Free Jazz Research Articles

AMIRI BARAKA AND EDWARD DORN: The Collected Letters ed. by Claudia Moreno Pisano (review)

Reviewed by: AMIRI BARAKA AND EDWARD DORN: The Collected Letters ed. by Claudia Moreno Pisano William J. Harris AMIRI BARAKA AND EDWARD DORN: The Collected Letters. Edited by Claudia Moreno Pisano. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2013. These letters are heady stuff, fascinating reading. It is like being catapulted into a wonderful newly discovered opera about bohemia. Of course, the music here is jazz not classical, and the heroes—yes uncompromising—are brave and idealistic albeit foul-mouthed, but they do want to save the world with their art. As fellow Beat poet Diana di Prima says in her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001), they had the feeling of doing “important work—the importance of getting it out” (218). With their mimeograph machines they were going to triumph over the cruel world, bring capitalism to its knees. They were willing to endure great poverty so they could create great art. But since this is not an opera but a candid look into the lives of two great American avant-garde poets and their culture, we see the warts as well as the shining armor. The heroes of the piece, of these letters between young close friends, are Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), a black well-connected East Village poet and a wheeler-dealer on New York art scene, and Edward Dorn, a white, less well-connected poet, mostly in Pocatello, Idaho, teaching as an adjunct at Idaho State University. The times were mostly the 1960s. These letters give us this world from the horse’s mouth. Unfiltered, they speak so candidly and in such intimate detail about their lives, we feel we are living through the times with them. These letters, meticulously edited by the young scholar, Claudia Moreno Pisano, cover the years 1959 through 1981, but they focus on the 1960s, the years the New American poetry took shape—also the years of Abstract Expression, the new post-bebop jazz, and free jazz. These are the post–World War II years when American art became a force to be reckoned with in the world. Baraka and Dorn are at the center of this world—Baraka physically since he was in New York, the center, and Dorn spiritually since he was in Idaho, the hinterlands, even though he did have visitors from that world such as Robert Creeley. But this distance allows for the existence of their beautiful exchange about the arts, mostly poetry and jazz even though the painters, such as William de Kooning, are in the background and poets such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbury, both profoundly influenced by Abstract Expressionism, are very much in the foreground. Although often sexist, these young men, radical and committed, have great insight into the arts of their time, including very astute comments about each other’s work. Dorn says of one of the difficult poems of the period: “Hegel is a nice poem. Is that part of a collection … the moving logic of it down to its feeling in the last lines. Um. You’re doing well” (21). And Baraka’s comments on such figures as Don Cherry are rough drafts for his classic jazz reviews of [End Page 134] the sixties. Here is a taste of this writing: “Not sure just what the fuck’s happening. But I did go to a wild extraordinary concert last week. Don Cherry, Billy Higgins and Wilbur! It was really beautiful. No shit, Cherry played a long slow gorgeous You Don’t Know What Love Is, that floored everybody. He has gotten to be too much” (77) and he was on the scene when Thelonious Monk played at the historic 5 Spot: “I stopped off at the 5 Spot where Monk is packing the place nightly” (153). They share jazz, discussing Sonny Rollins and other important contemporary figures (127). It turns the reader around when he/she learns that the great free jazz saxophonist, John Coltrane has been reading Baraka—in fact “he’d been reading all my stuff” (163). So how central is Baraka to the fashioning of free jazz? They talk honestly about race; I have never seen more honest talk about race between the...

Black sonic space and the stereophonic poetics of Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time

In the liner notes for Amiri Baraka’s 1972 album It’s Nation Time (Motown-Black Forum), Baraka asserts, ‘This recording is an institution.’ Recording on the heels of the 1970 Congress of African People , Baraka felt that the establishment of a pan-African nation was paramount, but where ought such a nation to be established? Could a recording be an institution? What does a nation sound like? The album, which received a limited release under Motown’s progressive Black Forum label, mixes poetry with free jazz, African drumming, and R&B – melding together the popular with avant-garde and traditional forms of black music. In doing so, It’s Nation Time attempts to re-inflect black life with a proud African ancestry and spirituality. In this article, I explore how Baraka uses the format of the stereo LP to push beyond the constrictions of place and history in order to produce a new, contingent black sonic space. The acoustic spaces Baraka inhabits are projective, hyperbolic, and imagined, and reflect a development in the studio stereo recording that took place around this time as engineers discovered that sonic spaces could not only be reproduced but manipulated and produced. As I show, It’s Nation Time strives toward a theory of sonic space that might redefine the parameters of a national space and create a new conception of blackness.

Mingus in the Workshop: Leading the Improvisation From New Orleans to Pentecostal Trance

But within all the varied components of black music and throughout all the changes it underwent, it remained a group-oriented means of communication and expression. --Lawrence Levine (1977, 239) In the mid-1950s Charles Mingus embraced two historical African-derived approaches that emphasized group expression: (1) the collective improvisation of early New Orleans jazz, whose lay in (2) the ecstatic worship and singing rituals of the black Pentecostal church. Mingus's recordings from the mid-1950s to early 1960s musically progressed from short sections of frontline collective interplay and group improvisation reminiscent of early jazz to longer forms of ecstatic ritual. This latter practice--in the form of solos, band, and audience participation--was a direct invocation of the Ghost-filled spiritual communion (Booker 1988, 32), or Holy Spirit possession that Mingus had witnessed in Pentecostal church services as a youth. Many writers have observed Mingus's diverse influences. Eric Porter (2002) writes that Mingus challenged all musical boundaries, invoking his aesthetic of late Romanticism, his anticipations of free jazz, and points between in tributes to Jelly Roll Morton. Brian Priestley (1982) remarked on influences from Mingus's work as a sideman for Louis Armstrong and big-band leaders Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington. Both Porter and Priestly also note influences of the black church, bebop harmonies, and rhythms modeling Charles Parker, Gillespie, and Thelonious as well as Lennie Tristano's modernist jazz sounds. Finally, Todd Jenkins mentions Mingus's jazz-rock and world-music fusions (2006, 4). Relatively little has been written regarding the contexts of these influences, particularly of early New Orleans jazz and the black Pentecostal church, nor have they been explored in close readings of Mingus's works and recordings. In this article, I argue that Mingus's use of New Orleans-style collective improvisation and composition (as in his response to Jelly Roll Morton) and the influence of church music follows a stylistic trajectory. I also explore his use of these influences contextually and through a musical analysis of the recordings. The elements of the two African-derived approaches are most evident in five recordings from the 1950s. The New Orleans style can be heard in the frontline's collectively improvised sections, in recordings as early as Jump Monk (1955), in Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), Dizzy Moods (1957), and implicated in Moanin (1959), where melodic instrumental interplay--along with group and solo improvisation--create texture and timbre, but also determine a tight structure. Later, such elements evolved into the pivotal idea of growth or expansion, what Mingus referred to as extended form. Here he gives soloists room to enact a spiritual transcendence within this more flexible form; Mingus's reenactments of the communal dynamics of the black church play out most obviously in Better Git Hit in Your Soul (1959) and Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting (1959). Mingus used these two approaches to advance not only musical expression but also political and spiritual ideas. In his music and testimony, after the moldy fig/modernist debate (Gendron 2002, 121-123; one between early jazz and bebop proponents arguing the merits of these subgenres) within the 1940s Dixieland revival, Mingus made New Orleans jazz a part of his larger embrace of group expression in the 1950s. His use went beyond bebop's small group format of head-solo-head (or soloist-versus-rhythm) or big band's similar arrangements. While Mingus's music orbited the same sphere of soul music (influenced by gospel) that Ray Charles and others mined during this era, his inclusion of idioms from African-American church tradition developed in musical form the confined uses of a roots stylistic approach, which can be seen in Charles's contemporary recordings or Nat and Cannonball Adderley's work songs. …

Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde:

John Cage's brand of experimentalism underwent a transformation when it was imported into the UK in the 1960s. There, in contradiction to the American's well-known preferences, indeterminacy became twisted up with jazz-derived free improvisation, owing to discourse that stressed performer freedom and creativity while downplaying notions of non-intention and discipline. The authors of these commentaries created the discursive conditions for a mingling of avant-garde traditions, but the material conditions owed more to the efforts of Victor Schonfield, whose nonprofit organization, Music Now, acquired Arts Council subsidies on behalf of a stylistically heterogeneous avant-garde that included artists working with both improvisation and indeterminacy. Schonfield also invited important guests from overseas, including Ornette Coleman, Musica Elettronica Viva, the Sonic Arts Union, the Instant Composers Pool, Christian Wolff, Sun Ra, the Taj Mahal Travellers, and, in 1972, John Cage himself. In the greater ecology of experimentalism that Schonfield created, improvisation became a kind of contact zone where musicians came together from a number of directions, among them free jazz, score-based indeterminacy, text-based intuitive music, Fluxus-inspired instruction pieces, and even psychedelic rock freak-outs. Music Now produced over 80 concerts between 1968 and 1976, when the organization folded.

Records ruin the landscape: John Cage, the sixties, and sound recording

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape , David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape , Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.

Doing Free Jazz and Free Organizations, “A Certain Experience of the Impossible”? Ornette Coleman Encounters Jacques Derrida

Many scholars have attempted to make jazz relevant to an organizational audience. We seek to extend this literature by considering a more radical version of improvisation associated with the jazz musician Ornette Coleman. Inspired by an encounter between Coleman and the philosopher Jacques Derrida, we juxtapose the radical collective responsibility associated with Coleman’s Free jazz improvisation and Derridean deconstruction. We especially emphasize a phrase used by Derrida, “a certain experience of the impossible,” as an expression for a particular experience of doing management. The overall contribution of the article is to explore the possibility of responding to issues within organizations in more participative and improvisational ways, without losing an appreciation of the inherent impossibility (perhaps even absurdity) of the managerial condition.

Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert by Peter Elsdon, and: People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! ed. by Ajay Heble, Rob Wallace, and: Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album by Tony Whyton (review)

Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert. By Peter Elsdon. (Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [x, 171 p. ISBN 9780199779253 (hardcover), $74; ISBN 9780199779260 (paperback), $16.95.] Music examples, notes, bibli- ography, discography, index.People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! Edited by Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace. (Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice.) Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2013. [xi, 312 p. ISBN 9780822354086 (hard- cover), $94.95; ISBN 9780822354253 (paperback), $25.95.] Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.Beyond a Love Supreme: John Col- trane and the Legacy of an Album. By Tony Whyton. New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2013. [xii, 160 p. ISBN 9780199733231 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780199733248 (paperback), $17.95.] Photographs, notes, bibliogra- phy, index.What is the future of jazz? It is folly to try to speculate about the artistic directions that may be taken in any style of music. But in the case of people have wondered about its future since at least the 1940s and 1950s. During those decades, there was good reason for their worries. During the era (late 1920s through the 1940s), jazz was part of mainstream American pop- ular music. Although the bebop style of the 1940s provoked some opposition and deri- sion from critics, it was eventually affirmed in the 1950s by historians as Whether swing or modern, much jazz through 1960 consisted of soloists taking turns in front of a pulse-playing rhythm sec- tion. Starting in the late 1950s, a few daring musicians freed the rhythm section from the meters and allowed them to play as equal soloists alongside the other instru- mentalists. The result came to be called jazz, two of its monuments being Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (Atlantic SD 1364, recorded in 1960, released in 1961) and John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse A-95, recorded in 1965, released in 1966). For the most part, though, free jazz was as commercially unviable as it was daring, be- cause its liberation of the rhythm section disposed of the very component-the pulse-that had held the attentions of many mainstream listeners. But at least free through its practitioners, had links to previous styles of jazz. The kinds of jazz ap- pearing since 1968-jazz fusion, world acid jazzcore, etc.-seem to have bro- ken away from traditional jazz. A chain of evolution can be traced from free jazz through modern bebop, swing, and early jazz to the New Orleans brothels. But jazz after 1968 may be glibly traced back to colleges. To believe that jazz can be traced back to the brothels or to the campuses means to have a simple, narrow view of its history. The irony is that the short semes- ters at college often permit only these sim- ple, narrow presentations of jazz history to students.In truth, jazz history is not merely di- verse, but downright messy; many of its records were made by the most unlikely musicians, now barely remembered. Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History, 1900-1950 (Berkeley, CA: Music and Arts Programs of America, 2001) tried to restore that sense of messiness by reopening every historical can of worms. At the end of his study, Lowe wrote . . [bebop master] Charlie Parker left some tantalizing hints of not just what the future would bring, but what the future was (italics Lowe's, p. 257). He was asking not what jazz would become, but where jazz seemed to be head- ing. How jazz would evolve was mostly un- foreseen. No one, or a very few people, could have predicted at the time of Parker's 1955 death, the reintroduction of modes, the jettisoning of blues and popular songs as bases of improvisation, the processes of free and the adoption of style and instrumental techniques from rock and roll, which at the time was only beginning to appear on records. For many years, the new jazz since the 1960s was easier to describe in terms of what it lacked instead of what it offered. …

Ensemble Plus-Minus and Leafcutter John at Kammer Klang, Cafe Oto, London

It would be simplistic to suggest that contemporary classical music exists solely within or around large institutions. For at least 50 years now, this music has also found a home in small galleries, loft spaces and basements, and other small, independent venues around the world, as seen for example in the Downtown New York scene. London venue Cafe Oto – operating out of a warehouse in Dalston since 2008 – runs on similar principles to specialist Downtown venues such as the Stone, in that it boasts a wide-ranging multi-genre programme focused on various experimental and avant-garde musics, such as noise, free jazz, and contemporary classical.

Conlon Nancarrow, “Hot” Jazz, and the Principle of Collective Improvisation

This paper explores the possibility that Conlon Nancarrow’s connection to jazz runs more deeply and widely throughout the Studies for Player Piano than is typically recognized through the clear stylistic allusions to jazz found in a few of the Studies. I propose that an awareness of this deeper connection—as suggested by Nancarrow’s profound appreciation for early jazz, especially that of Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines—might prompt a new and rewarding mode of listening to the Studies, an improvisational mode. The principle of collective improvisation, important in both early jazz of the 1920s and in “free jazz” of the 1960s, was valued by Nancarrow, and his discussion of it intimates an aesthetic stance that runs through his music.

Free as in BEER: Some Explorations into Structured Improvisation Using Networked Live-Coding Systems

Much improvised music that has developed since the advent of free jazz has been concerned with the imposition of structure, often through systems of directed improvisation, or through the use of rule-based approaches (e.g., game pieces). In this article, we explore the possibility of a networked live-coding system as a structural intervention mechanism par excellence, through the discussion of two pieces from the repertoire of the Birmingham Ensemble for Electroacoustic Research.

Jazz as cultural modernity: Consumerism, nationalism and cosmopolitan freedom

In this article I seek to explore the cosmopolitan foundations of jazz music and ask whether it currently exists as anything other than a postmodern commodity. I seek to investigate the practice of jazz in the 1950s and 1960s and argue that it sought to redefine what was meant by freedom. The aesthetic disputes of this period among musicians and critics around the practice of modernist (be-bop and free jazz) jazz music have played a crucial role in defining the identity of jazz. Critical here remain the attempts by musicians to establish a more autonomous relationship with the culture and entertainment industry. However the radical politics offered by jazz is fraught with ambiguity, caught between cosmopolitan sentiment and the establishment of gendered and racial hierarchies. Further, we also need to carefully investigate the role of black nationalism and the role that it has played in seeking to criticize more cosmopolitan understandings. In the final part of the argument I look at the material and cultural condition of contemporary jazz. Despite the power of the cultural commodification and the culture industry, jazz continues to exhibit a number of cosmopolitan frames that pose critical questions to the dominant neoliberal society.

East Meets West at Jazz Hot: Maoism, Race, and Revolution in French Jazz Criticism

This article examines the ideas about music and society of politically engaged editors and writers who headed the French jazz Magazine Jazz Hot in the late 1960s. Like many members of the New Left in Europe and the US, they drew from Maoist ideas about a global revolution with a strong cultural component. After identifying the assumptions and assertions they make about politics, the article asks how these basic elements may inform jazz criticism. The Maoist critics at Jazz Hot believed their predecessors in French jazz criticism had a patronizing, primitivist view of jazz and a bourgeois liberal bias. Against this static, classicizing view of jazz, the Maoist juxtaposed a view based on global solidarity and revolutionary action of colonial peoples in the developing world that recognized cultural and ethnic diversity and constant change and development. The Maoists saw this global project as highly relevant to politics and culture in the metropolitan center as well: i.e., to the extra parliamentary left in France, whose members led or incited student/worker mobilizations known as the May Events in France (and of which these writers were a part); and in the free jazz and hard rock emerging just at that time. The article concludes by asking how this revolutionary political engagement, and music that reflected it during the 1960s, may have informed discourse about diversity and global cultural interchange in jazz in the ensuing years, up to and including our time.

Amiri Baraka’s Adventures with the Out & the Gone

I want to explore Amiri Baraka’s idea of the Out and the Gone which he articulates in “The Author’s Introduction” to his 2007 short story collection, Tales of the Out & the Gone. The Out is “out of the ordinary” because the artists are “just not where most other people” are, and the Gone is “even farther ‘Out,’ crazier, wilder, deeper, a ‘heavier’ metaphor, a deeper parable” (10, 12). In essence, Baraka is striving to create an art which is as invocative and as original as bebop or free jazz: he wants to inhabit the same world where a great cutting-edge work can be called “Out to Lunch” (1964), a simple title declaring a radical aesthetic by the great alto saxophonist, Eric Dolphy. Amiri Baraka’s aesthetic has always demanded the extreme, the outrageous, both in art and life. From boyhood on, in every art form he sought the Out and the Gone. Later these pleasures helped him shape his own art. Even though he loved the Out and the Gone for itself, he always felt the extreme was the best way to the real. Therefore it is not surprising he ended up an avant-garde artist, a member of the Beat, Black Mountain, and New York Schools, collectively called the New American Poetry, a post-World War II predominately white innovative literary movement. He was close friends with the poets Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Ed Dorn, and the grand old man of the group, Charles Olson. They provided examples of the out and the gone. However, before he sought the out and the gone in the post-war American avant-garde and such European writers as Kafka and Artaud, he found it in 1940s radio, science fiction, rhythm & blues, and 1950s commercial fantasy movies. In Newark in his teen years, this was the only avant-garde available. In “In Memory of Radio” from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) the poet asks, “Who had ever thought of the divinity of Lamont Cranston? / Only Jack Kerouac, that I know of & me,” (12). Lamont Cranston is The Shadow, radio crime fighter with hypnotic powers and a double identity. Only the Beat novelist Jack Kerouac and he understood the importance of this character for suggesting different possibilities. Radio taught him to pretend but didn’t let him be a prophet poet, someone who could change the world with words. It is not until later when he is an adult reflecting back on the radio programs he says: “They taught us that evil needed to be destroyed . . . And I believed that—impressionable as I was at those young ages—but the trick is that I still believe it!” (Autobiography 21). He will have to move beyond this Beat vision to become a political poet, make a trip to Castro’s Cuba to learn alternatives. Science fiction also provided an alternative world, an alternative way to look at the world. He read Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and the annual sci-fi anthologies. Baraka has

Subterranean Blues: World Revolution and the Underground Violinists

SUBTERRANEAN BLUES: WORLD REVOLUTION AND THE UNDERGROUND VIOLINISTS DR. ADAM CADELL HIS ARTICLE PRESENTS PART OF AN ALTERNATIVE history of violin performance practices that culminates in what I am terming “radical violin performance practice.” This radical practice is rooted in a legacy of insubordinate, subversive, and forward-thinking musicians, from Heinrich Biber’s scordatura works for the violin in the seventeenth century, to the oppressed African-American bluesmen of the early twentieth century and their working-class white neighbors, to the black power music of free-jazz musicians and the revolutionary psychedelia of the international underground of the 1960s. This alternative history is heterogeneous and is in many ways the polar opposite of mainstream “classical” violin performance, on the other hand it is also, and defiantly so, not a history of popular or folk music practices either. Indeed, put simply, this is a history of unpopular violin performance practices and their presence within the history of subversive underground artistic practice. Through the possibilities opened by recording technology, the rebellious lure of anti-elitist politics, and the mind-expanding world of T 112 Perspectives of New Music non-Western thought, underground violinists in Manhattan during the 1960s began a process of shedding the traditional notions of composition altogether through improvisation and radical ideology. This is a defining element of underground violin performance practice, the expression of distinct philosophies, political ideals, and the radicalization of tradition through improvisation. On the whole there was a strongly ideological undercurrent to the underground violinists’ approach to their instrument, which led them to a unique interpretation of all of these influences and gave birth to a revolution in violin performance practice. What follows here is an introduction to the fertile underground of the 1960s, the firmament upon which radical violin performance practices were built. The decade of the 1960s was a monumental time in the development of Western music and art as a whole. It saw the birth of a culture that existed in the underground of post-war, predominantly Western, society and was, by its very nature, an extreme and often confrontational expression of the anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian views espoused by the wider alternative culture of the time. This underground society had its own press, poets, writers, musicians, artists, and revolutionaries, all with an international reach. In Germany Kosmische Rock (what is now commonly referred to as “Krautrock”) musicians rubbed shoulders and shared squats with Red Army Faction commando group the Baader-Meinhof gang; in Japan bands were involved in revolutionary acts, such as the infamous Red Army Faction Japan Airlines hijacking featuring a member of rock group Les Rallizes Dénudés.1 It is, however, the radical and artistically fertile soil of the lower East Side of New York City which forms the backdrop for the central protagonists of this article. The Greenwich Village “heterotopia ,”2 as Foucault dubbed it, became a crucible for the nascent avant-garde scene due to the availability of low rent loft apartments in the context of a rich avant-garde and radical heritage. Underground, downtown New York was a centre for beat poetry, queer sexuality, drug experimentation, avant-garde music and leftist politics. The downtown scene in the 1960s was fertile ground for the creation of new and original music, and the violin, along with other bowed-string instruments, was crucial to many of the new sounds. The violin featured prominently in psychedelic bands and began to feature in free jazz ensembles performing in unconventional spaces such as abandoned lofts and factory floors. In the circles of the avant-garde, the violin was deconstructed by the physical act of destruction or alteration and modification of its parts. Radical underground violinists Tony Conrad and Henry Flynt recorded and performed works for solo violin World Revolution and the Underground Violinists 113 as well as ensembles such as The Theatre of Eternal Music and Flynt’s protest band The Insurrections. The Velvet Underground came to prominence after their 1965, Andy Warhol–produced debut album in which John Cale’s viola brought the sound of New York’s avant-garde underground to the ears of rock music fans for the first time. Underground culture, and in particular the music...

‘HOW I BECAME A COMPOSER’: AN INTERVIEW WITH VINKO GLOBOKAR

AbstractThis article is an interview with the Franco-Slovenian composer, conductor and trombonist Vinko Globokar, translated, edited and introduced by the author. It offers an overview of Globokar's musical development and a consideration of his artistic position, which straddles the worlds of composition and improvisation. Globokar's music combines complex organisation with an interest in non-hierarchical and improvisatory elements. He has always refused to pit the avant-garde claims of contemporary music against those of free jazz, his music embracing aspects of both, as well as of traditional Balkan musics. His genre-defying approach remains better known in continental Europe than in the UK or North America, and the present text is a contribution to the limited bibliography on Globokar in English.

Social learning inside and outside transition projects: Playing free jazz for a heavy metal audience

According to transition science, system innovation requires experimentation and social learning to explore the potential of innovations for sustainable development. However, the transition science literature does not elaborate much on the learning processes involved. Senge's Field of Change provides a more detailed approach to the role of learning and action in innovation. We linked the Field of Change to transition management literature in order to explore social learning in an agricultural innovation experiment in the Netherlands called the ‘New Mixed Farm’. Our findings show that the project partners focussed primarily on the level of action and did not learn about (the values prevalent in) their environment. Our analysis suggests that social learning about a project's environment should be organised specifically to avert the risk of a project ignoring its environment. Furthermore, the relevance of social learning in relation to societal context is shown: an innovation experiment that does not or cannot learn about its environment is unable to respond to mounting societal pressures and therefore prone to failure. Finally, the results show that the Field of Change can be related to transition theory in order to provide a more detailed approach to learning in system innovation.

Musical Chameleons: Fluency and Flexibility in Online Remix Contests

Musical Chameleons: Fluency and Flexibility in Online Remix Contests

Theorising performance, performing theory: Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman at the Parc de la Villette

On the evening of 1 July 1997, Jacques Derrida made an appearance on stage during a concert by the celebrated African American free jazz saxophonist, Ornette Coleman. Derrida’s attempts to read from a pre-prepared text, as Coleman responded on his saxophone, were interrupted by loud boos and catcalls from the audience. After a few moments, Derrida left the stage, having failed to complete his peroration. By means of a close reading of the text of his aborted intervention, this article argues that Derrida in fact had something very significant to contribute to debates about the nature of improvised jazz performance. More specifically, Derrida’s intervention constitutes an important attempt to challenge and rethink long-held assumptions about the apparently spontaneous, unmediated, and hence supposedly ‘primitive’ nature of improvised jazz performance. In so doing, he was attempting to deconstruct a long tradition of phonocentric, ethnocentric, even racist assumptions that have characterised much jazz criticism, from its origins to the present day.

Religious Imperatives, Boogaloo Rhythms: Taking another Listen to Albert Ayler’s New Grass

Abstract: In this article I discuss free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler’s album New Grass, released in 1968. Although Ayler’s early works have entered the jazz canon, this album has been seen as the beginning of his decline and also as a sellout. I argue that by taking Ayler’s messianic religious convictions into account, we cannot only understand New Grass better but can also see how it fits into his career as a whole and widen our understanding of the ways in which religious convictions and experimental music interact.

Ethnoforgery and Outsider Afrofuturism

This essay detours from Afrofuturism proper into ethnological forgery and Outsider practices, foregrounding the issues of authenticity, authorship and identity which measure Afrofuturism’s ongoing relevance to technocultural conditions and the globally-scaled speculative imagination. The ethnological forgeries of the German rock group Can, the work of David Byrne and Brian Eno, and trumpeter Jon Hassell’s Fourth World volumes posit an “hybridity-at-the-origin” of Afrofuturism that deconstructs racial myths of identity and appropriation/exploitation. The self-reflective and critical nature of these projects foregrounds issues of origination through production strategies that combine ethnic instrumentation and techniques, voices sampled from radio and TV broadcast, and genre-mashing hybrids of rock and funk along with unconventional styles like ambient drone, minimalism, noise, free jazz, field recordings, and musique concrete. With original recordings and major statements of Afrofuturist theory in mind, I orchestrate a deliberately ill-fitting mixture of Slavoj Žižek’s critique of multiculturalism, Felix Guattari’s concept of “polyphonic subjectivity,” and Marcus Boon’s idea of shamanic “ethnopsychedelic montage” in order to argue for an Outsider Afrofuturism that works along the lines of an alternative modernity at the seam of subject identity and technocultural hybridization. In tune with the Fatherless sensibilities that first united black youth in Detroit (funk, techno) and the Bronx (hip-hop) with Germany’s post-WWII generation (Can’s krautrock, Kraftwerk’s electro), Outsider Afrofuturism opens up alternative routes toward understanding subjectivity and culture—through speculative sonic practices in particular—while maintaining social behaviors that reject multiculturalism’s artificial paternal origins, boundaries and lineages.