Avant-garde Jazz Research Articles

O Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra Projeto : entrevista com Steven Feld

In this interview, Steven Feld, an anthropologist, filmmaker, musician, and sound artist, discusses his multimedia project on “Jazz Cosmopolitanism” in Ghana. From 2004, Feld started to study acoustemology—one’s sonic way of knowing and being in the world—from the standpoint of avant-garde jazz musicians and visual artists in Accra. He worked as a producer and as a sound engineer, before performing as a musician with the Accra Trane Station band in Africa, Europe and the United States. In the following years, he produced CDs and documentary movies featuring musicians such as the drummer Ghanaba (formerly Guy Warren), the country’s leading experimentalist. In this interview, Steven Feld discusses his encounter with these musicians and visual artists and how their readings of the Black Atlantic came into dialogue. At the same time, his discussion of his artistic collaborations, and excerpts of his recording and video projects, reveal creative ways of addressing the history of race in music and the sensory memories of the slave trade in coastal Ghana.

Learning to make noise: toward a process model of artistic practice within experimental music scenes

ABSTRACT Emerging at the intersection of industrial, punk, electronic music, and avant-garde jazz, noise music represents a niche subgenre reliant on loud, discordant, and arrhythmic sounds to make music. Yet despite its place within the (broadly defined) experimental music tradition, research into experimental music education has largely overlooked the genre. In response, I explore noise music through the lens of situated learning theory by addressing the following research question: how do noise musicians develop their artistic practice? To do so, I present findings from a comparative case study centered on two intertwined experimental music concert and workshop series focused on noise music. I begin by analyzing interview data from seventeen featured artists to construct a process model of artistic practice shared between musicians. I then employ bidirectional artifact analysis to trace the development of one novice participant in the series through this model. In turn, these findings not only illuminate how experimental musicians learn within informal settings but provide a potential model of learning for informal education communities more broadly. This study also holds implications for situated learning theory by asserting the influence of non-anthropocentric actors within communities of practice.

Positively Monstrous!

Positively Monstrous!

Nothing But the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Dance Halls & a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar

Nothing But the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Dance Halls & a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar

Jazz Avant-Garde by Cecil Taylor

Jazz Avant-Garde by Cecil Taylor

Creative Improvised Music: An International Bibliography of the Jazz Avant-Garde, 1959–Present by John Gray

Creative Improvised Music: An International Bibliography of the Jazz Avant-Garde, 1959–Present by John Gray

Logic-Programming Models of Music: A Semiotic Evaluation

THIS IS THE PIECE CHRISTIAN ASPLUND 362 Perspectives of New Music GRAMMARS S A NEW GRAD STUDENT IN THE EARLY 1990S I remember feeling very much at home in John Rahn’s seminars, which were beautifully unpredictable, highly speculative affairs, with an anything goes vibe, ranging in short succession through multiple disciplines and modes of thought. They gave me novel insights that have stayed with me and affected my work ever since: regarding sequence/simultaneity, structuring of time, relations between different objects, and the role and nature of precomposition, or lack thereof. I have a recollection of him saying something like, anything can be mapped to anything given the right function. I learned to view precomposition as its own form of research, and that the relationship between conception and realization could be unique for every work created. This Is the Piece came out of this heady atmosphere. In 1994 I registered for John’s seminar on Artificial Musical Intelligence (AMI). At the time my only programming experience was in John’s computer music class using his LISP Kernel. One of the topics we covered was Chomsky’s phrase structure grammars as outlined in his Syntactic Structures.1 This subject captured my imagination as a fruitful and novel approach to sequencing musical events. At the same time, I was taking a seminar on the music of Anthony Braxton and other avantgarde jazz musicians. Braxton’s musical system in particular seemed to resonate with my project. He chunked music in entirely unique ways, ways that seemed to open onto new ordering paradigms like the one I envisioned using Chomskyan grammar. LANGUAGE MUSIC When Braxton played his first improvised solo saxophone concert in the late 1960s, he realized after ten minutes that he had run out of material. It must have been a disaster because he didn’t have collaborating musicians to cover for him and to feed him ideas. He decided he needed something both to structure his improvisations and to provide material for them. The result was his taxonomy of Language Types (LT) (see Appendix A)2 and Sound Classifications (SC) (see Appendix B)3. These became the foundation for his “Language Music” which in turn enabled him to record the first solo saxophone album,4 and to perform many solo concerts and several other solo albums since then. He has used Language Music in ensemble contexts as well.5 A This Is the Piece 363 There are only spotty sources of information about Braxton’s musical systems. They all seem to have a hybrid character of both a learned/literate invention and an oral/gnostic tradition. My information derives mainly from descriptions by his students, particularly saxophonist-composer Maxim Mahoney-Flake, who studied with Braxton, and with whom I collaborated for several years shortly after. Consequently, I am unable to cite some of this information. I have come to believe that Braxton left many details of his music open/ mysterious, doubtlessly for didactic/aesthetic/spiritual reasons he chose not to explicate. In these cases, I have felt empowered to fill in the blanks using deduction and creativity. I have found Language Music to be a powerful alternative to more traditional means of organizing improvisation. Improvisation in jazz until around 1960 had been structured around harmonic sequences (chord changes). With the advent of “freedom,” jazz improvisation in the 1960s was often structured (when it was structured ) around scales or motives. It seems that Braxton was searching for another structural principle more suited both to solo performance and to his own compositional preferences. LTs deal largely with melodic contour and texture, while SCs seem to focus mainly, though not exclusively, on timbre and instrumental technique. Thus, melodic shape, texture, and timbre become the fixed or composed elements rather than harmony, mode, or motive. Indeed, LTs and SCs are usually neutral as to harmonic, scalar, and motivic implications. These two classes of objects seemed interesting and powerful alternatives to the note as notational morpheme. A highly developed notational practice using such symbols would allow a multitude of complex, unsegmented melodic events to be expressed: phrases that could never be represented by note-based notation. Further, I was interested in manipulating these symbols with...

“The Fools Don’t Think I Play Jazz”

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018), who was associated with the postwar black musical avant-garde, and Mary Lou Williams (1910–81), who had roots in jazz’s swing era, met in a notorious 1977 Carnegie Hall recital. These two African American pianists possessed decidedly different temperaments and aesthetic sensibilities; their encounter offers a striking illustration of how conflicts between coexisting performance strategies can reveal a great deal about musicians’ thought processes and worldviews. Evidence from unpublished manuscripts and letters, published interviews and written commentary by the performers, the accounts of music critics, and musical transcriptions from a commercial recording (the album Embraced) reveals that, in addition to demonstrating the performers’ distinct musical idiolects, the concert engaged longstanding debates over jazz’s history and definition as well as broader issues of black American identity. In particular, it dispelled still potent notions of jazz as a genre with a unilinear historical trajectory, and it encapsulated the inherent ambivalence toward the past often exhibited by the jazz avant-garde.

The Other Side of Here and Now: Cross-Cultural Reflections on the Politics of Improvisation Studies

Scholarship on African-American avant-garde jazz and European free music is prominently featured in the emergent field of improvisation studies, premised upon an allegorical understanding of the phenomenon as a musical analogue for counter-hegemonic political dialogue and action. However, from an ethnomusicological standpoint rooted in improvisational traditions from Africa to Asia, serious questions arise about the cross-cultural validity of this axiological paradigm. Drawing upon studies of West African and South Asian traditions of improvisation, this essay brings a critical global perspective to bear upon issues of improvisation, community, and social practice, to elucidate the manner in which universalistically conceived ideological commitments can shape the political meanings of extemporaneous music-making. Ultimately, an ethnographic focus on ritual overdetermination of meaning within festive performance frames can reveal the significance that ICASP organizers’ conception of improvisation—as “a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action”—plays in empowering artists to imagine and realize utopian, transcultural, socio-sonic communities.

Palestinian Wildlife Series: embodiment in images, critical abstraction

The expanded cinema performance ‘Palestinian Wildlife Series’ parallels posthuman and postcolonial circumstance, using appropriated imagery of African animals shot directly from a television set in Palestine. Chronicling the experimentation and process that went into this work of ‘animal-video choreography’, the author interweaves research on Palestine, materialist film, and Afrofuturist thought. The exposition reflects on the impact upon Khalil’s work of women performance artists and avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, presenting a journey from text-based and signifier-heavy early experiments to the wordless and open-ended cinematic outcome the author comes to defend. Drawing on her transition from live performance to moving image production, this exposition will interest those concerned with interdisciplinarity and embodiment in digital imagery. It examines alternative modes of art activism and political uses of abstraction and experimentalism in art, specifically where critical ethnic and postcolonial studies are concerned. It supports discussions of rights and representation within artistic research and beyond from a diasporic perspective.

Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording by David Grubbs (review)

Reviewed by: Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording by David Grubbs Sara Haefeli Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording. By David Grubbs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. [End Page 170] [xxv, 220 p. ISBN 9780822355762 (hardcover), $84.95; ISBN 9780822355908 (paperback), $23.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, discography, index. David Grubbs prefaces this excellent book with a description of his own relationship to records as a late baby boomer growing up in Louisville, Kentucky—first as an avid consumer of pop music, then as a teenaged editor of punk and post-punk fanzines. This love of records was inspired by the materiality of the medium as well as the multimedia nature of the physical record. There was a joy in being able to return to a record again and again. When he moved to Chicago in 1990, he was confronted with a range of different attitudes toward records, including the claim by experimental musicians that records were antithetical to their art practice. What he valued about his encounters with experimental music and avant-garde jazz was that it was always different and unrepeatable—they were art practices based on the moment and one’s physical presence in the art space. Yet he also loved the culture of the record store and the joy of chance encounters and browsing through the bins. This introductory autobiography may seem self-indulgent, but it is not. Throughout this study we are reminded that Grubbs is not only deeply knowledgeable about these art practices and the time period in question, but that records genuinely captivate him. It is this love that seems to drive the encyclopedic knowledge demonstrated in this book. Part of the brilliance of this book is that it is a joy to read. It is virtually free of social-theory jargon, although the content demonstrates that Grubbs has all the theory firmly in grasp. He moves easily through discussions of the aesthetic theory of Nelson Goodman, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin without veering off into the ether. It is engagingly written, often poetically descriptive, and well-edited. The selected discography and the links to database resources make the book a useful reference resource after a first reading. In short, this is the best kind of study that is clearly motivated by a passion for its subject, and it is executed with aplomb. Grubbs’s project is shaped by the tantalizing paradox that John Cage publicly disparaged records and yet continued to make and sell records. There are a number of famous quotes by Cage that make his disdain for records clear. He told interviewers that he did not own records, that records “destroy one’s need for real music,” and that they “make people think that they’re engaging in a musical activity when they’re actually not” (p. 10). In the collection of interviews published as For the Birds (Boston: M. Boyars, 1981), Daniel Charles said, “Records, according to you, are nothing more than postcards … ” to which Cage replied, “which ruin the landscape” (p. 1). Yet Cage is one of the most widely recorded composers of the twentieth century. Given Cage’s central position in the avant-garde arts of the 1960s, these records were significant and helped to shape how others outside of the immediate circle of the New York School understood his work. Grubbs analyzes how these records continue to shape our understanding of the avantgarde today. Unlike fans in the post-Cage 1960s, we have easy access to this repertoire, as it is increasingly available through archival releases and rereleases, and is often downloadable for free via sites like UbuWeb (http://www.ubuweb.com, accessed 20 March 2015). Another paradoxical aspect of Cage’s antipathy for recordings is that he was a pioneer in the field of electronic music and wrote some of the very first pieces using magnetic tape; he also used recorded sound as source material for live performance. Part of the irony of the title of the book—Records Ruin the Landscape—is that it reminds us of Cage’s series of early experiments in electronic music called Imaginary Landscapes composed between 1939 and 1952. Grubbs...

Discursive Construction of African-American Identities and Spirituality: A Comparison of Muslim Hip Hop and 1960s Jazz Avant-Garde

This article analyzes the discourse of social change and African-American spirituality and how these have become intertwined with music as discursive vehicles for identity construction. We first focus on Muslimhiphop.com, a website which features several African-American Muslim artists. Second, we relate the above to the jazz avant-garde of the early 1960s. Islamic hip hop can be considered an alternative to mainstream hip hop and a medium for negotiating a Muslim identity and embracing social change. Similarly, free jazz expression once supported African-American society in establishing its status, beliefs, and rights.

From suits to robes: The use of African inspired apparel as a communication tool in the mid-twentieth-century American avant-garde jazz community

Abstract Many musicians working in the avant-garde of American jazz in the post-Civil Rights era publicly aligned themselves with black power cultural ideologies. The Afrocentric fashions worn by some of these musicians were a visual representation of their cultural beliefs and endure as a major component of the musical form’s legacy. This article reevaluates these performers’ standing in popular culture, recognizing them as fashion innovators on top of being musical revolutionaries. These musicians’ adventurous style lives on in popular culture through fashion statements in hip hop, neo soul and other musical genres.

Timbral Virtuosity: Pharoah Sanders, Sonic Heterogeneity, and the Jazz Avant-garde in the 1960s and 70s

Saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Pharoah Sanders is best known for recording a handful of meditative, cosmologically-inclined free jazz classics from the 1960s and 1970s, including “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” This article looks at the reasons for these recordings' popularity at the time, arguing that the key to understanding these works can be found in Sanders's use of timbral variation as a formal element. In considering what I call “timbral virtuosity” in Sanders's work, this article discusses the relationships that such a focus allows us to more clearly see between avant-garde jazz, fusion, and contemporaneous popular music from rock to soul.

Pharoah Sanders, Straight-Ahead and Avant-Garde

In this article I examine the career of Pharoah Sanders through two streams. I first trace the path of Sanders's career through recordings and performances in a variety of settings with various musical approaches. Specifically, I examine his evolution from John Coltrane's Meditations (1965), through Karma (1969) and Sanders's hit, “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” Thembi (1971), Love Will Find a Way (1977), and eventually to Live (1981). I posit that Live represents Sanders's mature style that successfully combines avant-garde techniques and a more mainstream approach. I then examine Sanders's reception through the critical literature to more fully contextualize his career. Several things become evident in this regard. First, this period (the early 1980s) is frequently overlooked in the literature on Sanders, and when it is discussed it is frequently misunderstood in terms of its relationship to his career as a whole. Along with this, critical reception tends to focus on Sanders's work of the 1960s. Second, I posit that Sanders has had a complicated and limited reception because he does not fit neatly into established categories such as straight-ahead, mainstream, and avant-garde or free jazz. Further, I posit that perpetuating these artificial boundaries is detrimental to the music and to musicians such as Sanders who do not fit into one neat category, as well as to the larger world of the arts, scholarship, and well beyond.

Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

<i>Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem</i>, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

Chaos-monde and the Aesthetics of Depth in Artur Barrio, Jacques Coursil, and Damián Ortega

This article discusses the plastic arts' non-dialectical engagement with materiality, by focusing on figures of depth in three recent artworks in mixed media by artists from the Americas: Artur Barrio's coffee-grounds installations (2000–08), Jacques Coursil's avant-garde jazz album Clameurs (2007), and Damián Ortega's action Moby Dick (2004). All three offer aesthetic experiences of depth that propose an approach to the questions of relation and chaos-monde addressed by Édouard Glissant in terms of plasticity and assemblages—unhinged from anthropocentrism and signification.

Willis Conover's International Jazz Diplomacy through Fandom: The Friends of Music USA Newsletter (1964–1969)

Willis Conover's Friends of Music USA (FOMUSA) Newsletter functioned as a record of overseas jazz reception and as a document that cohered a global network of fans. From 1964–1969, the newsletter gave a voice to Conover's jazz fans throughout the world, as it contained their correspondence in the form of excerpted letters. Consequently, the newsletter today comprises a social document of jazz reception by an international audience in the midst of the avant-garde jazz movement of the late 1960s. My research has shown that, while Conover intended his musical selection process in his broadcasts to remain both personally and musically unbiased, the newsletter, distributed to subscribing Friends chapters, contained decidedly partisan sentiments voiced through listener correspondence. The opinions and assertions contained in the newsletter served to shape the attitudes and the reception of jazz by a vast, international audience of fans and musicians overseas. Lastly, I present the FOMUSA Newsletter as a document inspired by Conover's prior experience as a fan and author of science fiction and fantasy literature by placing it in the context of fanzines, an integral component in the phenomenon of fandom.

AIDS, Race, and the Invasion of the Body in Sonia Sanchez's Does Your House Have Lions?

����� ��� Although she still writes today, Sonia Sanchez remains forever pegged as a Black Arts poet. Her later work, such as 1997’s Does Your House Have Lions?, offers us the chance to analyze and describe the post-Black Arts Movement era of American literature—and the same period in Sanchez’s career. 1 As Joyce A. Joyce emphasizes in her introduction to an anthology of interviews with Sanchez, the poet now “reaches out to a more diversified audience than she did in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s” (xiv). Joyce continues, “while [Sanchez’s] earlier poems and interviews challenged the multifaceted injustices that stifled Black lives, her later interviews have begun to highlight the need for planetary, humanistic harmony” (xiv). Yet Sanchez’s efforts in Does Your House Have Lions? to negotiate between the self, the family, and the larger community bring the poetry back to a central issue during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and reveal a continuing and essentially conservative philosophy of black identity and the family. The Black Arts context foregrounds three thematic considerations—the body, the family, and the nation—that provide the implicit organization of the fifty-nine poems in Sanchez’s little-known text. All three terms were interdependent and, at times, conflated during the Black Arts period, and this slipperiness of terminology challenged the political unity of the group while providing more than enough fodder for Black Arts poets like Sanchez. The poet’s representation in Does Your House Have Lions? of a black family struggling with a son’s diagnosis and death from AIDS allows her to demonstrate how the freedom to choose identity categories, as well as the notion of multiple and simultaneous identifications inherent to intersectional notions of identity, undermine racial solidarity and the strength of one African American family’s kinship bonds. The second epigraph to the text explains its cryptic title. Sanchez refers to a conversation with producer Joel Dorn included on the Rahsaan Roland Kirk Anthology, a compilation of Kirk’s avant-garde jazz saxophone recordings. Dorn explains the origin of the title: One day in the late sixties, I was on the phone with Rahsaan and mentioned to him that just that day I had bought a house. He responded by asking, “Does your house have lions?” I said, “What?” He said, “Lions. You know, like in front of a museum or the post office. You know, concrete lions. My house has lions. Get a house with lions.” (Sanchez iii)

‘The revolution never ended’

From the Jazz Artists and Jazz Composers Guilds, through the Collective Black Artists and New York Musicians Organization, to the Musicians of Brooklyn Initiative, Jump Arts, and beyond, New York City jazz collectives have long struggled to redefine the relationships among artists, audiences, and the broader music industry. Based on a decade and a half of ethnographic engagement, this article examines the contemporary cultural phenomenon of the Arts for Art collective, which has presented annual Vision Festivals in downtown Manhattan since 1996 to showcase their improvisational activism. As documented through interviews and engaged interaction with its artist-organizers, the history of this collective offers unique and critical perspectives not only upon the politics of artist-business relationships, but also upon the potential of avant-garde jazz performance practices significantly to restructure the artist-audience relationship through the creation of cohesive musical communities.