Don't let it happen here: Mingus / Minneapolis

Charles Mingus recorded this version of Martin Niemöller’s anti-fascist warning in 1965.

And today, sixty years later in Minneapolis when people intervene to help their neighbours, to come to the aid of those in their community, to attempt to ensure due legal process, they are pushed to the ground by the agents of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and shot ten times, shot four times, shot in the body on the ground, shot in the head, when pulling away in a car. Alex Pretti. Renée Good. A nurse, a poet. The observer is the new target. To be a witness a fatal act.

The Associated Press detailed that Pretti had embraced a person who had just been shoved by an agent. An agent then shoved Pretti, and the two fell back, still embracing.

They shoot down good and they shoot people embracing.

Sharing footage of death has been a necessary way of contending with the lies the administration tells in public. Evidence, reproduction, to show that this happened, even as the state doctors the photos and footage it itself releases. The image, when our eyes can’t be trusted, and the word: the lies told about the image. “I didn’t say that”. “He didn’t say that”. The image and the word. The reproduction of the image becomes a weapon, and, as a weapon, its consequences are fatal: loops of death. The line between witnessing and horrified voyeurism that for the past years of live-streamed genocide has become a part of the texture of observation. What does this do to solidarity and how we conceive of it.

Beyond these ethical questions, questions of representation, questions that matter for our conscience and our consciousness as artists, yet in ways that we find sometimes impossible to track, what matters is what you do. In Minneapolis, protests, marches, a general strike. The resistance of communities to the violence perpetrated on them, in their name.

Mingus’ recitation plays over footage from a demonstration shot for Thomas Reichman’s 1968 film Mingus. His biographer, Gene Santoro, writes:

Mingus figured you had to stand for something. The powers that be would come for you anyway. He was busted a few times with other marchers and spent time in the Tombs, New York’s downtown holding tank.

Mingus also shows Mingus facing eviction from his loft at 5, Great Jones Street, where he’d hoped to set up a music school, in 1966, and from which he was evicted after a crooked landlord set him up for a fall. The film’s last scene shows the press and cops crowding round as his instruments, his scores, his life are taken out of the building, and he’s taken to the police station after they find needles and a rifle in his belongings. He was released: no shots were fired; he planned music for a ballet called ‘My Arrest’.

The following year:

Charles Mingus, a well-known jazz musician, was arrested with two other persons late last night in a demonstration by a group of 200 hippies outside the Charles Street police station in Greenwich Village. Mr. Mingus, who was accused of scuffling with a civilian and two policemen who attempted to intervene, was charged with three counts of felonious assault. The demonstration began with a march by the hippies from Washington Square Park to the Charles Street station. It was touched off by rumors that an itinerant musician had been arrested earlier. These were later said to be unfounded. At the station the hippies sat down and began singing. The police moved the group half a block to the corner of Greenwich Avenue, where, they said, Mr. Mingus engaged in a scuffle with a motorist who had objected to hippies sitting on his car.

Mingus recorded ‘Don’t Let it Happen Here’ in March 1965, introduced by Ralph Ellison for a TV performance, and again in December, in the version released on Music Written For Monterey 1965. Not Heard... Played In Its Entirety At UCLA Vols. 1 & 2. That same year, sixty years ago, the assassinations of James Meredith, Malcolm X. Mingus fires his rifle into the ceiling and notes that it’s the same kind of gun that killed JFK. The right wing and liberal state alike claim a monopoly on violence, at home and abroad, and the vigilante forces that operate outside it, but with its tacit approval. In March 1965, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe murdered the Civil Rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo, shooting at her car as she ferried from the march on Selma. It was rumoured he’d assembled bombs for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Liuzzo grew up in one-room shacks with running water: her activism was the result of experience, of solidarity, the opposite of the KKK’s violence, as today, citizens turn up for their neighbours while others cheer on the forces of hatred. Gary Thomas Rowe received immunity.

The state assassinates people in private, and its agents murder people in public, on the highways and on the streets, whether they are activists or not. Fred Hampton. Sandra Bland. The state becomes and remains fascist because it assassinates and decimates the opposition. But this process of becoming is not some sudden leap of the cliff, though it can feel that way. The state becomes and remains fascist because the potentials for fascism are already there. In his book Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano looks at the analyses of police violence against populations of colour in the writing of Angela Davis and George Jackson to argue that fascism is a differentially-distributed experience. For some, the experience of the state is that it is already fascist. And then it spreads. The tree rotten from the inside will eventually collapse and take down everyone who’s placed their trust in it.

In Reichman’s film, Mingus delivers a sardonic monologue, tinged with furious irony and ironic fury.

I pledge allegiance to your flag—not that I want to, but for the hell of it, I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.

“If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night”, James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis a few years later.

The movement of the people in the streets can be clamped down on, it can be diverted, dispersed, thousands dead, arrested. The empire hovers over the regime, at home and abroad. The empires, plural, their vassals, their dregs. In Venezuela, in Iran. Invasion, kidnapping or ‘deals’ in exchange for extraction, of oil, of wealth: gangster capitalism, the continuation of decades of imperialism by all and any means, already dividing up the land piled up with rubble and with the dead. Fifty per cent of profits from new mineral and oil projects in Ukraine will go to the US; under the aegis of the US-led “board of peace”, the UAE plans a collaborative open-air prison marketed as a ‘safe zone’ in Gaza; the British government denies its complicity in the genocide in Sudan. But the movement doesn’t stop.

Mingus’ delivery in the TV performance is halting, as he fumbles the number of people genocided—death exceeding the weight of statistics—and over the collective noun to use—the politics of solidarity—speaking out against “those who killed…the other people with me.” And in that very awkwardness lies its clarity, its power. “And I say the only way we can avoid this is to look and speak out now. And don’t…let…it happen here”. From an opening lament spread between the brass instruments in the band as he recites Niemöller’s text, Mingus strikes up a propulsive piano figure and the band blares into collective improvisation. On the march, on the move. Fluency in fracture and the stammered statement of fact. The movement doesn’t stop. And though they may breathe in breaths strained, asphyxiated, observed, occupied, a breath that comes in gasps, a breath in combat, the people—continue to breathe.

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!

Mingus / Wieners

There is a piece by Charles Mingus recorded variously as ‘Inspiration’, in a very early 1949 performance with members of the Stan Kenton orchestra (as well as future members of his own groups such as trombonist Jimmy Knepper), and ‘Portrait’, in the 1962 Town Hall rehearsal-concert often described as a fiasco, but whose rough-edged playing through of some prime Mingus material forming part of his gigantic catch-all ‘symphony’, whatever you might call, ‘Epitaph’ (the title belying its grandeur, or perhaps amplifying it, as monument rather than after-thought) appeals to me in the way that the smoother (tho’ very weird) arrangements by Sy Johnson on ‘Let My Children Hear Music’, to pick a (perhaps particularly bad) example, don’t, quite. On this piece, whether ‘Inspiration’ or ‘Portrait’, or a more amorphously-identified component, a fragment, for use and re-use, for shuffling and re-shuffling, for titling and re-titling, in Mingus’ floating set-list or compositional oeuvre, there is a melting second melody which I have been living through and with for a week. This isn’t just the notion of the ‘earworm’, burrowing into an ear as some annoyance spoiling the apple’s juice, corrupting the already corrupt symbol of temptation, the invisible worm flying in the night and eating away at the heart of the rose of the world, corruption of desire or its suppression; rather it is that rose, as desire longed for and not had, or had, in recollection tho’ not tranquillity, always implying that which moves on from it and that which is lost in that move, as Mingus’ multi-part compositions do, elongating then breaking away.

So what catches is the catch, the break, the pause, the transition; in Mingus, the break is central; break as theorized by Fred Moten in his theorisation of the centrality of rupture in African-American culture, politics, cultural politics; or as Scott Saul discusses in his essay on Mingus’ Jazz Workshop, its accelerandos and decelerandos, sudden switches of tempo and instrumentation, the “the rhythmic foundation [which] seemed to rest on a San Andreas-sized fault”. Here, with the somewhat stiff Kenton musicians, the arrangement with a distinctly-third stream flavour, even a little reminiscent of Gil Evans’ arrangements for Claude Thornhill’s orchestra from around this time – mainly to do with the use of clarinet as a lead voice over a sort of soft-edged bed of brass, I think – the transition from the melodrama of the opening material (re-used in a movement from ‘Epitaph’, possibly ‘Children’s Hour of Dream’, and perhaps also in the material on ‘Pre-Bird’) to that secondary theme, is really emphasized; that theme, one of Mingus’ melting, romantic ones, which I’m sure is re-versioned elsewhere (as ‘Song with Orange’? my identification of tune with title tends to be slippery at best in Mingus’ case), on the Town Hall recording, played by Charlie Mariano (or is it Charles MacPherson? I think it’s Mariano) in that melting, declarative manner with which Mariano plays the themes in ‘The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady’ (and I also always think, when the Black Saint comes to mind, of Byard Lancaster’s to me at times very similar playing on Bill Dixon’s ‘Intents and Purposes’); but in 1949 the stiffness of that performance is the very thing that makes the twist that makes it, emphasizes the awkwardness of that pause; that transition, as if an intake of breath, moving to that new start. I’ve been reading John Wieners’ poem ‘Cocaine’; this transition is like that of the line-break before the ‘start’ that starts the final stanza, that fucks up the syntax, that breathes desire and despair in its space, beginning again with reduction of desire to reduce hurt, having been hurt, or, with Mingus, to desire more, out of storm, so here, reading them together, Wieners’ desire to reduce the significance of love and Mingus’ desire to increase it to its highest pitch, at the risk of melodrama, the overblown, whatever, meet and explode in and over that space of transition and break, and as I replay and restart that melody over and over again in my head or out loud in what must sound like a particularly egregious tuneless and toneless approximation of singing, messing up the ending, recircling, recycling, the melody becomes for me something like an absolute index of desire, starting MORE close to the source of desire, as Mingus too would want it, I think, to reach and hold onto it (or would Mingus impulsively move and throw that away, only to obsessively and declaratively reclaim it; more likely he would), that pitch of contentment. It’s the particular lilt given the melody here which simultaneously pogo-sticks the heart up with a stupidly fluttering happiness and makes it catch in the throat with the sadness that is that happiness’ underside; this pitch which will not be liveable, that pitch reached for which perhaps even you might try to live for and towards, ‘contentment’ too small a word for it and entirely the wrong one, implying satisfaction, possession, gain for myself, when what this is I think the move OUT for another and others in whom and with whom I find myself. This happened to me, too, with a piece by Sunny Murray, recorded only once, as far as I can tell, by a group called the ‘Spiritual Ensemble’ of whom there exists a single recording, as far as I can tell, a live one, in which this piece, a ballad called ‘Volaseta’, is played: Arthur Jones, the saxophonist whose albums for BYG/Actuel are beautiful and fiery and lyrical and true, but who, like so many, recorded little outside this brief late 60s/early 70s period, delivers the melody, which melts, in a very different way, into that same pitch, the rumbling of Murray’s malleted drums and Joseph Dejean’s guitar leading to a strange troubled, dissonant solo from Dejean, from which the lead back into the melody is glorious return; the many times I’ve heard this the solo itself most perfectly in place, everything, too, here not so much break as flow, oceanic wave, Murray’s cymbal work, the ferocious crashes at the end, the ballad amped up. These are personal indexes of some kind, taken for my use. What does this mean to anyone else, as I am sitting here furiously banging out keys with my headphones on and being absurdly overblown because I have stayed in from the rain outside and I am tired but at that stage of tiredness where a tendency to a kind of self-dramatization and investment in great emotional claims about what I have been listening to seems like a good idea. In both cases, I will say, or this is some sort of feeling I might have been charting without words or even very fixed-thoughts over a period of time, the utopian index of this music is not undercut, or in the Mingus that destabilizing move between moods is a kind of undercutting but with utter sincerity, irony and satire and pastiche and parody too, as in Mahler that balance of utter sincerity and a ferociously critical self-parody or refusal to simply inhabit the romanticized nostalgias he appears to idealize and idolize is crucial; in Murray there is a more basic trajectory, perhaps, between desire and the troubling of or assault on desire, that free jazz move in which a ballad moves from serenity to agitation and back, in that move leading either to dialectical resolution or to some perfunctory return which is actually equally an index of the desire for that resolution in its clichéd or failed or attempted version of it; I’ve written about this in relation, in particular, to Coltrane’s version of ‘Lush Life’ in Seattle in 1965, but I think also of his ‘Peace on Earth’ from Japan in ’67, or ‘Naima’ from the Village Vanguard in ’66, or the late recordings collected on ‘Expression’ and ‘Stellar Regions’. For starlight is almost flesh, the flesh that fires the night, with dreams and infinite longing, that extension forwards and back from that source presumed or fetishized as lost but each time heard revoked or re-vocalized, called, re-enacted, and, did you not know, the underworld of music is mobilized against the disappearing world of the starry heavens in order for the latter to be moved and to be a corporeal presence among humankind.