Altissimo (The Cry): Preview

Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge, October 7, 1961 © Atsuhiko Kawabata (photographer) /Hanako Kawabata. First published in Jazz Times.
 

A subscriber post on Substack, on the late Sonny Rollins.

There’s a radio recording from the Half Note in 1966 (or perhaps 1963, depending which discography you use): Rollins with McCoy Tyner, Walter Booker, and Mickey Roker, moving in and out of tunes at will; melody stacked free associatively on melody—rhapsody, in the sense of rhapsōidos, “stitcher of songs”, as if Rollins might play every song he knew, that act of association and recall a kind of survival force. Rollins was always walking around the club while he was playing, walking off stage while he was playing, playing within the form: having already begun as he stepped out of the taxi and walked into the venue, or deciding to take a trip up the stairs and out of the club to serenade Alice and John Coltrane in their home, followed by the remnants of the faithful. Sound bouncing off buildings, the walls, sound that would not be contained.

Walking while playing evokes the barwalkers, the entertainers of R&B, movement that refuses fixity; it’s a way of thinking, an exercise of freedom, a desite to get away, an impatience with the limitations of the form or the stage. This movement doesn’t translate to recordings; registers, instead, as a kind of sudden absence. In his unaccompanied cadenza on the Half Note recording, there are huge pauses as he moves around the room, testing the space: interruption, tension, void. All the more so given that these performances were broadcast on the radio, where they become dead air. But, rising again, resurrecting across the silence, Rollins comes back, the melody comes back, the force of remembrance, re-membered: a body put back together, gathering the limbs of Osiris. One tune becomes another, ‘Oleo’ to ‘Poinciana’ to ‘Happy Birthday’ to a newly abstract or abstruse motif: all those moments where what’s quoted and what is the thicket in which quotation occurs constantly blur and stretch, the earworm always within reach.

guitar (Preview)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

But the kernel is not necessarily rational.

“But a vision had to have been there.”*

Recent writing elsewhere

Some recent writing elsewhere...

Pleased to have poems alongside good company in Michael Klausman's and Patrick Tillery's magazine Luigi Ten Co: a sequence called 'Axis and Orbit' and a prose poem from something in-progress...

Thanks to Florence Uniacke for producing this beautiful pamphlet, Two for Notley, for the Cafe Oto summer fair, with proceeds going to the new trans health centre at House of Annetta.

One of the two texts in the pamphlet is an extended version of a text that first appeared on this blog. And a different version of that text is also up at Little Mirror--thanks to Hunter, Jen and Allie.

Also out, a piece on Steven Belletto's extremely well-researched new biography of the great Ted Joans, Black Surrealist, over at The Poetry Foundation: "Nothing to Fear From the Poet but the Truth".

Finally, I've introduced a paid option for my Substack, same name as this blog, over at this link. A paid subscription gets you access to any posts over 1,000 words, which go behind a paywall. The Substack-ification of writing (and the way it negotiates the sphere of paid writing, traditional media, precaritisation of readers and writers alike) is perhaps something to be ambivalent about, but it is, at least, a platform...