standstill, found in Miles Davis' (instrumental) music of the 70s so influenced by Sly, the rumour that he made his band listen to Sly's 'In Time' on repeat. (But was the song Davis played 'In Time' from Fresh--a song of delay, with its ironic play on Sly's reputation for lateness on stage and lateness in delivering albums--or 'Time' from There's a Riot, with its philosophical speculation on the nature of the universe? And how do those two relate? The time of the commercial cycle, the chart, time as money, and time as a flow that the music accesses along some sort of deeper, mythic substratum: or both times are equally mythic, myths the music is trapped between even as it seeks to reinvent time in a kind of oceanic splendour. Time, the times, temps, durée: marching, dancing, rioting.)
Sly Stone's music was modern, for sure: the insistent use of multi-tracking to build up virtual collectives that supplant or support or challenge real ones, the pop of slap bass, of a drum machine. But archaic, too, in some way: a keyboard that channels a harpsichord, an organ that--as with Davis--moves on past the church and the strains of the horror movie into a kind of synthesized future, or an idea of the future, a construction, improvised in real time. And children's songs, yodels, everyday songs, everyday kitsch. To find a collective there. Fusing them into a kind of indistinguishable stream, of approaching and receding lights--"in time"--where time seems to have lost its meaning, to have retreated--to extend the piece, the jam, beyond the limits of the pop single, to repeat and vary, not so much to ecstasy, increasing heights of energy, but into a kind of chugging gasp, a running on the spot--but beautiful.
Drifting past words, Sly Stone's music expresses and oozes that which goes beyond words, yet in doing so it loses words' capacity: the inability to put the riot into words, to formulate the demand. In Sly Stone's music, whether brief achieved bliss or the hazy, narcotized beauty of nightmare, music exists as dreams. Whenever an edge appears it disappears again. Roles are constantly changing. You can live there, get lost there. But when the time comes, you have to come out the other side again. "The universe needs to be a little stronger / Time they say is the answer, huh / But I don't believe it". And time is what we make of it, when dreams and the reality that endlessly in fantasy refigure as utopia or as nightmare, as working-through, crash up against each other and in the present strike a fire, blown by the winds both in and out of our control.
*
And clarity, crisp hard: the other side of the coin. The rhythm sounded by Horace Tapscott in 'The Dark Tree', the version from The Giant is Awakened: Dodot-dot-dash, dotdot-dot-dash. Morse code from another uprising, another time.
I listen to 'The Dark Tree' and then I listen to There's a Riot Going On and then I listen to them both again. Perhaps the best way to get the truth of the situation would be to play both those albums not back to back, but both once. But to listen to both at once would be cacophony, indescribable, unlistenable. As morse code turns language into abbreviated sonic signals that can then be decoded and turned back into language: a carrier, emergency transmission, made music. Tapscott would tap out that rhythm on the horn of his car or tap on the windows and doors of houses to announce his arrival at friends' houses in the late night rambles he would take towards the end of his life. And perhaps if you decode that rhythm some linguistic clarity, but which would in turn betray its conversion into music, two torn halves, a split. Dotdot-dot-dash, time is the answer, riot, silence. The imperative that we formulate an answer.
