New

My introduction to the new Blank Forms republication of Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman and Larry Neal's classic Black Arts Movement music magazine The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution is out now, alongside facsimile reprints of all four issues and a preface by Spellman himself.

Also out, a piece on the new Igor Levit recording of Hans Werner Henze's Tristan at Artforum.

More to follow...for now, some recent listening...

'China Fights'

Karl Amadeus-Hartmann, an important figure for Henze, emerged from his period of "inner emigration" during the Nazi era to find himself at first championed as an un-tainted figure who might take up a position in the new, "Year Zero" Germany, and then, in the era of the Truman Doctrine and the Cold War positioning in West Germany, once more at risk of external or self-censorship for his socialist sympathies. I've been reading a thoroughly-researched and persuasive article in Twentieth-Century Music by Ulrich J. Blomann And Jürgen Thym that demonstrates how Hartmann ended up either actively suppressing many of his Nazi-era socialist/anti-fascist works or incorporating the musical material into 'neutral', non-programmatic instrumental forms. Blomann and Thym's case study is China kämpft / China Fights, originally the opening movement in the Sinfoniae Dramaticae (1941–3), based on the Chinese revolutionary song ‘Meng Jiang-nuin, and dedicated to Soviet writer Sergei Tretyakov--himself killed in the pre-war purges--and to Tan Shih-hua, the hero of Tretyakov's novel A Chinese Testament. Eventually premiered at Darmstadt in 1947, US influence meant, according to Henze, that attendees were encouraged to boycott the premiere, and on subsequent performances, Munich newspaper Das Steckenpferd denounced Hartmann and Käthe Kollwitz as the "creator[s] of a socialist approach to art" for this "free reworking of a socialist song from the Chinese civil war". Hartmann revised the piece, denying that it was based on anything but a 'neutral' folk-song. Likewise, the final movement of the symphony, ‘Vita nova’, contained declamations from Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’ in Brecht’s translation: Hartmann wrote to his publisher suggesting that publication would be inadvisable, given the Cold War political climate, and the movement has since been lost. As a self-described "leftie without a country", unwilling to move to a socialist or Soviet country and mindful of the complex position faced by the likes of Shostakovich, but also aware that his socialist and anarchist sympathies rendered him at risk of losing his job in "the West", Hartmann, the authors argue, once more found himself in a period of "inner emigration" in which the politics of his works had to remain disguised between the 'neutrality' of symphonic form. Beyond Hartmann's specific case, there's much more to say about this conjuncture, and how it plays into the discourse of serialism, the legacy of Schoenberg and Webern--with whom Hartmann studied--and the [false] binaries between Zhdanovshchina and CIA-sponsored modernism with which Hartmann, Henze and others had to battle in the post-war period...

Marion Brown in Paris

The extraordinary Vintage Music Experience channel at Youtube continues to put out a wealth of extremely rare recordings on a daily basis, most recently a radio broadcast by a Marion Brown quartet featuring Gunter Hampel, recorded shortly before May '68. I'd need to double-check, but I don't believe any of these compositions made it onto an official record...

Wayne Shorter's 'Universe'

The late Wallace Roney performing Wayne Shorter scores written for Miles Davis, full of the expansive majesty of Shorter's orchestral writing that has only been widely showcased in recent years. I've not found a way to hear Shorter's collaboration with Esperanza Spaulding on the opera Iphigenia, so if anyone reading this has any tips, do let me know...

Mal Waldron in Amsterdam

An excellent late Mal Waldron quartet with Sean Bergin on tenor driving things into 'out' territory on a few numbers--this group, as far as I know, never made it onto an official release.  

Marion Bauer's 'Lament on an African Theme'

Finally, Marion Bauer's 'Lament on an African Theme': though Bauer had a reputation in the post-war period, she's little-known today, and is not a composer I know much about. Likewise, I can't find out much about the piece, but I believe it's an orchestration of a movement from her string quartet, with the "theme" in question subjected here to a series of austere yet stirring variations. Would love to know more about the source of the melody and how it relates to the history of white American composers' use engagement with African diasporic material...

Up-to-date (From Attica to AMM)

(Some pieces of writing recently published in other venues.)

“Attica is in front of me”, an essay on musical responses to the Attica uprising by Archie Shepp, Frederic Rzewski and Charles Mingus, appears online in a special issue of the Blank Forms journal, edited by Ciarán Finlayson, commemorating the uprising fifty years on.

A piece on the Eddie Prévost residency at Café Oto in July is at Point of Departure. There were four concerts in Bright Nowhere, celebrating Prévost’s eightieth birthday: the piece has write-ups of all four--a multi-saxophone concert, the ‘Sounds of Assembly’ group, a Workshop concert, and the last ever gig by AMM. 

And at Artforum, a shorter write-up of the AMM gig from the same residency.

An edit from a much longer interview I did with Eva-Maria Houben last month is up at VAN magazine. (The full interview will be out in the fullness of time--watch this space: I also wrote about the recent performance of Houben’s ‘Together on the Way’ at the Southbank Centre a few months back.) 

Other odds and ends:

A review of Decoy and Joe McPhee’s gig at Café Oto came out back in the July issue of The Wire, of which there’s an image below; there’s also a review of the Explore Ensemble concert of music by Poppe, Dunn, Dillon and Miller in the October issue, of which I’ve just posted a longer version on this blog. 

And even further back, in March, organiser Mark O. Chamberlain kindly read out my short paper at the online John Wieners symposium hosted by Durham University: video of that and the other papers can now be viewed online here.

In the near future, among other things, a piece on Igor Levit’s new disc based around Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan, a journal special issue, a poetry pamphlet from Andy Spragg’s and Jimmy Cummins’ RunAmok, new titles from Materials/Materailien, and the Blank Forms reprint of Baraka, Neal and Spellman’s The Cricket, to which I contributed a short introduction. Lauri Scheyer and I are also putting the finishing touches to Calvin Hernton’s Selected Poems with Wesleyan University Press, a project that’s been in the works for a few years and which we’re very excited to see moving to completion...

More on all that in due course!