Pat Thomas, Architecture, Abstraction (Preview)

Pat Thomas, JazzFest Berlin, November 2, 2025 © Berliner Festspiele, Camille Blake

(The second of three subscriber posts on Substack on this year’s Jazz Fest Berlin. The first two are longer essays on particular sets by Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer and by Pat Thomas, the third a more general overview of the festival.)

Thomas manifests absolute presence on stage: gregarious off it, on stage he is all business, sitting down and playing without the need of announcements or framing beyond the music itself. In an improvised solo set in the vein of the recent records The Solar Model of Ibn-Shatir and The Bliss of Bliss back to Nur in 1994, Thomas played what were essentially a series of short pieces: not quite miniatures, but relatively brief, each a study in a particular technique or texture. (One might call them études, perhaps.) Two were studies in rhythm and the harmonics that ring off a scraped or plucked piano strong, particular down the lower end of the instrument; the others focused on thick, splashy clusters and hand-over-hand runs dispensing with tonality as old news.

The full post can be read here.

“Myths and Dreams”: The Rolling Calf/Pat Thomas

(Photograph by Helen Wallace)

The Rolling Calf/ Pat Thomas

Wigmore Hall, London, 22nd January 2023

[A shorter version of this piece appears in this month’s issue of The Wire]

A few weeks into the new year, Elaine Mitchener continued her five-year artist-in-residency at the Wigmore Hall with a performance by her electroacoustic group the Rolling Calf Trio, joined on this occasion by Pat Thomas. In a relatively short first half, first we heard a Thomas piano solo—a characteristic study in piano resonance, making full use of the concert grand the concert hall setting (was this Thomas’ first time at the Wigmore? What are the points of access for what music is or is not allowed to be heard in such places?), thick clusters and repeating figures that never quite coalesced into riff or melody but moved off elsewhere, pealing like wave upon wave, preludial and exploratory. Next, Mitchener came and stage and, with Thomas performed a kind of deconstructed skeleton of a standard, or standards, Thomas playing plangent chords and discrete bursts of blooping electronics, Mitchener at one moment repeating a vocal sound and a physical movement that at first seemed spontaneous—head inclining to the right, hand moving up in the air alongside—and then repeating it, over and over, like a gif or a loop, problematising the notions of immediacy, performance and the like present in the position of the singer of songs of love or lost love, of feminine presentation, of the standard as vehicle for emotions and notions always greater than its lyrics suggest. I was reminded of Fumi Okiji’s paper on Cecil Taylor, Billie Holiday and gesture at the Taylor conference in New York a few years ago, riffing off Taylor’s line “as gesture jazz became Billie’s right arm bent at breast moving as light touch”, accompanied in her rendition by a video loop of Holiday’s arm in an old TV clip. The model of singer and accompanist is here at once gestured at and moved beyond, in that Mitchener, who keeps words to a murmured or half-sung minimum, functions as much as instrumentalist as singer. Even more so than the versions of standards found on Mitchener’s quartet with Alex Hawkins, the model of song form is moved away from into a more open, capacious improvisational and questing and questioning approach to the spirit of the standards more so than their harmonic or melodic content. The duo don’t perform any particular single standard as such as one, fifty-to-twenty minute ur-standard, a net picking up ghostly traces of songs that float by: the word “lovely”, a wisp of melody, a line or two half-recognised from a song. The first comparison that comes to mind—not least for the depths of Mitchener’s contralto voice, here heard with generous reverb allowing it to swell into the hall with the magnified intimacy pioneered in the recording technology of mid-century that did so much to shape ideas of what jazz singing might be—would be the ‘free standards’ of Ran Blake and Mitchener’s long-standing inspiration Jeanne Lee, in which the melodic contour, the verse-chorus-verse structure of the song are adhered to but the harmonic and rhythmic contours moved away from; or any number of deconstructions of the standard, from Taylor’s—or Sunny Murray’s—‘This Nearly Was Mine’ to the quieter, chamber deconstructions put in play by the likes of Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, or, more recently, Jason Moran.

 
Gesture and movement of another kind characterised the performance by the Rolling Calf, Mitchener’s ‘Black Power Trio’ with Neil Charles on bass and electronics and Jason Yarde on alto saxophone and an even wider range of electronics: synths, drum machines, digital manipulations and live sampling. Yarde—whose performance with Louis Moholo-Moholo’s ‘Six Blokes’ band in a three-horn line-up alongside  Byron Wallen and Steve Williamson one night, Shabaka Hutchings the other, the last time Moholo performed in the UK back in September 2019, was so vitally transforming and powerful—appeared miraculously recovered from the onstage stroke he suffered in October the previous year in France, his life saved thanks to the presence of two parademics in the audience who he insisted he go straight to the hospital, and to the treatment he was able to receive in France at a time when a government of millionaires is attempting to utterly destroy and deplete the British National Health Service in the spirit of a kind of nightmarish blend of Dickensian Victorian inequality and neoliberal ideology pushed to the max. Survival, literally, yes—that’s what this music has always been about.

The musicians entered from the back of the hall, behind and through the audience, each playing hand-held “stirring xylophones”—tuned wooden percussion instruments struck with beaters—in the quietly tempestuous manner of early Art Ensemble of Chicago records, first sparsely echoing melodic patterns, then swirling cascades in glissando’ing stir and swell; one at a time, the three came on stage, Charles and Yarde moving into loops and figures on mini-synths, drum machines and samples, Mitchener’s voice totally commanding, moving from the deliberately constricted/restricted register of the first half to declarative, soaring notes, pronouncements and announcements.

 
As in many of her recent performances, Mitchener has developed an approach to form in—rather than compositions or ‘heads’, but not completely ‘free’ improvisation, a set will be organised around different texts, which Mitchener will work at, sing and speak until their possibilities have been temporarily used up, moving to the next fragment. These texts, generally poems, but sometimes incorporating statements from interviews, were on this occasion organised into a collection named on the programme as ‘Myths and Dreams’, that included Césaire, Brathwaite, Una Marson, Taylor, Sun Ra, and Jay Bernard. They form points of reference, clearly demarcated sections that function something like movements in a suite, helping to organise an often quite lengthy piece in ways that are not obvious or circumscribed. These are not ‘lyrics’, in the jazz or pop model, nor are they ‘settings’, in the classical or new music model, so much as elements of musical material; while words imply narrative, context, fixity, in Mitchener’s case are treated in ways that—as in the case of Jeanne Lee, whose approach in her work with Gunter Hampel or on a record like ‘Conspiracy’ is again perhaps the closest formal analogy—might differ each time, in minute or quite dramatic ways, always with an ear to what is happening in the musical texture of that moment, how it might go on from there.

 
To me, the heart of this particular Rolling Calf performance was the rendition of a poem from young British poet Jay Bernard’s Surge, an elegy in pats in which Bernard’s archival research into the 1981 New Cross Massacre—an event which happened eight years before Bernard’s birth—is set against the unfolding tragedy of Grenfell Tower fire, which happened as the sequence was being written. Constructed as homages to the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson—particularly his own poem ‘New Crass Massahkah’—the first of two poems entitled ‘Songbook’ establishes a space and a geometry at once of the dancefloor and of wider tactical manoeuvres, the territory of mourning and militancy that first, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and later, Justice 4 Grenfell have to trace. In Johnson’s 1981 poem, released as the final track on the 1984 album Making History, words insistently inflect the music in dialogue, in contrast and tension: jaunty but haunted, the rhythms shift from the poem’s section, describing the celebratory sociality buoyed by the rhythms of the party before the fire—“di dubbing and did rubbing”, “di dancung and di skanking”—to the rhythm of the fire itself—“di crash and di bang”, “di heat and di smoke”—to the rhythm of activism, its persistence and resistance. “but wait / yu noh remembah”, “but stap / yu noh remembah”: the poem is a call to remembrance, of the need to tell and re-tell a story ignored or mis-told in official record. Like Johnson’s poem, written in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Bernard’s later poem traces the rhythms of dance—the party before the fire—turned to violence—the fire itself and the second violence of bungled police investigation and racist media reportage—in turn turned to resistance through the work of the committee and the Black Peoples’ Day of Action. Over time, the mathematics Bernard’s ‘Songbook’ traces—“me seh ah one step fahwahd an ah two step back”—its manoeuvres of progress and defeat, of progress and defeat, of going round in circles or back to square one—becomes not just the immediate events of a particular movement, but of the seemingly infinite deferral of closure, as the quest for justice stretches into and beyond the space of a lifetime. Echoes fade away, generations build and develop; Johnson’s insistent call to remembrance fades and must be taken up and replayed, overlaid and overlayered like the laboratories of dub transformations that take up and distort the sounds of an original track. When performing, Bernard themself recites the poem without music: the music-and-speech dynamics of Johnson’s dub poetry, with its low-key delivery given power and contrast by the accompaniment of Dennis Bovell and the Dub Band, internalised into the rhythms of the poem itself, as stripped-back, ghostly echo; a memory, of a social moment, a movement, something we can barely hear. “Me seh half de revalushun deh pun de attack / Only half a salushun to de tings dem we lack.” One step forward, two steps back, half a step, half the revolution, half a solution—the process is incomplete. There’s no closure, no justice. 

 

Yet Bernard’s poem is also about togetherness and community. Playing with rhymes or assonance in words like “back”, “attack”, “tack”, Bernard’s poem , which, like Johnson’s work, refuses to be contained by standard English, is buoyed up and carried on by the pleasures of rhythm and the pleasure of sound, the excess of sound, sounds ability to contain and then explode, the poem as a kind of carrier, an unexploded charge, carrying its “secret cargo” into the present. And when Mitchener delivered the poem within the context of music once more, the poem attained a fresh power, a declarative insistence. In comparison to Bernard’s Johnson-esque understatement, Mitchener’s was loud, present, unnerving: she delivered the text half spoken, half sung, a singer’s voice, expansive and huge, used to projection, not the quiet dynamic of a poet’s voice; her delivery at once toasting and sprechstimme; combined with the abstracted patterns of Charles on bass and Yarde on electronics, drum machines and synths stuttered into loops and sampled patterns, giving way to blasts of Yarde’s alto squall, the music traced another kind of time again, one in which instrument associated with pop music are repurposed and abstracted and which, in turn, an avant-garde that has too often excluded the matter of black life, is repurposed for its energies.

 
The music moves on again—picking up on the carefully poised ironies of a Sun Ra statement—“those who will not dance will have to be shot”—traversing language of ritual and apocalypse, Mitchener now playing with the ritual of calling out the band’s names—the celebratory incantation over music that signals celebration and closure in the Art Ensemble’s rendition of ‘Odwalla’ at the end of almost every concert they gave over the years, or the ecstatic sung shout outs on Pharoah Sanders’ 1981 album Live. “We are the Rolling Calf!” she proclaims, and as she picks up a phrase from a Cecil Taylor interview—“Hearing is playing. Music does not exist on paper”—turning it into an incantation, Pat Thomas makes his way to the stage, adding further electronic bloops and trademark thick chords and clusters on piano to the stuttering loops set up by Yarde and Charles. “Music does not exist on paper”. After a minute or so, the lights go out, the musicians playing in the dark, rendered illumination, focused on hearing, on the work that listening and playing can do, beyond visuality, beyond representation, beyond the page. The trappings of concert hall, of the performer/stage division, of the above-stage frieze, with its art deco image of music-making as a ritual idealized and frozen, already expanded by the trio’s entrance through the audience, by Mitchener’s dance round the stage, blowing a whistle, by Thomas’ entry onto the platform from the front-row seats; all these melt away, focus into the material and more-than-material presence of sound itself. Mitchener has long been an expert at making time melt, bend, twist in this way, all with an awareness of history, of music’s history and the histories beyond music that music sediments. Tonight was a particular resplendent example.

Houben / Oliveros / Mitchener / Thomas

(Some thoughts on three recent concerts as spring gradually emerges...)

Claire Chase presents Pauline Oliveros, part of SoundState, Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer, 3rd April 2022

(Image by the Southbank Centre's music director, Gillian Moore) 

This free concert in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall paid tribute to the late Pauline Oliveros, exemplifying the social, and sonic pleasures of the late composer’s work. Playing an array of flutes and whistles, Claire Chase was accompanied by Senem Pirler, working with the electronic ‘Expanded Instrument System’, a “computer-controlled sound interface” Oliveros first designed in 1963. For the first piece, ‘Sounds from Childhood’ (1992), Chase instructed the audience to remember a time in childhood “when it was a lot of fun to make sounds”, and then to make those sounds. The collective texture—raspberries, sighs, groans, ululations—was then played back through the EIS as a chorus at once disjointed and with the pleasures of togetherness; memory taken forward into the present and, via the EIS, the futuristic. For the text score ‘13 Changes’ (1988), Chase read out each of the textual prompts before interpreting them for an array of flutes. The titles thus served as entities in themselves, by terms pithy, humorous, and thought-provoking, from ‘Songs of ancient mothers among awesome rocks’ to ‘Rollicking monkeys landing on Mars’. The EIS gave the resultant whirling of breath and air an edge sometimes mechanical, sometimes digital, the pieces rendered something like epic bagatelles, condensed but imaginatively vast and expansive.

The duo concluded with the most substantial work on the programme, ‘Intensity 20.15, Grace Chase’ (2015). Oliveros wrote the piece for Chase’s enormous bass flute—or ‘Bertha’, as she dubs it—but with the kicker that the flute would only be deployed briefly at the end. For the rest of the piece, Chase would have to find other sound-producing means. After extended discussion, Oliveros and Chase hit upon the idea of using texts by Chase’s grandmother, Grace. Diagnosed as schizophrenic in her 20s and subjected to electroshock, Grace had self-medicated through art, writing unclassifiable texts in hundreds of notebooks, their inveterate punning subverting linguistic and patriarchal authority.

“In adulthood I have taken up a load of childlike things”, Chase proclaimed, neatly inverting the Biblical declaration of maturity. She proceeded to unload carrier bags of notebooks, bells, whistles, and percussion instruments, turning the stage into a kind of children’s music workshop run riot. This was music as dispersed play rather than concentrated training, un-learning the hierarchies embedded in the world of ‘classical’ music. A linguistic riff—“And I step on you and you and you”—saw Chase using countless pairs of shoes as percussion instruments, ultimately striking a giant bass drum with a high heel in a neatly subversive feminist gesture. The piece ended with an extended bass flute drone, a meditation that eased us back into the present. Throughout, the legacies of the women Chase described as her spiritual grandmother (Oliveros) and her biological grandmother (Grace) provided a non-essentialist model of feminist energies, accessible to all: airing what was unaired in order to bring in new airs for us to breathe together.

A few minutes in, I overheard a small child in the row behind me whisper: “this is cool, I’d actually like to stay”. The ‘avant-garde’ or ‘experimental’ here is accessible, not despite, but precisely because of its experimentation, the particular openings it offers onto the world—to childhood and adulthood, to suppressed memories and lost histories—and above all, to the sheer pleasure in sound-making as participatory endeavour. Oliveros would have been proud.

Eva-Maria Houben / GBSR Duo, Together on the Way', Southbank Centre, 3rd April 2022

(Image again by Gillian Moore)

Immediately preceding the Oliveros concert in the foyer, the QEH's inner concert hall saw a performance by the composer and the GBSR Duo, of Eva-Maria Houben's Together on the Way for organ, piano, and percussion, premiered at Huddersfield in 2021, a performance recently released on Another Timbre. Whereas that performance took place in a small church, the expanded space of the QEH allowed the work to breathe in a new way, even as so much of Houben's music is about doing away with hierarchies of vast auditoriums, prosceniums, scale as a performance of cultural legitimacy: a case outlined in her book Musical Practice as a Form of Life and elsewhere, which might in part be about returning to a pre-19th century way of thinking--the tradition of the local church organist, say (Houben's first professional job in music was as a 12-year old church organist), a different relation between composer, performer, and listening community than that of the giant concert hall--as well as elements of 19th-century Romanticism that might be reclaimed beyond the idea of the Romantic composer as an isolated, bourgeois "political bonehead".  Breathing in a new way, cast in a different light.

Today, bathed in a resplendently subtle light show, Houben was playing the QEH organ that literally rises from underneath the stage (sadly not a spectacle the audience got to witness): emergence from the depths not so much as cthonic grandiosity (Phantoms of the Opera), nor the portentous religiosity that horror film aesthetic builds off, but a more modest inhabiting of environment, of space: what's not there, hidden in the corners, the barely there, that which will disappear again. (Houben's ever-present concern with the paradox a sound that exists in its disappearance, with the "presque rien" indications on Berlioz's scores.) For though, to say it again, the organ has reputation as grandiose, enormous cathedral spectacular, in fact Houben reveals it as a wheezing, mechanical instruments of stops and clicks and wheezes ("the organ is for me a Hoffmanesque instrument", as she says in an interview about the piece here), and at the same time a delicate, airy instrument of breath, of near-silence, sustaining a kind of cloud of sound that hangs in, through and as air, through pipes and stops and keys, at once intangible, evanescent, and weighted, heavy, with freighted tradition, with its un- and re-making...

On stage, Houben was flanked by the two members of the GBSR Duo, Siwan Rhys's piano gently prepared with horsehair, but more often played in a series of unadorned notes, melody reduced to its simplest means--one note, two notes, a few notes that almost, but don't quite, build up a scale or an octave transposition--or gently struck dissonances, reverberating in the sustain pedal and a finger-dampened string; George Barton's huge array of percussion played as a series of barely-audible taps, synchronised and overlapping piano and percussion entries over a single organ chord, sustained over the course of the entire work, not so much as a "drone" as a near-transparent texture, wheezing, breathing, enormous yet transparent, what Houben calls a "shelter" or a kind of sounding silence in which the players can each occupy their separate spaces, spread out on the stage; rather than Cage, for whom it's de rigueur to compare Wandelweiser music, I kept thinking of Nono, Houben's image of "the way" and his borrowing of Machado in the "no hay caminos..."  motto that suffuses his late work, or the interplay of the piano and its outsides, its surrounding echoes and silences in "...sofferte onde serene", of the creation of sound as an environment, a way of remaking the space it's in.

Nono: "It is the inaudible, the unheard that does not fill the space but discovers the space, uncovers the space as if we too have become part of sound and we were sounding ourselves".

Houben: "all together are rather more listening than playing. 

all together become aware of the different ways their sounds decay."

At one point the breathing of someone in the row above me was louder than the music coming from the stage, but there was almost no "actual" silence: a veil, a representation, a mediation. Somewhere in all of this a meditation on decay, on the anxieties of environment as not simply a "natural" space but a contested terrain of despoliation and the imminent ending of life--Houben's programme notes nodding to the anthropocene--or the histories closer to home, the current conflicts and conjunctures that seep into a place that doesn't, as the cliche goes, close itself off from them in a cocoon, but lets them enter and disappear. This is a historical music, a music maybe at the end of something, with the melancholy that implies, but also with the possibility of remaking and rethinking ("when the chord is unfolded, it sounds for a while, then the process of deconstruction begins"...)--spread out, as the performers were on stage, over large distance, chasms, yet with a kind of intimacy, a human scale, the possibilities of bodies in space, the possibilities of hearing as a mode of relation: a music that models eternity or infinity, as per Cage's ASLSP, its centuries-long sounding organ, yet which is in itself concerned with the material of decay, with a focused materialism. After an hour or so--just under or just over--the work ends, signalled with uncharacteristic drama or force by an inexorable, regular set of drum taps, one after the other, over and over: I didn't count exactly, but perhaps as many as fifteen times, a regular, barely reverberating stroke, flatly thudding, inexorably placed. A host of associations invoked: Beethoven's fate, Wagner's forge, yet the taps here also remove drama, ostentation, military forthrightness: and while those connotations can never render this a gesture "purely" formal or abstract, the context of the work as a whole, the manner of its delivery, lend this conclusion a non-forced materiality, at once transparent clarity and a refusal to be reductively read, rendered symbol.

Afterwards, Houben remarked that the piece, which exists in a different configuration each time it's performed, and is thus in essence never the same piece twice, might be considered as still sounding, still being performed. More to write and think about this...

Pat Thomas/Elaine Mitchener--Cafe Oto, 10th April 2022

(Image by David Laskowski)

This was the first time Mitchener and Thomas had performed as a duo, though they appear with Orphy Robinson and the visiting duo of William Parker and Hamid Drake on the expansive Some Good News album, also recorded live at Cafe Oto a few years ago, on which Mitchener is essentially the guest--and entirely at home--with two established duos, that of Robinson/Thomas and Parker/Drake. No prerequisites or expectations as to 'genre' here, this Sunday afternoon in early April; either musician could go anyway, together or separately. It's playing as listening, improvising, holding a line or--more often--knowing when to let it drop and hold back; Mitchener stepping to the side of the stage to listen to Thomas, solo, or vice versa. Both supplemented the complex 'basics' of piano and voice: Thomas with two i-pads functioning as kaoss-pads--an updated version of his earlier rougher, analogue electronics and tapes of the 90s, where he'd deploy tapes recorded off the TV, lo-fi musique concrete cut-ups and blarts of noise, but nonetheless treated with the same expert capacity for a kind of brusque disruption, a refusal to use electronics to coast or provide ambient texture; Mitchener with objects on a table, selectively deployed--a couple of whistles, a thumb piano, some rattles and shakers, used for specific and precise textures at particular points. No prerequisites, no expectations--and the opening five or ten minutes in particular all about finding ways into listening: Thomas scraping or stroking the piano's inside strings, Mitchener's quiet articulations, sometimes the amplifier buzz louder than the sounds they made; audience quiet and focused, this warm spring afternoon, so much lighter and more lifted than the lockdown of two years ago, a social space open to be whatever it might be, the openness of matinees like this, where the music can just be open and relaxed in its exploration, in its unforced listening.

 
Both Mitcher and Thomas have a penchant for intensity and volume: Thomas' electronic walls or, on piano, trademark thick chords, often clusters played with palms, the piano at once treated in its harmonic richness and rhythmically, as drum; Mitchener's virtuosity, her to turn any note into a series of gasps or rhythmic stutters, gargles, fluid yodels, effects for which the term "extended techniques" will have to substitute for a more precise technical designation--ululations reminiscent of transmuted marketplace or muezzin cry or folk music buzz, echoes of jazz--though almost never 'scat'--occasional avant-classical high pitches, pure and biting like laser beams, sirens, piercing through. But this was not a showcase of techniques, a kind of masterclass or workshop in displaying virtuosity; those impulses initially, and often throughout, kept muted, finding their way in, not forcing the music. 

What was performed, with the interruption of a brief set break, was essentially one long piece divided into natural, unplanned episodes and pauses--though occasionally the audience broke in with applause to 'end' a section. Absent of a score, Mitchener used a series of texts--a Cecil Taylor poem on the elements and on creation("thrice water in air..."), Mingus and Jeanne Lee quotations on creativity, and, the most extended, poems by N.H. Pritchard, mainly from his second book, EECCHHOOEESS--which she moved through, improvising on or off, a word revealing itself gradually, cohesively broken down; the text not so much as a script but as a repository to give the voice shape, as texture and also as a space, a placeholder, a holding place for thought, for suggestion, for image. Pritchard in particular, who she's worked with before, formed the basis for the most extended (re)articulations of the set--the ecstatic yelling of the word "FR/OG" that closed the first set with aplomb, the poem of that name taken up again in the second half, Pritchard's splitting of words, so that "echoing" is reversed, mimesis of the aural effect rendered visually and then resounded--"ing echo", Thomas picking up on that echoic play with a rare melodic echo of Mitchener's pitched tones. An echo is one mode of relation, between the sounding and the sound, the semantic and the 'purely' sonic, the intentional and the unintended, the spoken and the spoken-for. Another--language's connecting words, the way they tie and fry, they fray: the spoken-sung recitation of Pritchard's mediation on and with the simile, "as a / as a / as a / hoo hooz", the call of an owl or the questioning of possession or colour gradation, "whose", "hue", words slipping and sliding, nature imitation, night birds or crickets, Thoreau's loon, nocturnes, clouds forming, faces in the sky, ("VISAGE / BLACK CLOUDBANK / FORMING/ ELSE WHERE") a kind of mystic-material inquiry rooted in (perhaps) American Transcendentalism, the reading of nature's hieroglyph as Emerson put it--letters, sounds, transparent eyeballs, bells--or theosophy, Toomer's Gurdjieff, his sound poems ("vor cosma saga [...] vor shalmer raga"), or a (post)structuralist enquiry into language--metaphysics or metaphor, any number of enquiries..."As a" as a repeated loop between speech and song, Thomas sometimes picking up with piano figurations that offered rhythmic support of staggered dance, more often with electronics on the i-pad that fed in insectoid cracklings or multi-layered clouds sustained then dying away.

(Pages from N.H. Pritchard's EECCHHOOEESS performed by Mitchener/Thomas)

I had a thought, but it was more a feeling, transmitted in the performance's vibrations, its sensations of tone, that this was all above all about material, about the piano as material, as object, as percussion, as an instrument with an inside and an outside, about how Thomas' performance "outside" on keyboard and "inside" on strings activated both, refusing distinctions between them; and how Mitchener too articulated inside and outside, clicks from the back of the throat while singing, the way the entire palette and throat is drawn into and made visible as articulation. It's about time, too, and poise, how listening gets articulated visually as well as sonically, in the way Thomas would hover over a chord, fingers in position, decide not to repeat it, move instead to the inside of the piano or the i-pad; the way both he and Mitchener insistently and unforcedly avoided the cliches of 'responsive' improv (echoing, playing 'together' in too obvious ways, as if that were the only way to play were to overcompensate by demonstrating you were 'listening' by imitation--which is not really listening at all, just a kind of language-learning game, a preliminary to the real listening that never really happens). Often Mitchener channeled an entire band in rhythm and lead parts herself, accompanying doubled vocal lines with a shaker, with a rhythmic articulation that supplemented and separated and merged from a melodic line (like an avant-garde Bobby McFerrin, occasionally); Thomas instead responding with a series of tranquil dissonant chords, or silence, or an electronic crackle, or in one delightful moment, a sudden burst of club music that faded in and out like the ghost of a different sociality, invoked with (im)perfect humour and (im)perfect ting, art brut, joyously knowing. Only at the end did he join or lead in a jazz-tinged series of chords that channelled a host of optimistically rueful medium-tempo solos exemplified by the solo Monk playing over the sound system when I entered the venue, and that maybe aurally echoed in his playing, that lent itself to song-like song-line close on Jeanne Lee's words on the experience of life as process, on life as living: not stasis, not object; and on those words, those chords, that song, synchronous, asynchronous, warmly to end.

Dominic Lash Ensembles at Café Oto

Photo by Roger Huddle.

 
John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones), Pat Thomas (piano), Dominic Lash (bass), Steve Noble (drums / percussion); Consorts (various musicians—full list below). Café Oto, Dalston, 21.10.2021.

Last year, bassist Dominic Lash began a record label, Spoonhunt, releasing music by three of his own ensembles: on Limulus, a quartet featuring, among others, saxophonist Ricardo Tejero, another quartet on Discernment, John Russell’s final recording alongside John Butcher and Mark Sanders, and a large ensemble called Consorts, heard on a record called Distinctions. Much of this music in turn arose from Lash’s 40th Birthday gig at Café Oto, and so it was fitting that, with the easing of pandemic restrictions, it was at Oto that the releases could be officially launched. The venue isn’t open at full capacity until next Monday, but there was still a good turn-out for what was by no means a flashy or hip gig or something with a visiting act as a draw: an indication of the health of the UK free improv scene, pandemic or no pandemic, and of the respect in which Lash and his music are held.

Given Russell’s passing, and the unavailability of Discernment’s original drummer, Mark Sanders, the quartet that played the evening’s first set had quite a different sound to that heard on the record, with Pat Thomas—originally supposed to be on the original date—replacing Russell and Steve Noble standing in for Sanders. This could have gone anywhere: Thomas sticking to piano, rather than electronics, always promises a certain amount of contained thunder, Noble a perhaps more buoyantly rhythmic approach, but the band might equally well have trod into the more abstract/rhythmically unmoored territory of quote un quote non-idiomatic playing. (By this I mean, a certain idiom that also gets called ‘European free improvisation’, whether that’s meant to imply geography, artistic tendency, style, or genre; usually, some sort of combination of all of those). Expectations of the latter arose in large part thanks to the presence of Butcher, whose earlier work with Russell and Phil Durrant (who was heard in the evening’s second half on electronics) gives his work some affinity with the beginnings of the more minimal school of improvisation that ends up with New London or Berlin silences, while the painstakingly precise multiphonics of his solo saxophone work (latterly, often amplified with electronics or in resonant spaces), suggests a kind of bridge between minimal tendencies and the more reactive scrabble of EFI. This kind of generic hair-splitting, of course, doesn’t go anywhere near to suggest the studious fluidity of Butcher’s playing, or the expansive range of Lash, Thomas, and Noble across numerous contexts. As I say, this could have gone anywhere.

As it turns out, the set—maybe 40-minutes or so in length, though I didn’t check the time—was surprisingly like free jazz. (Surprising, that is, given the tendency of the sectors of EFI with which Butcher would normally be associated to distinguish themselves from ‘energy music’ tendencies.) The quartet didn’t suggest free jazz so much in terms of dividing the music up into ‘themes’ and ‘solos’ or even pulse, but more in certain harmonic gestures and levels of energy/volume, generally initiated by Thomas and picked up on by Butcher, working some way outside his usual vocabulary. This is not, perhaps, Butcher’s preferred territory, but it didn’t show: particular on soprano, which he alternated with tenor, with I think two turns on each instrument apiece, he touched on scalar, declarative iterations that bordered on late Coltrane at its Live-in-Japan woolliest, repeated melodies echoed—not in the rote-repetition that screams “I’m listening and reacting”, but in genuinely surprising and fitting echoes—from musician to musician to musician. Butcher began in jazz when he was starting out in the early ’80s, playing in groups with pianist Chris Burn while studying physics at Surrey University and continuing to play in Burn’s big band while beginning a Ph.D on ‘charmed quarks’ in London. As Burn remarks in an interview with Simon Reynell: “I always joke that what started off as a 22 musician big band playing jazz compositions ended as a free improvisation duo.” (By 1992, the band sounded like this.) And jazz, free or otherwise, has largely left both Burns’ and Butcher’s vocabulary since then, though an unexpected and surprisingly effective duo with Matthew Shipp—convened at the invitation of Trevor Brent in 2010, also at Oto, and followed by an equally unexpected trio with synth player Thomas Lehn—saw a rapprochement of a sort. (A 2016 interview in which Shipp and Butcher sketch out the respective traditions from and out of which they emerge makes for interesting reading: it can be accessed here.) Likewise, one of the highlights of the performance by the Lash-convened quartet was seeing Butcher adjust to a climate that—largely through Thomas’ playing—had more of an idiomatic connection to free jazz than might be expected in this setting. Particularly in a solo context, Butcher plays virtually every note with an extended technique—multiphonics, false fingering, overblowing etc—veering away from any conventionally pitched vocabulary. That certainly figured here, so ingrained is it in his style: notably, on soprano, eerie, ultra-high altissimo, whistle-pitch sounds, or whispered wind ghosts floating through the body of the instrument after the mouthpiece had been removed. Yet these were juxtaposed or combined with melodic and rhythmic shards strongly suggestive of jazz, fragments of stories that Butcher seemed surprised he knew, but which he was able to re-tell, to spin towards and away from, with authoritative relish. What might have been par for the course in the work of more free jazz-oriented group thus attained the genuine “sound of surprise” here because of its variance from the norm of Butcher’s particular idiomatic tendencies, and in any case, I don’t think Butcher, inveterate Cubist that he is, could leave those phrases entirely intact.

Pat Thomas’ approach to the piano is historically rooted yet utterly distinctive. Spaciously hammered, thick, thick two-handed near-cluster; sparingly used and stringently lush ninth chords; repeated figures that are not quite riffs, not quite melodic fragments, more like rhythmic stutters that sound like a succession of mini-hammers. Deliberately so, there’s something beautifully paradoxical about his approach: gracefully ungainly, liquid granite, utterly poised in consciously distorted fashion. It’s immutable, authoritative, declarative, but entirely adaptable; the hyper-arpeggiated, glissandi-thick, rolled and clustered figures he gets in the upper register are nothing like that of Cecil Taylor, with which such playing inevitably gets compared—partly because of Thomas’ very different sense of space, his tendency to play in measured bursts rather than continuous streams (the unbroken sections of playing tend to focus on repetition rather than constant development); likewise, I don’t think any other pianist has quite the control of the lower register that Thomas has; and his use of the pedal is inevitably much subtler than the morasses of sound he conjures up with it might at first suggest. One chord he played maybe half-way through the set saw him release the pedal before the natural stage of decay where others would have simply let the note ring out; like Butcher, Thomas reminded us, in a kind of hyper-materialist, self-conscious meta-gesture, of the sources of sound production, drawing on the power of the gesture—the reverent haze or dramatic cloud the sustain pedal allows—while also drawing attention to its provisional quality (but with none of the studied fussiness that description suggests). Meanwhile, Steve Noble’s scraped or struck, perhaps bowed, small gongs and cymbals, along with other ways of playing the drum kit as pitched more than rhythmic instrument (his kit was out of my eyeline so I could only guess as to the origin of the sounds) kept things texturally open and spacious. And Lash, of course, has it all down—bowed harmonics, free arco hinting at but never settling into walking patterns, careening caterwauls and ship-wreck groans, the perfectly-placed pluck pinging into the space like a falling droplet that sends ripples from the centre to the edges of a body of water, be that puddle or pond.

During the course of the set, there were ‘episodes’, the conclusion of one and the beginning of the next generally signalled by Butcher switching instrument, but they felt more like movements in a suite than the variable incidents of a typical free improv set, moved between as they were with total, fluid assurance. The first such transition, about five minutes in, saw the music suddenly stop—one of those serendipitous pullings of the emergency-brake that generally sees the musicians wryly laugh and the audience begin to applaud, as if willing the music to end there. Here, the silence was sustained, and things immediately moved in a different direction: a focussed adjustment characteristic of the set to follow. Thomas was often the driving force behind the quality of each particular ‘movement’, though his playing was anything but grandstanding: repeated chords suggested, even as they slid away from, a harmonic direction or area. Yet it was above all a collective music, a conversation between equal musical personalities. Take away any one of the parts and the quality would radically have changed. It’s rare to see a purely improvised set of such cohesion, no hesitancies or verbiage or over-staying of welcome, each transition natural and surprising and fitting, everyone in sync, knowing when to sit out and when to step back in, no one treading on each other’s toes but no one hiding around the corner waiting for things to get going either. I trust the set was recorded, and I hope it might see release in some form or other.


Consorts, kind of chamber ensemble-cum-big band which, as far as I know, has only previously performed on the 40th Birthday gig which forms the basis for the group’s Spoonhunt release. Here’s the full line-up, taken from that release’s info sheet.

Douglas Benford - harmonium and percussion
Steve Beresford - electronics
Marjolaine Charbin - piano
Chris Cundy - bass clarinet
Seth Cooke - steel sink and metal detector
Angharad Davies - viola
Phil Durrant - modular synth
Matthew Grigg - guitar/amplifier
Bruno Guastalla - cello
Martin Hackett - Korg MS10
Tim Hill - baritone saxophone
Tina Hitchens - flute
Sarah Hughes - zither
Mark Langford - bass clarinet
Dominic Lash - double bass
Yvonna Magda - violin
Hannah Marshall - cello
Helen Papaioannou - baritone saxophone
Yoni Silver - bass clarinet
Alex Ward - clarinet/amplifier

I don’t think this was entirely reproduced on the night—Lash was playing electric guitar rather than bass; I didn’t see Alex Ward, Bruno Guastalla, Sarah Hughes, or Helen Papaioannou; Seth Cooke didn’t appear to be playing a steel sink and I’m not sure if the objects he was crouched over next to a small amplifier were metal detectors or not—but I think it’s largely representative. And whatever the individual components, the ensemble is in a sense also the piece they play, even if that piece is only loosely structured, certainly not formally scored or even conducted. With this line-up they could conceivably function in any way Lash decided, from the more conventional Improvisers Orchestra format, with its conductions and exercises, to full-on Alan Silva Celestrial Communications-style skronk. Full disclosure—Dom asked me to write the liner notes for the group’s album last year, but was more interested in what I might have to say about the music without knowing the methods that produced it than provided with the nuts-and-bolts of its structure. And I think that concern with what the music sounds like, rather than how it’s structured, is the point: an exploration of large-group texture that deliberately avoids the aforementioned large-group improv tendencies to density and information over-load while also gesturing towards—and departing from—the more minimal tendencies with which Lash’s has been involved in the Set Ensemble and other Wandelweiser-related endeavours.

As I understand it, the Consorts piece is essentially a set of sustained tones building to a crescendo, and those are the only guidelines: no score, no conduction, no other signals. (And in the rehearsal/soundcheck last night, apparently no mention of sustained tones was made.) So in part Consorts can be understood as a sort of exercise in orchestration, a textural experiment. As an exercise in orchestration, there’s a kind of giddy delight in textural variety—I’ll take not one but three bass clarinets, combine a string section with various electronics, ‘small’ or otherwise, round out the bottom end with a baritone, throw in two guitars. The group Lash had chosen is not ‘star-studded’—though who wouldn’t want a violin section with Angharad Davies in the corner! —which is, in fact, all the more index of their dedication in a music that is, after all, at its best, never about egoic fulfilment: players who quietly work away, in London or Cheltenham or Oxford or Bristol, at their craft: Martin Hackett’s inimitable Korg MS10, the tripled bass clarinets of and Mark Langford, Yoni Silver and Chris Cundy; Hannah Marshall’s richly adaptive cello; Steve Beresford in small electronics mode. From my seat, the only musicians in view were Marjolaine Charbin on piano, Mark Langford, the nearest of the bass clarinet players, and Hannah Marshall on cello (with Lash’s guitar popping in and out of view behind her). Consequently, I only realised, for example, that there was a flute in the mix about 30 minutes in, and had no idea Angharad Davies had been in the mix until Lash called out her name at the end. All this meant that I had to concentrate on it as a group sound rather than focusing on the individual sources of any particular sounds. Which is to say that being able to see the individual members of the ensemble perform both does and doesn’t make a difference. The ability to identify by eye, and thus by ear, the individual contribution of a particular instrument/individual helps one pick out one texture in the weave, one dot of paint in the pointillist whole, or any other such metaphor you might choose, but it doesn’t really reveal much more than how the parts are put together—which, as Lash’s reticence about explaining the piece’s structure implies, isn’t really the point of the exercise. Hearing snippets of sound and realising half an hour in that there was a flute in the ensemble, for example, is rendered all the more serendipitous, and the overall texture all the richer.

On Distinctions, the peak crescendo section has something of the quality of the more avant strands of doom metal; the 2021 iteration, while not quite as glass-rattling, certainly reaches for an effect you might call overwhelming, for its sheer, sustained volume, and the thick intensity of its accumulated textural thicket. The groups imperceptibly reaches a massive cataclysm of sound—driven, I think, by Phil Durrant’s very loud electronics, or perhaps it was Seth Cooke’s amp and whatever objects he had plugged into it; or maybe Matthew Grigg was also doing some small-scale Hendrix things with a guitar and amplifier; or Charbin was deploying e-bows, piano strings, and sustain pedals to give similar clouds. Either way, the sound was, thick and immutable, catharsis or textural exploration, followed by a shorter de-crescendo out (though it apparently lasted around ten minutes). Live, as opposed to on record, you can really feel the music fill the space; in providing contrast to the ‘climax’ and a mirror to the opening, the de-crescendo emphasizes the piece’s architectural, or is that architectonic, qualities. It reminded me a bit of taking part in a Michael Pisaro large group piece—also at Oto—back in 2015, in which everyone played ppp so that the overall volume was the strange effect of a very large group playing at a kind of medium volume: like an orchestra with a mute on it. Harry Gilonis also suggested the piece might be set alongside new music exemplars of the crescendoing sustained/repeated tone like James Tenney’s ‘On Having Never Written a Note for Percussion’ or Stockahusen’s Inori, to which I’d add some of Giacinto Scelsi’s orchestral pieces. (Lash himself mentions Phill Niblock, whose music he’s performed and on whom he’s written academically.) The Tenney is an exercise in solo texture and focus, with its own influence on a strand of improvised music—think Mark Wastell’s tam tam or Eddie Prévost’s bowed cymbal—as well as the general ‘swell piece’ structure found in larger groups. It would be interesting, meanwhile, to think what an improvised ‘swell piece’ like Consort’s does that those composed pieces don’t, and vice versa. If Scelsi and Stockhausen’s experiments in the form associated it with a specifically ritualistic quality (in Stockhausen’s case, unexpectedly Messiaen-type sonorities, allusions to the 'Dies Irae' melody, etc), there was almost nothing ‘ritualistic’ about Consorts. Let’s call it a more materialist approach to sustained tones that aims to be a study in texture and group contributions to an overall sound rather than a trance-inducing exercise. (Of course, the whole crescendo thing might also be seen to originate in the serious musical joke that is Ravel’s ‘Bolero’.)

These are all open-ended hints rather than a final say on the matter. Suffice to say I enjoyed both halves of the evening very much: unusual in the level of contrast between the sets and the level of focus throughout. But of course, given the calibre of the players, entirely to be expected. Roll on the next series of Spoonhunts!

Recent Writing (June)

Not posted much on this blog of late, but a fair bit of other writing elsewhere, of which a digest follows...

Over the past month I've been working on a long article on the great organist Larry Young / Khalid Yasin, now up on Point of Departure. The piece covers all the periods of career: early work in the soul jazz idiom from 1960 to around 1964, progressive jazz with the class Unity in 1965, free jazz (or a synthesis of free jazz with elements) from 1966 to around 1969, and then 'fusion' from 1969, first with the Tony Williams Lifetime, then with his own 'Love Cry Want', 'Lawrence of Newark' and 'Fuel' bands. The gist of the piece is that Young provides a lens for all kinds of trends, movements, placements, moving from doo wop to soul jazz to the advanced end of bebop to free playing to fusion of various kinds, along the way reinventing the sound of the Hammond organ. (To hear just how radically he'd transformed what could be done with the instrument, take a listen to this astonishing solo piece). It's often said that Young's training as a pianist is at the root of what was so unusual about his approach--e.g. taking the influence of McCoy Tyner's fourths and Monk's use of space and adjacent, dissonant notes, rather than the Jimmy Smith licks and held-note vocabulary ubiquitous amongst soul jazz Hammond players from the late 50s on. At the same time, of the technical achievements of his playing-are developments from  materiality of the instrument itself, as a kind of proto-synthesizer/big-band-in-minature, and from the vocabulary of soul jazz, even as they explicitly move away from it. So' for example, when he transitions from soul jazz on albums like Unity, Young explicitly moves away from the Jimmy Smith technique of holding a single note over the tune's chord pattern in an ecstatic imitation of tenor 'screamers', blues 'shouters' etc. But in the 1970s, that technique returns, transformed into a series of  sustained drones and 'washes' of sound which create dissonances, clusters, white noise blocks as the harmonic pattern surrounding them departs radically from the soul jazz patterns with which Smith worked. Similarly, the doubled thinking required to play both bassline in the footpedals and comp/solo with hands on the keyboard leads to a dialogic conception that in turn influences his playing within a group--a collective approach that in turns leads naturally to free jazz (Of Love and Peace in 1966) and the groove-based large-group improvisations of Love Cry Want and Lawrence of Newark in 1972 and 1973. And in terms of genre, the roots for the free jazz/ avant-garde playing of c.1966-69 are laid in soul jazz and hard bop of c.1960-62--in itself a kind of 'fusion' of elements of progressive jazz (bebop) with urban pop music (R&B)--which then presage the jazz fusion of c.1969 onwards, as the harmonic ambiguity of free jazz combines with the harmonic simplification of fusion and its focus on rhythm and groove. Which means that this at once a dialectical process--as per the Hegelian sense that hovers over fellow Newarker Amiri Baraka's earlier account of the movement from bebop to cool/hard bop to free in Blues People in 1963--and Baraka's 'changing same' circa 1967--which is and is not dialectical, at least in the same sense. (Clearly more thought needs expanding on this!). Baraka's not invoked arbitrarily here--he provided liner notes for an early Young album and was immersed in/emerged from the same thriving music scene in Newark. Which is the piece's other argument--that Young, along with Alan and Wayne Shorter, Grachan Moncur, Woody Shaw, Tyrone Washington, etc etc--marks a strand of Newark-originating playing in the late 50s/early 60s that often challenges strict divisions between 'mainstream' and 'free' and suggests another stream to the music. So that circa 1967/8--the year, after all, that Baraka writes 'The Changing Same'--there are a number of recordings which suggest a continuum between R&B, free jazz, mainstream hard bop, etc--Young's Contrasts, Washington's Natural Essence, Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music, even (less successfully) Ayler's New Grass--that are a kind of 'fusion' in advance, but alway in terms of Black music, rather than the way that fusion later becomes, too often, a kind of code for white virtuosos coming in and making the money. (As producer David Rubison put it, "Jazz fusion meant white people playing Black music"). All these arguments end up becoming somewhat speculative in part because Young (and Washington, Gale, etc) was never documented as much as he should have been. There's roughly a record per year when he had a contract with Blue Note (1965-1969), but after that--which is precisely when his playing really takes off--the documentation is a lot more sporadic: Lifetime's best work was live, but can only be heard on a few bootlegs; there's only one recording apiece for the Love Cry Want and Lawrence of Newark bands; I'm still wondering if tapes of the trio with Dewey Redman and Rashied Ali at Slugs' Saloon in 1968 exist...(Highly unlikely that are recordings with Frank Wright, Cecil Taylor and Coltrane, all of whom he played with at various points.) For that matter, it's impossible to get hold a copy of his final record, The Magician, a Germany-only release by his much-maligned final fusion band, Fuel. 

So that piece is now out on Point of Departure, along with three other reviews: George (E.) Lewis' Recombinant Trilogy, three works for solo instruments with electronics; The Locals (Pat Thomas et al) Play The Music of Anthony Braxton, which I noted back in Februrary on this blog; and new poetry-and-sound releases on Fonograf Editions from Nathaniel Mackey and the Creaking Breeze Ensemble and Douglas Kearney/Val Jeanty (Kearney's book sho is also out from Wave Books).

(Image of N.H. Pritchard from the East Village Other)

Back in April, I reviewed the reissue of N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix for Artforum: since then, I've been working on a longer piece based on this research as well, encompassing Pritchard's other books, EECCHHOOEESS, which is the first publication from Adam Pendleton's Daba Press, and some uncollected and unpublished work--of which there's a ton out there, including Pritchard's novel Mundus. Watching his appearance as a preacher in Elaine Summers' and Rev. Al Carmines' Another Pilgrim thanks to the digital versatility of the New York Public Library was a highlight of this--a real slice of place and time.

Also Umbra-related: Honoured to have been asked to write on Askia Touré's work for a special issue of Paideuma which republishes his 1972 book Songhai! Researching his poetry and thinking about the role of the African American poetic epic and Islam was fascinating work; it's astonishing that there's so little criticism on it. The piece, 'Songs for the Future', should be out soon.

Also out soon, a final Umbra-related item: from the University of Buffalo, Edric Mesmer's Among the Neighbors is a primarily bibliography-focussed pamphlet series on little magazines associated with the New American Poetry. My contribution to the latest batch offers a chronology and a brief introduction to Umbra, followed by a bibliographic listing of the contents of the five magazines produced between 1963 and 1974. This emerges from a much bigger Umbra bibliography project I began last summer, which aims to track the publishing activity of all the major Umbra poets and other poets associated with Umbra, providing details of major publications, as well as secondary criticism and other relevant material. The draft of that document runs to over a hundred pages, and I'm not sure as to what will be done with it--perhaps part of an online resource at some point. (If you'd like a copy, leave a comment below this post and I can send you the draft.) Many thanks in any case to Edric for his work on the Among the Neighbors pamphlet, which I hope will be a useful resource, given the rarity of the Umbra magazines themselves. (I'm also excited to be working on a two volume Umbra project with Tonya Foster and Jean-Philippe Marcoux, which should be out in the next few years. Watch this space!)

Boston Review are running a piece of mine on Yours Presently, the selected John Wieners letters recently out from University of New Mexico Press. It was edited by Michael Seth Stewart over a period of ten years, and having read the entire, unedited version--Seth's thesis at CUNY--which runs to around 1000 pages, I can attest to Seth's editorial acumen in producing this shorter version, still scrupulously annotated with a wealth of contextual and biographical information. (Let's hope too that Robbie Dewhurst's equally vital work on the biography and the complete poems--the latter provisionally entitled Ungrateful City--might see publishing fruit.) And props to Ammiel Alcalay and CUNY's Lost and Found programme for supporting scholarship like this. Hearing Ammiel, Seth and Eileen Myles talk at the online launch last month, setting this in its context, was a perfect illustration of the spirit in which the enterprise was conducted--Ammiel recalling meeting Wieners at Grolier's bookstore as a thirteen-year old, hanging out and talking, about the government persecution of Billie Holiday, about Wieners as part of the 'outside'--queer activists, anti-war activists, drop outs, and so on--that was much bigger than it is now, as Ammiel put out; Seth reading out a funny and engaging letter in which Wieners puts down Kerouac and Ginsberg and comes out with casually brilliant and moving phrases imbued with the poetry that shot through his life; and Eileen Myles likewise come up with phrases of music and casual poetry--"the basketweave of the soul" a phrase I half remember; all this was a moving affirmation of Wieners' importance. 

The Boston Review review comes out of a bunch of other work on Wieners I've been working on over the past few years--in particular, an essay on Wieners' great book Behind the State Capitol, editing and typography, just out in the Queer Between the Covers collection edited by Leila Kassir and Richard Espley, which emerges from a conference at Senate house Library back in 2018. The whole book can be read here and also includes work on Valerie Taylor's lesbian pulp novels and the government attacks on London queer bookshop Gay's the Word in the 1980s. On the Wieners front, a piece I wrote four years ago on Wieners and Dana (of "God love you Dana my love" fame) for an edited collection on Wieners' work called Utter Vulnerability might hopefully see the light of day in the not too distant future (for now it can be read at academia.edu); and there will likely be a couple of Wieners chapters in my current book project on queer poetry in Boston and San Francisco, focussing on the lesser-known parts of his career--his early work as editor with Measure magazine and in the context of the Boston 'Occult School', and--supplementing the Queer Between the Covers chapter--further details of his time in the orbit of Fag Rag and Charley Shively. Fag Rag and Gay Community News alumnus--and author of the excellent Culture Clash and Queer History of the United States--Michael Bronski has been super-helpful and generous in discussing this work, along with Seth, Raymond Foye, and all the others contributing to what seems--hopefully--to be a bit of a mini-Wieners revival. Not that he ever went away, but there's so much more to be said and discovered about this work. Michael and I did a long interview about his life in activism, scholarship, publishing, Fag Rag and the rest, back in December and are hoping to publish that at some point.

Over to the world of music--and honoured to have been asked to write the liner notes to the new Anthony Braxton boxset, Quartet (Standards) 2020, selected documentation of the band's European tour last year out from the Tri-Centric Foundation / New Braxton House on June 18th. The group's three-day residency at Cafe Oto--one of the last bits of live music, if not the last bit of live music I saw before the pandemic hit--was extraordinary (my write-up came out in Artforum here), and it was likewise great to grapple with the entirety of the set: 67 tracks in all, of standards familiar and obscure alike, with Alex Hawkins on piano, Neil Charles on bass and Stephen Davis on drums providing far more than merely a 'rhythm section'.

Some recent liner notes also out to a fascinating released by a large-group ensemble led by UK bassist, improviser, composer Dominic Lash, one of the first batch of physical releases from his Spoonhunt label (the bandcamp page also has some excellent digital recordings, including work with Christian Wolff, Nate Wooley, etc). Distinctions is a 40-minute recording for an ensemble called 'Consorts', working in particular with sustained tones and the relation between acoustic and electric sound: seems like it finds intriguing solutions to many of the problems of large ensemble improvisation (though the relation between composition and improvisation, as ever in Lash's work, can't be eaily parsed). The other CDs in the batch are equally worthwhile: the wholly-improvised Discernement offers one of the final recordings from the late John Russell, in a group with Lash, John Butcher and Mark Sanders; and Lash's quartet with Alex Ward (in guitarist guise), Ricardo Tejero and Javier Carmona on limulus showcases some of Lash's distinctive compositions, in and around (but never quite inhabiting) whatever we call 'jazz'. Get them here.

If Braxton's take on standards represents the latest stage in a decades-long engagement with jazz history in theory and practice, a different take on the music's relation to history emerges in a recent volume curated by Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta, out from Rab-Rab Press. Free Jazz Communism collects a number of historical essays, interviews, source texts and polemics, focusing in particular on the performance by the Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students held in Helsinki in 1962. Though the event's been mentioned in a fair few studies of the music, it's rarely been examined in detail, and is an interesting flashpoint for questions concerning free jazz, Cold War politics, and the like.  Pierre Crépon and I reviewed the book at Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes Critiques en Improvisation.

As well as Larry Young, recent listening has involved heavy rotations of Hasaan Ibn Ali's 1965 Atlantic date, long thought lost, which has finally been rediscovered and released as Metaphysics, out on Omnivore Recordings. A quartet set, it was recorded a few months after the 'Legendary Hasaan' trio date with Max Roach, with Hasaan's then-protegee, a young Odean Pope on tenor. Hopefully I'll have more to say on this one elsewhere--suffice to add that the archival buzz is more than justified in this instance.

Finally, a poem from Local Apocalypse (published by Materials in 2020) is up at the 87 press, with thanks to Azad and Kashif: https://www.the87press.com/post/digital-poetics-2-1-unhide-when-true-david-grundy.

(Writing not on this blog listed/linked on Linktree and the 'Writing Elsewhere' page on the sidebar.)

February Papers (Recent Writing)

[Tazartès / Corea / Graves / Oxley / Hemphill / Moor Mother & Billy Woods / The Locals Play Braxton]

Once more the new year sees the passing of some of the fundamental musicians of the margins. I wrote a fairly lengthy article about the extraordinary singer Ghédalia Tazartès back in 2009, when there wasn't much attention being paid to his music outside the world of music-sharing blogs, Tazartès on the cusp of a the flurry of activity, including collaborations including the groups Reines d'Angleterre, with David Fenech and Jac Berrocal, and reasonably frequent live performances. While there's much that's cringey or inaccurate about the writing, I'd still stand by some of its characterisations of his music. I'd add that 'singer' doesn't really capture the scope of his artistry: the music's focus is on his powerfully flexible, emotive voice, but the role of a kind of cracked analogue technology, of recordings spliced, looped, cut-off mid-phrase, incorporating the sounds of life all around them, is equally vital to their loosely authoritative architecture. Dialogues, shadows, doubles, music that's made out of the valued detritus of life, Tazartès' apartment by all accounts shaped like his music, a Simon Rodia-esqueassemblage spilling over at the edges, a magpie-like imagined folk music beyond the bounds of nation or people but with all the grit and attention to detail of a music made from the bottom. "Ferme ta gueule, Zarathustra!", as one of his pieces so memorably puts it.

Also in February, the passing of Chick Corea and Milford Graves--who, improbable as it may seem, were both part of Graves' Latin Jazz group in the early 1960s, and whose respective directions suggest something of the options available: either fusion stardom or unwavering commitment to the avant-garde and undersung community focus. Predictably, I find Corea's early experiments, which have, so to speak, been marginalised in his own career, the more interesting: his ring-modulated electric piano in the Miles Davis 'Lost Quintet' (whose only recordings come from their relatively brief live tours of 1969 and 1970) was, years ago, a kind of gateway drug for free jazz; likewise, the swarming precision of his trio work with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes and with Dave Holland and Brian Altschul--as well as the large ensembles on Sundance and Is--suggests a brief moment where he, Wayne Shorter and others were pioneering a brand of fusion, exploding from Davis' turn-of-the-decade bands, that had improvisational discovery at its heart, that burst all genres at the edges, rather than packaging up the most palatable elements of each in every-extending technical grandstanding and slick composition. So we have Corea on marimba(!) on Shorter's Motto Grosso Feio as part of a percussive thicket, slivers of slide guitar and cymbals crashing from both sides of the stereo picture; or swapping places with Jack de Johnette to play drums in the Davis Quintet--someone in the audience asking Davis what was going on with his new band and Davis replying that they were simply doing their thing. Above all we have his quicksilver piano playing, limber and lithe, bursting into dissonant runs enhanced by the ringing, bell timbres of the electric piano Davis had encouraged him to use and by the edition of ring modulation, blurring edges and adding multi-frequency possibilities previously encountered predominantly in the realm of avant-garde classical music. Even when playing acoustic instruments--as he continued to do until the formation of the first Return to Forever band--something of the approach taken from the electric version seeps into the style: a preference for harmonic ambiguity, for responsive and declarative statements that are open to flux and change. (Historian Bob Gluck's book on Davis' Lost Quintet provides some excellent accounts of this group and its place in the period, setting it aside not only the developing fusion movement but alongside other free jazz ensembles like The Revolutionary Ensemble and Musica Elettronica Viva.) Having formed a trio with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul, probably the furthest 'out' Corea got was the group Circle, with Anthony Braxton added to form a quartet. In some ways, Circle showed up both the interest and the limitations of Corea's free work, Braxton's coruscating precision sometimes making Corea's approach sound too technically flamboyant--those tendencies that would reach a nadir with what was, conversely, the band's most popular iteration, featuring Al Di Miola and the fusion variant of Stanley Clarke, whose playing with Pharoah Sanders had been so moving, melodic, strong, inventive. On albums like Romantic Warrior, it's as if endless run throughs of scalar patterns, tricky note combinations,  and sub-prog-rock fantasies of medieval feudalism(!) could substitute for heart and soul. I suppose we can blame dianetics--John Stevens tells the story of going to see Corea at Ronnie Scott's to ask if he wanted to do some playing, only to receive a scientology-infused lecture on making money and self-betterment. 

But no need to harp on that. Corea's compositions were fresh and inventive, unfussy but subtle studies emerging from his deep love and study of Ravel, Chopin, Mozart--the children's songs, the solo work--and early Return to Forever (the first two albums), while hardly as earth-shattering as those other outgrowths of Davis' bands--the Tony Williams Lifetime, Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi and Headhunters or early Mahavishnu Orchestra--is insistently melodic, light and joyful, abuzz with earworms: flute, electric piano, Flora Purim's wordless vocals, Corea incorporating his early Latin jazz experience into an atmosphere and sonic texture unique to this particular iteration of the band. Likewise,  while the duos with Gary Burton can become a little samey, lacking the haunting space--and, dare one say it, the historical range--of, say Walt Dickerson with Sun Ra, tracks like 'Crystal Silence' rhapsodize appropriately, blissed-out, dancing and swirling. And for all the polish of the Elektric Band--RTF's medieval pomp replaced by a kind of corporate sheen--the acoustic music in particular that he continued to produce until his death showed him capable of subtlety, variety, wit, improvisational grace.

Milford Graves, on the other hand--what can one say. Reinventor of drums, of percussion, of the rhythmic capacity of music: totally committed to music as communal, communicative, collective; totally nonpareil. Contrast Corea's scientology-inspired contention that making a lot of money and playing big festivals was the index of spiritual success: Val Wilmer's As Serious as Your Life uses Graves as a kind of test-case refutation of accusations that the New Music was elitist, followed only by a white bourgeois/intellectual audience, etc etc, memorably opening with a vivid account of a performance by a variant of Graves' Babi Music groups in his lifetime neighbourhood, Jamaica, Queens. Live performance--not in arenas but in community venues, outside, etc--was central to Graves' work, and the existing footage suggests the visual, holistic dimension of a music that incorporated movement as part of its total practice: saxophonists moving off stage to play in the audience, Graves playing his kit with his whole body or dancing away from it. Force, energy, joy.  More thoughts on Graves in a piece for Artforum here.
And, thinking once more of drummers who've reinvented the kit and the approach to the drums, I've just finished reviewing some Tony Oxley reissues for the upcoming Point of Departure--the long-unavailable February Papers--featuring among others, the superlative and criminally ignored violinist Phil Waschmann, and Oxley playing the edge of a knife blade with a violin bow--and more posthumous live evidence of his superlative duo with Cecil Taylor. More detail in those reviews, which I'll link when they've been published: for now, suffice to say that they're vital studies in Oxley's art and in the possibilities of the drums in improvising contexts.

Elsewhere, in terms of new/old music, I'd be remiss not to mention The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony, the fantastic new Julius Hemphill box-set from New World Records, drawn from the extensive Hemphill archives at NYU: Marty Erlich's informative and thorough liner notes are here. Like that of Graves, Hemphill's is a music that bursts at the seams of recording. And so even this comprehensive and lovingly assembled box--a labour of love comparable to the Albert Ayler Holy Ghost box or the recent New York Art Quartet set, Call it Art--leaves me wanting to explore even wider. Among other things: to see Sweet Willie Rollbar's Orientation, the unfinished 1972 film that sees Hemphill, poet K. Curtis Lyle and dramatist Malinké Elliott wandering into a field of Dogon sculpture; to think about Hemphill's use of the minstrel figure against itself (Baraka's "renegade behind the mask") through the figure of 'Roi Boye', and other aspects of his use of poetry and theatricality. Revisting Benjamin Looker's history of the Black Artist's group, its excavation of that Fort Worth context--Hemphill, Coleman's younger cousin, hearing Louis Jordan from every window, travelling to Chicago to see the AACM (and refusing to join as he'd just go out of the army--he'd hung Nation of Islam posters in his room to try to get kicked out)--is certainly a good first step. And then: to think through Hemphill's use of the figure of Janus; his creation of works based on Ellison's Invisible Man--Todd Clifton's funeral speech juxtaposed with Soweto in 1976--of operas for massed saxophone, the brass band of army experience meeting the expanded ensembles of early and free jazz; the fact that he was the partner of the great classical pianist Ursula Oppens, for whom he wrote a superlative piano piece; to consider how it's possible that Dogon A.D.--recorded, as Looker notes, in less than auspicious circumstances (AWOL musicians, malfunctioning recording equipment)--is such an astonishing record. 

Music of more recent vintage, which explodes ideas of history, past and future in its haunted presentness, Moor Mother and Bill Woods' BRASS finds Moor Mother in more conventionally hip-hop territory than on her other recent releases from a busy 2020--the free jazz opera Circuit City, Irreversible Entanglements' Who Sent You?, and a live duo with AACM flautist Nicole Mitchell--but her words are sharply diagnostic, jarring and haunting as ever. From 'Blak Forrest':"I don't know time but I see it passing me / While the trumpets play casually / Sound like Albert Ayler, like 'Why these ghosts chasing me?'"

And finally, an ensemble put together by Pat Thomas back in 2006, and a record that, like the Oxley releases above, has been put out by Martin Archer's Discus label. 'The Locals Play the Music of Anthony Braxton' might slip under the radar, offering as it does funk versions of Anthony Braxton compositions, but it should be at the top of everyone's listening lists. Dominic Lash in a rare outing on bass guitar lays down the funk; Thomas is on piano and melodica; his brother Evan on electric guitar; Darren Hasson-Davies on drums; and Alex Ward's clarinet swoops and dives in joyous abandon. (I can only assume that it might approximate a semi-legendary band--to me at least--featuring the Thomases playing in the style of Ornette Coleman's Prime Time groups, of which I've heard tell but no recordings.) 'Composition 6C' might be the highlight: Evan Thomas' opening guitar squall leading to a solid groove and Braxton's melody dancing out in slick yet rough-edged unison, inexorable and irresistible. There's no way this should work, but it does--in the process telling something about Braxton's music that might return us to it with fresh ears.