A subscriber post on Substack: three fragments from Daybook, on Mal Waldron/Jeanne Lee (with excursions through Shepp, Coltrane, and Gilroy), Jacques Derrida/Ornette Coleman, and Anti-Fascist Noise.
For Jeanne Lee, words and music were themselves always in dialogue, communication traversing the endless path of the semantic and non-semantic, the spoke and the unspoken. Talking drums, speaking tongues, healing water healing earth hurling air and fire. Lee’s first husband was the sound poet David Hazelton: in the mid-60s, they lived in Berkeley, Lee acting as editorial consultant on Hazelton’s magazine Synapse and performing in sound poetry events. After the couple’s split, and Hazelton’s suicide in 1968, poetry continued to be an integral part of work as she stretched away from the form of the standard or the song, improvising off lines of poetry—her own, those of Hazelton or Jackson MacLow or juggler, clown, poet Robert Lax—or, more frequently, going beyond words altogether. (“no words, only a feeling”, begins her record Conspiracy, working off a text by Hazelton.) “The thing about lyrics is that I stopped singing them because they no longer represented a reality I could relate to”, she remarks in an interview with Roger Riggins for Coda magazine. “the word becomes incidental to the sound […] But now I’ve come back to them in a totally different way, from the inside out.” For Lee, words and music mutually unsettled and mutually transformed each other. One of Lee’s former students remarks on her emphasis in teaching on “the musicality of words, the dancing and the movement of words, the unity of words, music and dance.” To Riggins, she speaks about “singing in a way so as not to be conscious of “singing” but just becoming a white light”.
I began to understand that this was another dimension. I began to write poetry again and to understand that the poem could be another reality.
