Keith Rowe At The LRB Bookshop

Keith Rowe (Solo)
London Review Bookshop, 22/06/2011



During a brief introduction, Rowe explained that he would be playing two sets: interpretations of, first, a page from Cornelius Cardew’s ‘Treatise’, and second, Christian Wolff’s ‘Edges’. In certain anniversary years of Cardew’s birth, he plays Treatise throughout the year; this year (the 75th anniversary), he was up to page 68 (which is slow progress, apparently). However, as he made clear, the piece was being used as a point of departure, rather than being ‘played’ as such: thus, while he began the performance by keeping a fairly close eye on the score (looking at it continuously as he made one particular manoeuvre), things soon started to lead away from that in the flow, or succession, of improvised ideas. In any case, Treatise is a particularly open piece, designed to encourage thought, care and attention in interpretation, but also to allow the individual to make the music they might make anyway, in a more coherent, or at least, structured, manner: to group ideas that might, otherwise, flow somewhat diffusely or digressively, around a central series of specific points. One might also note that there’s a rather different set of parameters involved in solo, as opposed to ensemble interpretations: whereas (according to one way of playing the score) the ensemble may feed back on itself, certain people’s interpretations of certain symbols informing other individuals’ interpretations in dialogic fashion, the solo performer is interacting solely with the score itself. Rowe remarked, in deadpan fashion, that we wouldn’t notice much difference between the Cardew and the Wolff pieces – he was placed very much in the foreground, with the two composers somewhere in the background of his musical thinking, perhaps serving to focus the occasion (rather than taking an entirely free ‘let’s see what happens’ approach, an exploration of playing as a wholly sufficient and interesting category in itself, à la Derek Bailey), but by no means providing a ‘key’ to understanding the performance, which one could appreciate in and for itself with no knowledge of the scores that were being played (or departed from).

Before describing the music, it might be useful to mention the reduced size of Rowe’s set-up – a small mixing board, two radios (one tuned to BBC Radio 3 (perhaps pre-recorded, as three distinct, and quite different pieces of classical music were used), the other to BBC Radio 5 Live (mainly John McEnroe offering his pundit’s opinion on the second day of the Wimbledon tennis championships, which was happening at the same time across the city)), a fan, an electric toothbrush, brillo pads, stones, pedals, metal objects, and, of course, the ‘guitar’ itself – a modified fretboard, laid flat on the table. I’ll come back to the point later, but it struck me that this set-up offered, on the one hand, an element of risk – what if none of the sounds on offer really seemed to be working, and another option was desired that simply wasn’t there? – and conversely, of stability – the opportunity to really focus in on a specific set of materials and concerns, generating an immediate sense of focus, a certain usefully freeing limitation (if that makes sense).

Anyhow, 'Treatise' began abruptly, one might even say violently: abrasive, sharp, metallic sounds of fairly short durations, chosen deliberately for their jarring effect: at several points, as Rowe scraped a string or rubbed it with a brillo pad, a grimace of concentration, even anger, seemed to cross his face – albeit mixed with a certain glee in pushing things ‘out there’, in taking a particular action to its noisiest extreme. As the set progressed, a more familiar approach asserted itself, with drones coming in and out (often generated by holding an electric toothbrush over a particular string, e-bow style) – this leading at times to the sort of beating frequencies and timbres that have become common in the more drone-oriented areas of ‘eai’. Things were, however, still broken-up – one sensed that, despite having (presumably) decided to take this approach before he started, Rowe was still feeling his way in, which gave the music a palpable sense of discovery, invention. Things weren’t ramshackle, but they were unconcerned with propriety (despite the parallels he likes to draw between his own work and classical music, and his use of fairly substantial classical excerpts in the second set). It was above all about improvisation (in contrast to the more conceptual work on the recent duo with Radu Malfatti, during which, at certain times, one senses that Rowe was rather less than comfortable (for instance, the fact that the recording of Jurg Frey’s ‘Exact Dimension Without Insistence’ had to be pieced together from three separate takes, because Rowe found it too hard to limit himself to the score’s narrow confines). (I don’t mean to disparage the collaboration, or the Frey score, but to suggest that Rowe may be heard at his best in a situation more akin to the LRB gig.)) Actions here are directed, intended, precise – particularly given the use of the aforementioned small set-up, much reduced in size from those we have seen used in the past– but relations between sounds do not follow a straight narrative pattern. One might say that the second set did follow some sort of linear trajectory, beginning from sparseness – slow, scrubbing and scooping of metal on metal, as objects were moved up and down the strings, with ‘peripheral’ white hiss faded in and out – and moving into the loudest section of the evening, a particularly violent scraping action that made the blue lights on the PA flash and crackle. Nonetheless, this very loose movement towards crescendo (and I’m inevitably simplifying the actual process, the attempt to recall what happened flattening out the actual details of its unfolding) was hardly smooth progress, and certainly not indicative of the general feel the music took. Let’s consider, as more representative, the endings of the two sets: Treatise stopping when Rowe dropped a metal object onto the floor by mistake (he’d just about finished anyway, but the sudden accidental clang made a nice abrupt snap out of ‘the zone’.) A wry smile; “That’s it.” And that was it. Edges, meanwhile, finished with Rowe reaching over and switching off the small desk-lamp which had been lighting the score, as the sounds he’d been making simultaneously ceased. A brief silence (traffic whooshes and whispers leaking in from upstairs), but not luxuriating in it – and from the darkness, “that’s it,” again. There was something very unaffected about this, possessing more in common than one might think (contrary to my earlier suggestion) with Derek Bailey’s no-nonsense approach: the desire to use one’s materials (developed as they are through detailed and constant thought and philosophical investigation) in the situation that exists as one finds it, rather than imposing ‘high art’ into a world it won’t fit. One thinks of the story about Zen archers that Rowe likes to repeat, illustrating as it does the importance of knowing the room, judging the room, being a part of ‘a perfectly ordinary dimension of reality’. Or again, his insistence on not practicing, on not rehearsing, of being actually terrified of his instrument: this is not, as solo improvising can so easily become, the slotting together of a selected assortment of tricks, effects, techniques, patterns in a slightly different order to your last performance, but what he calls “searching for the sound in the performance.”

Some might argue that this shows a sort of contempt for that audience – as if, because Rowe doesn’t woodshed at home, his stage performances become that wood-shedding, rather than a considered, crafted musical piece – and the process is somewhat (ok, very much) antithetical to the notion that dominates some forms of popular music, of putting on a choreographed stage show in which each element fits. (Then again, perhaps that extreme choreography is more a characteristic of an increasingly commodified and ‘whitened’ strain of pop – Madonna, Lady Gaga – where spectacle, costume changes, and dance routines take the place of shifts and discoveries in the music itself. James Brown, by contrast, might have put on a tight –a very tight – show, but there was still space for the music to breathe, for discoveries to be made within those tight parameters that were the music’s raison d’etre.) What Rowe is doing, then, is not showing contempt for his audience (which, in any case, consists on this occasion of no more than thirty or forty people (the venue, in the LRB basement, wouldn’t allow for any more)), but respect for them: taking for granted their willingness to participate in the thought processes he manifests through the sound he creates, to follow the music where it goes, to embrace the possibility of abruptness or jarring transitions or seeming ‘failures’ (where a new technique is tried out and falls flat or seems out of place). It’s an attitude that, perhaps, emerges only from years of playing this music, of developing something of a thick skin, but also of knowing that one is performing in an intimate setting, for an audience who are sympathetic and willing listeners, willing to go (again) where the music demands: an attitude exemplified by the way he played through the sound of a mobile phone going off, that sound then becoming, briefly, a not-unwelcome part of the texture, rather like the found material heard on the radios – not to suggest that “anything goes”, or that any interruption is valid (as in Cage’s 0’00”) (and, indeed, the use of radios seemed rather more pre-ordained, in the manner of sampling, than random or aleatoric) – but that there is a high degree of flexibility to the aesthetic, a flexibility that doesn’t compromise serious dedication to a particular set of goals and methods. Accident and discipline here go hand-in-hand: as in the occasional sounding of the ‘guitar’s’ open strings as ‘accidental’ by-product of other actions, rather the main intention. Another example: at one point during ‘Edges’, a low wadge of feedback conjured up, for me at least, the ‘hard’ sound of the rock guitar – but it happened so quickly that it barely registered as such. While I’ve suggested that Rowe could be considered more and more as a player of ‘electronics’ in recent years, his use of a modified, table-top version of the guitar (like a small chunk sawn off from a ‘real’ instrument), and that aforementioned occasional striking of open strings, reminds one that he does still have some interest in the instrument as such, even if aspects of its heritage rankle with him. Perhaps it’s simply the uncontrollable resonance of history and tradition, asserting itself against or despite departures from it (in contrast to the parodic play with cliché and genre in Amalgam days, and in contrast to the very conscious use, in this performance, of radio’d classical music as something to dialogue with, a technique somewhat reminiscent of the way that Keston Sutherland’s ‘high modernist’ poetry consciously dialogues with poets of the past, even as it studs and stutters itself with mangled fragments of the hyper-modern, the global-technological-late capitalist sphere). In fact, though, it may be that very emergence of historical fragments from outside immediate intention which allows individual artistic development to take place: the shock of something unexpected – either unexpectedly new, or unexpectedly, and disturbingly, familiar – leading to that existential moment where one is forced into a decision – ‘where do I go from here? what do I do now?’ – and where one then makes that decision, where one then acts. From the Paris Transatlantic interview, once more:

“You can't escape history, you can't escape memory - but I can honestly say, even now I will discover things I've never done in my life, and I constantly search for that. To a casual observer it might sound like something I've done before, and I know it isn't. I'm the judge of that, and I'm pretty severe with myself. I do not like the idea of reproducing something I've done before. I will happen on it, I'll suddenly find myself doing something I've done before…

DW: And then do you say "Whoa, I've done that before.." and stop, or do you accept it?

KR: I'll accept it, and then quickly counterpose it with something…Stop it abruptly, so something unethical to it…”

Un-ethical? The fact that Rowe even talks in terms of ethics brings us back to Cardew – ‘Towards an Ethic of Free Improvisation’ – and brings home the fact that this is, in fact, profoundly ethical music-making; well-suited to the visual coincidence (or was it intention?) that found Rowe setting up his table between LRB bookshelves marked ‘Music’, ‘Religion,’ and ‘Cultural Studies.’ Not that the music inspires religious devotion (though Richard Pinnell’s review of the gig under consideration is indeed a fervent response), but that it argues, and earns for itself a certain weight, a certain importance that one might be hard-pressed to think music could now have (except as all-encompassing distraction, as identikit-background-noise to music-video theatricals.) And, really, thank fuck for that.

Koboku Senju Live in Oxford

Koboku Senju
Tetuzi Akiyama (acoustic guitar) Eivind Lønning (trumpet) Toshimaru Nakamura (no input mixing board) Espen Reinertsen (tenor saxophone) Martin Taxt (tuba)

Stephen Cornford / Patrick Farmer / Sarah Hughes
Cornford (mixing-board (feedback)) Farmer (turntable, objects) Hughes (chorded zither)
Art Jericho, Oxford, 27/05/2011

As I walked through the door of Art Jericho (a neat little gallery space down a back-street of half-built and shadowed buildings), Patrick Farmer (on turntable and various objects), Sarah Hughes (on chorded zither (i.e. autoharp), played with various modifications and electronic treatments) and Stephen Cornford (on mixing board and objects) were creating an immediately absorbing kind of pindrop-music; indeed, the sound of a pin dropping could very well have formed part of their arsenal, perhaps connected up to some sort of feedback device or scratchily amplified on the turntable. The first ten minutes or so trod a pleasing line of simultaneous tension and stasis; there was a lot going on, in terms of events and changes (particularly from Farmer, who seemed to be playing the role of agitator, suddenly creating loud, harsh jolts of feedback and noise in unexpected places), but, at the same time, much of this took place over a fairly stable drone, provided by Hughes’ bowed zither. Then something happened, and the music moved away from this course (which it could easily have held for half an hour or more); things became more broken up, even theatrical, from delicate quiet sonorities which the half-sitting, half-standing crowd seemed to be craning forward to hear, to Farmer’s aforementioned jolts and outbursts. When Hughes bounced a small red balloon off the strings of the table-top zither, so gently that it seemed to make no perceptible sound, the performative aspect kicked home; though the three musicians were sitting fairly still at their three tables, or work stations, this didn’t feel like a solemn or reverential set-up – instead, they became garden shed scientists, fiddling around with arcane and quasi-magical devices fused from the cutting edge of electricity and the homely detritus of eccentrically-kept junk. Hughes’ strongly diatonic instrument also militated against the harshness of some of the other sounds; her employment of a simple melody (played with such delicacy that her thumb barely seemed to brush the strings) adding a folkish, even ambient touch that was all the more effective for being sparingly employed. Towards the end of the set, Farmer picked up a box and emptied its contents (compost? Chinese take-away? dried leaves?) onto the turntable, all in one motion, the gesture radically changing the sounds coming from his set-up, and providing a nicely serendipitous correlation between physical movement and sonic event. It was typical of the trio’s unforced and easy improvisational method; improvisation as the discovery of the genuinely new, the creation of surprising and pleasing relations and juxtapositions, a sound laboratory.

If Farmer could have been said, broadly speaking, to play the ‘agitator’ during the trio set, then Nakamura filled that role during the start of Koboku Senju’s performance at least, his sharp, fizzing high tones and sudden bursts of scrunching feedback giving the impression that the machine was controlling what sounds were about to come out as much as he himself – though his pose of calm concentration (which might perhaps be mistaken for sleepiness), barely moving anything more than his hands, suggested that such a situation would not have perturbed him in the slightest. It was if he was reading a book or scrutinising a sculpture, looking down at the no-input board and waiting for it to reveal its secrets to him, rather than manipulating it with obvious physical dexterity or virtuosity. Akiyama’s guitar playing was similarly untroubled and relaxed, though more conventional in terms of technique: he began with three capos clamped on the instrument’s neck, gradually removing these as the set went on, playing relatively brief melodic phrases at untroubled, though fairly regular intervals; neither settling into finger-picking nor Bailey-esque improv; later on, rubbing a metal slide over the strings to produce an arco effect. This combination of melody and the textural improv of Nakamura and the three Norwegians (Espen Reinertsen on saxophone, Eivind Lønning on trumpet and Martin Taxt on tuba respectively) was something that perhaps shouldn’t have worked in context. Indeed, what makes Senju stand out as a group is their seemingly rather clunky line-up of three brass/wind instruments, electronics, and acoustic guitar. In the end, though, it was the mesh rather than the abrasiveness of the instrumentation that compelled. Having listened to electro-acoustic improvisation for a number of years now, I thought that the days of not being able to tell which instrument was doing what might be over (that initial shock when one first hears the employment of extended techniques –, that disorienting, blurring effect), but, even seeing the music live (which should make who’s doing what clearer), it was sometimes hard to believe the evidence of one’s own eyes. How is it possible that a trumpet can produce sounds like that merely by tilting the mouthpiece to the side of the mouth? Is it possible that a saxophone can sound so un-jazz-like? Are those high sonorities really coming from the tuba? All this was compelling enough – meshing, merging, and those collective swells (not so much climaxes) out of which emerge a moment of piercing clarity, often provided by Akiyama’s melodies – but what really tipped things was the moment, about half-way through the set, when the three horns suddenly moved from extended techniques to a succession of three-voice jazz melodies. Presumably improvised and unplanned, it was, like Hughes’ zither melody in the first half, a moment of lovely and unforced surprise – and what was more admirable was that Senju didn’t just stop there, as they well could have, but moved back to textural playing (Taxt, at one point, removing part of the tuba’s tubing and clinking it against the body of his instrument; at another, turning the whole thing sideways so that the enormous, gramophone-like bell pointed directly at the audience; Lønning circular-breathing, smoothly but with an edge of roughness, a popping breath sound that came around every few seconds – simultaneously the result of physical necessity and a part of the music). Really, the hush at the end (I say hush, despite the sound of Friday-night parties passing down Walton Street) and the following applause, were more than well-deserved.

[Reviews also up from Lawrence Dunn and Richard Pinnell.]

Billy Bang is Dead / Memorial Playlist

Billy Bang & Shoji Hano at Inage Candy, Chiba, Japan, 11th Oct 2008 (MP3 version included in the playlist link at the bottom of the post)

"I lived many deaths, being a soldier in Vietnam fighting. I learned to get past death in Vietnam as a soldier. I was afraid of death, and that's the truth – no one wants to die – but I could not be afraid of death to do my job. I pulled point, I was the first cat out, I did ambushes, I was in the actual war fighting, so I could not be afraid of death, because I might have to give my life up for my next compadre right next to me, so death had no significance for me – the job of survival did, the job of getting the job done did. So I was not afraid of death, and…nobody wants to die, but I was not afraid of it. And I'm still not, especially not now, because I think I left the world with enough documentation and testimony that if I leave tomorrow – not tomorrow, but I'm sure I will leave – then I feel good about leaving the planet earth with what I left behind me, and with me, so I have no problem with that. And then, I don't know what the next story is about, where I go, so I'm not worried about that. People who are preoccupied with that do not live, and the best thing is to live every day, each and every day until that time come. And let death take care of itself."

Violinist Billy Bang died of lung cancer on Monday, April 11th 2011, at the age of 63. Probably best known these days for two fairly recent albums reflecting on his experience as a solider in Vietnam, he’d established himself on the New York loft jazz scene back in the 70s, becoming a key figure, along with the likes of frequent collaborator William Parker, in the second-(third-? fourth-?)generation free jazz movement. His playing combined abrasive grit, rough-edged folksiness, surprisingly straightforward melodicism, and a certain swinging jazz touch (the latter was to become particularly prominent later on in his career, though that’s not to suggest he morphed into Didier Lockwood…).

The violin/drums format witnessed in the at the top of this post brings to mind, of course, the legendary collaboration between Leroy Jenkins and Rashied Ali, 'Swift are the Winds of Life'. Bang's folkish touch and Shoji Hano's ebullient rhythms ensure, however, that this duet has a very different feel, somewhere between a hoe-down, a call to the spirits, and a straightforward rock-out. Listen four minutes in as the violinist locks into repeated figures, playing them over and over with minimal variation – incantation, invocation, whatever you choose to call it, it has undeniable power.

Bang’s playing suggested any number of folk traditions - elegant plucked pentatonic figures reminiscent of Oriental music, big sawing motions and slides from American country and appalaichan traditions, percussive col legno from the avant-garde, and of course the free-jazz tinged post-bop language which he made his own. As he said in an interview, his aim was to get between the virtuoso technique of Leroy Jenkins (with whom he studied) and the much-maligned, but more intuitive approach of Ornette Coleman. It's that combination of melodic simplicity with a certain 'off' roughness around the edges (rather than the heightened sweetness we're accustomed to from Hollywood movies and the classical violin repertoire) that makes Bang really stand out. His compositions, which tended to be riff and groove based, demonstrated that same simplicity, but he was by no means a 'simplistic' musician, as should be obvious from just glancing at the number of different projects and musicians he worked with, often changing from record to record. (And as was made even more abundantly clear when listening to excerpts from WKCR’s 24-hour Bang memorial broadcast.)

Bang’s musical story proper begins upon his return from military service in Vietnam; finding the South Bronx its own kind of war zone, he half-wondered if going to fight had saved him from the equal trauma of drug addiction – nonetheless, he continued to suffer nightmares from his own experience throughout the following decades. Having studied law, his first case proved to be fixed; disgusted at how easy it was to manipulate the justice system, he ended up falling in with a group of Black-Panther-inspired would-be-revolutionaries; due to his weapons-handling experience from Vietnam, he ended up being tasked to buy the group guns. On one such trip (the weapons were to be purchased for the purpose of a bank robbery), he chanced across a violin in a pawn-shop, and, on a whim, used the money intended for the guns to purchase a violin, the instrument he had originally studied whilst at school. His comrades, convinced that Vietnam had finally driven him mad, abandoned him and carried out the robbery on their own; several of their number were killed. You could say that music literally saved Billy Bang’s life.

“The reason why I become an artist was because I was really trying to evade society’s infrastructure. When I came home from Vietnam, I didn’t want to kill anymore, I didn’t want to be part of the conglomeration of sending people out to die for non reason. So, the only thing I could find the truth in was the music. I knew I wouldn’t make a dollar, but I didn’t care about the money. I said, as long as I believe in the truth, I can live with myself. I can get up, when I go shave, I can look in the mirror and be a happy soul.”

Though his playing was rusty at first, he had apparently convinced himself that music was what he wanted to do; and not just any music, but the esoteric and most definitely non-lucrative free forms of New York’s downtown jazz players. He moved downtown, just to be closer to them, and ended up studying privately with Leroy Jenkins. Technique now matching concept, he was ready to make his mark, and began forming his own ensembles: the String Trio of New York, with John Lindberg and James Emery, The Music Ensemble and The Survival Ensemble. The significance of this latter name is twofold: firstly, even if you’re never going to make enough money to become rich or famous, you have to make enough to survive, to feed yourself and house yourself and your family; secondly, this music is actually necessary ‘in order to survive’ in a society plagued by racism and poverty and inequality and the sacrifice of artistic endeavour on the altar of money and superficiality. Over the years, it was the former that would prove the hardest to accomplish: combine continuing psychological troubles from Vietnam with a hostile or indifferent climate for adventurous jazz-derived music (particularly if it was played by African-Americans), and there were times when Bang nearly went broke. Indeed, his eventual musical confrontation with the Vietnam experience, on those early 2000s records, only came about because of his plea to Justin Time label head Jean-Pierre Leduc for a recording project: Leduc suggested tackling Vietnam, and Bang, after much thought, agreed.

“Sugar, the sweetest thing out there – we put it in our teas, our coffee, our hot chocolate – is initially, originally brown – it’s brown, it looks like my colour. But they don’t want that, so they bleach it, they make it different and they make it white, because it represents their…thing – white people, Europeans, so they make sugar white. They don’t want nothing brown to be sweet. It’s a conscious thing, it’s not an accident – it’s not like, ‘wow, let’s just drop this colour in’ – there’s a purpose to that. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – I watched this as a kid – the cowboys that show up, the good cowboys, always dress in white. The bad cowboys, the evil guys, always dress in black. So black always means bad and negative and ugly. So I grew up with this – well, I’m saying, shit, I’m not bad and ugly and negative. The truth is, I had to fight through all this to become me, to become myself, to get beyond all this, to get stronger than anything out there, and that’s who I am to today. I learned to trust my own self and I applied that to my music. I learned that the universe is one place – the earth as we know it is only one home. I started thinking that I was a man of the planet earth, and that allowed me not to think in terms of borders and conscriptions and I was free – I was very free.”

Despite the difficulties that were to come, and those that had already been, the '70s were an exciting time for the likes of Bang: there was an abundance of music being played, recorded and released, and loft spaces finally allowed for an arena in which musicians could perform what they wanted, how they wanted, at whatever length, rather than having to kow-tow to the wishes and financial desires of nightclub owners perplexed by lengthy pieces that demanded prolonged and focussed concentration, rather than slotting into easy, manageable chunks, as the background to clinking glasses and cash registers. One gets the sense of a real community just by looking at the personnel lists on the back of the record sleeves – so-and-so appears as a sideman on this record by this other musician, who appears as a sideman on his sideman’s record…etc. Furthermore, the presence of figures about whom very little is known, such as saxophonist Bilal Abdur Rahman, who composed half the material on Bang’s own debut as a leader, ‘New York Collage’, suggests that the scene was made up of far more than just a handful of initiates and masters – especially given the fact that the ‘masters’ weren’t exactly well-known in their own right. As Valerie Wilmer puts it in her liner notes for the 1983 record 'Intensive Care' by The Jazz Doctors (Bang, Frank Lowe, Rafael Garrett, and Denis Charles): "To have reached [this] point in music history, thousands of men and women have gone unsung and unrecorded. Only a handful of individuals are allowed to enter the history books despite the clearly collective nature of music practice."

And Bang himself makes the same point, in a more generalised way:

“You can be yourself to some degree, you have to be strong within oneself, but if you just think the world revolves around you as a person, being yourself, you cannot co-exist – and co-existence makes peace, it makes love, it makes harmony. This is my belief.”

Bang’s first recording came in 1974, though it was not released until the end of the decade, as part of a compilation of music recorded at various dates over a period of several years: William Parker’s ‘Through Acceptance of the Mystery Peace’. In fact, Bang appears on two cuts from the final album – the 1974 date, which finds him somewhat submerged into a medium-sized instrumental ensemble (‘Rattles and Bells and the Light of the Sun’), and a 1976 piece forming part of the music for the ballet ‘Dawn Voice,’ in which he joins fellow violinist Ramsey Ameen (later of the Cecil Taylor Unit) to accompany Parker’s poetry recitation.

William Parker - Face Still Hands Folded
Billy Bang, Ramsey Ameen (violin) William Parker (recitation)
Recorded October 1976
from 'Through Acceptance of the Mystery Peace' (1981)

This Parker album also featured a couple of other ‘Downtown’ violinists besides Ameen and Bang: Jason Kao Hwang and Polly Bradfield, the latter of whom would appear alongside our man on Frank Lowe’s 1977 ‘Lowe and Behold’. Whereas Bradfield (a musician virtually unknown today, except to the extreme cognoscenti) has an at times shockingly abrasive approach, Bang can be heard as a contrasting lyrical (if somewhat off-kilter) voice (the track opens with his short duet with John Zorn, who was here making his recorded debut proper).

The Frank Lowe Orchestra - Heavy Drama
Frank Lowe (tenor sax, arr), Joseph Bowie (trombone), Butch Morris (cornet), Arthur Williams (trumpet), John Zorn (alto sax) Peter Kuhn (clarinet) Polly Bradfield, Billy Bang (violin) Eugene Chadbourne (guitar) John Lindberg (bass) Phillip Wilson (drums)
from 'Lowe and Behold' (1977)

The following year, Bang released the already-mentioned ‘New York Collage’: an opportunity to demonstrate his compositions, it also featured his own poetry recitation on the second side. The record opens with a tribute to John Coltrane, as was fairly standard for free jazz dates (Frank Wright’s ‘One For John’, for instance), but from the start it clearly has its own aesthetic: a brief violin solo gives way to a jaunty unison theme, soon moving into an accelerating repeated figure which provides a transition between tight written material and more ‘out’ ensemble playing, everyone soloing at once with enthusiastic abandon. Though there are plenty of fire-breathing moments here, Bang’s violin tones and compositions give a more studied, thoughtful, pre-structured feel to things than, say, is the case with the Arthur Doyle school (indeed, as Hank Shteamer suggests in a recent post on ‘Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches’, even the album that is supposedly the definition of ‘out-there’ free jazz, Peter Brötzmann’s ‘Machine Gun’, is, in fact, a suite alternating composed elements in a variety of genres, moods, and tempi.) Still out-of-print, half the album can be heard in a vinyl rip provided by Destination…out.

Billy Bang - Nobody Hear The Music The Same Way (Dedicated to John Coltrane)
Billy Bang (violin, bells, shaker, percussion), Bilal Abdur Rahman (tenor sax, soprano sax, bull horn, percussion), Henry Warner (alto sax, bells, shaker, percussion), William Parker (bass), Khuwana Fuller (conga), Rashid Bakr (drums)
from 'New York Collage' (1978)

Bang was certainly not hanging around: in the next year he released his first solo recording (from which we hear a track built around urgent, swirling repetitions and bright, hard-edged clarion calls), and his first recording with the String Trio of New York, a group he had co-founded with bassist John Lindberg and guitarist James Emery in 1977. (The Trio has continued until the present day, though Bang left in 1986, his placed since filled by a rotating cast of violinists, including Charles Burnham and Regina Carter). Though the line-up suggests a somewhat neo-classical, or perhaps third-stream side, the music contains plenty of propulsion and gut. Characteristic of the group's releases was a sharing of compositional duties between each trio member; Bang's contribution to their debut is the intriguingly-titled 'Subway Ride with Giuseppi Logan', who at the time had vanished from the scene, having been an important mentor for and collaborator with New York's 'New Thing' musicians during the mid-60s. Dancing, winding, interlocking improvisatory lines over dot-dash bass rhythms suggest the high-flung conversation between Bang and Logan, the two free jazz travellers - mystical, intellectual gravitas within the alien technological rush of the modern city. (Perhaps they didn't even speak; musicians yes, but in this case choosing to communicate through their silence, to communicate through simple presence - songs of the unspoken, songs of the unsung.) No matter the evocative nature of such contextual musings, it's an exhilirating track, tricsky yet flowing, tripping and dancing and flying through air.

Billy Bang - Part of Distinction Without a Difference
Billy Bang (violin)
from 'Distinction Without a Difference' (1979)

String Trio of New York - Subway Ride with Giuseppi Logan
Billy Bang (violin) James Emery (guitar) John Lindberg (bass)
from 'First String' (1979)

As is obvious from the larger ensemble recordings, such as the Lowe, or the varied instrumental line-ups on the Parker, Bang’s group-playing interests were moving far beyond the trumpet/ saxophone/ piano/ bass/ drums format inherited from be-bop. One might immediately think of his incorporation of traditional Vietnamese instruments on the later Vietnam projects, a timbral quality foreshadowed on the final piece from a 1980 trio session called ‘Changing Seasons’. For me, this closing track is one of the most texturally interesting of all Bang’s recordings, the combination of Toshi Tsuchitori’s autoharp and the plucked strings of Bang and William Parker giving the music an insectoid yet somehow stately quality, moving with abstract dancing flickers and flecks and sometimes even near-grooves (Parker’s grounding bass). Much of the piece’s feel – of a music on its toes, dancing quickly and skitterishly but with a certain amount of energising nervousness and trepidation – is surely due to the way Tsuchitori plays the autoharp (I suspect with some sort of drumstick). Bang, meanwhile, nicely mixes up simpatico staccato with squelches and scrapes – towards the end, contributing and developing one particular upwards-rising bowed figure (with added squeaky-door frequencies) that introduces a palpable and building sense of tension, of being inexorably drawn/ driven to some climax – compelled to go there, whatever the risks. And then the introduction of flutes right at the end, and the dissolve into the sound of crickets which opened the record as a whole. Really, I think, one of the highlights of the Bang discography. (And it’s not in print, of course.) Tsuchitori, incidentally, plays mostly drums on the record – since then, he’s moved from free jazz percussion towards investigating ancient instruments and Asian / African music and dance, recording alongside some prehistoric paintings in a French cave along the way), as well as collaborating with theatre director Peter Brook.

Billy Bang - Winter Rains
Toshi Tsuchitori (autoharp) Billy Bang (violin) William Parker (bass, flute)
from 'Changing Seasons' (1981)

We hear a different side of Bang on a perhaps dated, but nonetheless still exhilarating jazz-rock number from Bill Laswell’s ‘Material’. His violin adds bite and textural variety to the tricksy ensemble passages, and another, wilder dimension in during a solo towards the end of the track. This was recorded around the same time he made his sole appearance as a member of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s similarly funky electric band The Decoding Society (alongside Byard Lancaster, Vernon Reid and Charles Brackeen on their debut album, 'Eye on You'). On the selected track, 'Shaman', Bang gets to play the shaman in his trance, whirligging furiously in between a Shannon Jackson drum solo and the weirded-out guitar and quizzical, almost mocking melody line that dominate the tune. Also in this 'punk jazz' vein are a later appearance with British avant-rock band Sonicphonics and a guest spot with Last Exit and Diamanda Galas at the 1986 Moers Jazz Festival (available as a bootleg recording).

Material - Upriver
Olu Dara (cornet) Billy Bang (violin) Sonny Sharrock (guitar) Bill Laswell (bass) Michael Beinhorn (synthesizers, tapes, radio, guitar, drums) Fred Maher (guitar, drums, percussion)
from 'Memory Serves' (1981)

Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society - Shaman
Billy Bang (violin) Byard Lancaster (alto sax) Charles Brackeen (tenor sax) Vernon Reid, Bern Nix (guitar) Melvin Gibbs (bass) Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums) Erasto Vasconcelos (percussion)
from 'Eye on You' (1980)

Last Exit with Billy Bang/Diamanda Galas - Enemy Within
Peter Brötzmann (tenor sax) Sonny Sharrock (guitar) Bill Laswell (bass) Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums) + Billy Bang (violin) Diamanda Galas (voice)
Recorded live at the Moers Jazz Festival, 1986

Enjoyable as they were, Bang's electric adventures in general remained something of a sideline: the real meat of his playing came during acoustic collaborations. And it was during one of these collaborations that he was pushed to perhaps his furthest extent, in a spark-generating quartet led by pianist Marilyn Crispell. At this stage, one hears her fascinatingly weaving her own sound out of (broadly speaking) Cecil Taylorian territory: the music is loud, passionate, heavy, the heavy piano chords and echoing lines really spurring Bang on to whooping, wailing flights. Bang's violin sometimes gets rather lost in the mono radio mix (there's an official recording, doubtless with better sound, called 'Live in Berlin', which I haven't, thus far, been able to get on my hands on); however, the audio is generally adequate, and this track has the added bonus of a superb Peter Kowald solo, ringing tones from his rasping, growling bass as though determinedly wringing the last drop of water from a wet sponge. Comparing all this to Crispell's rather placid recent albums on ECM makes one wish she’d continued developing what she’d started here. I'd include the whole recording in this playlist, if it weren't 38 minutes long: it can be downloaded, however, from Folly For To See For What.

Marilyn Crispell Quartet - Chant
Billy Bang (violin) Marilyn Crispell (piano)Peter Kowald (bass) John Betsch (drums)
Recorded live at Donaueschinger Musiktage, 1982 (SWF2 radio broadcast)

Rather 'lighter' in tone, but no less 'worthy', is a 1984 live date with Don Cherry, who once again proves himself as a player uniquely capable of fitting into any given context without modifying his essential style (check his collaborations with Peter Brotzmann, Rip Rig and Panic). Like Cherry, Bange was as capable of playing with an infectiously 'happy', joyous tone as he was of delving deep and stretching out. That same joy comes through in one of his catchiest tunes, 'Rainbow Gladiator', also taped in a live setting; and in a tribute to Stuff Smith recorded with, all of people, Sun Ra (who had actually played with Smith back in '50s Chicago). It's a mark of the respect with which Bang was heard that Ra took one of his very few sideman jobs in a group led by the violinist; and the date itself is a wonderful example of ostensibly 'free' players digging deep into the tradition without the slightest hint of neo-conservatism. After all, as Bang points out in the liner notes, "[Stuff Smith] was avant garde too, in his own way... By the nature of his instrument, basically. People still don't understand the notes of Smith or can catch him. He was so far-fetched, so far away from jazz. Not for the main people, not for the people that are inside, but even for people that are in my neighbourhood [The Bronx]. I had never heard of Stuff Smith. It too me a long time. You would hear Papa John Creach before you'd hear Stuff Smith. You would actually hear Ray Nance before you'd hear of Stuff Smith. So he was outside of that medium, somehow." Steve Holtje, in this same liner notes, succintly captures how the Bang-Ra group find their own way into Smith's legacy; Ra, "finding complexity in simplicity", playing a solo on this track that "almost any pianist could play - but only Ra would think of it. And while comping under Bang, Ra turns the music inside out with his off-kilter rhythms and harmonies. Bang is hardly overshadowed, spinning out inventive yet swinging, structurally sound lines. With Ore's fat bass sound and Cyrille's pointillistic drumming providing a rock-solid but supremely flexible rhythm section, the liberties Ra likes to take are perfectly supported." (Incidentally, Bang revisited this tune on his most recent recording, 2010's 'Prayer for Peace'.)

Billy Bang & Don Cherry - Unknown Title
Don Cherry (pocket trumpet) Billy Bang (violin) Wilber Morris (bass) Denis Charles (drums)
Recorded live at Tramps, NYC, 1984

Billy Bang Sextet - Rainbow Gladiator
Billy Bang (violin) Roy Campbell (trumpet) Oscar Sanders (guitar) Thurman Barker (marimba, percussion) William Parker (bass) Zen Matsuura (drums) Eddie Conde (conga)
from 'Live at Carlos 1' (1986)

Billy Bang/ Sun Ra - Only Time Will Tell
Billy Bang (violin) Sun Ra (piano) John Ore (bass) Andrew Cyrille (drums)
from 'A Tribute to Stuff Smith' (1992)

In some ways, Bang's whole life was shadowed by his experiences in Vietnam, but it wasn't until his last 10 years that he directly approached the subject in music, recruiting a band of other ex-Vietnam vets, including Ted Daniel and Butch Morris, and releasing two of his best received albums, 'Vietnam: The Aftermath' and 'Vietnam: Reflections'. Having made his peace with Vietnam, tragically, it was still Vietnam that had the last word; the cancer that caused his death was apparently a result of Agent Orange.

It was that first Vietnam album that brough him some added notice in the jazz press: people seemed surprised at its easy, swinging nature (as if Bang hadn't shown them how capable he was of playing in that style already), respectful of its historical resonance. As Jim Santella wrote in a review for All About Jazz: "The music moves evenly with a peaceful country air. Dirges, dances, ceremonial rites, a little dramatic counterpoint, and swinging anthems take on surreal qualities through Billy Bang's compositions.[...]Bang and five other members of the ensemble are veterans. They've turned these memories into a positive affair. Culture, society, and a deeper meaning color the session thoroughly, but they're couched in lively, straight-ahead jazz terms."

Billy Bang - Tunnel Rat (Flashlight & a '45)
Billy Bang (violin) Ted Daniel (trumpet) John Hicks (piano) Curtis Lundy (bass) Michael Carvin (drums)
from 'Vietnam: The Aftermath' (2001)

One of Bang's finest recent recordings came in a quintet with Frank Lowe; this was also one of the saxophonist's final performances before he too, succumbed to cancer, and, indeed, he played this concert with only one lung, becoming so out of breath at the end of proceedings that the promoter wanted to call an ambulance. Bang and Lowe’s musical relationship had lasted for more than twenty-five years, and by this stage, both had, perhaps, ‘mellowed out’ a little: Lowe’s solos, while retaining atonal interjections, are less burry and ferocious than they had been in the ’70s, instead taking on a pithy and even pretty edge, while Bang swoops between grandstanding, super-fast runs, staccato rhythmics, and smoothly expansive melodies. The track I've chosen, 'Nothing But Love', gives Lowe and Bang the least solo space of any of the tunes on the record, but their unison statements of the righteously hopefuly melody attain an added poignancy with both mens' passing. Another side of the band is shown in the video embedded below; recorded five years earlier, it finds Lowe in fine fire-breathing mode, yet manages to slot deliciously into a fairly straight (yet not cliche-laden) jazz & blues-based approach.)



Billy Bang / Frank Lowe Quintet - Nothing But Love
Frank Lowe (tenor sax) Billy Bang (violin) Andrew Bemkey (piano) Todd Nicholson (bass) Tatsuya Nakatani (drums)
from 'Above and Beyond: An Evening in Grand Rapids' (2005)

The technological boom of the past decade has meant 'obscure' musicians such as Bang can, theoretically, be seen and heard by tens of thousands of people all round the world - something undreamed of in earlier days of day-to-day struggle. And if that might be a rather utopian way of looking at things - it still is a struggle for those playing this music, and the internet isn't going to change all that - it's nonetheless true that there's more than enough good-quality video evidence of Bang's playing during the 2000s to allow even the laziest music fan to investigate his work. I've chosen to embed a few examples below (they won't be featured in the playlist, obviously). To begin with, Bang guesting with the band Trouble) contrasts Harvey Cowan’s freescrape violin solo with Bang’s own melodic, building approach. Cowan (who is apparently also an architect) sounds a bit like Bang used to – not that either approach is less relevant or valid, just that Bang plays differently now (though he can of course whip out the dissonances and rough finishes - they are what gives his playing its spice). Following that, two trios with Hamiet Bluiett, the first also featuring Jin Hi Kim on komungo (a Korean zither dating back to the 7th century), the second with percussionist Kahil El'Zhabar; another trio with Kim and William Parker; and a very fine duo with Parker (all recorded live). Roulette TV, meanwhile, has a full-length solo violin performance from 2010, opening with an introspective piece self-descriptively entitled ‘Daydream’, proceeding through a poem dedicated to Denis Charles and ending with a trademark super-fast cadenza. It's both a fine example of Bang’s solo technique and of the relation between his compositional and improvisational methods (as explained in the interview which appears towards the end of the video). Interesting also to compare it to the solo violin piece from 30 years earlier which I posted nearer the top of the playlist.

Roulette TV: BILLY BANG from Roulette Intermedium on Vimeo.

Bang appeared, if anything, to be growing stronger, rather than withering with age: albums like the Sirone-Bang Ensemble's 'Configuration' and the William Parker Violin Trio's 'Scrapbook' have some of his finest playing on record, and ‘Prayer for Peace’ had been among the best-received jazz albums of 2010 - so the news of his death came as quite a shock to quite a few people. Perhaps, those closest to Bang knew; and at last year’s Vision Festival, he’d announced his battle with cancer. But he was determined to keep on playing through it, and there were planned appearances, for example, at this year’s Vision (where he was going to pay tribute to the recently-deceased Marion Brown), and a number of other dates. The video below, from Feburary 2011, is perhaps his last documented performance: a quintet featuring Dick Griffin on trombone, Andrew Bemkey (who we heard with the Lowe/Bang Quintet) on piano, Hilliard Greene on bass, and Newman Taylor-Baker on drums. As a shaven-headed Bang leads with the solemn, hymn-like melody of 'Prayer for Peace' over churchy piano chords, trombone and bass drones, and rumbling drums, one reflects that the title of the piece he dedicated to John Coltrane could just as well apply to the man himself: "Nobody Hear the Music the Same Way."

Billy Bang Quintet - Prayer for Peace
Billy Bang (violin) Dick Griffin (trombone) Andrew Bemkey (piano) Hilliard Greene (bass) Newman Taylor Baker (drums)
Recorded live at the Savoy Theatre, 4th Feb 2011

Download the Full Playlist Here
(THIS contains some tracks from bootleg recordings and MP3 versions of videos: sound quality on these will not be up to the standard of the official album tracks.)

The quotations interspersed throughout the post above are transcriptions from a video interview given by Bang in 2007, and available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsXJ2uzM9Vo. George Scala's Billy Bang discography can be found at http://www.mindspring.com/~scala/bang.htm, while John Lindberg's reminiscence of his time with Bang in the String Trio of New York is at New Music Box.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011)

Starring: Werner Herzog et al
Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Director of Photography: Peter Zeitlinger

Given the almost-universal acclaim (if not widespread cinema release) with which ‘Cage of Forgotten Dreams’ has been greeted, one gets the feeling that it’s a film most people don’t even need to watch to like. Werner Herzog, the Chauvet Caves, 3-D (3-D?!!!) – what could go wrong? Yet, while it’s certainly a competent piece of work, often it feels like a straight documentary which has self-consciously been made 'Herzogian' round the edges - most notably, with the 'characters' of the perfumier sniffing for cave and the fur-suited man playing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' on a bone flute, as well as (of course) the postscript about albino crocodiles. As one review notes, Herzog's typical view of nature as, at best, indifferent, at worst, actively hostile, takes a back-seat here for a reverent approach to the dynamic, yet ultimately rather benign depictions of animals inside the cave itself. There would have been plenty to stress about the hunter-gatherer way of life, humans placed in a world of actively hostile animals where they were not yet top of the pile – and yet this element is not emphasized, Herzog even suggesting that the footprints of an eight-year old boy found next to those of wolf might hint at some sort of companionship – yes, the wolf may have been stalking the boy, but they may also have been walking side by side. This seems to provide an instance where, because the history is so far back, Herzog can play on his old ‘ecstatic truth’ trope, inventing stories and fantasies and dreams about what the cave artists’ life may have been like (somewhat akin to the original idea of creating a sci-fi out of the desert landscapes, wrecked vehicles, and drought-riddled corpses of the African desert in ‘Fata Morgana’) – and yet, much of the time it feels as though we are actually witnessing something rather sanitised, National Geographic-style. This reverent approach is underscored by the ever-present sound of Ernst Reijseger's music, which pairs Reijseger's own high-pitched, folkish improvised cello melodies over organ drones, quasi-medieval choir, and, in the final montage of the cave paintings, an 'ethnic flute' deployed in something approaching early ’90s chillout fashion. As a result, sections of the film are actually rather dull, the most notable culprit being the 5-minute sequence in which we follow a female professor around the caves as she points out what we can actually see with our own eyes - 'here is a painting of a lion' – like a tour guide who cannot let her charges experience the place first hand, but must constantly place it under a contextual veil, sterilising it, removing it from the realm of the living. Also notable is the way that she constantly refers to the cave artist(s) as male - 'he stood here, he made this mark' - something her briefly-glimpsed colleague corrects (changing 'man' to 'human') – but to which she soon returns as the camera dutifully follows her around. Surely, one speculates, the assumed male-ness of the artist belies the fact that we witness statues of giant female deity-figures with enormous pubic regions in similar caves, suggesting some sort of fertility cult (cave as womb). Indeed, the one representation of a human form in the whole of Chauvet is the lower half of a female being embraced by a bull – and here one thinks of Simone de Beavouir’s notion of ‘woman’ as mediatrix between natural and human worlds. “She is endowed with mind and spirit, but she belongs to Nature, the infinite current of life flows through her; she appears, therefore, as a mediatrix between the individual and the cosmos.” (‘The Second Sex’) (If this appears too solemn, one could always counterpose the following: “For me, to recognize that so many of the preserved Paleolithic images were done casually, by both sexes and all age-groups, more often than not by youngsters, who even left their tracks under renditions of wounded bulls and swollen vulvas, in no way makes Paleolithic sites less hallowed. The possibility that adolescent giggles and snickers may have echoed in dark cave passages as often as the rhythm of a shaman’s chant demeans neither artists nor art. Instead, it opens the possibility for us to conceive, with familiar warmth and greater immediacy, the entire range of preserved Paleolithic art.” (That’s R. Dale Guthrie, from ‘The Nature of Paleolithic Art’.)

We might consider also (of course, this will remain speculation) the role of these paintings, once more using de Beauvoir’s terms: are they ‘priestly’, the work of a caste who “control and direct forces they have mastered in accord with the gods and the laws, for the common good, in the name of all members of the group,” or ‘magical’, the work of one who “operates apart from society, against the gods and the laws, according to his own deep interests”? The fact that the cave contains so few human traces, in contrast to the large number of animal skeletons, suggests that it was infrequently used, or at least, used only temporarily: small bands of people, or individuals, holding their torches to the walls and making riddles, invocations, codes apart from the main social and practical functions of diurnal life; art as cultic ceremony, with a power understood only by the few, perhaps not even by them in their own selves (instead through possession, access to some form of higher, other power, spirit); as something potentially dangerous, potentially over-spilling the limits even of primitive social structures. No system of patronage, not that kind of art-cult; but still speaking from somewhere other than the place to which people are accustomed. Are audiences invited in to witness shadow-ceremonies, shows of music and light and movement? Or are these kept as private invocations, experiments, searches for knowledge that may be applied to the other world of the everyday, but which must first be tested, fine-tuned, played with? Magic as creative act – making something happen – naming as magical act – drawing as a kind of naming (the representation of the animal as the visual equivalent of its spoken name) – or the combination of the two, the visual/totemic element alongside the sounding of the name, of magical words/spells/formulae (science today still has that magical inheritance – balancing the equation, getting the correct formula is equivalent to getting the right words, pronouncing the spell correctly).

One of Herzog’s most intriguing notions (though, it has to be said, a fairly obvious one) is that the Chauvet paintings are an early form of animation/ cinema (and, we might add, gesamtkunstwerk, or opera), combining sound, visuals, and movement. We see this most clearly in the attempt to capture motion – animals with multiple legs, drawn round contours of the cave wall (e.g. a bison chasing an ibex from out of a shadowed recess) – and they could seem to come alive when ‘animated’ by the play of torchlight on walls – shadows interacting with the paintings of animals (here Herzog rather whimsically inserts a clip of Fred Astaire dancing with his shadow). This is not merely a kind of 3-D-style wow-factor – rather, it fits in with notions of transformation and fluidity. A scientist in the film speculates that human identity was viewed as permeable and porous, rather than fixed – humans can transform into animals, animals can stand on two legs and walk about, trees can speak – thus, the play of light and shade, breaking down visual distinctions between human performers and animal paintings, is not merely play, but becomes part of an entire mode of seeing the world very different from our own. I would quibble, however, with the claim, also made in the film, that visual communication was regarded as more reliable than oral (the ‘ecstatic truth’ of an image, perhaps) – it seems presumptuous to make judgements on the predominance of the visual just because that’s all we have left from the cave (sound, of course, doesn’t survive; while certain patterns in song, music and non-written language may become traditions, tropes, repeated and passed down through generations, they are still subject to change and revision to far greater degree than solid visual marks). The Chauvet paintings, however astounding they might be, are merely traces; as if one had been left with the stage sets from a play, without the actors, the script, the director, the lighting, the audience – as if one entered this empty theatre and attempted to make judgements about what took place within. The indications, though, are that the Chauvet caves were the site of a kind of total artwork; they were a ritual space, a theatre-temple rather than an art gallery. For instance, a bear skull placed on an altar-like rock appears to have been surrounded with incense (maybe the perfumier sniffing the caves out isn’t so crazy, after all…); combine this with bone flutes and voices, and we have a fusion of ‘primitive’ light-show/shadow-play/magic lantern with ‘art’ (painting), smell and music. The attempt to privilege visual over oral, then, is not merely misguided, but part of the whole modern process of specialisation, tied to the division of labour: “As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (Marx, ‘The German Ideology’)

Perhaps the cave artists were already part of the process towards specialisation, acting as part of a separated cult, an elite caste akin to William Blake’s hated priesthood– the cave was not inhabited by humans (there are no human bones inside, though there are plenty of bear skeletons (and bear scratches on the wall), but instead seems to have been a secret place, at a remove, hidden, separate – a place for rites, for cults (the production of sacred objects as a dangerous task – see the Dogon production of sacred statues away from the village) – art originating as a cultic activity, secret, magic, involving hidden knowledge (gnosis) – that which binds together the elite, or the unspoken/unspeakable backbone of the social community as a whole. In Herzog’s film, the circus performer turned scientist recalls an anecdote about an aborigine artist, who touches up an old cave painting whilst accompanied by an anthropologist. The anthropologist, curious, asks him what he’s painting, to which the response is ‘I don’t paint, the spirit does’ – this of course, part of the whole notion of the ‘muse’, of creative inspiration, of channelling something other than oneself. At the same time, one does not simply abandon oneself to chance, the willing servant of a god whose purpose one cannot divine but in which one must absolutely trust; one invokes a presence (animal, spirit) through imitating it, through actively embodying it. This might take place through sound (bearing in mind theories about the onomatopoeiac origins of speech and song) – sound as invocation, with the power to make things happen – not a representation but the thing itself – one can directly channel the voice of an animal, a spirit (shaman, medium). Does it follow that sound, then, offers a more unmediated access than visual art? Well, perhaps I’m reversing that visual/oral distinction unnecessarily, for it seems that the cave paintings play their own invocatory, creative role. The Chauvet walls are drawn on in long, sweeping outline – as is pointed out in the film, one animal, over six feet in length, has been sketched out with a single, stretching gesture. Here, once more, Blake springs to mind: “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art.[…] Leave out this line, and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it again before man or beast can exist.” (Blake, ‘A Descriptive Catalogue’) Blake’s ‘Ancient of Days’ is depicted sitting in the sky with his hand stretched out, two lightning-like streaks emerging from his thumb and fingers, tracing out that originary line of creation, “the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements” which enables us “to distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox.” This is not simply the original creative action of a separated sky-god, but the work of ‘The Eternal Great Humanity Divine’ (man himself, in his spiritual being) which is put into practice every single day. The act of invention and execution is a single act (no mind/body separation here – creation is the almost instantaneous flash from brain to arm); drawing a line is a continually repeated act of creation, as is our perception. All our experience depends on our creating it, in every moment – to exist is to create – we create our existence. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “Each perception…re-enacts on its own account the birth of intelligence and has some elements of creative genius about it: in order that I recognize the tree as a tree, it is necessary that, beneath the familiar meaning, the momentary arrangement of the visible scene should begin all over again, as on the very first day of the vegetable kingdom, to outline the individual idea of this tree.” (MP, ‘Phenomenology of Perception’). Like the Australian songlines, which constantly re-enact the original moment of creation, the Chauvet paintings are not mere decoration, not mere ‘form’ into which ‘ideas’ are poured, but dramatizations, if you will, of the act of perception itself – creative acts, gestures that (once more) make something happen.



Both Blake (and, to some extent, Merleau-Ponty, with his desire to re-achieve an inalienable, “direct and primitive contact with the world, endowing that contact with a philosophical status”) were against a linear notion of time as always regular, always unfolding as a succession of points along a straight line; such thinking merely fits with the capitalist need to commodify time, to measure it in terms of pay and employment rather than in terms of human perception (or in terms of vast distances beyond the measure of human perception, and certainly beyond the reach of capital). For Blake, real value lies in the moment of epiphany, of creation, the minute particular, the “Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find”; “Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery/ Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years, / For in this Period the Poet’s work is Done: and all the Great / Events of Time start forth & are conceiv’d in such a Period, / Within a moment, a Pulsation of the Artery.” (‘Milton’) Given this, the Chauvet caves, with their refusal to fit into any (art-)historical schema, any pre-ordained genre (animal portraiture? devotional image? totem? record of psychedelic experience?) and their almost unimaginable distance in time (and space, if we consider how recently they were re-discovered, and for how long they were sealed off by rockfall) prove an exemplary challenge to our neat notion of narrative; not that we can necessarily experience them with the immediacy of Merleau-Ponty’s “direct and primitive contact,” nor Blake’s “pulsation of the artery”, but that they do somehow stand outside measurable history (we can say that one drawing was executed several thousands of years after the one it overlaps, but can we really imagine, conceive of such distance except as a meaningless figure?). Twentieth-century humanity, with its eye constantly on both the future (the threat of ecological catastrophe; the need for ‘progress’ and technological development; the possibility of making more and more money; the measuring of political/imperial trends in a globalised world) and the past (constant conservative appeals to notions of empire and racial purity; a sense of generational change and loss in morals, fashions, ideas; the fetishization of historical images thought to stand for some heroic past era from which we have regressed (Churchill, the Blitz, Henry V)) loses a sense of the present moment which – we dangerously speculate – may have been much more immediate, much more accessible (because not really considered, simply acted upon without thought) by the artists of Chauvet. It’s that palimpsestic revision that does it – who now would think to draw over the Mona Lisa, for instance (and that’s only a few hundred years old) – the fetishization of historical art objects as untouchable, holy, the past as a foreign country, rather than as marks on a cave wall that exist in the present, no matter when they were originally lay down, and over which one re-inscribes another image. Herzog’s prompts us to go further, his suggestion that the Chauvet artists were somehow outside history, with no sense of the future, made explicit in John Berger’s concluding comments from his own, earlier, visit to the caves: “The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years. We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries. Today's culture, instead of facing mysteries, persistently tries to outflank them.” At the same time, it would not do to romanticise the paintings as some primitive art-ideal; life was undoubtedly ‘tough’ at a time when (Berger again), “the average life expectancy was 25”; furthermore, “the nomads were acutely aware of being a minority overwhelmingly outnumbered by animals. They had been born, not on to a planet, but into animal life. They were not animal keepers: animals were the keepers of the world and of the universe around them, which never stopped. Beyond every horizon were more animals.” Life as a short flash, in which every moment is that much more vital for not being followed by an interminable succession of lengthening moments into the dreariness and inactivity of old age? (The myth that ‘the good die young’; stone age man as a tribe of Mozarts.) And a notion of co-existence with, rather than destructive dominance over nature (this belied, as with the ridiculous notion of the Mozart tribe, by the fact that one had to hunt to survive, that animals aren’t naturally disposed to be ‘nice’ to each other, and, above all, by the ferocious physical conditions which enveloped the planet – a glacial landscape of freezing temperatures, in which fire assumes a special, almost sacred meaning (the myth of Prometheus). This, of course, actually counts for much of the vitality of the cave art – fire and warmth inside a cave are that much more precious, and thus endowed with something more than mere theatrics; there is a sense of landscape, not merely as a pretty view one looks out upon (the landed aristocrat surveying his estate) but as something one is placed within, which one is a part of – something much more interior, a sense of being literally inside the earth. As much as possible, then, we should attempt to read the paintings in their historical dimension, from their physical circumstances, as much as a more mythic and metaphysical reading suggests itself; perhaps the two interpretations can go alongside each other, at least, until we invent time travel. So the paintings can be at once the scrabblings of a cold and hairy man/woman called ‘Ug’ and something akin to the founding myth/ act of origin we cannot name; akin to Heidegger’s “question [which] has today been forgotten” – ‘what is the meaning of Being?’ A question, an act, before records, across what Herzog calls an “abyss of time” – not to reduce the paintings to a Life magazine “oo, they were just like us” platitude, but neither, perhaps, to go as far as Herzog does in the film’s coda. Most critics seem to have left analysis at the door by this stage, and simply noted this concluding segment as a delightful example of Herzog’s wackiness (rather like the way they let the hack-work of ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’ off the hook because it had such self-consciously ‘crazy’ touches (lizards! Nicolas Cage! point-of-view shots! breakdancing souls!)). That’s perhaps slightly unfair, though, and in some ways the sequence clarifies the film’s entire view, beyond the restrained solemnity of tour-guides and overdone music and ten-minute pans round the cave walls; it’s as if Herzog can say, ‘at last! back to the unknowability and indifference and magnificence of nature! (this “harmony of overwhelming and collective murder”which “I love against my better judgement”)’. So, the scene shifts further down the valley, to where (supposedly) a nuclear power plant has caused genetic mutations in crocodiles; cue footage of these small, albino creatures in a greenhouse, being followed above and below the water line by Herzog’s camera, overlaid with his speculative commentary about the alienness of other species; these crocodiles may look back at/ on us with the same confusion as we look back on the Chauvet artists, across an ‘abyss of time’. This “unfathomable depth of time” applies equally to the far distant past and to an imagined sci-fi future: “The film goes completely bonkers at that point, during the postscript. It's like we are entering pure science fiction fantasy. But it's not just for the sake of that fantasy, it has to do with our perception and the perception of the people at that time, 32,000 years ago. We cannot reconstruct it - we do not know. Of course, we can describe our perception, but what is going to happen in 20 generations from now? And how would albino crocodiles see it if they expand all the way to Chauvet Cave [laughs]? In fact, reality is much wilder than my science fiction fantasies.” The ‘abyss of time’ means that ancestry, then, is not a guarantee of stability or value; we wish to know it (hence our ceaseless wondering about the mysteries of the cave), romanticise it as a primitive, creative, originary period, and at the same time fear what it might reveal about us, the murder and hardship which exists just as much now as it did then (‘how far have we really come?’) and which existed just as much then as it does now (no backwards-utopianising to a more ‘innocent’ time (mankind’s childhood, as it were)). The reason this coda has much more power than the rest of the film’s mix of Discovery Channel/ National Geographic competency and selected moments of oddness is, perhaps, that it moves further from the straight documentary style into which Herzog had seemed to be uncharacteristically shoe-horned; now for ‘ecstatic truth’, now for fabrication in order to access some ‘deeper’ insight beyond the check-list of facts and figures. (Particularly given the fact that he appears to have made up the whole story about the crocodile mutation.) One would have thought that the entire subject of Chauvet would offer ample opportunity for this (odd that Herzog should fictionalised more about Gesauldo than about Chauvet), and the coda therefore makes the film that preceded it feel like something of a missed opportunity. Still, it’s a fascinating subject, one which raises all sorts of other considerations and provocations, and there are moments where Herzog nails this; perhaps best to view it as a one-off, rather than as part of a ‘corpus of works’ (that historicizing urge, again), enjoy it for what it is and reflect that, since you or I are unlikely to ever gain access to Chauvet, this may be our best opportunity to see those marks and shadows and recesses and contours for ourselves.

Where Now for the UK Anti-Cuts Movement?

OK, so a lot to unpack from Saturday's TUC march/rally in London. Much of the subsequent online discussion, it seems, has centred, not on the rally itself, but on the aftermath, with the arrests of 145 UK Uncut members who'd staged a peaceful occupation of Fortnum and Mason. This seems to mark the moment at which 'softer' activists (i.e. those who are not experienced black bloc members, well-versed in outwitting the cops) encounter the true hypocrisy and opportunism of the police, their willingness to: (a) exploit a situation for maximum threatening effect (don't do this again, don't dare challenge things or disturb the political/social order, don't dare to cause even the slightest hint of 'disruption' beyond the usual managed routes - don't do these things, because if you do, we'll arrest you again, you'll have a criminal record for life which may mitigate against job opportunities, and we might rough you up a bit as well); and (b) to do this while maintaining the media advantage, which ignores the march itself to focus on the 'disgusting' activities of a 'violent minority'. Sample headline on Sky's Rolling News service: '500 anarchists are heading towards Oxford Street'. Sitting in a pub on that very street, we looked out of the window and wondered how anyone could possibly believe such nonsense. But then again, we had actually been on Oxford Street and on the main rally for the previous few hours, so it appeared obvious to us that we were just watching a desperate attempt to stitch together a false narrative from a few innocuous images (protestors in the streets; journalists running at a small line of cops with riots shields, make one of the cops flinch their shield slightly; a couple of hooded people smashing a window and an ATM). As the same footage was looped for the next five minutes, however, the hypnotic and suggestive effect of the false narrative became apparent; and anyone coming at this coverage ‘cold’ (i.e. with no knowledge of what had actually happened on the day apart from what Sky News was telling them) might plausibly buy into the story. And even though this was a particularly hysterical variation on the ‘peaceful march hijacked by violent minority’ line, one also saw such a stance coming through in the pages of ‘liberal’ papers like The Guardian; Millbank might have been fun, something of a journalistic coup for those close enough to capture it, and something which might prove to have symbolic capital later on (perhaps plastered over some gallery showing of ‘subversive’ or ‘rebellious’ images of protest, neutered and neutralised like a Che Guevara T-shirt) – but this, well, this is just a bit awkward. We like to go shopping on the high street on our weekends; so are you implying that we’re in with the bad guys? Tory HQ is one thing (it’s clear who the enemy is then), but BHS is a whole different matter…Considering complicity in this way is not something of which centre-leftists seem capable – thus the need to disguise any real debate about the use of direct action or disruptive tactics with a blanket dismissal of ‘violence’.

Of course, such coverage begs the question, since when is paint-balling a few buildings and attempting (rather unsuccessfully) to smash a few ATMs 'violent'? (And since when is such ‘violence’ considered more newsworthy than policemen wielding batons and dragging protestors to the ground? If half as much column space had been devoted to Alfie Meadows and Jody McIntyre as has been taken up by supposed leftists’ blanket condemnations of anarchists, then the police might actually start to worry about being held accountable for their actions.) This whole argument about destruction of property was one I discussed in my blogposts on last year's education protests, and I stand by my view that: (a) Far more 'violent' than breaking a few windows is the espousal of the exploitation and immiseration of all those not fortunate enough to have been born into wealth, or to be part of the capitalist buddies club; and just as violent, by implication, is to simply accept this as 'the way things have to be' (let's all tighten our belts (well, some of us will tighten our belts, some will just talk about it from our comfy seats of power), the market must be placated because it threw a little tantrum and caused some bother). (b) Sometimes, the 'legitimate', 'peaceful' means of protest are not enough; sometimes, you have to hit them (those in power) where it hurts, just as they hit those in whose interests they are supposed to govern (but manifestly regard as a doltish mass of benefit cheats, scroungers, immigrants and hooligan leftist who might even let them get away with absurd economic and social policy). They are clearly rattled by public expression of dissatisfaction, clearly rattled by the destruction of property - a visible, concrete, physical sign, an ACT that cannot be misinterpreted or 'spun' to mean something other than what it is; a manifest truth. As Rob Ray writes on libcom.org, a protest that simply stays within the white lines scares nobody:

“Tory MPs are not stupid sheep to be panicked or genuinely outraged by ITN throwing a "breaking news" strapline on the TV screen; they'll take note of the size of the march, its overall level of militancy and what it has to say (which is apparently "oh pwease don't be nasty, pweeeease" even though this approach manifestly didn't work in 2003 using three times the number of people against a supposedly more liberal Labour government which wasn't being directly pressured by the markets). In reality, if this is just a nice, pleasant walk-around, said MPs will almost certainly heave a huge sigh of relief and put those notes in the bin.”

I take Dan Hind's point that smashing things up can play directly into the hands of the cops: as he points out, undercover police instigators love encouraging this sort of behaviour, as it provides perfect material for the ‘violent minority’ media coverage.

“I support direct action. I was at the UK Uncut occupations in December, for example. But I am wary of photogenic attacks on shop windows precisely because they distract attention from what is a serious - potentially fatal - challenge to the Coalition.

In general I am very reluctant to adopt tactics that are actively encouraged by police agents. Peaceful civil disobedience and rational argument hold out our best hope of stopping the cuts and securing a wider transformation of the country.

The state wants to encourage violence because it can win a fight.

It cannot win the argument.

So, let's have an argument.”

Given this, one might feel that one is stuck between a rock and a hard place: a mass, peaceful demonstration of public opinion can be politely noted and then completely ignored (as per Iraq), while simply ‘smashing things up’ plays into the hands of those who wish to bring repressive tactics to bear on protestors, thus threatening peaceful protestors as well as those who want to take things further. I’m not convinced, though by Hind’s “[the state] cannot win the argument”; I’m not convinced that the current government wants to have an argument in the first place, or that they would be willing to have one in the second; and neither I am convinced that they give a flying fuck what anyone on the left of the political spectrum believes should be done in response to the financial crisis, or, indeed, about any ‘movement of the people’.

What am I advocating, then? Despite the impressive turn-out on Saturday, I remain sceptical about the TUC’s ability and willingness to organise a genuine resistance movement; it still seems to me that they will end up compromising with the Labour party leadership (as per Ed Milliband’s insipid headlining speech at the rally), hoping that the ConDems will shoot themselves in the foot and that we’ll be back to New Labour for the next election (which will suddenly seem like rather a good option after several years of Tory rule, much as we despised Labour’s right-ward turn under Blair and Brown). To which it could be said: but what do you really expect? Stop being so idealistic (unrealistic) and put your efforts behind something that can actually work, that can actually have some effect. Well, perhaps some people are fed up of the pressure to be all peaceful and unthreatening and 'reasonable', when something more angry and maybe, yes, 'violent', would be much more convincing. I don’t just mean paint-balling high-street shops and smashing ATMs, but strikes, sit-ins, occupations, street theatre, squats, ‘actions’; all these are visible, public measures which do not have to be governed or organised by a centralised, nationwide leadership. Given the extremity of the government's right-wing measures, calling for something as 'extreme' as a general strike or civil unrest is not unreasonable, and one feels it’s only because we’re in England (where the tradition of resistance and protest is either ‘underground’, glossed over in the official histories (the Luddites, Ranters, Diggers, Chartists, poets, artists), or becomes neutered by mainstream acceptance (punk’s (semi-)recuperation by the culture industry)) that something like a general strike seems so extreme, seems beyond the pale.

In the end, perhaps that’s the problem: we are too scared, too often; we are too timid, too afraid, when, perhaps, encouraging/ forcing the powers that be to play their hand, to step up repressive measures, might allow us (we, the opposition), to start winning the media battle, to make things go so far that even woolly liberals start braying in unmediated anger. Or perhaps we should stop focussing on media coverage so much and focus on scaring the shit out of the government through a movement full of spontaneous, unpredictable action as well as mass, organised protests such as Saturday’s; for while big rallies in London are all very well, London is not the only place in England – the cuts will be felt across the country, and mobilising support, moulding a network of interconnected pockets of resistance, seems like a more attractive option than simply relying on centralised union bureaucracy. The student protests were (I use the past tense, though I’m not suggesting the movement has died away; instead, it may align itself with the general anti-cuts outrage that will surely become more and more prevalent in the coming months) a loose coalition between students and supportive academics; when the NUS failed to take the lead they should have, despite organising the first big march, a much looser group of occupations and protests filled the gap left by an insufficient/non-existent centralised leadership. Millbank didn’t happen because Aaron Porter directed us toward it like a lollipop man; it happened because a general feeling seized a small and spontaneous crowd, and it suddenly seemed possible to take action rather than simply standing politely and watching some well-meaning anti-cuts videos. With general anti-cuts protest, the scope is clearly much wider, and a broader movement may have to be more organised; yet local, less centralised occupations, squats, etc, will still be vital as the main meat of the movement, the bricks in the wall for which central organisation is merely the cement. Those are a couple of dodgy metaphors; and the idea of wall is not fluid enough for what I mean to suggest: collectivised decision-making processes; workers’ councils; direct action; self-organisation; that which is organic, rather than circumscribed.

This is necessary because circumstances have changed, and the traditional leftist modes of resistance may not always prove appropriate. In particular, I’m thinking of union organisation; the history of trade unionism is indeed a vital one, but there is a sense that it is not always adequate to changing standards and practices in working life. For instance, say I have just left university, and cannot afford to do a post-grad course; so I sign on at the local job centre (where the workers tell me that their own jobs are unsafe, thus filling me with confidence), and eventually get a lowly office/admin job at a big financial firm. For all the disadvantages of old-style factory jobs, at least they offered a certain amount of job security, opportunities for collective organisation, a tradition of standing up to the bosses, going on strike, etc; with the new, information-based job market, organised around job agencies and temporary contracts, it is that much harder to organise oneself into a body that can negotiate with the bosses to ensure fair pay and working conditions. Each individual is in competition with at least 200 others from similar backgrounds and with similar skills; they are all scrapping over one crappy little six-month temporary contract, after which, if they’re lucky, they may get re-employed by the same company for another six-month period. Of course, everyone hates the fluorescent lighting, the inane and anal little do’s and don’ts, the senseless office rules for whose instigation no one claims responsibility and which no one seems able to change; but, if you’re not careful, if you complain too much or to the wrong person or at the wrong time, then you can be dismissed as if you were simply a fly, idly swatted away with the back of the hand on a summer’s day. Everyone, then, is encouraged to toe the line, to mutter and grumble a little (but only when no one’s looking), to chat about the X factor or Heat magazine, and to get their head down over their desks. ‘Solidarity’ exists only as a tamed and regulated ‘banter’ that disguises deep-set anxieties about getting fired for doing something ‘inappropriate’ or because the boss just doesn’t take a shine to you; and traditions of unionism and campaigning for one’s rights as a worker have been virtually erased. You are an individual, trying to get by, and living for the weekend; screw everyone else. Elements of this fit with what Nina Power’s analysis of ‘the feminization of labour’ in ‘One-Dimensional Woman’: the sort of secretarial, admin and call-centre work that used to be done by women has now been ‘generously’ extended so that men can do it as well. This is not a fine sign of gender equality, but an extension of old means of oppression/ keeping women down, across the board – a kind of reverse equality, in which we don’t make give some people rights equal to those enjoyed by others, but give everyone the same rights to inequality.

So, let’s take our prototypical mid-twenties graduate working on a temporary contract in an anonymous admin job (soon to become our prototypical mid-twenties non-graduate (who wanted to go to university but was frightened off by the rising cost of tuition fees, so squandered themselves on the job-centre scrap and a life of very English ‘quiet desperation’)). Depending on their level of political awareness, they make take trade unionism to stand for a distinguished and important history of workers’ organisation; but it will remain just that, a history, and one to which they have no access as a present means of support. Public sector workers may be in a more favourable position vis-à-vis unions – though they are obviously in dire straits in general terms – but the growing generation of educated/aware but financially badly-off admin workers cannot be ignored. And it is for those such as them (I’m sure there are many other thumbnail social analyses one could do for similar categories) that new methods of resistance and organisation have to be found, away from union bureaucracy and centralised TUC initiatives (remember that these people may not be able to afford the extortionate train fare to London in the first place). This will require people taking the initiative, taking matters into their own hands, rather than waiting for the next big march in London; it may involve hours of tedium, apparent failure, and miserable, poorly-attended rallies in the rain outside the local shopping centre. It will also require creativity, a desire and a willingness to disrupt and go beyond social norms, without simply retreating into an ‘underground’ of those who are ‘hip’, those who are ‘in the know’. Can it be done? Of course. Will it? Let’s see what happens…