A relatively spontaneous announcement of a relatively spontaneous gig: this for a new quartet combining poetry and music, with myself (poetry), Andrea Burelli (voice, poetry, perhaps violin), Lucio Capece (bass clarinet), and Stellan Veloce (cello). It will happen at the Casino for Social Medicine at Sonnenallee 100, Berlin, on this coming Saturday, 16th May, at 19h.
As a trio, Stellan, Lucio and I worked together twice last year, and
that was beautiful. (Their duo at a performance a few months before the
first of those occasions, after which I approached them to work
together, was even more beautiful). As a quartet with Andrea, we’ve done
one rehearsal so far, and I think it’s entering a whole new dimension,
which I’m very excited about.
Also reading will be Tracy Fuad. And I’m excited about that, too.
Two luminous orchestral works by the late, great Wayne Shorter: first, Dramatis Personae, a Lincoln Centre Commission from 1998 with Shorter on soprano, Jim Beard on piano, Christian McBride, bass, and Herlin Riley drums alongside orchestra conducted and arranged by Robert Sadin--the bridge between the monumental, and underrated, High Life(1995)and the orchestral collaborations of the Danilo Pérez/ John Patitucci/ Brian Blade acoustic quartet to come.
A decade-and-a-half on, the massive LA Philharmonic commission Gaia (2013), described by Richard S. Ginell in Variety as a “murky, thick-set monster of a piece [...] massive, slow-moving, opaque textures, sometimes tracking Wayne’s distinctive long, snaking melodic lines on soprano; treating the sections of the orchestra as blocs”. Varying in performance from 25 to 30 minutes, this version from Gdansk in 2014 veers toward the latter, with Shorter on soprano forming part of a quartet with Leo Genovese (piano) and Terri Lynn Carrington (drums); the solo vocal part and libretto are by Esperanza Spalding, who also doubles on bass as part of the quartet.
Shorter first began work as a teenage student at NYU, and it’s to be hoped that Shorter’s Kennedy Center collaboration with Spalding on the opera Iphigenia--his final piece after he retired from performing in 2019--might appear in the future. For now, the serene drama of these orchestral works represent the majestic, achieved late blossoming of the compositional impulse Shorter had been building throughout his entire life, from his early work on that teenage opera through to the unreleased orchestral pieces Universe, Legend and Twin Dragon he wrote for Miles Davis in the 1960s and ’80s (later realised by Wallace Roney) and the misunderstood trilogy of post-Weather Report Afro-futurist epics Atlantis (1985), Phantom Navigator (1986), and Joy Ryder (1989), along with the aforementioned High Life.
I have a longer piece on Shorter in The Wire, with thanks to Meg Woof.
(Edited down from a 30,000 word draft--with plenty more to say on Shorter’s orchestral work, his status as composer, and the framing of ‘jazz’; more of that may see the light of day elsewhere.)
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In other news:
My interview with composer Hannah Kendall is online at Bachtrack: Kendall is Composer-in-Residence at the Royal Academy of Music this March, and a couple of concerts are forthcoming the following week. Highly recommended if you’ve not heard her music in performance before.
On March 22nd the trio GUE will be making its delayed debut at waterintobeer in Brockley, South London. Jacken Elswyth on banjo, Laurel Uziell on electronics and myself on electronics and melodica. We’ll be joined by a saxophone trio of Alex McKenzie, Nat Philipps and Nicholas Hann, plus Tom Mills on theremin. Tickets £5, doors 6:30, to be wrapped up by 9pm. Eventbrite page here.
Finally, I’m delighted to reveal the cover for the Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton, co-edited by myself and Lauri Scheyer, and now available for pre-order from Wesleyan. The book includes material from across his career--including the long out-of-print The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong--and a foreword from Hernton’s longtime friend, publisher and champion Ishmael Reed, along with notes, chronology, and index. It will be published this August.
In February I was interviewed about A Black Arts Poetry Machine by João Paulo Guimarães (University of Porto) and Elina Siltanen (University of Turku) for the online Poets Talk Politics Series hosted by the University of Porto. Thanks to João and Elina for the questions and discussion, and to João for the invitation. The event was live-streamed and should be uploaded to the Youtube channel of the Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa in the next few weeks. For now, it's available on Facebook, as embedded below (no need for an account) or at this link.
Also online is the video of the online launch for Present Continuous back in January, hosted by Malvika Jolly and with responses from Tyrone Williams, Linda Kemp, Ciarán Finlayson, and Ghazal Mosadeq, can be seen on the Pamenar Press Youtube channel here, or in the video embedded below. Many thanks to Malvika for hosting and Ghazal and Hamed for publishing, designing and typesetting the book!
Some photos from the 'Electro-Acoustic Responsiveness' gig at IKLECTIK with Eddie Prévost (percussion), John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones), N.O. Moore (guitar), Emmanuelle Waeckerlé (voice, objects), and Tony Hardie-Bick (electronics), courtesy of film-maker Stewart Morgan, whose film on Prévost should soon be nearing completion.
Photo credit - Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz
And some photos from the Materials/Materialien reading at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, with James Goodwin (launching the new collection Faux Ice), Lütfiye Güzel and Laurel Uziell: thanks to curators Ann-Kathrin Eickohf and Elisa R. Linn.
James will be doing a UK launch for his book at Café Oto in Dalston on Sunday 9th April; this will also be the launch for Candace Hill's astonishing book-length poem Short Leash Kept On. James will be in conversation with Nisha Ramayya and I'll be in conversation with Candace via Zoom. (Fred Moten will be reading, in his trio with Brandon Lopez and Gerald Cleaver, later in the evening.) Tickets from the Café Oto website.
Finally, in further Materials news, Anne Boyer's Money City Sick as Fuck and Lisa Jeschke's The Athology of Poems by Drunk Women are back in print and can be purchased from the Materials website at the following links: Boyer here and Jeschke here.
I'll be playing at IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Ln, London SE1 7LG, with members of Eddie Prévost's London Improvisation Workshop (Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Tony Hardie-Bick and N.O. Moore), Eddie Prévost, and John Butcher, on 14th February. Details here: https://iklectikartlab.com/electro-acoustic-responsiveness-improvised-trajectories/
And a couple of weeks later, on Sunday 26 February 2023, I'll be at IKLECTICK again for here.here | Social Virtuosity with Eva-Maria Houben, as part of the here.here series curated by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and Harry Whalley. Three new works by Eva-Maria Houben, written for Artur Vidal and Dominic Lash, will be performed, and there'll be a discussion with Eva-Maria led by myself and Emmanuelle. More details here: https://iklectikartlab.com/here-here-social-virtuosity-with-eva-maria-houben/ (Artur and Huw Morgan will also be performing more work by Eva-Maria on Friday 24th Feb at 7pm, St James Garlickhythe, Garlick Hill, London EC4V 2AF, UK. See: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/all-good-things-come-in-threes-music-by-eva-maria-houben-tickets-518929260387)
The performance of Eva-Maria's Together on the Way last year was truly one of the most astonishing things I've seen (I wrote about it on this blog): these works really live and breathe in live performance, and if you can, I'd encourage you to try to make one or other or both of these performances.
WEDNESDAY 10th OCTOBER (tomorrow!) Red Rose, Finsbury Park, London
Pretty late notice, but a quick head-ups for this gig - if you're able to get there, you should definitely go along. Trevor Watts is now the sole surviving member of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble following the recent death of Paul Rutherford. Time Out magazine describes this as "intoxicating tribal jazz-dance with an emphasis on Latin rhythms from the saxophone and percussion duo, supporting their recent album 'Ancestry'."
