‘Belabouring in Vain’: Scattered Notes on Michael Haslam

Let’s start with the introduction Haslam pens to the volume around which these notes will flip and flap (‘A Cure for Woodness’, the concluding part of his ‘Music’ trilogy). There at first is posited an apparent desire to get away from that soundplay, that rhyming rhythmic jingle-jangle (which John Wilkinson would term a schizoid ‘clang association’ (viz. his analysis of John Wieners’ work)) in which H. has so often revelled, arcane etymological connections not as language’s historical sedimentation (viz. Adorno), but as sidetracks, the eccentric investigations, almost, of a Victorian leisured gentleman (tho’ rougher-shod, and informed by a life of labour): locality and quaintness, amateur histories (some of which spirit, now I think of it, does hover round certain of the ‘English Intelligencer’ prose that’s recently been put out by Mountain Press, particularly Peter Riley’s various investigations of Britain’s stone age past – though there things are more tempered by (a) academic temperament and (b) a sometimes crushingly Olsonian grand project to reclaim origin and to re-write history thru what I guess one might call ‘investigative verse’). In part, of course (and as the succeeding poems in actuality prove) H. actually wants to defend that laboured-leisured sense of non-academic play, often within Nature (we’ll let the generalized term stand, as place-holder, for now) as refreshment for melancholy or ‘woodness’, as a consolation not Romantic-regressive but necessary: “the birds and mammals, streams and flowers and trees, the web of all living life and the pleroma of physical forces, with humanity de-centred”; even without the “religious cause,” in which Nature, however ‘fallen’, still revealed something of God (to the monks on Skellig Michael, for instance, or to St Francis, exhibiting humility and openness in a non-anthropocentric universe), “there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our being enlivened by the beauty of our sustaining ecology” (but note a total lack of sentimental earth-mother piety in this (tho’ the earth as feminine fecundity trope does crop out with a fair frequency in the following verses): “It’s marvellous how consoling the cruelties of nature can be”) – in any case, (inter-)dependence rather than just Brute (Social) Darwinism, the fittest survival; the role of co-operation, yes? But still this worry that the language sound-play and often blatant use of rhyme into which H’s verse has moved functions as regression and narrative from his earlier ‘languescope’ of impersonal undirection and non-paraphrasability, in which the question of “whether the results divulged merely my own so-called ‘Unconscious’ or the truth of the world would be for the world to judge.” Yet the “grand abstract vision” (viz. Hart Crane’s Bridge as abstract synthesis in poetry of that which in life remains messily separate and clashing (as Atlantis, eternity, “one song” which “devoutly binds,” “in single chrysalsis the many twain”)) can’t be accomplished, even in verse: the fall instead is into plot and soundplay – not as (fortunate?) Fall but as “waves & cycles of personal emotional happenstance” – despondence, confidence, elation, tragedy, etc – which aren’t exactly specific in the narrative fixity they impose on the poem; rather, “personal, but common enough” – not as exact specific biography, the poem as confession, ‘authenticated’ by its status as document of inner struggle (and thus elevating the role of the author as one who feels ‘more’, or ‘better’, than us ordinary mortals, and whose documented feelings thus deserve more attention or respect more than those of non-artists). The aim is to avoid being falsely ‘universal’, un-historically/-socially specific in a disingenuous, metaphysical, escapist sense of unchanging essence, whilst simultaneously acknowledging and highlighting personal contingency, even a certain capriciousness. Such capriciousness is central to Haslam’s persona, and is what perhaps enables the free-flowing (though of course, exquisitely controlled and skilful) Delight of his poetry – drawing attention to a certain sonic materiality, sensuous sound-patterning and excited jibber-jabber prized over a previous investment in what H. describes as a certain modernist absence, a near-religious worship of the void (the 'languescope': “There was a time when I was strongly drawn to the lure of an idea of absence. How can Emptiness shine like a tin can? The siren idea I drew from a concept formed from what I might call post-Symbolist French poetry. I remember hearing and reading such stuff in the 1970s. So much whiteness, nothingness, void, and silence, absolute silence. There was something almost mystical in the absence of God: you could almost worship the blankness.”) Instead of such abstracted paring-down, we have here instead an associative play that is almost out of control, that takes one out of oneself, or that takes one outside a structuring sense of one’s self as a stable and rounded entity, instead focussing the sharp or blurred edges of moment-to-moment existence as experienced and lived in its non-schematic minutiae. It’s a little like watching a Stan Brakhage film, where Brakhage’s field of activity and wandering attention is on the play of light and movement, its forms of organization super-fast and contingent. (One could take any number of the painstakingly hand-painted and hand-scratched frames of those brief but highly, highly concentrated, flitteringly dense films from the latter part of his career, and present them as miniature paintings in themselves, but their cumulative power is very much meant to be, and indeed is, in their total effect, their combination into the moving ream: film as mitigating against the permanence (and thus the commercialization and elitist museum-bound segregation) of the art object, as a liberation of perception into temporal flux and flow). Similarly, any one of Haslam’s phrases might cause one to trip and pause on its delicious sonic effect (he could easily have made a fine sound poet), causing one to have to go back and re-read the line, and maybe the line before that, to get back into the ‘sense’ of it – it’s what makes reading Haslam such an exhausting pleasure, such a capacious joy: not because of difficulty of allusion, the kind of stringency demanded by certain forms of late modernist poetry, but because of sheer glorious density. Such density is, of course, a density of allusion and of multiplying potential meanings, cross-connections, associations, etc, as much as it is a density of sound, and the two are, I’d argue, closely connected: sound patternings spark sense connections that would not occur to the ‘rational’ mind, even if afterwards they are rationalized, placed in argumentative order, saying something rather than merely playing with nice vocalized jingle-jangles. (The process, in fact, is not that far off, in general methodology, if not in impact or real practical similarity, to the work J.H. Prynne was writing in the 90s and 2000s (‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ of course being a different proposition altogether, moving through tough and extended argument rather than the building up of thematic area by the build-up of quick-jump fragments and associative build-up)). The difference to Brakhage, of course, is that Haslam is working with language, packed full of signification and allusion, whereas Brakhage, particularly in those abstracted films, can move from visual signification to the creation of new forms that have no exact parallel in what we might see in the world itself (the closest analogy, and one he frequently made, being to ‘closed-eye vision’, that delicate patterning of light synapses when one closes one’s eyes (or, as D. Oliver puts it in ‘The Harmless Building’, “the ever-present background of combinational probability laws that were a more-modern hesistance of the swarm towards pattern, a swirling and sparkling”). Of course, H. could have moved into sound poetry proper, and that he did not suggests that his project is still very much invested in meaning – not the ‘liberated’ meaning of a grunt or growl (viz. Burroughs’ oft-cited statement that “words are an arbitrary communication system and any sound could do as well. An exquisite sonnet could be conveyed in bestial snarls and grunts.” Without overlooking the importance formed by language's non-verbal semantic elements – those qualities of voice (timbre, rhythm, pitch, etc) which are not so much formalized codes (though they contain recognizable features that allow them to be 'read') as individualized modes of conscious or unconscious expression – it would seem foolish to prioritize non-linguistic communication units as something 'better than language'; and, allowing for rhetorical overstatement, the valorization of a kind of 'primitive' animality (why "bestial snarls and grunts" rather than, say, the 'motherease' with which an infant is lulled? well, I guess Burroughs' misogyny would answer that question...) seems a little problematic. By this, of course, I don’t mean to suggest that poems should be all lulling sweetness and light…); OK, so not that ‘animal liberation’ thru sound, access to one’s inner spirit-man, one’s inner lion (a la McClure) (however parodically and delightfully ridiculous this is made to seem by Cobbing, his tongue firmly popping in his cheek), but a negotiation with the fact of mouthing words through tongue and teeth and spittle, a kind of muttering musical complex inside the head which one could become stuck inside, and which poetry’s delicate task is to pick its way through, using that near-schizoid sound to sound out new meanings, new association complexes, to combat language’s bureaucratized or war-mongering straitjacketing without falling into a lulling sonic cocoon of regressive rhyming chiming nonsense:

“The polymorphous parts / of sorry sores and soothing phoney story sorts” (‘A Bunch of Tales’).

Which seems to suggest that any chiming stories that are told are fakes, tho’ elsewhere, as we’ll see, the figure of wounds or bruises, blemish and waste and mess, stand more for a kind of down-to-earthness, a literal materialism that is multiple and, yes, poly-morphous (and poly-tonal, -phonic?), which H. wd most certainly endorse, and wish to participate within, in that self-description. And, let’s think about this: sound and stories have their linkage, in oral epic, the sounded refrain (refrain as both to sound again, and not to do so, to ‘refrain from’ – that dialectic in origin (as the original sensed of the word ‘rhythm’ clash between blockage and flow; as the Dogon word for ‘to open’ and ‘to lcose’ is the same): refrain, then, might be both affirmative action and negative inaction, refusal of action, excess and decorum.) And stories as sorting, arranging of multiple experience into one followed trajectory, one strand of narrative, akin (again I quote) to Hart Crane’s “one song devoutly bind[ing],” his “many twain[ing][…]in single chrysalis.” “Erosis” – giving over to eros (“woodness” as madness, including sexual elation, self-forgetting (madmens’ selves multiply, are forgot, become archetypical (Poor Tom, the generic crazed vagrant), also as erosion (of self? of land? of boundaries?) – the play in this section on ‘so’ sounds and on wounds, s’s and o’s, decay as painful wound (the "worm returning", penetrating in, as in Blake’s Sick Rose) and as ecstatic, tho’ “sickly bliss” – the holy fool, the blessed disease. A particularly striking conceit: clowns as nude weatherpeople (forecasters? rain dancers? the shamanic function sleeping right at the back of that most gleaming of regularized TV banality-bulletins, the weather report). And, ah, stars, as in Bunting’s ‘Briggflats’, that distance – “with starry gaps / of high renown.” A “cry” as birdsong, lyric O (not I) utterance, both the utterly personal and the inarticulate unperson’d, “sounding out of the depths of being” (Nietzsche), ‘O’ as folksong collective utterance at that moment of most personal pain (Prynne’s ‘English Poetry & Emphatical Language’), as danger/pain signal and as ‘music’ (birdsong – nature as decoration, no: “The cry might sound alarming. Clear enough. / It’s nothing personal. It could be couched / and may be decorated with birds.”)

“I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’” (Chuck D)

And with that on, now, to what I think’s the best poem in the book, ‘Belabouring in Vain’. Here there's play on lyric as mass/ folk / fairy (faerie?) pastoral, not as gossamer Edwardian kids at the end of the garden but as rough reverie (wood dwellers misconstrued as spirits might be outlaws, wild (green) men, Winstanley’s commune trying to eke out an arboured existence). So we have leaking, pissing, shitting, ‘wages’ recurring throughout – cash, consequences (wages of sin); we have art as (parodied) lyric (French?) delicacy –“pull faces / thinking phrases for the lyric graces, lilac cordial, vanilla curlew and so on. And hammer on / until the limb’s gone numb” – from easily-slipped dance or drink to lifted hammer, beating out the rhythm in repetitive strain  – art literally become wanking about, as in – “They say it [Art] wanks / to wage thankless assault on taste, by means of / glorious plebeian ructions” – some coarser (Anglo-Saxon?) materiality. The eruption of that rough rusticity of a peasant-pastoralised lyric, not as distanced court dalliance, rural tourism (“a cheap holiday in other people’s [idealized] misery”) but from within the place itself, or from some vantage near enough in sympathy not to render its fantasies spun too wildly into regression and lie: the people, labour, material facts, material world – as against, again, the courtly nostalgized idealisation of yer common-or-garden non-political pastoral idyll (that non-politics of course implicitly and insidiously political in its conservative claim). “There are dozens of us delving in the mass / of gross behaviour” – a kind of free love orgy (“each labourer may love / his or her next or nearest neighbour[…]dreaming nakedness, I readdress thy face”) which is partly imagined as “reverie” and dream, perhaps akin to the gender reversals and temporary madnesses in Shakespeare’s ‘green worlds’ – As You Like It’s Forest of Arden, Cymbeline’s Welsh mountains, the Tempest’s Isle, Twelfth Night’s Illyria, and most particularly, A Midsummer Night Dream’s Athenian Forest. Here we might recall RF Langley’s poem ‘Cash Point’, in which AMND leaps into the present, with a cash point as the “hole in the wall” through which Pyramus and Thisbe communicate, that hole as a point of access between a world of reality and a world of dreams (occurring explicitly in a play within a play, a parodied love story, Romeo and Juliet played for laughs) – like Bottom, those that seek to escape, say, the urban world, the world of court intrigue or brow-beating end up being turned into donkeys, literally being made an ass of. Langley suggests that both Pyramus and Thisbe’s attempt to keep their love alive through the hole (the sexual punning obvious, that hole perhaps, even, as a glory hole, anonymising and rendering almost entirely individualistic what should be an ecstatic inter-personal closeness), and a modern attempt to “cash in dreams for reality, language for things” (in Jeremy Noel-Tod’s words), are efforts doomed to failure, fictions of consoling artifice: the quasi-magical exchange of a pin number for a piece of paper which will allow one to purchase material things is a kind of ‘cashing in’ on the dreams that, say, promises of endless credit encourage –“With your last twitch you can / point at the letters that make up / the spell” – ‘spell’ referring to words as well as to magic, to the act of naming a desire that, it is hoped, produces the material effects of that desire’s presence, but which ends up as just another deferral, another consoling fiction as are the fairies in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (a play which, for AD Nuttall (in ‘Shakespeare the Thinker’) is “not escapist; it is about escapism,” subjecting its subject to a “philosophic scrutiny of the status of love-experience” to be “maintained to the end of the comedy”). If Langley remains sceptical about the consoling power of either cash or nature (elsewhere, he draws together a territorial dispute between a beetle and a wasp and the suspicion which led to the execution and torture of numerous women during the era of witch trials – misrepresentation, the fantasy of fairies and witches, as both consoling and dangerous, leading (as does the fantasy of endless cash and credit) to immiseration and exploitation), Haslam is more like Mercutio, in whose Queen Mab speech – according to Nuttall’s account of it – “wild imagination” ends up “outrun[ning] intellect”; and, unlike Mercutio, he starts off by wishing to believe, if not in the literal existence of fairies, at least in some notion of a consoling nature, or, at least, a nature that is both curse and cure, both the cause of madness and the restoration to sanity: and this can happen in a poem, which can question its own premises, its own wildness of imaginative fancy and sound-play at the same time as revelling in precisely those qualities, constructing connections not possible in the real world, perhaps, bending time in and around on itself to create constellations of country labourers, lyric poets, poetic work and the work on the land, not ignoring the structures of oppression within either, nor valourising himself as a kind of modern-day John Clare (who’s later namechecked), but as partly-parodied “yokel local-focal,” wandering in eccentric bumbling bucolic melancholia.

‘Belabouring’s implied orgy, if it’s imagined as a kind of Green World dream, is also sex as concretion melding, as assertion of body into text rather than the virginal idealization of courtly love (L’Amour de Loin). The ‘gross’ of “gross behaviour” is an excess (viz. the talk of wages and work and counting up (archaic) coins) – ‘gros’ as Falstaffian fatness – ‘delving’ as digging into the earth (here a sexualized activity, no doubt) and as undoubtedly echoing John Ball’s famous notion of communal peasant closeness to land (“when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”), that non-hierarchical commons involving a free and shared sexuality as well as labour (hopefully not in the sense of customary tribal prostitution (polygamy for men) that Marx criticises with regard to notions of ‘free love’ in a non-Communist society (the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is yer reference here)). The poem’s title implies that reverie itself is a kind of labour, whether this be labour as birth, ripeness (“a state of ripe undress”), but still at a remove, a recall, a recoil; yet ‘reverie’, in its modern sense, only tells half the story – from the OED, we find a Dionysian ‘madess, delirium, wildness, rage, revelry, wantonness (13th cent. in Old French), incoherent thinking, wandering of the mind, foolish idea, idiocy, absurdity’ – similar indeed to that earlier traced etymology of ‘woodness’: reverie as ‘ravery’ rather than the Debussyian introspection with which one would normally be inclined to read the term). That danger of idealization, fictionalization, telling stories in sound that sound sound but that in fact deceive, taking sound as sense to take leave of one’s senses, in the woods, a mad malady, and yes, this is anticipated and satirised, or fun is poked at it, even in the midst of the most jangling-dangling bits of sound-patterning, where one might think meaning had completely run away with the fairies: thus, the anticipatory rhyme and word-prefiguring of “the butchers dress/ the tripe with cress[…]the village lads and lases[…]in states of ripe undress.” Tripe and cress, daintiness and roughness (roughage), animal / meat and vegetable / plant, the shit or piss that comes out and the food that goes in (the “lyric graces” of “lilac cordial” and “vanilla curlew” (addition, entry) turn to “a loss, a slash, a pee, a piss”, a kind of jocular “aperture” between inner and outer, self and nature into which the waste goes, defecating outside: “that’s my own / at the aperture, open flies / at the back of the shed, / the industrial wate”; where flies become both zippers and insects, organic waste paradoxically industrial, this latter reminding us, perhaps, of the human workers who enabled the, say, inhuman machine-ations of the Industrial Revolution to sprout. Read yer E.P Thompson. ‘Work’, in the poetic and the more usual physical sense, as both making (in the sense of the poetic ‘makir’), crafting, and as sweat, labour, physicality: if art is “hard at work / against vulgarity”, it is really also vulgar because of the hardness of its work, its sweat and flesh and bone (even as, at the end, Haslam drifts from what might thus seem a too-simple celebration of the Victorian work ethic into a more dreamily reveried in- or e-vocation of pastoralized haystack romping – tho’ even there, “the village lads and lasses lay about themselves with mops” – there playing into the last few lines’ play on the clean and the dirty, lyric grace and lyric grit or dirt or mirth or girth, the afore-mentioned tripe and cress, “cleaners wip[ing up] the mess.” And in such messy play of word and worth (where value is, say, meaning, in that metaphor of artistic merit in monied terms we can’t avoid, it seems (seams of “the ore raw bouse”)), ‘mess’ transl(iter)ates into the penultimate line’s ‘mass’, wehre mess is am ass of amassed meaning, hard to master, the labour forcing the pun, the point, to his master’s consternation, to the consternation of the reader reading or delving for solving or solvent clues, for --- synthesis, Haslam here substituting the synthetic for the organic, the synaesthetic (as in ‘A Bunch of Tales’’ sensual mingling – “send out an ear to look”) for the single-minded, in multiplicity, simultaneity, super-imposition, in an ecstatic equivalent of sonic jangle that points to a lighter version of (again) Brakhage’s dissolutions of overlaid image: over-laid, be-laboured, a ‘lay’ as sex and as song, laying back and going for it, energy and repose, labour and reverie, making us work in pleasure, reconciled even, as in Marx’s unalienated dream that we might so be, in the full communism of the individual free to pursue whatever course at that moment is fancied – hunter, fisherman, critic, at different times of the day. That this happens, or even can happen, only in poetry or in necessarily speculative philosophical aside does not render it simply a pipe dream, a song that drugs and dulls to stupor, but as that refreshment that H. found, in his introduction, in the woods above his home, that we might find in a notion of complete personal and political liberation (or as near as could be complete in the necessarily shifting provisionality of any apparent completeness within a non-metaphysical, dialectical understanding of the world as continuous movement, dynamism, contradiction, growth (viz. Mao Zedong, y’all)) – that refreshment necessary to go on at all, to re-invigorate the struggle, whether for continuing poetic composition (‘continuale song’) or continuing fights for the removal of oppression, the ‘green world’ not as the containment structure it assumes as temporary ritual breakout within an inherently conservative framework, but as the possibility for a real radicalism to be (whether in imagination or reality) tried, tested, worked thru, poetry’s su/staining alternative. (But there’s so much of this, in this, that I can’t take too much at one time – so much rhyme, excess, express-train-wandering all over the track (tho’ in fact, as one reads on, one realizes that the range of referenced tropes is relatively slim in recurrence across the whole scope of the book). It would be too easy to overdose, to glaze things over, to just collapse – to fall flat on your back and let it all wash over you. Or you’d go mad, get that wild woodness Haslam harps on, fall head over heels into some realm that not so much heals but hauls one unstoppably in all conceivable directions, un-homing, crazed flight. In that sense, I guess, it’s precisely the opposite of the staid stillnesses in yr common garden pastoral idyll (even Larkin (Philip)’s urban scrubland blanknesses (‘Here’)) - the ‘city’ energy of modernism exploding into a Natural riot of song and voice, bird and birth and berth, in real multiplicity that opening outside: where be-laboured reverie becomes just as much a fantastic dance as hard labour, exploding vibrancies of wired contemplation.)

More (maybe) to follow.

Aisha Orazbayeva: The Traces of Sound

Works by Lachenmann // Feldman // Boulez // Nono
King's Place, London, Monday 23rd April 2012 

Aisha Orazbayeva's recital of works for solo violin played to a smallish room, an attentive audience who knew what they were in for, and there was narry a cough or an ill-judged (boogie-stop) shuffle to be heard – apart, that is, from a strategically placed throat-clearing whopper (or so it felt) at the very end, seemingly demanding that applause break the heavy hush that had settled at the end of Luigi Nono's 'La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura'. Likely, half the audience didn't know the piece had finished, or only half-suspected as such, given that their eyes were shut in contemplative concentration (the heavier breathing that accompanies such poses a curious sonic side-effect which, in its own way, took on the irritant status usually occupied by the cough). My eyes were shut too, for most of the piece – though the theatrical dimension, in which the soloist moves between six music stands, each laden with a large sheet of folded manuscript paper inscribed with hand-written notation, notes and indicators sometimes scribbled and highlighted in apparent incompletion, demanded at least a little over-the-shoulder peak, now and then (heads craning and turning almost in the manner of school-children taking a look at the fascinating events occurring outside the window, when they know they should be facing the front of the class (in this case, the lit stage, with its central music stand and row of eight speakers, all turned to face the wall)). That slightly awkward dynamic is perhaps not what Nono had in mind – his description of the piece as “a madrigal for many travellers” – the generation of a group identity through multi-tracked singularity – suggests a kind of communality that, in practice, is perhaps not usually found in the concert hall; though it is also, of course, about ghost dialogue and schizophrenic uncertainty and all the rest of that uncomfortable stuff (something dealt with more explicitly in Boulez’s ‘Dialogue de l’ombre Double’), and, given this, that awkwardness might to some extent be intentionally built into the piece. Well, OK, but ‘intention’ is not really a word I like to use; I feel myself falling back into the terminology of the controlling composer almost as soon as I write about a more traditionally-composed work, it seems, and I would want to resist that urge. So, intention is less important than the actual experience of the work in performance, and it seems to me that ‘La Lontananza’s theatricality is somewhat limited, perhaps claiming more for itself, in terms of spatial experimentation, than it actually delivers: despite the distributed speakers and music stands, despite the play between live and recorded sound (partially controlled by whoever is at the mixing desk on the night, as active performer in themselves), we are still in a controlled situation, being delivered a composition – as opposed to, say, the more fluid shared dynamic of post-Cageian silences, or the rebarbatively chummy, dialogic intimacy of gnarly pub-improv. Not that listening to fluid jazz improvisation is necessarily different (though the sense of communal participation, shouted encouragement, etc, before it turned into the stale cliché of applause at the end of every solo, or on the occasion of every segue into banal riff-playing or tune-quoting, has perhaps been lost in the enshrinement of jazz as museum piece cultural exhibit, Lincoln Centre et al) – I think the problem, though, is that Nono’s piece gestures towards a kind of potentially participatory theatricality (participatory in the sense that it least causes the audience some discomforted engagement, even if it doesn’t ask them to volunteer or make their own sounds or anything that crude), without really ever doing more than making that slight gesture, a suggestion that doesn’t gestate or develop a into fully-blown realization. Then again, the whole thing seems to me almost a work in progress, despite its length (probably near on an hour, though I didn’t check the timings precisely). I don’t mean this in a derogatory way – it is, in fact, what opens it up beyond the pitfalls I’ve been outlining, what constitutes its fascination through failure, or through the risk of failure. Nono prepared the written part hastily, in time for the work's premiere (it had been commissioned by Gidon Kremer), withdrawing it to work and re-work on it after, and perhaps, as Tim Rutherford-Johnson suggests leaving it still essentially incomplete on his death a year later. Through its rather higgledy-piggledly pre-recorded tape element, it becomes a work that draws attention to the material circumstances of its construction, to the labour involved in its production (here, no doubt, Nono's Marxism coming into play) – no effortless technical ease, no glossy product removed from the roots of its making, but a fragile and sometimes rambling working through of the ghosts of technique, the particular stylings of a musician's playing personality (I can't help hearing the sawed raw lunges that spring up at various points as very Kremer-esque), a move from a nervous if-not-busyness, then un-quiet, restless flitting, to the work's still heart, a mesmerising quietude in which the tape part almost disappears, or so meshes into the live playing as to become absorbed into it, the motion of bow on strong as reminiscent of breath, whisper hush only brushed, feather-dusted or delicately tinged with pitch, timbre taking centre stage in a way that I can't now help but hear through the prism of the improvised music that followed - viz. Angharad Davies, maybe even certain elements of Wandelweiser – the sound of an instrument moving away from its history into a blended otherness of extended technique and extremes of quietude and register. But, unlike that kind of 'reductionism' (the label itself reductive), Nono is very much concerned with paying explicit homage to the instrument's history (of course, I'm not saying that the improvisers aren't aware of this - see, for instance Seymour Wright's comments on his practice as an engagement with the entire history of the saxophone, his dedications to such figures as Jimmy Lyons, Pepper Adams, Steve Lacy, etc - all of whom sound, on the surface, a million miles away from his deconstructed instrument - just that, in 'classical music' as opposed to 'free improvisation', the goal of making audible historical reference as theoretical and practical engagement may be higher on the list of priorities). OK, this is, after all, a piece whose title combines the notion of idealized nostalgic past with that of a utopic future, so history, of whatever kind, has to be in there – even if that history comes through more as a slightly jumble of manipulated studio documentation (the occasional sound of an Italian-accented voice, presumably the composer's own; various incidentals bangs and crashes, probably relating to opening and closing doors, etc; what sounds like the violinist going through various techniques in a way they might in order to demonstrate to the composer the resources the instrumental composer might deploy in their piece) than as, say, the extended bricolage of quotation, re-framing, re-working that we find in certain works of Berio and of Lachenmann. I do wonder about how structurally successful the work, ultimately, is – hearing that middle section, and making the connection, explicitly in my mind, at that point, to A. Davies, I wondered if I would prefer not to have heard a live improvisation in which that material would have been developed for perhaps twice the length of time: there were moments when it felt as if so much stuff had been gathered that it was thrown together somewhat willy-nilly (OK, I realize this is exactly the criticism most non-initiates make of improv); and while this had the effect, of say, jolting one out of reverie or trance through a sudden burst of taped noise or one of those afore-mentioned Kramer-esque bursts, it also seemed to come and go without the structural precision or concentration that one might find in the work of, say, Feldman (where detail, in itself scrupulously notated and worked out, is experienced by the listener as part of overall shape, slow change, slow, as barely-noticed pulse slip (as opposed to the more obvious syncing in and out of Steve Reich's phase patterns), not necessarily 'going somewhere' (the progress narrative of climax, development, recapitulation, etc), but working with and through material in an organically organized tightness). This was, it must be admitted, my first experience of the piece, and I'm no Nono expert; I would say, though, that 'Non Consumiamo Marx', an electronic piece using recordings of chants and slogans from May 68, along with woozy electronics, suffers the same meandering quality, tho' as fever-dream reminiscence I suppose it works well – I'm just not sure it was really intended to have that quality, more to be a report from the barricades, political noise music, the avant-garde at the front of the street battle. Orazbayeva's careful and rather whimsical pacing between the music-stand stations, as if a parody of tip-toe walking, did heighten, though, the element of fragility which what I've called, perhaps unfairly, the piece’s directionlessness does engender: her walking well-suited the work’s own processual movement, its structural disappearances into itself, only to emerge with sudden asserted re-appearances, perhaps over-asserted in a desperate attempt to make a grand flourish, a definitive statement which is, however, never completed, fading back into indefinite temporality, into indefinition, incompletion, perhaps experienced as failure (the fall of Communism, prefigured a few months before its occasion by the work), perhaps as the necessary flux of the world and of its history as non-schematized potentiality.

Enough, now, of this garbled verbiage garbage! Those, anyway, are the thoughts the Nono prompted – and I’d like to look further into it, time permitting – but there was a first half, albeit a brief one, so I’ll just briefly sketch that out before I call it a night. We were promised another work for violin and electronics, this time a premiere, by the composer Martin Matalon, but that had disappeared from the programme on the night, to be replaced by a couple of quickies from Lachenmann and Feldman, along with the advertised ‘Anthèmes I’, a Boulez soupcon). The Lachenmann ‘Toccatina’, in its complete avoidance of the rhetorical flourishes of the violin repertoire that even Nono fairly frequency referenced, felt nicely-focussed and serious in its intent – though, as with other Lachenmann pieces, I felt its workings-through of non-standard techniques to be still a little, I don’t know, schematic and repetitive, still too tied to certain tenets of classical form. This is, in fact, the criticism Radu Malfatti makes of HL in his Paris Translantic Interview, which I re-read a couple of day’s ago, so perhaps I’m being unduly influenced; what I will say is that the upwards and downwards movement of the initial string-striking (with base of bow) may have over-stretched its welcome, but the final minute or so, in which the violinist bows a different part of the instrument’s body in turn, sounded wonderful. (There’s a piece by James Saunders which takes that sound of bowed wood as its only source, and I didn’t find that too inspiring at the time, but I may be tempted to listen to that again after hearing Lachnemann’s more limited use of the same technique.) Orazbayeva, a refreshingly un-showy, focussed stage presence, moved straight onto the Feldman without a break for applause (perhaps some people thought this was part of the same piece, though I doubt anyone who possesses the slightest acquaintance with either composer’s work would make that mistake): ‘For Aaron Copland’, a five-minute piece from 1981, is like a sparser version of that closing viola melody at the close of ‘Rothko Chapel’. In its unaffected sobriety – a kind of reticent mourning – it becomes quite devastating, as I listen to it on my headphones through the medium of youtube at one o’clock in the morning, the rain outside having finally stopped. In concert, I remember being disturbed by the heavy breathing of an audience neighbour, that fuss making the five minutes seem shorter than it was (something of the, ‘O, is that it already?’ vibe stirring up, which I felt a little bad about; knowing that my (dis-)appreciation of the piece was not a result of performance or composition but of a silly momentary irritation). The Boulez ‘Anthèmes’, on the other hand, seems to me a less interesting piece in itself. Looking back on my write-up of the Boulez performances at the 2010 Aldeburgh Festival, I recollect experiencing ‘Anthèmes II,’ the extended version for violin and electronics, as somewhat glib – nice surface, but nothing particularly challenging or of lasting structural interest – and in solo iteration, there’s even less to hang on to, so that the thing felt more like a catalogue of particular techniques than anything else – not as virtuoso showcase, more as little experiments Boulez had been making and decided to turn into a fully-fledged composition. The programme note described it as ‘cold’; perhaps that’s right, though my main problem was that it felt too conventional in its violin vocabulary, in a way that the Lachenmann, with its non-standard techniques, and the Feldman, with its unadorned melodic simplicity, did not, and which the Nono for the most part did not either. Good stuff, altogether, though; and nice to hear this music on programmes and in venues that better suit it than pre- or post-chestnut Proms sandwiches…

eartrip - issue 7

ok

Spring Decoys: Cambridge, 17.03.12

A decoy is usually a person, device or event meant as a distraction, to conceal what an individual or a group might be looking for.

'Spring Decoys' was a festival, I guess you'd say, that happened in Cambridge over four nights the previous week: this year's version of the Miscellanous (theatre?) Festivals which Jeremy Hardingham has been curating in the Judith E Wilson Drama Studio for the past few years and which have seen some extraordinary collisions and collections of poets and performers and musicians, extending often from seven in the evening till three in the morning – energies of productive chaos and some sort of social sense derangement, energies which you can take within you as tinderbox or as constellated spark which can't ever be fully translated outside that place's seal (even when you're inside that very place, that drama studio, again, for some other event), but which yet you do take, you do carry, in readiness for expected or unexpected re-prompting, re-flaring. The come-down is what's worse, and the chronicling or cataloguing of what did occur schematically is a part of that, but how else to make a sense of it beyond that it was, merely, a good one-night last stand?

So, yes, the Decoys were, then, drawing on this spirit of Miscellaneous Festivals past, the difference this time I suppose being that 'performance' and 'poetry' each had their slots on different nights (Wednesday's event in particular, involving Ollie Evans and Ian Burrows and Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon and Irum Fazal and Jeremy Hardingham, deserves a write-up which I haven't given it). Though the poetry event was far from a simple 'poetry reading', Justin Katko (that night's curator) maintaining, throughout the evening, an improvised noise jam (some keyboards / some max msps / some recorders and some kazoos / some record players / some melodicas / some korg monotrons) which played thru the intervals and even under and into some of the readings (most notably under Jonathan Redhorse's rhythmic and droll prose delivery and, at that stage of quiet spaced-out drifting concentration that inevitably sets in at the end of such a long and varied evening, under Samantha Walton's reading, accompanied with artless tenderness by Jow Lindsay on Jandekian plugged-in piano). At various stages, too, Jeremy Hardingham enacted extended or momentary solo performances which seemed both to work alongside and against those readings whose sonic and physical space they shared. Indeed, the evening was visually dominated by a construction he'd rigged up along the centre of the room (the audience placed around the walls' square) -- a row of large envelopes bundled into bag-shapes, filled with pieces of paper confetti (stage-snow, I guess), and dangled from the ceiling on ropes and electric cables, large pieces of squared paper taped underneath, to the black box's floor. Occasionally, he would perform a sudden act of what one might either term vandalistic outburst or creative opening up (evacuation?), unravelling, revealing what lay inside the initial formulaic blankness of the envelope scrunches, ripping and dropping fire exit signs, hammering white-painted wood constructions, crawling and contorting and eating paper snow and white dust.

But that I've written on his performances at this length doesn't mean that they dominated proceedings: there were 18 readers in total, one turning up on the night and asking to do something – which he did – the others mixed between Cambridge locals (who got five minutes each) and invited poets from out of town (who got fifteen): Marianne Morris, Sean Bonney, Ed Luker, Joe Luna, Jow Lindsay (tonight, as 'Sofia Stres'), Jonathan Redhorse, Frances Kruk, Danny Hayward, Samantha Walton and Jefferson Toal the visitors; Ryan Dobran, Neil Pattison, Tomas Weber, Caitlin Doherty, Connie Scozzaro, Luke Roberts, [Blank] the 'Cambridge poets'. As line-up this doesn't look 'established', though poets such as Bonney, I guess, count as 'big names' within the ridiculous but hopeful smallness of this 'underground’/ as it is: yet, yes, it looks like a young scene, and a varied scene, no 'Brighton' school or 'Cambridge' school, no Prynne vs Sutherland vs London debates, but an invigorated and ironized and heartfelt, often rebarbative, but in the end in some provisional way really collective, 'scene' (not even that word, which is too fixed, perhaps, though I don't mean to imply that 'anything goes'). Now this seems something like the line Chris Goode lays down in his introduction to the 'Better than Language' anthology, with the additional overlap (outside a book) of performance -- the poets' noise ensemble, the presence of theatre makers (themselves often poets or deeply invested in poetry) such as J. Hardingham, O. Evans, L. Jeschke, L. Beynon, whether performing or in the audience. In all of this the ramshackle (conversational adjunct, private whispers and jokes, interval spilling (wine as well), the passed bottle of whiskey, bar zero, the endless negotiations with the english faculty's electronic locking system) existing alongside the purposiveness and intensity of thought and critique of the poetry itself, which was, in the end, why we were there.

To go through the readings one by one, oddly, perhaps. Marianne Morris' set, its early placing and non-combative (tho' not lazily or easily won) gentleness, its quiet emotional and moral resolve, as she read fragments, literally at times, small scraps of ripped paper with the words written there; this method of reading, presenting work in progress and in working method, offering it up outside the category of the 'finished', is a risky move and one whose results could vary -- but having seen Morris read twice now, on two succeeding Saturdays (previously at the 'Women Poets Against DSK' event organized to follow the traumatic protest against the shameful platform given to D. Strauss-Kahn at the Cambridge Union), it is a method which in those moments has perhaps said, despite my initial reservations, or done, or made us or I feel, more than the overt aggressive hammering rack/ratch-ets which too are necessary and kin to it, and into whose anger too it spills: and this was a quieter reading, certainly, than the first: and the poem dedicated to Mary Stillman, tho' I can't quote its substance back as I'd like to, was really, yes, beautiful in its non-naïve directness and wish. Ryan Dobran's poem with its wit, hanging out in an alley with Michael McClure. And the release of laughter in that, the first now enabled in the audience. Neil Pattison, one of the highlights of the evening, I thought, reading his new and very different work, which is bright colours and Delicate Steve and Skeletor (these poems were addressed to Skeletor) and his reading, shunning the microphone, pacing and looking up at those for whom the poem was shared, and looking up to show that this did mean something in poetry and in life, and it did. And Sean Bonney, all prose, the letters he's been writing for the past six months or so asking themselves about poetry's efficacy, and the prose poem as form, or discovering what formal hybrid between, in any case making in that an argument which we do need to hear and hear even if at moments there might be the flare-ups or disagreements that any such strength or force of conviction-polemic might engender.

The first interval.

Ed Luker, reading much the same set, I think, as that delivered at the Foule Readings last term, last year: again in that internet jargon'd, ironized register which maybe is a 'Brighton' thing in some way - Joe Luna's reading later doing it too, tho' differently; Tomas Weber, the wax wiped off in time, his hours of labour invested the previous week in the making of the four-page poem he read on the night, proceeding as it did oddly on that mixture of allusion and joke (the twenty different nationalities that made their appearances, the fleeting characters disappearing in the space of a line or a word, the strange role and negotiation played by semi-private methods of text generation, the Santorum song/ the ‘Kill Blinton’ laughter points). I've tried to write about his work in a report on a previous reading and didn't really get anywhere; and so here; somehow it still resists me in that way, even tho' it doesn't feel resistant in a closed or harsh way – it is not 'friendly', such an awful word, or easy, but somehow still open to what is brought to (bear on) it.

The second interval.

One of Jow Lidnsay's hilarious extended screeds, governmental names checked and over-balanced in multiplying satirical venom, those moments when he could be heard over the raucous racket(eering) noise which he'd requested from the 'house band' (so many miles here from Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, it's not real). Joe Luna
’s poetry thru internet and irony defeating its own sudden lunges at utopic total universalism, seen as the only ground for ethical hope, head-spinningly, then spun back to the mirror or the filter, the window or the screen thru which passing data and role-play, tv shows jammed up on prynne, the unwitty circus, the plastic or pixellated selves thrown back at us thru which negotiating our real self, if that can be ever whole or non-complicitly separated (not yet), is the burden, placed, here, on and in and thru language.

The third interval.

Caitlin Doherty's first pamphlet has just appeared in a beautifully semi-wonky hand-made edition of 100 from Foule Press, and moves with incredibly dextrous assurance for a first publication thru registers from a page of sound poetry (read tonight) to choric dialogue which translated quite brilliantly into a collective performed realization at a Foule Reading last year: tonight was quieter, solo, newer work, I think, continuing the obsession with satellites that's translating into some really interesting riffs on technology – this is work that is really going places and should be kept on with for sure. Connie Scozzaro, reading just two poems, a shortness and a sharpness and a roughness; Jonathan Redhorse, about whom I know very little, tho' there are some engaging and really interesting pieces of his fiction that are internet searchable, with a sharp and smooth delivery I've already in part discussed or mentioned;

The fourth interval. No: these become blurred, I think the programme was departed from a little as things went on (probably eleven o clock at least by now). In any case, Frances Kruk, another prose work, the audience's flicking from Kruk to Hardingham's performing (as, again, I've mentioned) – I'd have liked to hear it better, because now I'm finding that I can't summon up incisive comment as I'd have liked (such slippings are inevitable, I guess; and in any case I wasn't sure I was going to write this up - to do so seems a little expected or boring, perhaps, now?); then, the fourth interval. Audience sliding around now, divisions between interval noise and reading less clear-cut: so, suddenly, Danny Hayward was reading, a long work, and as one would expect a politically incisive scalpel on the particular issues he'd chosen thus to excavate, excoriate; and Luke Roberts, for the second time that day, after the first reading in a long time, from the (excellent) 'False Flags' and a new work written in December -- that longer reading given at the Runneymede Literary Festival in London, this second five minutes only, a single poem only, again from 'False Flags', with its background preamble, Bobby Fischer and Kasparov, the poem if I remember correctly, and on looking thru the book, being 'The Sonar Deal';

The fith(?) interval (?!):

One other reader; then to end it Jefferson Toal, whose work is really prized in these parts by those few who know it, and which should, on the evidence presented of it tonight, be prized outside, and known by more than a few. The noise back up and the tidying up and finishing the alcohol and eventually at after 2AM everyone going outside, that entire dark dream.

ONE STAR LAUNCH // CAMBRIDGE, 25th FEBRUARY 2012

So, the launch for Luke McMullan and Sophie Seita’s finally-released magazine, 1* I guess we can call it, or alternatively pdpdpdpdpd: it’s from Contingency Press, its format is A4, and it’s got poems, got prose, got interviews real and fictive, got drawings (designs?,; got here at last after some time in the preparation. As readings go, I’d hesitate to call this a ‘reading’ as such (in the sense that term takes on as a kind of coded, public social experience). Because it was more like this: there’s this party going on and then can we all move next-door; so it’s just, what, ten people in a room, maybe a few more, and some of them standing up or leaning on tables and reading: poems mostly, one prose piece which in delivery, in fact, felt divided or enunciated at least cadentially, as if there were some line-breaks we couldn’t see as we read along. This (by Jonas Tinius) was about quotation, in part – about synaesthesia, as a whole – but, following Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicity-(non-)programme lead, also about gathering in, or scattering, diversities of sources and putting them in a kind of non-hierarchical dialogue with each other, argumentation as experimentation, testing out the waters. A passage from Nabokov in which synaesthesia links to childhood providing the refrain (de- or re-territorialization, D & G style), and amidst the D & G and Barthes and Serres the pleasant unobtrusiveness of a little throw-away sound play from Tom Waits about sleepy male whores, I think. At times the piece felt like it wasn’t really about synaesthesia at all; rather, synaesthesia serving as a trope for a kind of multiplicity or inter-disciplinarity which the magazine itself encourages.

Lisa Jeschke actually read first: three short poems which I’ve heard her deliver several times previously, brief and rigorous. OK. So I realized upon being asked to write up this event and the magazine that I’d written something on Jeschke’s work a month or so ago, but not done anything with it. And as it’s been lying on my hard drive in inactivity since then, let’s just shoehorn it in here for now. It’s about restraint and excess. Also talks about some work by Jeremy Hardingham, who wasn’t there at the launch, and Lucy Beynon, who was, so it both connects and moves away from the matter at hand, the review of the event. Bear with it, tho’, it’s only a paragraph.

restraint & excess in the work of jeremy hardingham, lisa jeschke, lucy beynon

from a poem by jeschke: "this rests upon restraint. // austerity measures." consider here: restraint both as a method of performance, a necessary paring-back or what jeremy hardingham might call 'evacuation', and as something associated with an ascetism demanded of us by those in power whose lives are anything but ascetic, their non-asceticism, their excess and extravagance in fact allowed by our enforced asceticism ("austerity measures" - 'cutting back', 'saving the pennies', 'adding an extra notch to the belt'). as such, it might be taken as a negative CONstraint, upon desire and excess, the latter as a revolt beyond the allowed or allowable, a shout in the face of the hypocritic enforcement of austerity. to what extent does self-imposed limitation – something very much present in the work of hardingham, jeschke and beynon – force an artistically rewarding tension between stricture and slippage, leaving minute space for negotiation, variation and invention within a set of apparently narrow, but often in practice, quite wide parameters? we might counter-balance this with the excess seen as a virtue in a particular kind of performance art - the vienna actionists and their caressed/tormented swans, the live action painting extravaganzas of georges matthieu, yves klein's objectifying nudey-paint-rolling 'anthropometries', nudity and meat and the writhing body as a kind of anti-technological animality, a primitivist assault – by contrast, moments of the shocking, or the perverse, assertions of wilful oddity here have their force precisely by not being the be all and end all, prolonged into endless orgiastic background noise, a kind of anti-ambient music with the same ultimate effect. consider, more in line with a restrained or cramped excess, yoko ono's apparently – and, indeed, truly – excessive vocal works – the prolonged sing-scream in which that performance pitch is maintained not as the rock star's flamboyant animal roar – roger waters, even iggy pop – but as something more constrained, sustained, a narrow confine forcing sustained discomfort, rather than allowing iggy's or waters' quick orgasmic release. also to consider: whether art which works within these restraints – the often conceptual scores of the wandelweiser group, john cage's number pieces, hardingham's recent theatrical works (which work specifically with an element of temporal restraint) – in some way also work with the manner in which we are constrained –socially, politically, economically, emotionally – in the forms of everyday life, in terms of allowed movement or speech or spatial existence – forcing similar restraint to be felt rather than simply unconsciously absorbed and acted within, and, paradoxically, opening up a space beyond that, a counter-restraint which is at once terrible, sad, tragic etc (if you like), and liberatingly imaginative (it's not the word i want, but it'll have to do), you yourself setting the terms of your own constraint, setting your own parameters within a space that you circumscribe, a magic circle in which excess plays with and against what would curb it and exacerbate it, in which limit is tested, enforced, and even, for the briefest moment, broken through.

So Lisa Jeschke read, and Jonas Tinius read, and Sophie Seita read, a new poem, untitled, about ten minutes in total to read, I guess, an exploration of a kind of structural boredom, in part, repetition and expectancy, managing to avoid the knowingly ironic smugness the approach potentially engenders through its own sense of its possible, and actual, deliberate banality; conscious too that it might just be ‘playing around’ – but a necessary play, I think, like Jeschke’s, in fact, looking at those conventions round readings, their righteousnesses, their slashings of irony and anger and intimacy, going outside all those things and instead, multi-lingually and calmly, going through a set of procedures in which formality is highlighted, anticipated, parodied, carried on with, followed through. “Skip another line

Break” and there is play with sound, the repeated line on the first page maybe even intended to trip up a too-smooth enunciation of its regularity, as a kind of re-assertion of error or risk amongst what, now I think of it, actually acts as a kind of error or risk in itself – the risk of boredom, the apparent appearance of CD-‘skip’, a hop and a jump or feet shuffling on the ground in a pulse that can’t quite remain as ‘soothing’ as it proclaims itself to be for the hardness of its cutting k’s and popping p’s, the ping-pong pop too, in the reading, of the played audacity click-track, loping plosives off tongue maybe twisting or re-iterating, re-iterating what, actually getting going, riffing on that notion of (not) getting started – as in Cole Porter, right – deferral and a kind of battle of wills, poised anyway in intended uncertainty inside a laughter that turns – where? on the reader or listener themselves, causing them to smile at being in on the joke, or maybe to smile at not being in on it, seeing how far that could go – and that’s then thrown back in the real or imagined critical extract that follows the slight twitch or breakdown that signals the end of that first page of skipping line-breaks, when ‘skip’ does a kind of stutter – ‘skip k’: “The one thing that interested me about the poem was that it was not yet there.” But of course it is there and now is there in another list, figures of twelve, an impossibility of cataloguing, that catalogue resulting in a series of samenesses wrenched from diversity, maybe, tho’ I’m not sure I know what the various things that follow the twelves are doing with each other. Well, they’re funny – yet then we get caught, again, just now that we were settling in, caught on the final line: “The one who performs these every day will not be poor in a thousand births.” Which for some reason disturbs, a little, whether it’s the (gendered) pain involved in the thousand births, or the impossibility of material poverty being averted through plays on names and multi-lingual puns and steps in Rome or piano keys – which is, then, about an artistic impotency, and saying that is not in itself a highly original thing to do, maybe, but we all do harp on or batter against that constraint, right, and it’s not polemical(?) as I thus make it out to be, no? And then the lit-crit voice again, “The one thing that interested me about the poem was that it was short,” which anticipates and draws into itself, as did its predecessor, the criticism (a) that the poem is (in- or un-)distinguished just by its regular and soothing rhythm, and (b) (by saying the opposite of what it means) that the poem is actually too long, self-indulgently so. Now I am going to speed up, tho’ the next page in fact is the densest so far (I’m reading thru the PDF retrospectively, so maybe this is a reading of the written text rather than of the read text, last night, for which, apologies –and, yes, that tension or embarrassment(?) about the potentially perceived frivolity or patience-trying of the text is key to its delivery and smooth crackle as performed poem, which is what the end, I think it is or wants so to be). The next page is (very briefly) about views and, again, banalities, suburban settings and windows and curtains and plays with sound, the line about nothing being seen outside television as drawing in or together the theme of mediation, the line on “vowelling our way out of or into without any form of dogmatism” seemingly an accurate description, but of course not, and the poem acknowledging that rejection of dogma, or that ‘purely’ formal approach, as itself a kind of dogma or stricture, and the sentences descending into self-parodying nonsense of assonantal or spiffily poly-syllabic (and self-describing) words: “text terminates in reference and reverence to one of the greatest terminologators of” – before again the repeated stuckness skips – “please take some time with this line”, how to read that unchanging right-hand column against the little insistences of the left-hand column. This refrain is actually the opposite of that found on the first page: whereas at that first the line negates itself by causing skipping or skimming, flicking through until things properly begin, here, the injunction is to dwell on a line which is nonetheless no more full than the one we were earlier instructed to ‘skip’. And the lit-crit coming back, now explicitly identified with “the [common?] reader”, speaking you back at yourself, and at itself – like, you know that running together “lines” and “lions” and “lie-ins” is banal and maybe there’s a pleasure in it, but what can it lead to except platitudes: “Lots of words sound like / other words.” And questioning then whether an admittedly pleasurable sound play can be ethical, or whether it is in some sense just superficial surface to a real ethics that gets done in what’s said rather than how it’s said, some imaginative ‘grace’ against the necessary authenticity and ‘grounded-ness’ of ‘gravity’(?). “There is no reason why this should be so / apart from habitual / steadiness.” And then give up. “This poem doesn’t interest me at all.” Now I feel that here I should be breaking through to saying something really cohesive and conclusive about what the poem does, but I will just stop there, you’ve probably all had enough.

Luke McMullan read. And explicitly this reading was trying to tell us something, to do theory-enactment in a poem, the title, from Adorno, “Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world”: ‘Negative Knowledge’, the poem, to grapple with that one we’re all going tête-à-tête with, that ‘I’ of yours whose illusion of ‘free’ and private subjectivity prevents genuine solidarity and out-boxing thought (“the speechless obliteration of difference”). Space is crucial here (as is surface – “our enneper love”): spacing on the page, and spacing in terms of the Occupy movement, which Luke mentioned, and which re(con-)figures relational body-position and occupation, yes, of space defined explicitly as non-private, as against a kind of false individuum of gaping rapacious maws: “the perimeter of the subject / the diameter maintained in the private jaw.”

Some other person read. And at the end, Ian Heames read. And as when I saw him read at a more public occasion, back in November, he read from memory, so we could say he spoke, or recited, rather than ‘read’, just sitting in a corner and I was thinking /

how far could a delivery impart something that a poem itself, when encountered on the page at least, did not necessarily contain?

I was thinking this in part because of reports of the Lyric and Polis conference at Falmouth where Denise Riley’s reading reduced much of the audience to tears, and the prose section in Douglas Oliver’s ‘An Island That Is All The World’ where he talks about doing a reading of the Diagram Poems in which he also so moved his, different, audience – having explicitly decided beforehand to concentrate on prosody only, on the musical articulation and regulation of utterance, of syllable length and of breath – and in so doing, taking himself out of the poem and out of himself as subjective ‘deliverer’ of that poem; as it seems Denise Riley may also have done. Those tears are a strong emotional reaction that seems to come from somewhere originating in the formal, as that shades over into affect. Though of course ‘thematically’ it is to do with the loss of a child that both poems enact (Riley’s ‘A Part Song’ is her first work for several years, and the result of a sense of poetry’s inadequacy in the face of actual loss, the memorialisation of the dead that always poetry has self-consciously done in spite of the awareness of the inadequacy of its own rhetorical over-statement), it is to do also with taking oneself out formally, the latter something that might at best be hard to really catalogue or chart, and at worst, impossible or undesirable and even mendacious so to do.

I say all this, maybe, as preamble, and because I’ve been thinking about it this past week, and I realise this is already too long (“The one thing that interested me about the review was that it was short”), which is itself a kind of verbal-diarrheic over-compensation for not having anything to say and saying it, so, On: When Ian Heames read his voice had a tremble to it which no doubt came from the sheer effort of actually remembering these poems, which are not simple poems in the slightest, and delivering them with clarity and fidelity, and the intensity of just someone sitting on a sofa in what is a domestically-scaled setting, and where do you look, everyone quiet breath, at their feet perhaps, I didn’t look up myself, and you could laugh, even, when there were jokes and smile with recognition at bits you’ve heard like that line about having three browser windows open and eating the guts of an alarm, which does so many things with the mechanised and the work-place and the sci-fi element that runs all the way through and alarm as ironised or made bathetic even as it’s registered, thus reduced of any efficacy at all: which is all to say, it was intense, moving, even – lines that in the text one might skim or not be as struck by here take on a terrible force: “Time penalties cannot hurt her”, “Thank you for not shooting You are my favourite ones”, “The orchestra wells up with the last / ice cap,” “Dealing with the loss / like merchandise,” “Love is the derangement of leisure time.”[1] (The sequence, of five short poems, hasn’t been published beyond photocopies here and there, will take a while to come out, is dedicated to Jeff Keen: ‘Banners over Terminal Highway’, you’ll check it when it appears I’m sure.)

I was going to combine this review of the reading with a review of the magazine itself, and I’ve run out of time and space and energy, so there’s a lot I’ve missed out: the interview with Birte Endrejat; Thom Donovan’s piece; Yates Norton’s piece; Eben Wood’s piece, &c. You can get it all, tho’, from pdpdpdpdpd.wordpress.com. Click.

Another line-break.

Out.

[1] Ian points out that this last line is borrowed from a poem by Danny Hayward.

Britten Sinfonia / Adès – Concentric Paths

West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge,
Monday 20th February 2012

Couperin Les barricades misterieuses
Couperin arr. Thomas Adès Les baricades misterieuses
Thomas Adès Three Studies from Couperin
Ravel Le tombeau de Couperin
Stravinsky Airs du rossignol and Marche chinoise
Stravinsky Suites Nos 1 & 2 for Small Orchestra
Thomas Adès Concerto for Violin (Concentric Paths)

Thomas Adès conductor
Pekka Kuusisto violin

The first half of the evening centred around re-workings of, works inspired by, and actual pieces by Francois Couperin: as such, it evidenced a fairly carefully-programmed selection, guaranteed not to offend the delicate sensibilities of a classical crowd, with the dissonant meat or medicine (Adès’ violin concerto) shoved to the end of the programme. Normally, mind you, it works the other way round: get the commission, or revived recent work – twenty minute concerto or programme piece, whatever – over and done with mercifully early, and then settle down for the guest soloist laying down some Mozart. James Dillon has complained at the way in which classical programmes still retain such an awkward and none too well managed balance between the ‘classics of yesteryear’ which are the clear preference of both traditionalist audiences, and, perhaps, orchestral players, and the new works which are, it is felt, somehow culturally necessary to avoid charges of total nostalgic regression. The idea that there might be a whole concert of ‘new music’ (which, in context, means anything atonal written from the ’40s onward) is a real rarity – which makes such instances as the ‘Total Immersion’ weekends at the Barbican gleaming havens amidst the mediocre sea of compromise (sorry, that phrasing is absurd).

Adès’ music – to get started on that right away – is technically accomplished, and it has some colour: the ‘Ecstasio’ movement of ‘Asyla’ does a diverting job of imitating the sounds of a club with a full orchestra, though it sounds little different than the re-arrangements of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher that the London Sinfonietta did a few years ago, and which have got nowhere near the same press. Still, I can’t help feeling that it remains something of a trick for the un-hip: classical audiences – or maybe not even audiences, maybe just composers who want to be seen as cool young things, bursting out of their stuffed shirts – are not too savvy with the real thing, with the pounding experience of hours on end of communal movement and throbbing bass and the surprising pared-back dissonance that can occur in dance music; but they find quirky and amusing and rather trickily skilful the imitation of such occasion. It’s like the stripper music in Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Prelude, Fugue and Riffs’ (a piece for which I must admit to having something of a soft spot), or, most execrably, the appearance of Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s ‘Hammered Out’, like a drunk dad trying to dance along at a wedding party. Needless to say, such projects fall flat on their face between two stools: maybe pop or rock or dance musicians seeking some sort of ‘credibility’ (let’s say, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, now a composer of soundtracks and even classically-premiered works), or maybe classical composers and musicians trying desperately to retain(?) some social relevance, to get down with the kids and with local communities (Charles Hazlewood’s various schemes in this regard perhaps the most polished and well-intentioned of such endeavours).

Adès’ work is not really an example of this, that ‘Asyla’ moment excepted, but it does share with it a kind of in-betweenness that I find, in the end, profoundly unsatisfying: constantly gesturing forward towards cluster and dissonance and extremes of orchestral colour – high violin lines against parping or muted trombones and tubas, the occasional string scrape or slightly woozy flute/bassoon combination – but drawing back almost straight away into a conventional chord resolution, a moment of ‘beautiful’ melody as if to reassure us that some such song still sings. What we get, then, is neither a truly memorable or beautiful melodic sense – fine, I’m down with that – but neither do we get anything truly radical to offset that: the orchestral colour thing has been done so much more interestingly by numerous composers – the high/low thing by Varese back in the 20s! –and the rhythmic sense is surprisingly lumpen. Compare Birtwistle’s cross-rhythms, the mechanically-driving sound of ‘Harrison’s Clocks’, a take on clockwork with affinities to the ubiquitous and now tired sounds of (post-)minimalism but with a sense of development and technical problem-solving or addressing that takes it far beyond the easy comforts of that mode of writing: or, for the pitching of fragile but continuous melody over rumbles and clouds of frighted and ominous discontent, the little-known ‘Grimethorpe Aria’, perhaps the finest work written for brass band by a classical composer. Adès’ violin concerto was, in the end, remarkably traditional, for all its apparently spiky outer-garments: in three movements, the slow one in the middle, orchestra playing support to soloist, never challenging or questioning or really much interacting with the violin’s continuing ‘concentric paths’ of vaguely folk-ish, vaguely anguished, non-directional melody, spinning on through no real development or contradiction in furrowed-brow meander. There were moments, of course – in particular, the gleeful/ominous devil’s dance at the very start of the third movement (though this was quickly sidestepped for something more lyrically effusive) – but I find it hard to see how The Guardian’s Peter Culshaw could read in Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir and The Rite of Spring, a ‘gorgeous bluesy tune’, and a ‘close-to-techno beat’, let alone laugh at that movement’s ‘audaciousness’, as he claims to have done. Iannis Xenakis’ electronic works, or the ferocious rugged struggle of his concerti, have more in common with the spirit of dance music as its most radical or rock music at its most radical than Adès’ nods in that direction – and I fail to see who, really, the latter are for, in the end. The middle-aged-to-old people I was sitting behind smiled through the Couperin (which was beautiful, and beautifully-played – Adès’ gifts as a pianist are not in doubt); the Couperin arrangements (which were often skilful, and sometimes flashed rather deliciously odd textures, through muted brass or marimba or a gentle tug at the emotional register (for which, compare Glenn Gould’s Chopinesque take, in his 1955 recording, on the 25th of Bach’s Goldberg Variations), turning the music keening and quasi-tragic, while keeping it under its original wraps (that restraint, of course, being part of the music’s charm and, I wouldn’t say difficulty, but mode of careful and sustained attention); and the Ravel (for which, yes, I was smiling too – let’s even say that I find the more bittersweet moments quite moving, in fact, having listened to this piece over and over over the past few years, feeling its nuances, the sudden shifts from reverie to an almost-enforced helter-skelter jollity which, through its dignity and slight restraint, retains something of that preceding sorrow). They sat through the Stravinsky, aided by the faux-exotic Chinoiserie of the ‘Marche Chinoise’ (which for me was really a sour note after the ‘Airs du Rossignol’, a piece nicely tough in texture, its birdsong imitations even gesturing towards Messiaen, the piano clanging and hard, the violin rough and thick, folk-music style, not the thin-edged pious wail of its salon- or Hollywood-music incarnation), and jollied along by the shambolic-smooth dances of the Suites for orchestra; and then they grimaced their way through the Adès, taking their medicine (a medicine that nonetheless managed to inspire the apparently contagious malady of the auditorium coughing round), clearly not impressed by the ‘further-out’ moments, nor too drawn in by the melodics that one felt were in some sense written for them (am I being unfair here?). OK, so if this music ended up not being for them, fine: neither was it it for me. It just doesn’t have that purity of intention, attention, technique dedicated towards the solving of formal problems that in some sense matter, historically, even (to get all Adornian on y’all). I can just think of so many other composers, in different modes and from different times, to whom I would rather listen – and this isn’t limited to Adès, it’s something I find distressingly prevalent across a whole spectrum of middling, quasi-dissonant but none-too-adventurous composers, particularly British ones – something, no doubt, to do with our island parochialism (Adès has written a piece called ‘O Albion’, the soft counterpart to Finnissy’s rigorously impossible ‘English Country Tunes’ (a work I don’t love, but which one cannot but admire) or even James MacMillan’s slightly sub-Ivesian, yet nicely rowdy ‘Britannia’ and football-piano-concerto ‘The Beserking’). Even, say, the utter unswerving devotional pitch of Tavener’s ‘Protecting Veil’ wins out, for me, over the similar moments in the Adès concerto where a high solo line is placed over a low pitched orchestra. And to those who argue that such compromise is necessary because of the inhuman, academic excesses of straw-man-serialism (“I remember starting the first rehearsal and thinking, I'm making this noise! It was so--you know--modern. It really did sound like horrible modern music”), I’d put the question: how much more bonkers richness is there in any number of pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen, how much more unworldly eeriness (mingled with fierce political commitment) is there in a piece by Helmut Lachenman, how much better did Luciano Berio deal with the whole tradition of classical music and with contemporary culture in his works, how much more richly coloured and attractively, endlessly inventive is Pierre Boulez’s superlative ‘Derive II’? For Christ’s sake, how much more radical and more alive is the music of the 103-year-old Elliott Carter? And there let it end. (I did dig the Ravel, the Couperin, the Stravinsky (in part) – honest.)

"Make the Suckers Back Back": An Amiri Baraka Music Compilation

01 // New York Art Quartet - Black Dada Nihilismus (3:39)
Album // New York Art Quartet (ESP 1004, 1964)



02 // Sunny Murray - Black Art (6:35)
Album // Sonny’s Time Now (Jihad 663, 1965)



The connection between modern poetry and music – specifically, jazz – was obviously not one that started with Amiri Baraka, but it was brought to a kind of fruition in his work that can be argued in some way to have sparked an entire generation and style of doing the poetry-and-music thing which has its legacies in – among other things – the hip-hop and slam poetry movements, and the work of Gil Scott-Heron, Kain, Wanda Robinson, The Watts Prophets, Sara Webster Fabio, Jayne Cortez, The Last Poets, et al. Whereas, in earlier collaborative efforts (witness Kenneth Patchen or Jack Keroauc's recordings with musical combos), poetry had tended to sit on top of a jazz background, easily rolling along on its atmosphere – the jazz restricted and smoothed down by having poems in front of it, the poetry similarly smoothed down and, perhaps, distracted from by the jazz combos – Baraka's aim was for a kind of synthesis in which the two – music and poetry – were placed in active dialogue. The energies that Keroauc tries to replicate in spontaneous pieces such as 'Old Angel Midnight' find themselves pushed back down, rather than dialogically or even dialectically invigorated, by accompanying music; and though a little-known poem such as Ray Bremser's 'Drive Suite', a sequence dedicated to Cecil Taylor, and purportedly written underneath the piano that Taylor was playing in a club, has a visual and textual energy intended to reflect the energy and multi-directionality of Taylor's music – suggesting exciting mutual influences, inter-disciplinary encounters and endeavours – it's not, it seems, until Baraka' first recordings with musical groups during the mid-60s, that those energies and potentialities are liberated into fused or excitingly tense and crashing encounter, poetry and music sharing performative space in far from token, genuinely exploratory fashion.

That said, Baraka's reading on the first track, 'Black Dada Nihilismus', is restrained and quiet, even hesitant – which suits the sombre mood perfectly, no doubt influencing the contributions of the New York Art Quartet as they play around and under him. It is not the rhythmically-thrusting, angrily energised thing it would become later on (a change also reflected in Baraka's solo reading style, without music – compare the available recordings from 1964, say, with the readings from the 1979 film 'Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds'), but a threat all the more sinister and urgent for being understated. 'Black Art', released as part of a Sunny Murray album put out on Baraka's own Jihad record label, ups the ante – Albert Ayler's staggeringly wide vibrato, Don Cherry's inquisitive, pithily constant melodic investigations and Sunny Murray's freed-up drums force the poet out of that place of quietly terrible contemplation into active exhortation, the gleeful, horribly gleeful vocal imitations of aircraft, machine guns, police sirens setting off a chain of similarly multifarious, emotionally complex responses from the horns. The words are, finally, as shocking as the music, the music as shocking as the words; there is a sense of something on the cusp, of a moment of potential transformation which is longed for and even revelled in, but also shocking and violent, involving intense personal, as well as more broadly social and political ruptures that are embraced almost against themselves.

03 // Jihad Singers - Beautiful Black Woman (3:19)
04 // Jihad Singers - Nineteen Sixty Something (4:29)
Album // Black & Beautiful, Soul & Madness (Jihad LP1001, 1968)




Put against these two recordings, the doo-wop songs recorded for an album credited to the 'Jihad Singers' (or ‘The Spirit House Movers’) might seem rather tame: certainly, they don't possess the same lyrical strength, tending to exhortation rather than complication, striving for a kind of declamatory urgency of utterance that sometimes falls flat in unintended bathos: "The white man / at best / is corny!" A piece like 'Beautiful Black Women' pushes a notion of idealised femininity in which women must be entirely beautiful (the fat, ugly and old have little place in Baraka's rhetoric of this period, except as occasional targets of ire and scorn) and exist entirely to support their men in what is essentially, a reinforcement of the heterosexual family model (with added polygamy – for men only, of course). Such idealisation combines with notions of racial purity that we might find equally problematic - and, lest we forget, round the corner from this, Baraka’s virulent misogyny of this period ("the world cant beat you/ and my slaps are love") and the anti-Jewish, anti-Irish, anti-Italian slurs (however based the latter are, in, say, economic conditions relating to store ownership (cf. James Baldwin's essay 'The American Negro is Anti-Semitic Because He Is Anti-White'), useful methods of ensuring there is no inter-racial co-operation between different groups of oppressed people). Nonetheless, the way in which all these problematic hatreds fuse with more progressive notions of throwing off oppression is, undeniably, incredibly uncomfortable and hard to untangle, and it certainly should not be apologised for. All that said (of course, 'Beautiful Black Woman' is hardly the most despicable example available), I've picked the piece because its combination of Baraka's spoken word with a version of Smokey Robinson's 'Oooh Baby, Baby' seems a potent example of the concept Baraka would go on to articulate in his 1967 essay 'The Changing Same', in which R & B, free jazz and the Black Arts movement are seen (I should say, heard) as part of a continuum of Black expression, the related urges of the sacred and the secular (made earlier explicit by Ray Charles' use of gospel stylings for secular lyrics, of course) generating and embodying, encouraging and being encouraged by a revolutionary potential, the constrained desire and physical oppression and repression that threatens to burst out into social upheaval. As Baraka points out in his liner notes to the album's reissue, the music might have "seemed a classic R&B du-wop send-up," though at the same time "we also had a clear vision of what we wanted to say regarding the Afro-American struggle for equal rights and self-determination[...]we thought of ourselves as cultural workers, revolutionary artists 'pushing the program' as some of our cultural nationalist comrades were wont to say." That element of parody would thus appear to be poised somewhere between the intentional and the non-/unintentional; certainly, the lo-fi sound quality and the somewhat rough-and-ready nature of the performances (particularly Russell Lyle's saxophone playing, which can be at times rather undirected) are nowhere near the level of actual R&B big-sellers like The Impression's 'Keep on Pushing' or Martha & the Vandella's 'Dancing in the Streets' – tracks with the potential to inspire socio-political ferment through the hidden codes or meanings which their ostensibly harmless lyrical and musical material secretly contained, or could be adapted towards.

05 // Wha's Gon Happen? (7:43)
06 // Who Will Survive America? (3:06)
07 // It's Nation Time / Pull the Covers Off (4:13)
Album // It’s Nation Time (Black Forum/Motown Records 457, 1972)



That ‘changing same’ impulse finds perhaps its finest expression in Baraka’s recorded output on his next release, the 1972 album ‘It’s Nation Time.’ This time the record label is Black Forum, a Motown subsidiary who also put out various Black Power related speeches, attempting to give that kind of ethos a slightly more mainstream availability, perhaps. Given this, the recording quality is higher, the band – or, I should say, bands – seem better rehearsed, and the whole forms a kind of two-part suite which plays very nicely as a record, rather than as a raggedy collection of separate numbers. The poetry is mostly from various pamphlets put out around this time, in which Baraka’s Black Nationalism is at its most assertive (though, paradoxically, this pushes them formally closer to Beat Poetry than to anything else – they’re certainly a far cry from the carefully tortured, almost Creeley-esque placements of the poems in ‘Preface to a 21 Volume Suicide Note’ and ‘The Dead Lecturer’); as their sentiments go, they’re fairly reprehensible (no “crackers” or “old people” will “survive America”), and faintly absurd – the fantasy, on ‘All in the Street’, of a kind of retro-futuristic African city seems almost to be posited as a genuine political programme (intriguing though it is to view it in relation to Afro-futurism, and, particularly, the work of Sun Ra, a close associate of Baraka’s for a time). That said, the combination of an R & B group, a ‘New Music’ group (playing not-quite-free jazz, but something approaching it, particularly in the vocalized and sensuously slippery stylings of Gary Bartz, who made several Black Power-tinged records of his own around this time which still hold up pretty well), a chorus of male and female voices, and a group of African drummers – these various groups sometimes uniting, sometimes playing on different songs – remains remarkably cohesive and satisfying, the occasional hesitancy in transition (which could easily have been edited off the finished records) only a momentary slip. If nothing else, the sheer urgency and street-toughness of ‘Pull the Covers Off’ still packs some punch today (“attack attack, make the sucker back back”), even if the sensation of listening to commands to “put some on your cracker / put some on your devil” is inevitably somewhat masochistic for all us 'honkies' out there listening...



08 // You Was Dancin' Need to Be Marchin' So You Can Dance Some More Later On (4:09)
09 // Better Red Let Others Be Dead (3:47)
Album // 45" record by The Advanced Workers with The Anti-Imperialist Singers (Peoples War JPU-1001 (1976))

The two tracks released as a 45" six year later on People's War make up the recorded legacy of a band – full title, ‘The Advanced Workers with the Anti-Imperialist Singers’ – which apparently gigged around Newark, fusing funk with Baraka’s declamatory, some might say strident, Marxist sloganeering. While the music is fine – certainly better-played and better-sung than the rather rough-and-ready doo-wop of the Jihad singers record (which is no surprise, given the participation of musicians from Parliament, Funkadelic and The Commodores) – one might argue that the blend between form and lyrical content misses precisely the subjective urgency – which is inextricably political – that Baraka had earlier identified in the blues. I should say that 'subjective' here does not imply merely, say, the solitary individual self-pity of the suicidal singer-songwriter strumming away in their room – the kind of mythology that Nick Drake's early death, say, might play into – but an often collective undercurrent of emotions provoked, constrained and released by social and political factors that are always entangled with questions of love, sex, death, and oppression. Once a more stable notion of community is organised out of fracture and individual alienation – the move made by Baraka some time in the mid-60s, as he entered his Black Nationalist phase, accompanying the decisive break from Greenwich Village – the attempt to speak to a 'we' becomes an over-riding concern which might seem unpleasantly hectoring. Indeed, there are real problems here; a sense that the pudding must be constantly over-egged, that the community must be exhorted, verbally forced, to actually exist, let alone to act. Somewhat schizophrenically, this can lead to Baraka both praising the inherent, natural goodness and beauty of the black man as already existent (see the photo captions in 'In Our Terribleness'), and invoking that goodness as un-realized potential which must be invoked and summoned up. The problems of putting such poetry into practice might be best illustrated by the footage from Jean Luc-Godard's abandoned 'One AM' (later refashioned by D.A. Pennebacker as 'One PM'), in which we see Godard and the crew travel down to Newark to witness a performance by Baraka and cohorts, in the street outside the Spirit House. Godard hangs around the fringes of things, looking as if he doesn't quite believe what he's seeing – the detached, amused outsider, a Gallic cigarette hanging from his mouth; while Baraka, for all his reputation as an artist who could actually in some way also function as a community leader, facilitator and negotiator with those in political power (the alliance with mayor Kenneth Gibson), hangs back, hesitantly striking a xylophone, leaving it to others in his group to move in and out of centre-stage (or road), blowing 'ethnic' flutes and improvising generic Islamic-tinged Black Arts lyrics. The social contradictions manifest here are almost too many to name: the simultaneous sense of gleeful performance for the white cameramen and women (perhaps Baraka's awareness of this contradiction is why he holds back) and barely-disguised suspicion and hostility towards them (after the performance, the 'musicians' troop back inside; there is no suggestion that Godard & co. will be invited back in with them); the emphasis on African roots finding its expression only in a kind of dabbling (it's clear they don't really know how to play the ethnic flutes) which is arguably as unconsciously racist as the appropriations practiced by the likes of Picasso earlier in the century; the fact that, for all the claims to creating communal art (which were, to a certain extent, true, it seems – read, for instance, the passages about the Watts Riots in Horace Tapscott's autobiography, ‘Song of the Unsung’), the street is deserted save for Baraka & co. and Godard & co., and the faces that we do see, peering out from behind windows are simultaneously amused and apologetic – an old woman and a child, both equally baffled by the whole occasion. Given all that, and given the harmful separatist notions which perhaps prevented the kind of coalition that could have caused genuine revolutionary change in the United States at a certain point in the mid to late 60s (the direction Malcolm X was heading in before his murder by, shall we posit, a combination of black separatism / religious extremism and something between government approval and active involvement), Baraka's embrace of Marxism, his entry into the left that he earlier seemed to flirt with in the fairly early essay 'Cuba Libre', would seem a step in the right direction. But his insistence on doctrinaire preaching, on pushing a form of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tse-Tung thought of a sloganeering variety, would hardly seem the best way to enter into the third world liberation, women's rights, and class struggles that he does endorse; though perhaps it contrasts positively with the widespread vagueness elsewhere of left-tinged peace and love sentiments that one might see as regrettable hippie hangovers. The fact that Baraka's analysis often seems borrowed from an earlier time, something even approaching that Communist Party line which Ellison satirised in 'Invisible Man' – his active admiration for Stalin, his notion of the 'black belt south' as a separate nation which should seek independence – could not have helped matters, though the legacy of the Black Arts has continued to inform his writings on music and collaborations with musicians – the latter actually increasing in the last twenty years – serving to prevent mere doctrinaire haggling, his poems becoming performative, near-musical things in themselves in ways which might dialogue with rap or with slam poetry (see his appearance on the TV programme 'Def Poetry Jam', or his collaboration with 'The Roots', included in this compilation). And it's hard not find the People's War tracks exhilarating, to enjoy the perversity of their combined slogans and funk (even as Baraka perhaps doesn't see that perversity), even to be exhilarated and inspired by the conviction with which those slogans are delivered, the hopes that they contain.

10 // I Love Music (3:12)
11 // Class Struggle In Music I (5:25)
12 // Class Struggle In Music II (6:43)
Album // New Music, New Poetry (India Navigation 1048, 1980)



‘New Music / New Poetry’, from 1980, sees Baraka move into the position which he’s pretty much held to this day – that of a kind of guardian of the African-American tradition, somewhat like a less-conservative Stanley Crouch (Crouch initially beginning as a poet very much influenced by Baraka, though his lectures and rants tend to outweigh the actual poetry he manages to read – see the album ‘Aint’ No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight’). At this time, though, both were championing the same breed: a generation of ‘young (or not so-young) lions’, including the likes of Arthur Blythe and David Murray, whose rough-edged fire still gave their music a free jazz ferocity, even as the forms they adopted moved closer to the regressive models that Wynton Marsalis and Co. would enshrine and turn into museum pieces at the Lincoln Centre (with Crouch’s support). Here, the combination of Baraka’s strong delivery, his confidence in the musical potential of poetry that has been very specifically crafted, as notation, to foster that kind of delivery, Murray’s roaring saxophone (sometimes restricted to repeated melodic figures, sometimes leaping outside that restriction) and McCall’s complementary drumming, mostly works well – though the repeated backdrop to ‘Dope’ actually smooths over the incendiary, bitingly satirical power that Baraka imparts the poem on an exceptional solo reading from around the same time. Lyrically, we are presented with a mixture of celebrations of black music, sarcastic and crude insults thrown out at various real or perceived enemies, and directions on the correct political line to take: ‘I Love Music’ is perhaps a lesser piece than the more famous Coltrane poem ‘AM/TRAK’, but Baraka’s howled imitations of Coltrane’s multiphonic squalls are intense and even frightening, while the moments when he locks in with McCall’s drum pattern on the first ‘Class Struggle in Music’ would seem to indicate poets and musicians working off the same (invisible) page.

13 // The Roots - Something In The Way of Things (In Town) (7:04)
Album // Phrenology (MCA, 2002)



14 // William Parker Ensemble - People Get Ready (12:080
Album // The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield: Live in Rome (Rai Trade, 2007)

There have been numerous live projects with the likes of Murray since then, including a jazz opera, but we have to skip forward into the next century to hear the next substantial recording, in which Baraka, taking on, in context, the kind of wise old griot role he had played in Warren Beatty’s film ‘Bulworth’, intones a poem of urban despair and dread, suitably backed up by the Roots’ gloomily atmospheric soundscape. Baraka is here very much as ‘poet’, rather than as rapper or even proto-rapper, but the symbolic significance of his appearance on a hip-hop record should not be underestimated, even if it took a decade or so since the original, radical explosion of hip-hop as global phenomenon for such collaboration to happen. It would seem, in the main, that Baraka’s musical heart still lies with jazz and R & B, rather than with hip-hop, in any case, even if he recognises the music’s historical, social and political importance. Both genres are combined in William Parker’s intriguing ‘Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield’ project, in which that ‘changing same’ principle is once more explored, Parker’s aim being to unveil the energies within Mayfield’s songs, look at them from new angles, unlock their still-relevant potentials. Baraka’s words serve both to connect to that Black Arts tradition which saw, for instance, David Henderson write a poem called ‘Keep on Pushing’ about the Harlem Riots, and to keep things in the present – however tenuously – with curses rained down on the likes of Berlusconi (the concert was recorded in Rome). If the music doesn’t, I don’t know, ‘match up’ to the originals, that’s because it’s not supposed to – it is something different, and whether wholly successful or not, it suggests a level of thought and engagement with cultural and political history that manages to avoid the recuperative and stultifying tactics of the jazz neo-conservatives. No longer at the forefront of proceedings, Baraka nonetheless does not seem extra baggage, an unnecessary guest: his shouts and recitations energise the music, providing punctuation or encouragement and giving some sort of purchase which can act as focus and rallying point: and the screams with which he ends a purposeful ‘People Get Ready’ indicate that he’s not easily slipping into a comfortable old age. We’d expect nothing less.



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