A subscriber post on Substack on a solo guitar (and saxophone) set by Dirar Kalash, with diversions on Paul Klee, Christa Wolf, mathematics, awkwardness, blues, and cheerfulness as ways to utopia.
Before he plays, Kalash speaks about the idea that politics,
revolution, resistance is not ideology, or not just ideology, but
something that is forced from one when one can no longer breathe, as
Fanon says of anti-colonial revolt. Air through the lungs, rising up.
The piece at once literalizes all that and turns it into representation:
the deaths of racialized people in custody, in jail or on the street;
DK speaks the words “I can’t breathe” into the saxophone before squalls
of notes translate it or transcend or move through it, breath becomes
sound becomes something else—not, he says, as a process of abstraction,
or of abstraction as the removal of context, content, but abstraction as
politics; or abstraction as the constant oscillation of the literal and
the metaphorical, the capacity for translation in sound and speech of
what it’s possible at a given moment to say amidst all the choking air.
Sound becomes something else, and that something else is not easy, it’s not nice,
it’s messy or unpleasant, it’s what we’d rather gloss over, its sticky
entanglements. Breath and the breathing apparatus, a trail of saliva
from the saxophone, a trial, the phlegmy mucus matter of the lungs one
coughs up, a habitual gargling or strangling vocabulary of vocalities, a
matter of course. “Base materialism”
and so on. Is how the spirit chokes to get out, is labour, bodily
production, without which any notion of spirit and its entanglement with
matter is just an empty mystical shell.
Mid-December 2004. The Museum of Garden History, Lambeth. AMM—Eddie Prévost on percussion and John Tilbury on piano—perform with Sachiko M on empty sampler, a performance a little over an hour long, unearthed from Tilbury’s archive and released in 2025 as Testing. (The album is available from the Matchless Recordings website here.) We begin with a duet for sine wave and the rumble of muffled traffic familiar around old buildings in London, the stone and the earth vibrating with vehicles unknown when they were built. Collisions of time.
Today as I put the CD on, I have floaters in my eyes, and trying to focus them sideways on a point in the distance as you’re meant to, things start to blur and swim in the middle in the field of vision. The start of the music something like that, too. It’s several minutes before we hear a tone from the piano, the overtonal ping of a note with the string dampened by finger or object. Bending, pressing and holding the piano’s inner strings, varieties of pressure and weight can lead to the subtlest shards of resonance intended and unintended. Tilbury has been working this area for decades and each note is inflected with the history of that practice: a practice of instantaneous carefulness, patience and intense listening. Prévost’s cymbals and tam-tam are invariably bowed: percussion reinvented as bowing rather than striking, a sound sustained by an incessant movement of the arms, but not a traditionally rhythmic one. Percussion becomes a stringed instrument and the piano a kind of muffled, tuned percussion played quietly and slowly. Machines are turned against themselves, identities swap and blur.
A sudden and exquisite arpeggiated chord. Broken and rolled, the piano as harp. The snows started to melt yesterday and the temperature today leapt up by around ten degrees. The world outside the window, muffled for a month in the snow, suddenly comes to life again, and sounds from outside mingle with the performance, so I can’t tell if the birds or church bells I’m hearing are coming from the recording or from the newly-brightened daytime outside. There’s a particular quality of hush to this recording, as if the implacable harshness of Sachiko M’s test tones, buoyed on the feather down of bowed or struck piano string and metal were a kind of austere cocoon, a drained lullaby suffused with a mourning attentiveness. The scrape of percussion is like a rusted gate, a door, the piano’s ping a gentle tap. Gaining admission, quietly exiting. At one point a police siren; at another, the choked utterance of what sounds like a sampled voice; at another, a sound as if someone were quietly whistling to the side. Seymour Wright’s liner notes link the music to plant growth, to the plant cultivation in the museum’s history, to dissociative fugue states, where one temporarily loses all sense of who one is or where one is. (As Alessandro Giustiano puts it, Sachiko’s sounds (for the most part) involve “no attack, do not offer mediation or guidance.”) And yet both Sachiko M and AMM have never sounded more like themselves, a practice of identity as dissolution.
Prévost plays a “stringed barrel drum”, a wine barrel he took from an old Italian restaurant on the Strand where AMM used to eat and repurposed into an instrument. With its added strings, it sounds somewhere between a guitar, a koto, and a lute; the upper end of a string bass, and the sound one gets from stringing rubber bands over a box to make a child’s guitar; a delicacy chunky and crude, answered by Sachiko M’s electronic rumble, crackle. Music as salvage: the empty sampler, the empty barrel, the piano, its interior treated, as per Annea Lockwood burning or flowering pianos, as a source of endlessly modified growth, of resonators and resonating devices, string and hammer and key, a finger or an object added and taking away. At once clear and always blurring the edges, the music seeps in like the cold Wright describes on that night, seeping in from the Thames and its tides, sweeping in from the outside, bleeding into skin and stone. Like plants, musicians, too, have to weather the winter: often in freezing venues, wherever can be rented or found, to prepare, to test, to take and transform the place they’re in in the gentlest of ebbs and flows, of incremental growths, of giving and taking.
Stuart Broomer in his review talks of the music’s opening as “a study in the ineffable”. But this is also a study in the palpable. It is about presence, however stretched or suspended. Sounds that die and are succeeded by others. AMM’s second album was, after all, called The Crypt, and in their repurposed industrial sounds they perhaps refract something of the musician’s pasts, already haunted: the echoic clang of the factory, the sounds of metal striking, sparks flying, ships hauling into docks where Prévost’s grandfather worked, the post-war damage in London and other cities. In 2015, AMM performed at the Museu Industrial de Bala do Tejo in Portugal, a performance later released as Indústria. And as AMM’s music continued through the 1980s and out the other side, those characteristic sounds, their boom and swell and crackle, had come to speak all the more of the post-industrial wastelands left in Thatcher’s wake. (On the other side of the ocean, Detroit techno: both creative responses to ongoing conditions of production.) The histories, like those of the Museum of Garden History and other spaces in which AMM have performed, could be traced back even further. You might even go as far back as Prévost’s Huguenot ancestors, fleeing persecution in France. The Huguenot exodus gave the English language its word ‘refugee’, from the French réfugié ‘gone in search of refuge’: the kind of history all too easily forgotten in the current anti-migrant hostility seeded in Britain and across Europe.
The music is not “about” any of these things. Yet they surround it, are the world in which it moves. Presence stretched, suspended; sounds die and are succeeded by others. Yet in that moment of sustain—piano pedal, sampler’s infinite spread, the way a bow stroke maintains a static sound, paradoxically, through movement—and in their recorded after-life, they are never more alive.
Charles Mingus recorded this version of Martin Niemöller’s anti-fascist warning in 1965.
And today, sixty years later in Minneapolis when people intervene to help their neighbours, to come to the aid of those in their community, to attempt to ensure due legal process, they are pushed to the ground by the agents of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and shot ten times, shot four times, shot in the body on the ground, shot in the head, when pulling away in a car. Alex Pretti. Renée Good. A nurse, a poet. The observer is the new target. To be a witness a fatal act.
The Associated Press detailed that Pretti had embraced a person who had just been shoved by an agent. An agent then shoved Pretti, and the two fell back, still embracing.
They shoot down good and they shoot people embracing.
Sharing footage of death has been a necessary way of contending with the lies the administration tells in public. Evidence, reproduction, to show that this happened, even as the state doctors the photos and footage it itself releases. The image, when our eyes can’t be trusted, and the word: the lies told about the image. “I didn’t say that”. “He didn’t say that”. The image and the word. The reproduction of the image becomes a weapon, and, as a weapon, its consequences are fatal: loops of death. The line between witnessing and horrified voyeurism that for the past years of live-streamed genocide has become a part of the texture of observation. What does this do to solidarity and how we conceive of it.
Beyond these ethical questions, questions of representation, questions that matter for our conscience and our consciousness as artists, yet in ways that we find sometimes impossible to track, what matters is what you do. In Minneapolis, protests, marches, a general strike. The resistance of communities to the violence perpetrated on them, in their name.
Mingus’ recitation plays over footage from a demonstration shot for Thomas Reichman’s 1968 film Mingus. His biographer, Gene Santoro, writes:
Mingus figured you had to stand for something. The powers that be would come for you anyway. He was busted a few times with other marchers and spent time in the Tombs, New York’s downtown holding tank.
Mingus also shows Mingus facing eviction from his loft at 5, Great Jones Street, where he’d hoped to set up a music school, in 1966, and from which he was evicted after a crooked landlord set him up for a fall. The film’s last scene shows the press and cops crowding round as his instruments, his scores, his life are taken out of the building, and he’s taken to the police station after they find needles and a rifle in his belongings. He was released: no shots were fired; he planned music for a ballet called ‘My Arrest’.
Charles Mingus, a well-known jazz musician, was arrested with two other persons late last night in a demonstration by a group of 200 hippies outside the Charles Street police station in Greenwich Village. Mr. Mingus, who was accused of scuffling with a civilian and two policemen who attempted to intervene, was charged with three counts of felonious assault. The demonstration began with a march by the hippies from Washington Square Park to the Charles Street station. It was touched off by rumors that an itinerant musician had been arrested earlier. These were later said to be unfounded. At the station the hippies sat down and began singing. The police moved the group half a block to the corner of Greenwich Avenue, where, they said, Mr. Mingus engaged in a scuffle with a motorist who had objected to hippies sitting on his car.
Mingus recorded ‘Don’t Let it Happen Here’ in March 1965, introduced by Ralph Ellison for a TV performance, and again in December, in the version released on Music Written For Monterey 1965. Not Heard... Played In Its Entirety At UCLA Vols. 1 & 2. That same year, sixty years ago, the assassinations of James Meredith, Malcolm X. Mingus fires his rifle into the ceiling and notes that it’s the same kind of gun that killed JFK. The right wing and liberal state alike claim a monopoly on violence, at home and abroad, and the vigilante forces that operate outside it, but with its tacit approval. In March 1965, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe murdered the Civil Rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo, shooting at her car as she ferried from the march on Selma. It was rumoured he’d assembled bombs for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Liuzzo grew up in one-room shacks with running water: her activism was the result of experience, of solidarity, the opposite of the KKK’s violence, as today, citizens turn up for their neighbours while others cheer on the forces of hatred. Gary Thomas Rowe received immunity.
The state assassinates people in private, and its agents murder people in public, on the highways and on the streets, whether they are activists or not. Fred Hampton. Sandra Bland. The state becomes and remains fascist because it assassinates and decimates the opposition. But this process of becoming is not some sudden leap of the cliff, though it can feel that way. The state becomes and remains fascist because the potentials for fascism are already there. In his book Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano looks at the analyses of police violence against populations of colour in the writing of Angela Davis and George Jackson to argue that fascism is a differentially-distributed experience. For some, the experience of the state is that it is already fascist. And then it spreads. The tree rotten from the inside will eventually collapse and take down everyone who’s placed their trust in it.
In Reichman’s film, Mingus delivers a sardonic monologue, tinged with furious irony and ironic fury.
I pledge allegiance to your flag—not that I want to, but for the hell of it, I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.
“If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night”, James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis a few years later.
The movement of the people in the streets can be clamped down on, it can be diverted, dispersed, thousands dead, arrested. The empire hovers over the regime, at home and abroad. The empires, plural, their vassals, their dregs. In Venezuela, in Iran. Invasion, kidnapping or ‘deals’ in exchange for extraction, of oil, of wealth: gangster capitalism, the continuation of decades of imperialism by all and any means, already dividing up the land piled up with rubble and with the dead. Fifty per cent of profits from new mineral and oil projects in Ukraine will go to the US; under the aegis of the US-led “board of peace”, the UAE plans a collaborative open-air prison marketed as a ‘safe zone’ in Gaza; the British government denies its complicity in the genocide in Sudan. But the movement doesn’t stop.
Mingus’ delivery in the TV performance is halting, as he fumbles the number of people genocided—death exceeding the weight of statistics—and over the collective noun to use—the politics of solidarity—speaking out against “those who killed…the other people with me.” And in that very awkwardness lies its clarity, its power. “And I say the only way we can avoid this is to look and speak out now. And don’t…let…it happen here”. From an opening lament spread between the brass instruments in the band as he recites Niemöller’s text, Mingus strikes up a propulsive piano figure and the band blares into collective improvisation. On the march, on the move. Fluency in fracture and the stammered statement of fact. The movement doesn’t stop. And though they may breathe in breaths strained, asphyxiated, observed, occupied, a breath that comes in gasps, a breath in combat, the people—continue to breathe.
ake’s
biography describes her as “a surrogate weeper, currently working and
living in Beijing, conducting site and context specific sound
experiments, events, behaviors and installations, also writing poetry,
being a musician, organizer and waiter”. Among other activities, ake
“accidentally initiated the nomadic space A2 space”, and appears as part
of collaborative projects on Zhu Wenbo’s Beijing-based cassette label Zoomin’ Night, as well as Yan Jun’s sub jam cassette box Silence is Shit, but ake (阿科), released in January 2025 as Sub jam 020, is her first solo album.
Working with the material to hand, ake’s work gives a new, subversive meaning to the well-worn term “site-specific”.The
eight tracks fit together awkwardly, like a kind of broken jigsaw. They
refuse to build up to a unity, but remain fragments, though, as
fragments, they are in themselves whole: broken wholes, wholly broken. A
majority of the tracks are field recordings, though this is no
pastoral. If it has a ‘field’, it is the field of the (urban) social:
social action and social inaction as experienced in the corners of
everyday life, the boredoms and discontents and acts of quiet rebellion
by which one might negotiate one’s way through the world and its
systems, what is given to us, what is taken away from us. These are
recordings of environments, or recordings that make environments, that
intervene in them, that frame and re-frame them, that question or that
spark questions. Workers destroying a wall in a Shenzen hotel are heard
from a bed, the hammer blows a kind of impromptu drum set, accompanied
by scattered fragments of conversation [...] How do we listen to this album? A field recording is supposed to
put emphasis on the environment, but these recordings often feel
‘inwards’ as much ‘outward’. It sometimes feels as if the listening is
being done as much by the performer as the listener, eavesdropping,
confused.
No New Year’s list of projects like last year for 2026, but in the New Year, I’ll be endeavouring to write up my notes for reviews that didn’t manage to find a home elsewhere, potentially to include all or some of the following...
In the meantime, as the sub-zero temperatures descend and the new year begins with the latest bout of criminal invasion, the latest oil-grab and imperialist intervention, the latest blatant violation of international law, some astonishing footage of the Blue Notes at Ronnie Scott’s Old Place on the Ogun Records youtube channel. Ian Hutchinson’s original film The Real McGregor, shot in 1967 and restored by Paul D.J. Moody in 2025, is prefaced with some brief excerpts of newly-shot contemporary interviews—including Hazel Miller, Evan Parker and the late Louis Moholo-Moholo—filmed as a part of an in-progress documentary on the Blue Notes. The (colour) footage itself follows. Chris McGregor on piano, Dudu Pukwana, alto, Mongezi Feza, pocket trumpet, Ronnie Beer, tenor, Johnny Dyanu, bass, and Moholo on drums, playing in the small original venue of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, maintained by John Jack after Ronnie Scott’s itself moved on to a bigger premises, music every night of the week.
The only previously-available footage of the group I’d seen catches them in an earlier iteration, shortly after initially moving to Europe. Though the footage only offers truncated glimpses of a full performance, they’re still more recognisably within the bop-oriented mode with which they’d began than the free music to which they soon gravitated within the experimental laboratory of the London music scene. In terms of records, the music featured here is most reminiscent of the 1968 album Very Urgent, released under McGregor’s name, perhaps the group’s closest engagement with free jazz, and in itself marking a transitional stage to the emergence of the Brotherhood of Breath big band, documented in a chapter of Bill Shoemaker’s excellent Jazz in the Seventies.
For these exiles, uprooted from their homeland by apartheid, The Old Place became a kind of home, a lab, as well as a stage. Shoemaker notes that “without a piano in his flat, McGregor spent all-nighter after all-nighter composing in the damp, cold basement venue, often falling asleep at the piano”. Informed by material difficulty, in which the group often struggled for gigs and to make ends meet, the music has as its backround too loss, sorrow, and turmoil: The Blue Notes’ original tenor player Nik Moyake, returned to South Africa soon after the group’s original departure, dying of a brain tumour in 1965, while Moholo and Dyani would be stranded for months in Argentina, where they’d gone on tour with Steve Lacy, after the 1966 anti-commnist military coup (watched with approval by the USA). But this is not music of existential negativity, formalist exploration, or anarchic destruction, tendencies perhaps more pronounced in the European versions of free music in which it participated, so much as the persistent and insistent declaration of liberation, as a process always in motion. Key to the Blue Notes was the influence of kwela, a Zulu word meaning “get up”. In 1967, Pukwana, Beer and McGregor appeared on Gwigwi Mwrebi’s album Kwela. McGregor hung out with Albert Ayler for several days, talking and playing. Dancing, and other forms of ascension, rising. Free music was not a movement away from dance but into other ways of moving and using the body.
In this footage, we see the Blue Notes a few years into their exile from apartheid, playing as if their lives depended on it, or with a new lease of life, the formal opening up of the music to create that unique and beautiful synthesis of free playing and endless melodic capacity, song as collective repository. Within the basement club’s cramped conditions, it’s all the camera can do to keep the musicians in the frame: an intimacy and an expansion, as if the collective and individual force this group represented couldn’t be contained by the media in which it was captured. Recordings after all, as we know from Baraka’s comment on Albert Ayler, are but rumours of the original, in-person blaze of sound. Rumours, ruins. But here they are through the restored lo-fi haze, dispelling time’s mists and basement cold in blazing heat: Mongezi Feza’s foot lurching out as if kicking a football or stabilizing himself during his solos, as if otherwise his playing might cause him to levitate: Moholo stopping playing for a moment, looking exhausted but not spent, preparing himself to re-enter a music which it sometimes seems can never stop; a Dyani bass solo which cuts away to images of painting, a laughing baby, the life that surrounds the music that compresses it into the space of a bandstand and the time of a gig; the furious, raucuous, joyous collective soloing by Feza, Pukwana, Ronnie Beer. (Perhaps the least-remembered of The Blue Notes today, Beer later left music to build boats in Ibiza but was a key part of the South African jazz scenes from which they emerged: this film offers a fine opportunity to see him at work). McGregor’s piano, meanwhile, launches speedy runs that blur into the sustain pedal then come out again into staccatoed clarity, moving in surges or waves, and the music as a whole is constant movement, towards the end of apartheid, yes, but also that constant search that moves beyond any end point. Restored from another era, the music sounds out of a past but also with the promise of a future not yet arrived. The music’s quality, Evan Parker notes in his interview, is “certainty”. As the year turns, reading the news, going out on the street, facing the upending of orders or their continuance in more brazen form, the spread once more of something that moves towards a fascist consensus, all gives rise to of doubt, despair, a series of shocks. That certainty is something vital. It’s how The Blue Notes survived—and—maybe—it’s how we might get out of this.
***
Available to subscribers on Substack, an essay on the varied career of
the neglected saxophonist Robin Kenyatta. This might be the first
substantial piece on him in decades—at least, according to my initial
attempts at researching Kenyatta: a player who’s been on the edge of my
listening consciousness for a while now, since hearing his solos on
records by Bill Dixon and Andrew Hill, but whose full career had so far
eluded me. There’s still much that’s unclear, but for now, consider this
something like a listening guide. Here’s a sample.
Something of the dual character of Kenyatta’s work is suggested by the fact that he was spotted by Bill Dixon—one of the most committed of the avant-gardists—while playing with Pucho and his Latin Soul Brothers. Replacing Giuseppi Logan in Dixon’s groups, Kenyatta takes a searing solo four minutes into ‘Metamorphosis 1962-1966’ from Dixon’s 1967 Intents and Purposes: a ballad feature full of yearning, somewhere between fulfilled desire and its anxious absence that always reminded me of Charlie Mariano on Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady—or for that matter, Mingus’s more usual alto player, John Handy, a mentor of Kenyatta’s. The same year, Kenyatta appeared—alongside a rare recorded appearance from Logan—on Roswell Rudd’s Everwhere, returning the favour the following year with Rudd’s appearance on his own debut, Until. The wide-open, folk-tinged quality that Rudd brought to Shepp’s group and his own projects suits Kenyatta perfectly: there’s a declarative, melodically-focused joy to everything he plays. Technically extremely proficient, he plays flute, alto and soprano saxophones with equal felicity, and in the late ’60s had a phase of playing exclusively on tenor. Until opens, unusually, with a ballad—the title track, written by pianist Barry Miles (not to be confused with the British writer of the same name, Miles featured Kenyatta on the Third Stream-ish album Presents his New Syncretic Compositions in 1966). As previously evidenced on his appearance on Intents and Purposes, ballads were Kenyatta’s strength. One senses he knew this. Interviewed by Robert Palmer in 1974, he noted that he attempted to convey meaning and feeling through tone rather than prolixity of notes: why play ten notes where one will do?
A subscriber post on Substack on some rare pieces by Bill Dixon and his relation to extended (or compressed) songform.
In 1979, Dixon wrote a piece called ‘Places’ for the soprano
Jennifer Keefe. Premiered at Bennington at an Erik Satie tribute concert
organised by composer and Bennington Faculty, Vivian Fine, with work by
Dixon and Fine in the somewhat unlikely company of Virgil Thomson and
Emmanuel Chabrier.
Performed by Keefe, tenor saxophonist Stephen Horenstein, and Dixon on
piano, the piece initially had a wordless vocal part. A couple of years
later, another of Dixon’s Bennington students, singer and theatre marker
Shellen Lubin, added lyrics, retitling the piece ‘Dusty Rose’, and
recording it in a voice-piano version on a programme devoted to her work
on WBAI-FM in 1983. (Uploaded to her own Youtube channel this year, it
has six views.) Neither of these performances is otherwise publicly
available [...]
This isn’t programme music, representation or mimesis. Which is to
say, for Dixon, those ‘Places’ could be anywhere/ Nantucket. New York.
Vermont. Wisconsin. Firenze. The place of the music. Places are
emotional states too. States of mind, containers and expressions of
feeling. “At one moment there can be this almost silent vortex of what
be called textural sensitivity—all is fine—all will be fine. And then,
faster than the visibility of a bolt of lightning, the metamorphosis of
all that is opposite descends”.
