Funeral Music

I was at a party on Saturday night when someone came in and said that a van had driven into the Berlin Christopher Street Day parade, killed one person, injuring more. I’ve never been to CSD; go, instead, to the Internationalist Queer Pride demo that, since 2021, has been organised in contradistinction to the corporatisation and pinkwashing of the main CSD demo, whose organisers had called the police to remove pro-Palestinian marchers. Since 2023, this has meant outspoken support for the victims of the genocide in Gaza, and all the attendant policing that involves. So to me Berlin Pride also means cops pepper-spraying and pain-gripping people on the street. Well, it’s in the tradition. In the sun, the heatwave having finally come back after the week’s rain and thunderstorms, finally setting off after several hours, marching past the newly-converted Rheinmetall weapons factory, formerly a builder of car parts, the first time arms manufacture has taken place in Berlin since the Second World War; Rheinmetall, sender of weapons to Israel, to Turkey, to Saudi Arabia, for use in Syria, in Gaza, in Yemen, part of the government’s shift towards increased weapons production since Olaf Scholz’s 2022 Zeitenwende speech and its 100 billion euro fund for war, the willed and ever-expanding horizon of war. The march monitored, not for our own safety, but for the safety of the city’s “white” citizens, by vanloads of armed cops with their machine guns pointing down to the ground; the same cops who let another van drive through or past the protective barriers in the Tiergarten to plough into a path of queers that evening. Not protecting us from the world, but protecting the world from us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the parade, in the evening, people start heading off to the parties. The killing happened around ten p.m. and I didn’t find out till around midnight. People had been arguing in the kitchen about the World Cup. Guatemalan funeral music by the San Lucas Band was playing, out of tune, slow. Then Ornette Coleman. The music soared. I felt the world drop out. I don’t quite know how to describe that simultaneity—of hearing that music, which I love and which to me is the sound of possibility and joy and collective potentiality, of what Coleman means by harmolodics, infinitely transposable in whatever register, whatever instrument, whatever key—you could call it queer if you wanted to do that—of hearing that music at the same time as that news. I don’t know what it means, I’m not writing to turn this into a metaphor or an allegory or to makes sense of it, I’m writing it because I have to, I’m writing it to register the loss. Mourning is about revision and return, repeating that initial moment of knowledge, replaying it. It’s a loop, yet it develops; it moves forward, yet it stays in the same place. I’m writing this two days later but I’m still in that kitchen, the world is still dropping out, Ornette is still playing, the San Lucas Band are still playing, and I’m still in that kitchen. I don’t know who they were, the person who was killed, I don’t know their name, and I mourn their absence, that gap. The driver of the van attacked people with a knife or a machete after ramming the van into people on the path and fled. And I don’t know who they were either. And I’m still in that kitchen and already I’m thinking, if it’s an Islamist attack, queers will be used as convenient propaganda—never more convenient than when dead—against whoever it is the state wants to kill, deport. Whoever it was who drove that van could equally well have been one of the white supremacist AfD supporters at the counter-protest staged earlier that day. And if it’s not an Islamist attack, we’re just dispensable: they’ll gloat, those other AfD supporters, CDU supporters, and all their unaffiliated supporters, privately, in their homes, or publicly, online: they’ll cheer the death; they’ll smirk at our loss.

So say what. Stay alert. Some platitude of the sort. Mourn, but don’t let them use us, use you.

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I wrote those last lines the same night. The next day, the news comes out in more detail. Wanted posters on digital screens. Perpetrator, Islam, terror attack, plastered everywhere, all over the newspapers, all over the city, and the victim still not even named. The year before, the Chancellor had described raising a queer flag over the Bundestag as akin to treating it as a “circus tent”. Today, the national flag is lowered to half-mast in a gesture that passes as “solidarity”. But I don’t really know what’s worse. This half-mast show, as if there were some sort of unity between the national flag and a flag that should negate the idea of the nation, of this nation, entire. Already the videos coming out, this instrumentalised commentary that is the opposite of mourning, that is like spitting in the faces of the dead. Already the voices of the AfD and its cheerleaders in the right or the so-called “centre” raising themselves. A white blonde Woman on Welt says “Political Islam kills” and talks about Hamas and “irregular migration”, as if that had anything other than precisely fuck all to do with any of this. “Deport all dangerous individuals”, says someone else. (The attacker was born in Germany.)

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So mourning is once again becoming a weapon against those it’s supposed to protect. But you still have to mourn. Where does that feeling go. Who becomes a part of the “we” imposed like an unwanted national flag, vampirically, over the bodies of the dead. The flag doesn’t absorb the blood that flows from the body, it doesn’t stanch the wound. Rather, it is the very thing that sucks the blood out: blood spread into its colours, blood the basis of its being.

It’s not my nation and it’s not my flag. But these are, I feel, my dead, not the dead of those nation and flag who opportunistically claim them; not directly, but still, my dead, and I mean that internationally— these dead, not dead to be recuperated by nations and borders but dead who belong beyond those borders; my dead, in whatever way one might take that to mean, without taking any ownership. The person who was murdered was visiting from Poland with her daughter; the killer was German. No nation owns that death.

These dead my dead, because, yes, whatever it was Donne said about diminishment and involvement and nothing in itself entire, yes, that, perhaps, but more specifically: this person is dead because they were queer or they were seen as queer or they were in a queer space, a space that was, for that moment, queered, and because those have been or are my spaces, too. And because of that, because when I heard the news the world dropped out, because this next day and the day after I still can’t get it out of my head—because of all this, I still have to mourn.

I tried to do that by writing a poem. This is hardly a poem. On the afternoon of the next day I pace around inside and it starts to rain and I stay inside and eventually I cycle over to the vigil by the Brandenburger Tor. It starts to rain again, then it stops, then it starts again. This is hardly a poem. Soon after I arrive they finish clearing away the barriers by the gate. A tourist takes a series of selfies in the vacated space, oblivious, smiling away. On the ground on the raised bit of pavement there are rainbow and trans flags, placards, candles. By now, early evening, some hours after the vigil began, swelling to ten thousand people, the crowd is small, but still present. People stand here, they linger, they don’t just pass by, the group becoming in its silence rather than its noise a crowd. “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” and the opening of the seal signalled the end of whatever world and you know all the noise that will follow. Here, it’s quiet, respectful. I realise I haven’t brought any flowers with me to lay so I leave nothing but my temporary presence. People look dazed. Some quietly crying. Older gays and younger queers, mainly but not exclusively white. Some Zionists holding up a sign saying “this is what happens when you globalise the intifada” are eventually persuaded to leave. Then I notice after a while that the rainbow flag carried by the woman sitting quietly near the centre has a Star of David in the middle. Next to me are some people with a keffiyeh and a keychain with Palestinian flags. Who do you think I felt safer standing next to.

And it’s not, not really, my safety that’s the issue. Or not the me, not the we, the state might take me to be.

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I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of Tiergarten now without thinking about the attack. About its political uses by the predictable barrage of right-wingers calling for “re-migration” and denouncing Islamist terror as proxy for their racist nationalism. About the Zionist flags I saw at the vigil. About the feeling of the ground opening up, the world dropping out, and at the party, when I heard the news, I didn’t know what to say or what to do so said my goodbyes without comment and I left, quietly, as if ashamed.

The driver of the van attacked people with a knife or a machete after ramming the van into people on the path and fled. Later, when he ran at them with the same weapon in an allotment in Spandau, the cops shot him. As if this was some sort of satisfactory conclusion. But likely, it’s only the beginning. They will talk about “protecting” us and there will more cops on the parade to police us and to police real or imagined threats, and white blonde women and straight men on Welt will say things like “political Islam kills” and talk about Hamas and “irregular migration”, and the head of the Alternativ für Deutschland will condemn the killing knowing full well that many of their supporters are delighted by it on all counts, the cops killing the Muslims killing the queers, two birds with one stone.

“And many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”

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Recorded by ethnomusicologists, the music of the San Lucas Band was nominated for a Grammy Award and the musicians were displaced and probably killed in the Guatemalan Civil War, with its genocide of indigenous populations and activists. The Kaqchchikel musicians, survivors of the Mayan populations decimated by the conquistadors and their massacres and the diseases they brought, tried to bend the western instruments they’d been left and the funeral march melodies and dirges they were playing into the microtonal inflections their own traditions encompassed. It’s as if you can hear the music break under the strain, and yet it stays together.

The evening of the Monday after, the sirens seem to have not stopped sounding. Cops on my road. As if their music were any less sickening or inappropriate than whatever threat it is they are supposed to protect whatever “we” it is they think they are protecting us against.

I refuse it, I refute it, I am not that we.

The vigil was silent but after it I needed to hear something, and so, over these past days, I listened to ‘Atomic Peace’ and ‘Altruvista’ and ‘I Want to See You’ by Alice Coltrane, recorded after John Coltrane’s death, and to ‘Vigil’ by John Coltrane, recorded in watchfulness before his own, and I listened to John Corigliono’s AIDS Sympony, its first movement, titled Of Rage and Remembrance, and I listened again to the San Lucas Band, and they all finish playing. For now, Coltrane’s Meditations is the only purgation that will do, for each sound that comes out on the record sounds like it’s about to break in two. There is no mourning here that is not screaming. No screaming that is not mourning. Multiphonic. Flame. Flowers by a monument in the rain. Flowers by a grave.

And then again silence.

Not to let such a death be used, and not to let it be in vain.

25^th-28^th July 2026

For the victim of the attack on Saturday

and for all those it will be used against

Words and Music (Preview)

A subscriber post on Substack: three fragments from Daybook, on Mal Waldron/Jeanne Lee (with excursions through Shepp, Coltrane, and Gilroy), Jacques Derrida/Ornette Coleman, and Anti-Fascist Noise.

For Jeanne Lee, words and music were themselves always in dialogue, communication traversing the endless path of the semantic and non-semantic, the spoke and the unspoken. Talking drums, speaking tongues, healing water healing earth hurling air and fire. Lee’s first husband was the sound poet David Hazelton: in the mid-60s, they lived in Berkeley, Lee acting as editorial consultant on Hazelton’s magazine Synapse and performing in sound poetry events. After the couple’s split, and Hazelton’s suicide in 1968, poetry continued to be an integral part of work as she stretched away from the form of the standard or the song, improvising off lines of poetry—her own, those of Hazelton or Jackson MacLow or juggler, clown, poet Robert Lax—or, more frequently, going beyond words altogether. (“no words, only a feeling”, begins her record Conspiracy, working off a text by Hazelton.) “The thing about lyrics is that I stopped singing them because they no longer represented a reality I could relate to”, she remarks in an interview with Roger Riggins for Coda magazine. “the word becomes incidental to the sound […] But now I’ve come back to them in a totally different way, from the inside out.” For Lee, words and music mutually unsettled and mutually transformed each other. One of Lee’s former students remarks on her emphasis in teaching on “the musicality of words, the dancing and the movement of words, the unity of words, music and dance.” To Riggins, she speaks about “singing in a way so as not to be conscious of “singing” but just becoming a white light”.

I began to understand that this was another dimension. I began to write poetry again and to understand that the poem could be another reality.

Recent Poems Read

--Asha Puthli on ‘What Reason Could I Give’.

 

--Christa Wolf on dividing skies.

--Jayne Cortez telling us that ‘There it is’.

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It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so just some reports on some of the latest books to have made their way from the letterbox onto my table, where the shelves have run out of space and the piles continue to pile up. First up, a package in the mail from Michael Klausman and Patrick Tiller’s Colorado-based wry press, continuing their acts of unexpected and pleasing acts of careful recovery and shepherding into print. 

The Cobra King is a small, posthumous book of poems by Oswell Blakeston, whose pseudonym contracts the two names of Osbert Sitwell, or reads, alternatively, as “o swell”. A former drinking buddy of Dylan Thomas (“mouse” to Thomas’s “rat”, so the preface tells us), Blakeston was very much part of the British modernist scene from the 1920s on, though he remains under the radar: among other things he made what is reportedly the first abstract film, watched by Buñuel, wrote prolifically for the important film magazine Close-Up, and was a key part of the circle around Bryher; as well as his involvement in film, he was a painter, a writer of cookbooks, travel books (one of which saw him banned from Salazar’s Portugal), mystery novels and poems. Ian Young’s introduction—which recalls meeting Blakeston in a London pub while editing his gay poetry anthology The Male Muse in the early seventies, and recalls among other things Blakeston’s outré anecdotes of the German dancer, performer and actor Valeska Gert—suggests that there were as many as one hundred books and chapbooks over the years. The Cobra King comes from typescript in the Harry Ransom archives in Austin: described by Blakeston as his “beefcake poems”, they’re short and pithy with a wicked streak, memories of queer love or lust, come-ons, put-downs, alternately melancholic and joyful. The pick of the bunch a free-verse couplet half-way down a poem: “Make love until / we have no faces”.

If the Blakestone book is petite, pocket size, Paolo Lionni’s Headlines is widescreen, the page stretching out to extend the long lines of Lionni’s mixed prose texts and poems, largely emerging from London’s countercultural milieux, and lovingly assembled by Klausman from various underground magazines and from the 1962 manuscript which gives the book its title, found in the papers of yet another neglected poet, Philip Lamantia. More links with the film underground around the likes of Piero Heliczer, including a prose text originally written as the script for an unrealized surrealist film set on an Italian train. As the title suggest, newspapers form an important source, in found text re- or de-contextualized or satirically paraphrased, along with more gnomic addresses to poets like Corso and Ginsberg. As the biographical note suggests, these were mainly the product of Lionni’s itinerant twenties, bursting with energy, and culminating in a kind of ecstatic manifesto, ‘To The Queen’ first published on the front page of the International Times in 1966 after a copy—collectively signed by, among others, Rosemary Tonks, Michael X, Harry Fainlight and Brian Patten—was sent to Buckingham Palace. In such work, as with Blakestone, poetry is perhaps one of many modes, not just of art, but of living: the scattered fragments of a life lived on the move, the very incompleteness and sometimes disjointed energies of the work are a part of its spirit, which tugs at the corners of the pages as if yearning to jump onto the street or road or boat once more.

Not an archival project, but recent poems: Ken Bluford’s Skip Tracing is the first full-length collection, following the collaboration with Tom Weatherly, Climate/Stream. Bluford was part of the scene around Middle Earth Books in Philadelphia, including Bockris-Wylie, hung out at the Poetry Project and Slug’s Saloon, and is, the bio note informs us, the brother of Guion Bluford, the first African-American astronaut in outer space. The 145 pages of poems here were largely first published as facebook posts, antidotes to the ever-shortening streams and screeds of today’s social media platforms and their intersections with the mendacities of US national (and international politics). Bluford instead offers wry, ironic or tender, measured reflection on a variety of subjects: here, for instance, the noirish Robert Mitchum western Blood on the Moon might make an appearance alongside Al Green or Charlie Patton. Bluford’s (non-exclusive) preference is for four-line stanzas, often capped off with an incisive couplet that introduces a new resolution or note of ambiguity, plentiful enjambment constantly moving the twists and turns of poetic thought against the interrupter or continuation of the line-break. The bio notes the way the poems combine the responsive nature of improvisation with the careful workings of form, elements that true students of improvisation knows are in no way incompatible—the paramount example, perhaps, Coltrane’s warp-speed working-through of patterns in ‘Giant Steps’, a track Bluford recalls from a street a few blocks away from where he lived and workshopped and woodshedded, as the “revolving drums” of a concrete mixer merge with a drumset, a Coltrane mural whose blues suggests waves of water or sound, across the stanza, a poem about keeping the memory alive as the mural fades--as one of the tasks of poetry is to keep a cultural memory that fades into nothing even in the very guise of being re-branded, re-marketed and sold on any number of online platforms. Poetry knows a history in the crevices, in the metaphorical association, the quick flash, that the poem taps into with a patient speed: not so much, perhaps, the famous breakneck up-tempo of the famous recording in which Coltrane suddenly calls double, triple, quadruple, quantum time, but one of the slower, earlier takes heard on the Heavyweight Champion boxset. (Not that ‘slower’ means slow.)

(The group’s conversation on the first alternate take, transcribed by Vijay Iyer and Steve Coleman. Coltrane opines “I don’t think I’m gonna improv this—I ain’t goin be sayin nothin, tryin just, makin the changes, I ain’t goin’ be tellin’ no story...Like, tellin them black stories.” “Shoot. Really, you make the changes, that’ll tell em a story.” “You think the changes are the story!” “Right, that’ll change all the stories”. “I don’t want to tell no lies!” “Changes themselves is some kind of story”. The melody, the chords, what rides both to twist away from it.)

One of the sharpest of the political poems, ‘Self-Defense Poem’, avoids the mode of elegy that many of the better-known poems emerging from Black Lives Matter and the Floyd Rebellion have adopted, instead deploying a mordant and incisive irony against the white-right-ring militias and their hysterical fears of antifa and black life, and the rewriting of cops as potential victims of assault who must shoot first, ask questions at the inquest. Imagining that they’ve shot a cop in pre-emptive ‘self-defense’, the poem concludes: “And if I was photographed having a drink or two // With fellas from Antifa with time to kill / Who’s to say this poem isn’t aimed at you”. The tone of world-weary—yet not resigned—wisdom, chastened compassion, or a quick and cutting take-down of the lies that justify continuing anti-black violence, calls to mind the later work, say, of Lorenzo Thomas, in Dancing on Main Street: sometimes in the pacing and tonality too I hear echoes of Bluford’s friend—and Thomas’s literary executor—Aldon Nielsen, who’s thanked in the acknowledgments, and who is himself on a streak of fine poetry books of late—the Selected Poems edited by JP Marcoux from Blazevox a couple of years back, and most recently, the recent book-length interview-cum-autobiography Memewars with E. Ethelbert Miller. Either way, Bluford’s is a very fine first full-length—at the age of 75!—and deserves the expanded set of readers I hope this publication will land it.

Following the trail, also from Blazevox and in the mail, is Edric Mesmer’s Tides that Don’t Perturb. As librarian at the University at Buffalo—he was an excellent host when I did archive research there in 2022—Mesmer has excellent knowledge of Buffalo’s literary and artistic lore, and a fine line in bibliographic research with the Among the Neighbors pamphlet series. Buffalo provides some of the referential landscape of these poems, including my favourite in the book, a tribute to Cornelius Cardew, who worked on the manuscript for Treatise while on a fellowship in the town in the sixties—the original version of the score published by Gallery Upstairs Press, who put out the chapbook Pressed Wafer by another temporary Buffalo resident, John Wieners, the same year. On that archive visit, my train out of town towards Massachusetts was delayed for over an hour, I think because of snow: at the station I met a couple who told me stories of the campus in the sixties, the architectural history of the town, a wealth of connections and cross-connections and a generous encounter that stayed with me, but I could never remember the names—until Edric identified them as Max Wickert and Katka Hammond just this past week. (A poem is dedicated to them in the book.) It’s connections like that, coincidences or dots joined up, that the poems specialize in, but that’s not their motivating method, more a part of their texture. The poems have something of the crossword puzzle to them, the pleasure of teasing out their careful and multiple allusions, often framed through classical mythology, but they also have the pleasurable spark of language that doesn’t need to be deciphered to be richly enjoyable, as the sound and play propel forward across Dickinsonian dashes—“trying to capture the cadence of thoughts, and ruptures”, as Edric puts it, in a time when thinking has become fragmentary and disjointed, to make the connections or leave them hanging there. During one of several memorial panels for Tyrone Williams at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture this past February, JP Marcoux talked about Tyrone’s use of the em-dash in relation to Fred Moten’s notion of the break, to the picket lines of a sanitation strike, as a pause or a connector which might reach across from life to death and back, an image I just can’t get out of my head: in Edric’s poems, I’m thinking of the em-dash as a bridge, a rope one perhaps, over the yawning abysses or tides that open up under us as we teeter forward into this bad new year. Like stumbling by chance into a talk on St Francis, staring at an aquarium, counting the syllables, moving ahead into the light.

Finally: from the other side of the Atlantic, Tom Crompton and Dom Hale, two thirds of the Poets Hardship Fund, have put together a beautiful petite chapbook from Tom and Alex Marsh’s Gong Farm called Mud Ramps. It’s a prose text of less than a dozen pages—eight to be precise, in fourteen paragraphs—and calling it a prose poem risks putting it too safely in a generic box, but it is in prose and it is fundamentally and committedly about poetry. Perhaps it’s more like an essay, but then, really, it’s a poem, or an essay, or both, in prose, but really, in language. It’s a petite book, with a lovely cover image by Amy Todman, printed at the Leeds Footprint Workers Co-Op, and that size, the modesty of scale speaks to its humility of ambition. It’s not small because it’s seeking to be a collector’s item but because that smallness of scale is where we can widen our view, slip it into our pocket or a letterbox, a carrier pigeon coming in off January winds to bring us a message for the turning of the year. The pamphlet has a polemical edge too—the text feels like a manifesto for our time—but the polemic has a generous edge, and it builds itself, not by defining an in- or out-group in the classic mode of the manifesto. This isn’t about building a movement or a group, but a manual for anyone to use. Like a poem it’s sometimes obscure in the best ways, and it’s in the obscurity that the clarity, really, is to be found: you feel it wandering on the edge, shaded by the landscapes of the north of England or elsewhere, their vocabulary—kerb, cairn, calyx moorsense, borage, scrim—echoing the work of Barry MacSweeney and Maggie O’Sullivan it’s informed by. (O’Sullivan, along with Stephen Rodefer, provides one of the epigraphs, opening up a world in just four words: “Poetry finds my life”.) A few years ago, in an interview broadcast, of all places, on Instagram, the late Jean-Luc Godard said that the Americans invaded Iraq in order to capture the birthplace of writing. I remembered it as him saying they wanted to invade Iraq in order to destroy language from its source. Either way, he’s being proved right as the swirl of banalized language in this era of Global English swallows itself up under the sign of Trump and Musk—what the opening page of Mud Ramps has this down pat in identifying as “the virtual extraction void”, “bot-language” the “devouring machines”. AI is no longer an early millennium sci-fi flop by Stephen Spielberg but the consuming future of warfare, our lives, as Europe rearms and the US inclines itself more and more to domestic neo-fascism. Once you start reading it’s tempting to quote every other line: the best thing, though is to read it yourself. Paraphrase dilutes the mellifluous fluency of its phrasing. But here’s a run-through, some tunes from amidst the overall flow of the song: plotting counter-landscapes, “inventing scales to measure”: the image of the tuning fork in the traffic, “remaking languages is always the first and last principle”, “it’s not freedom but discloses it”, the dissonance of collective life, Dorothy Wordsworth “hallucinating drills and airstrikes” and calling Tom Raworth on the phone to reflect on the making or destruction of landscape. And: the momentary and stupid beauty of the poem that becomes history, down crumbling lanes of the heart, “the ancient and futural horizons of poetry that emulsify all living writing with the brilliant dead”, and the penultimate sentence, what is at the text’s core—“so that who we are is really unimportant in the language”—as what a poet offers is an air that remains beyond the life or name that gave it breath. And so this text, its collective resonance, reverberation, something for the road, for the year ahead. I’m very grateful to have this and I recommend it highly!

 
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So ends the round-up. More to come on various things, including Theodore Harris and Amiri Baraka’s Our Flesh of Flames, out in expanded full colour reissue. Still wanting, too, to write on Elaine Mitchener’s stupendous record Solo Throat from last year, to finish off other manuscripts, other projects, tidying, collecting, sifting. More, in time, to be revealed, whatever the rest of March and beyond chooses to bring.

December

I talked to Diedre Murray earlier in the year, and that interview is now out in Point of Departure, thanks, as ever, to Bill Shoemaker. We touch on her career as a cellist in improvised music, including her work with Larry Young (Khalid Yasin) in the 'Lawrence of Newark' band, with Henry Threadgill and Marvin Hannibal Peterson, with Fred Hopkins, with The Roots, and as a composer for the stage. A respected figure in the world of musical theatre for her arrangements of Gershwin, her collaboration with the likes of Chesney Snow, and as a composer of operas and musicals, Murray's prior career as an improviser has been sorely neglected in the often male-centric world of jazz criticism, but it's a crucial part of the legacy of American (and global) improvised  music. Hopefully this interview brings it some of the attention it deserves.

Also in the new Point of Departure, reviews of a Sam Rivers session, Undulation, and of the newly-rediscovered recording of John Coltrane performing the 'A Love Supreme' suite with an expanded group live in Seattle.  Another talk on that album, focusing more on its social and historical context, appears at Artforum, here.

And my essay on Gabrielle Daniels, writer-choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, and New Narrative appears in Journal of Narrative Theory.

Other things in the pipeline meanwhile, on the 'Occult School of Boston', musical responses to the Attica uprising, etc...

john coltrane: 'lush life' in seattle, 1965

this from a cd which collects the remaining recordings from coltrane’s residency at the penthouse in seattle in 1965 – an expanded group comprising pharaoh sanders, donald rafael garrett (on bass and clarinet), jimmy garrison, elvin jones. the quality is pretty dreadful compared to the officially-released impulse 2-cd set (the untitled half-hour track taken from a radio broadcast is the cleanest, similar in vein to ‘evolution’ from the impulse set). nonetheless, worth making it thru the murk to find this cover of billy strayhorn’s ‘lush life’. i’ve been playing it for days, it makes me feel ill or something tho’, voices transported thru some ancient analogue form of recording technology, ghosts in the machine sounding out some terrible warning barely disguised as languid balladry, an interlude before the up-tempo and familiar ‘my favorite things’ routine (which itself sounds under some terrible strain here, coltrane’s soprano piping away obsessively over phrases that drown out under the general murk of the rest of the band’s pounding). this is partially a quality of the recording, but it’s there in the rest of the seattle tapes as well (as per this blog post from a little over a year ago). partially this is to do with the tension between the move towards free jazz that coltrane, sanders and garrett are taking, and the continued use of standard material – i mean, it’s perhaps somewhat surprising to find coltrane playing the strayhorn at this stage (tho’ the impulse set also includes ‘body and soul’), and there are moments here, as there are (to a far greater extent) on 'body and soul', where pharoah sanders enacts a queasy near-disintegration of the standard quite different to anything else in his or coltrane’s work (despite an online reviewer’s rather dismissive comment that he simply was “not really in this mould,” that it was “not his bag then”). & while coltrane and tyner stick to the chord changes, coltrane's playing nonetheless has an urgency to it far from the smooth and uncluttered phrasal shapings of his 1962 'ballads' record and collaboration with the smooth baritone of singer johnny hartmann. while the hartmann version stays solely and comfortably within the mode of wistful, resigned melancholy that characterizes strayhorn's tune, its chronicle of lonely day-drinkers (“sad and sullen faces / with distingué traces”, “twelve-o-clock-tails,” etc), here we have an attempt – or at least, this is how i hear it – to seek reassurance within that melancholy as a kind of pleasurable resignation, even transformed into a triumphant emotive assertion (as in nathaniel mackey's notion of 'blutopia'), rather than the desolation and desperation that the interpretation increasingly gestures towards – hence coltrane’s clinging close to the melody in a fairly lengthy opening exposition. yet sound and fury are always on the verge of kicking in, as witnessed by some upper register intrusions around two minutes in, and by increasing phrasal clutter and expansion before the entrance of pharaoh sanders (just as, in this period, coltrane's own ballad 'naima' comes to seem less and less a serene ballad, more and more poised between the quiet bliss of its first half and the element of uncertainty that creeps into the second, that element of the tune emphasized and exacerbated in lengthy solos that are increasingly dramatic in their stasis - check, for example, the 1965 version at antibes, or the version with sanders at the village vanguard the following year). so sanders follows coltrane with strange tonguings (signalling elvin jones’ drums to really start kicking in, almost drowning everyone else out on the muffled murk of the bootleg recording), a queasy sliding or turning away, a kind of dribbling and wavering quality to the tone, far from 'free jazz macho', an uncertainty, hesitancy, odd phrasal gaps, not quite going far enough away from the tune to constitute an explosion of something radically other (as in archie shepp's solo preface to a version of 'in a sentimental mood' live in san francisco), but rather opening up some space in another dimension inside or outside the tune (between the lines, off the edge of the page) which it never quite enters, falling between the changes-melody approach and something much more askew, all the more disturbing for that uncertain balancing act. (and all the more emphasized by the fact that the other musicians are rhythmically and harmonically still within the changes framework - that quality, tension-and-release, soloist straining from rhythm section yet playing with them at the same time - given a particular and still almost shocking quality in these seattle recordings, in a way that's hard to pin down technically (sanders' own debut recording on ESP disk has the same tension, but it's in no way similarly productive, just as cecil taylor's early recordings are hamstrung rather than productively ennervated by this opposition)). i really think this is something which hasn't quite been matched since (david s. ware's takes on standards, for example are ecstatic, reverent, even sentimental, their ‘free jazz’ techniques nowhere near as chilling as elements of coltrane’s seattle ballads): it certainly hasn’t been matched in sanders' own late-career interpretations of standards, which move back to a smoothed-out, less-complex version of coltrane's own earlier takes on that repertoire. nowhere here the volability of coltrane’s 'sheets-of-sound' approach, a kind of unstoppable glossolalia, hyper-complexity as the realisation of the form at its limit, teasing out every single implication of the tune's harmonic sequence to the point of exhaustion or even self-parody, hyper-articulacy as a kind of babbling on the edge of terror to which the only response is the scream, literally vocalised or sounded thru saxophone multiphonics, reed-shriek. sanders’ later ballads don’t really contain the smoothness of coltrane’s more measured approach on 'ballads' either; rather, they manifest a kind of robust steadiness, straightforwardly tender (i’m thinking here of recordings like ‘crescent with love’, or the take on, of all things, ‘a nightingale sang in berkeley square’). tenderness on the seattle recordings, by contrast, is wracked by doubt and violence, desperately yearned for, returned to, but never with any sense of resolution – that which one breaks thru to, in that "air from another planet" of sanders' solos (as in the final movement of schoenberg's 2nd string quartet, poised on the breakthrough to atonality) isn't fulfilled utopia, isn't heaven, is unimaginable, could be utter horror, catastrophe. and even tenderness itself enshrines exactly such horror in the societal conditions in which one must place coltrane’s 1965 recordings (tho' their address to these conditions is in no way propogandistic-direct, doesn’t necessarily offer alternatives or answers) – by which i mean that tenderness cannot be a total other to violence, is implicated within it even as it must be vitally felt as its other, its counterforce (thus, coltrane’s following up of the unexpected and utterly chilling multiphonic in his recapitulation of the melody at the end of ‘body and soul’ with an exceptionally tender melodic extrapolation that at once mitigates against and emphasizes the sheer strangeness and foreigness of that multiphonic). well this version of ‘lush life’ doesn’t go quite so far as i might seem to be suggesting, within the compression of its 10 minute running span (on the recording of ‘body and soul’, it’s partially tyner’s lengthy solo that sets the ground for the most ‘out-there’ sections of the piece, ratcheting up the tempo, granite thud and thump and right-hand sprinkle, wavering arco, spirals of repetition like a sudden lock, trapped in a cycle you can’t get out of) – and yet at times sanders’ solo comes to seem a hideous parody as it tries to push the tune into something it isn’t and remains stuck on those changes, a gurgling and gargling strained thinness of tone transforming the tune and its changes from melancholy to an emphasized statement of – what? and then coltrane’s re-statement of the melody, ending in low-register barfs and morphing back into the contours of strayhorn’s tune, stuck in codas that can’t end, that contain but can neither entirely release nor entirely dissipate the disturbed energy that has built up on the relentless propulsion of jones’ drums and sanders’ questing spirals. and right at the end, almost all we can hear is the hollow thud of jones’ drums, tyner’s piano tinny uncertain ending, cut-off by the recording before it’s even finished. what the hell would this have sounded like as you sat in the club with your strayhornian cocktails. what the hell does it sound like now. melancholy as real despair, latent violence, hardly some heroic artist-struggle but objective social record. that’s how we have to hear coltrane, that’s why even fans like the amazon reviewer i quoted earlier just don’t get that, for example, sanders’ utterly un-canny or really terrifying solos on ‘body and soul’ and ‘lush life’ don’t just evince a failure to fit into a particular mould, that he can’t play ballad changes properly or something; rather, they temporarily split that ballad form right open and reveal the abyss at its heart.

(a belated part 2)



that last sentence was one of those rhetorical flourishes on which it seemed right to end the other night, but i've been thinking about this over the past day or so and realized that one element i could and really should have talked about to a greater extent was the tune 'lush itself' itself, and its relation to strayhorn's race and homosexuality. it seems fairly established that the line "i used to visit all those gay places" is not a reference to sexuality, both because the sexual connotations of that term were not widely established at that stage, and because strayhorn, as a 16 year-old from homewood, pittsburgh, wd likely not have been aware of them. but i wonder if we cd argue that the tune's melancholia, its lyrics' description of a milieu which is materially luxurious but emotionally unsatisfactory (visits to paris, moves into a cosmopolitan world of jazz and cocktails, and so on, don't make up for the pain of lost love), is also a melancholia with unspoken, perhaps even unintended wider resonances - if not in the original, or hartmann's smooth, gentleman's rendition, then certainly in coltrane's exacerbated expansion of something that was in some sense there at the heart of the original tune (that 'abyss' i somewhat clumsily mention at the end of the original post). by these i mean, firstly, racial overtones: fine clothes, drinks, a more tolerant / cosmopolitan european cultural setting with its own african-american expatriate community, don't disguise the glaring fact of continuing racism which means that wealth for a black man or woman is not the same as it is for a white man or woman - not to mention the real melancholia of continuing murders and race riots and ghettos and incarceration as tactic (these things which have not gone away, even if frank ocean's portrayal of disaffected ‘super rich kids’, on the album 'channel orange', is of a very different kind to strayhorn's projection of an older man's world-weariness from the position of a non-rich kid; and even if black wealth is increasingly celebrated as excess, joie-de-vivre, the jewell'd paraphernalia and weaponry of hip-hop, its money obsession). second, the melancholia of strayhorn's own sexuality, the particular and difficult problems of that sexuality within the black community, the sense of seeking 'sophistication', elegance, etc, as opposed to a more macho modern of proletarian manliness that the black arts movement would frequently valorize to the extent of caricature.

and it’s in relation to this that fred moten’s ‘in the break’ proves helpful: moten puns on strayhorn’s surname and the similarly ‘straying’ or wavering pitch of his vocals on his 1964 version of ‘lush life’, to suggest that str’s work manifests “a disruptively essential fugitivity”, “a propensity to wander or migrate or stray that is always animated by desire,” this propensity characteristic not only of his own practice but of the artists of the harlem renaissance whose sexuality and frustration at american racism lead them to europe – james baldwin, beauford delaney – this perhaps also present in strayhorn’s line in ‘lush life’ about a curative “week in paris.” relevant here might be strayhorn’s early ambition to be a classical composer (a realm he could not enter due to his race) – again, this realm of ‘sophistication’, that which, in a double-bind of condemnation, one is not allowed (by the white establishment) to enter into, not supposed to possess, because of one’s race and class background (‘culture’ as doubly foreign, both european in influence and ‘alien’ to yr supposed class and race position) – and the desire for which is also later taken (by the militant black resistance to the white establishment) as a betrayal of black working-class culture, in often sexualised terms. (see here amiri baraka’s conflation of aspects of the european or white avant-garde with this betrayal – his ambivalence towards cecil taylor explicitly figured thru a suspicion of the ‘euro-american’ lineage which he sees as taking taylor away from the more ‘authentically black’ style of, say, an archie shepp (even as taylor himself, in interviews, frequently claims just that very blackness, disowns the very same euro-americans – cage, stockhausen, david tudor – that baraka lumps him in with) – yet implicitly predicated on a suspicion of taylor’s homosexuality conflated with 'whiteness', 'europe', or 'classical influences' (again, see moten’s more expanded take on all this in his reading of baraka’s ‘the burton greene affair’)).

if this fugitivity is both racially and sexually determined, it would be be too simplistic to draw this back into the argument about coltrane and sanders’ exacerbation of 'lush life's melancholy: the melancholy of the original tune can’t really be said to emerge out of a self-tortured closeting (strayhorn was nothing if not open about his sexuality, tho' his relatively low public profile compared to ellington seems to have been the price he paid for such freedom). i mean, check his enunciation of the word "places" on the afore-mentioned 1964 version of the tune on which he sings and plays piano - this isn't the wounded heterosexual masculinity of chet baker, more a clipped kind of queerness that identifies itself as queer precisely by being less heart-on-its-sleeve than someone like baker. this itself is perhaps out of a reaction to the stigmatizing of homosexuality as particularly 'feminine', out of which camp dismissal emerges as the deliberate parodic disavowal of deeply felt hurt or pain, especially in love – and so strayhorn’s own version of ‘lush life’s’ melancholy is less emotionally volatile or searing than coltrane’s or sanders’ can be, as if fear of any indulgence in a specifically homosexual or 'feminine' melancholy comes to be precisely that which characterises the homosexuality of strayhorn’s rendition, while the heterosexual musician is free to take the role of emotional depth-plumber. (think also of the fact that miles davis' trumpet playing, actively taking the 'female role' as it 'speaks' for the silent jeanne moureau in scenes from louis malle's 'l'ascenseur pour l'echafaud' (or taking the role of porgy in 'porgy and bess', or the female mourner in 'saeta' from 'sketches of spain'), doesn't seem afraid of emotional vulnerability, even as davis' own personality veers strangely(?) between the debonair, fine-dresser ('the man in the green shirt') and the hyped-up boxer, hard drinker, ladies' man.)

which is all to say (again) that it would be too simplistic to interpret coltrane and sanders as consciously bringing out the racial and sexual melancholy that lies behind the surface love-melancholy of 'lush life': i’ve no idea of their attitude towards homosexuality, and in any case tackling a strayhorn tune isn’t exactly a statement of intent in that regard, ‘lush life’ itself having become such a standard (coltrane apparently adding it to the session with johnny hartmann after hearing nat king cole’s rendition on a car radio). nonetheless, their take on the tune (which as far as i can tell is pretty much unique in terms of its emotional register among the many interpretations that have stacked up over the years) might be taken without too much of a stretch to suggestively, if not uncomplicatedly, correlate with those resonances.

similarly, their playing here, not necessarily through programmatic intent, but through its affective qualities, pretty much blows away the argument that being particularly open about emotions, especially painful ones, is a particularly feminine thing, that strong/silent men might remain more tight-lipped – tho’ perhaps one might characterise the emotional register of coltrane’s work as hard to mistake as stereotypically ‘feminine’ in a way that davis’ might have been. (even as davis and coltrane get lumped together as both equally examples of masculinity by herman gray, for instance, who argues in a piece for callaloo that “davis and coltrane, like their contemporaries, enacted a black masculine that not only challenged whiteness but exiled it to the (cultural) margins of blackness - i.e, in their hands blackness was a powerful symbol of the masculine.”) that said, at the point coltrane and sanders recorded ‘lush life’ in seattle, davis’ own work had moved more towards a fast and loud style in which the softness and perceived technical shortcomings of previous recordings were replaced by hard, fast tempi. well, that’s itself a caricature, take ‘filles de kilimanjaro’ or ‘in a silent way’, take even simon reynolds’ argument that the emphasis on groove, extended timings and so on across davis’ late 60s-mid-70s output, its gesture towards something approaching the ambient, is itself some kind of feminine, anti-phallic, ‘oceanic’ deleuzian flow: “i reckon miles was half in love with, half in read of, the ‘female’ will-to-chaos, the mutagenic, metamorphic life force[…]that’s why miles’s misogynist nickname for oceanic flux with ‘bitches brew’.” in any case, to suggest that emotional forthrightness, length, technical complexity and so on are specifically male or macho would of course be a stupidly reductionist position to take. one might, for example, note the change from the rhythmic emphasis of mccoy tyner and elvin jones to the more floating, freer rhythms of alice coltrane and rashied ali as a different kind of complexity and elongation, one predicated less on the tension that characterises the seattle recordings and more on a trance-like flow in which detail is of less importance than overall, continuing effect (the deleuzian / gregory batesonian ‘plateau’) – and one might then adopt reynolds’ position and characterise this (albeit in scare-quotes) as ‘feminine’, noting alice coltrane’s role, her harp-like arpeggios. but then one might also note that her work on, say, ‘live in japan’, has a kind of droning grounding to it predicated on a strong left-hand (she cites her husband as encouraging her to use the whole register of the piano, to move away from a more limited be-bop concentration on particular areas of the keyboard), is hardly just harp-like delicacy and float. and rashied ali, jimmy garrison, sanders, coltrane, are equally, collaboratively responsible for this freeing-up. while gendered readings of the music might prove valuable, then, (witness david ake’s essay on ornette coleman and the ‘re-masculation’ of jazz), i’m not primarily interested here in reading coltrane's music that way – even if i have proffered the (homo)sexual melancholy of strayhorn’s composition as some sort of backdrop to the expanded melancholy of coltrane and sanders’ rendition. and even if i have suggested that the more emotionally forthright performance or transformation of this melancholy comes to seem a heterosexual privilege, as much as jazz itself came to seem a particularly macho or heterosexual form (despite its original, new orleans brothel associations with homosexuality – viz. jelly roll morton’s gay mentor tony jackson). but this is meant less in terms of a particular performance of black masculinity (sexualized or not) as in terms of a socialized understanding of coltrane’s 1965 ‘lush life’ in which melancholy, as in the blues but formally beyond it, comes to seem a force, not of resignation or quietism, but of some kind of registration of the objective difficulties and traumas of revolt, racial, sexual and political.

Vibes & Time: The Elasticity of Bobby Hutcherson, &c.

Above: Walt Dickerson erasing the drivenness of be-bop, its relentless forward momentum, slowing things down to a floating meditation in which it can seem that every note is surrounded by a wavering, blurred, vibrato’d halo, haze round streetlamp, fogg’d, exquisitely taking its time & erasing time as it goes, so that, rather than remaining within the compact confines of a tune, with its set order & order within the overall set of album or gig, the playing hangs loose, occasionally bursting into plosive, explosive runs, but more often than not just hanging there, tracing the permutations of a simple phrase, as if whispering it diminuendo to oneself alone, sometimes barely audible over the whispered, tremulous harmonics of Richard Davis’ absolutely exquisite arco bass playing. The result is far from merely ambient wash – rhythmic pull & release, ebb & flow is always in evidence; this is serious & inventive playing indeed, but is not jazz in the speed-freak boppery sense. That’s not to say that Dickerson can’t fly up & down those mallets with the best of them, that he can, in the words of John Fordham, “improvise such fast melodies that his mallets seem barely to be making contact” – indeed, there are some scintillatingly fast runs on this very track – but the overall impression is nonetheless far from omni-directional drive, is something far more considered, spacious, even at higher tempi.

This results in part from Dickerson’s own judicious use of vibrato – taking us somewhere close to the “soft-lights glow” that Fordham sees him as rejecting (tho’ Clifford Allen’s paradoxical descriptor “warm-ice sheen” is perhaps more apt) – but also to the accompaniment of such superbly subtle drummers as Andrew Cyrille, who, on a recording like ‘Tell us Only the Beautiful Things', the logical extension to Dickerson’s earlier ‘To My Queen’, sometimes sounds as if he’s barely even there, or else in another room, the swish of his brushes or the tap of stick on stick merging with the hiss of room tone as a kind of gently rhythmic white noise over which Dickerson can stop-start rhapsodize in tandem with bassist Wilbur Ware, here melodic equal rather than mere sideman. Dickerson’s preferred contexts would seem to be in small groups, with players who are more interested in the changes in texture and temporal flow necessitated by improvisational contingency than in maintaining a constant bed to anchor solo playing: Bill Evans taken further out – much further out! – let’s say. Thus, rather than establishing clear sections for particular players to do their thang, there might be sections in which only Dickerson and Cyrille, or only Ware and Cyrille, or only Dickerson and Ware, or only Dickerson, are playing, yet the transitions are so subtle that they don’t really feel like transitions at all. Further, Dickerson has a trait of returning every so often to the initial theme, caught in the same stream as the improvisation; not in the way that Monk would improvise close to the melody over changes, nor as ensemble refreshment between individual solos, but as part of improvisatory thinking and overall mood. Faster passages might stop and return to rumination; or a sustained vibraphone swell might be followed by a breathless run of fast-struck notes; but again, these are not so much sharp contrasts, gestural or timbral blocks in the Albert Ayler manner, as extensions of and in time that evince a beautifully intuitive sense of form’s unfolding as the unforeseen.



The clip at the start of the post is one of a number of exquisite duets that Dickerson recorded with Richard Davis, something of a master of the form (recall the extended treatments of e.g. 'Come Sunday' with Eric Dolphy); & indeed, it's through both Davis & Dolphy that I want to make a connection, or, more accurately, comparison, to another vibes player, Bobby Hutcherson, who, with Davis & Tony Williams, formed one of the great rhythmic set-ups on Dolphy's 'Out to Lunch', ten or so years earlier. Perhaps it's an indication of changing sensibility that these collaborations are so different - certainly, the absence of a drummer affects things, the intimacy of the duo format versus the asymmetrical push of Dolphy's full-group compositions. But it's nonetheless instructive to compare Dickerson's free-float with Hutcherson's much more overtly percussive style.

For Hutcherson, the vibes are jagged edge, each note struck pinging out, the vibraphone's resonant afterglow only serving to round out the sharp attack of that sound still further: listen to the extended section towards the end of his solo on Jackie McLean’s ‘Action’, in which his temporal extensions and tightenings of one phrase move like a stretched and then relaxed elastic band over the steadier, tho' always driving & toe-jiggling momentum of Cecil McBee & Billy Higgins' bass-drum team. Charles Tolliver does something similar in his trumpet solo on the same tune, something about the pauses which might for a moment make you think he's lost his way, phrase out-blown but the smoother repetition which could naturally follow & draw applause in its smooth generation of 'excitement' as be-bop fluency mixed gutbucket edge REFUSED! instead for a repetition that sounds as if it's missed its cue and has to cram the phrase into the remaining time allocated by the changes played underneath with sudden burst of breath, askew & gasping burr. I guess Monk would be the temporal & off-centre phraseological model – tho' Monk's status as piano player often gave the impression that his solos consisted of the spare material that would usually make up another piano player's comping beneath a horn player's solo (while, conversely, his comping, with its clanging lower-register thump & thud, sometimes serves to distract attention from the soloist if they or you aren't careful). Certainly, Tolliver & Hutcherson would desire to fill up the total space more so (plus the tempo itself licks out at a generally higher rate than Monk himself had settled into by this point, with the Charlie Rouse group of his, anyhow).

Hutcherson's own comping, meanwhile, as perfected on Eric Dolphy’s ‘Out to Lunch’, has a kind of floating quality to it that piano players are less able to sustain, by virtue of their instrument's capacities – by this, I don't mean to contradict my earlier comments on his isolation of single notes, but rather to suggest that this kind of ‘floating’ or ‘hanging’ quality is like the suspension of a phrase that is suppressed or skipped, so that the sequence is always implied but never totally filled out: the interval between one phrase and another, either sustained by a silence or a reverberating after-glow of struck notes, is felt as tension, delay, break, rupture, a rupture that can't be entirely filled by bass & drums' maintenance of tempo throughout. (Here one might recall A.B. Spellman’s comments in the ‘Out to Lunch’ liner notes: “For one thing, [Hutcherson] avoids the tight pedalled, piano-like effect of long and lucid arpeggios that most vibists try for. His is a more ringing, chime sound. His chords, once struck, hang in the air.”)



That said, Tony Williams and Richard Davis, on ‘Out to Lunch’, are just as much about breaking things up in this way as is Hutcherson: Davis, insisting on muscling his way into the front row with odd harmonic extensions of the walking bass line, Williams, with his splash-crash-suspend attack, working on similar principles to Hutcherson. (This is also the case, for Williams, in his work with the Miles Davis quintet at this same mid-60s period, where, for example, the usual roles by which horns can break up & vary the temporal & harmonic line over a steady rhythm section backdrop are reversed, so that it is Williams who solos with rhythmic freedom over the steady, obsessive-repeated melodic iterations of Davis and Wayne Shorter – on ‘Black Comedy’ and ‘Nefertiti’ most notably. It's worth noting here that this was a period when Coltrane, tho' buoyed along by the much more steady, on-the beat clang of McCoy Tyner’s left-hand, was starting to blur the edges with the addition of extra percussionists, bassists, horns – even if, ultimately, the direction into which Coltrane would move, in the last phase of his career (the Sanders / Alice Coltrane / Garrison / Ali group) was much more an ecstatic continual thicket of texture, high-energy plateau rather than constantly broken-up, jagged momentum. Albert Ayler’s work proves a further contrast, in which the jagged nature of the music occurs not so much in the collective improvisations – which are experienced, again, as ecstatic thickets (Ayler’s own term) or blocks – but in the compositional or organisational contrast between the simple marching themes & the passages of wild & free atonality).

Returning to the trio of Hutcherson, Davis and Williams: their extension of be-bop's sharpness, its swift & exciting laying down of contour at a speed almost too fast to follow, is primarily a rhythmic extension, in which time itself becomes more elastic, but in which the play between that elasticity & the maintenance of generally consistent and swinging beat creates a constant frisson – the same too, true of the harmonic & timbral permutations of McLean's higher-register work (first deployed as far back as some of his late ’50s-work with Charles Mingus: check ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’). And of course this is not an attack on two fronts, separated into two categories marked 'temporal-rhythmic' & 'harmonic-timbral', because it is the combination of these two elements which gives this music its tense & tensile drive: check also the work of Sonny Rollins from, say, '63-'66, 'Sonny Meets Hawk' & 'East Broadway Rundown', as voice in broken monologue, as an actor forgetting lines, stumbling & stammering thru hesitancies, blank spaces - or, rather, as something much more calculatedly off-centre, the development of a melodic fragment or askew interpretation of a scale that runs deliberately counter to the changes being laid out competently underneath as the horn pursues a different path at a different pace.

{{Another horn to consider, by way of contrast: Archie Shepp, whose work at this point, most notably on ‘New Thing at Newport’, where his group consists of Hutcherson, Barre Phillips & Joe Chambers, provides a fairly steady, ominous set of atmospheres over which Shepp's tenor dives in & out, slurring & blaring with sudden, almost vulgar emphasis or soft-breathed amour straight outta Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins: exemplified for me, at least, on 'Rufus'. The tone would remain, but the temporal attack would become much more regularized, once Shepp became, to all intents and purposes, a straightforward be-bop/blues heritage player at some point in the mid-to-late-’70s. The repeated & relentless ostinati of Grachan Moncur tunes on which Shepp often draws at this time do share territory with Moncur’s frequent collaborator McLean (or with, say, McLean's version of Tolliver’s ‘On the Nile’, which, on the Tolliver big band recordings (see below), is fast & punchy in a fairly straightforward manner, but on Mclean's sludges out (at least in the opening melodic exposition) at grinding clip-clop pace, drags you into its orbit as dark-toned procession, paradoxically that much more urgent for the slower tempo). Yet this happens several years after the fact, as it were (and several years, indeed, after Moncur himself had been a part of Shepp’s group), so that these tunes are now vehicles for 20 or 30 minute saxophone solos in which seemingly endless exposition of particular scalar patterns or licks replaces packed-in tension & uncertainty with declamatory pontification. (That’s not to say that said pontification doesn’t possess a certain sense of granite purposiveness which can, if you're in the right mood, act as a slow-burning kind of exhilaration. This is the 'hip' in 'Hipnosis', perhaps - i.e. check the 25-minute-plus version of McLean’s tune of that name on ‘A Sea of Faces’, in which that aforementioned relentlessness of repetition becomes both literal hypnosis, a kind of trance state of the sort Shepp explored thru the quasi-african drumming on 'The Magic of Juju' (tho' without the harmonic freedom provided by the keyboard-less, percussion-heavy set-up of that piece). & check also the mega-version of ‘New Africa’ on a 1977 bootleg recording from Alassio, Italy.)}}



Yet all this nonetheless has little of the jiggly nerve-fry that makes you feel really so urgently alive in the McLean-Hutcherson-Williams nexus of the woods. Wrapping these rather rambling notes up, one final comparison might be between the McLean band's take on a number of Tolliver's tunes - 'Right Now!', ‘On the Nile,’ ‘Jacknife’ – to Tolliver's own 1970s takes on them with his band Music Inc., where they're much more straightforward blowing vehicles, the compositional material (these are good, memorable tunes) actually overshadowing the sometimes rather by-rote soloing: well, e.g. on ‘Music Inc. & Big Band’, an album I love, the big-band riffs & so on that come in under the solo rather distract attention from whatever the front-line instrument (normally Tolliver's trumpet or Stanley Cowell's piano) is playing, the soloist sometimes seeming to fill a particular time & space that has been allotted within the format of the tune without that particular urgency or tension or sense of playing with he form that you get in the McLean records. This is not to say that Tolliver’s big band music is not intensely joyous & colourful & punchy, tho' its tone colours are a lot less adventurous than say, those of Gil Evans, or, indeed, the subtle & complex work of the great jazz composer-arrangers of the big band heyday (the effect, by contrast, is something like McCoy Tyner’s piano style translated in stark & unfussy fashion to a bevy of brass instruments, with occasional flutes for the rather rarer delicate moments; indeed, Tyner's own big-band record ‘Fly with the Wind’ is somewhat similar in effect). Certainly, tho’, in terms of form, it's much easier to coast along to in one's listening than McLean and Hutcherson’s constant engagement – or, for that matter, Dickerson’s more meandering elasticity, form as rumination and reverie as against form as inexorable repetition (Shepp) or form as something from which one departs and to which one returns in swift break-outs (McLean, Hutcherson et al)).

eartrip - issue 7

ok

John Coltrane: Selflessness / Live in Seattle

Coltrane in 1965 is what I keep coming back to. Now that all this stuff is on the you tube (see above), I've been listening to it again, taking advantage of the potential to skip back and forward in a track, to listen and re-listen to particular second-long clips without having to juggle the fast-forward function on cassette or cd player – just with mouse clicks, to listen to a ten-minute or a ten-second section three times in a row...and all that jazz. McCoy Tyner's playing was so *thick* at this time, his chordal voicings approaching clusters in their density, and his rhythmic monotony a crucial part of the dialectic between stasis and continuance/momentum that gives his playing its peculiar quality. (This is similar, I suppose, to the trance states induced by particular kinds of tribal drumming, but you're not going to go into a trance here: the rhythm is too insistent and also too broken-up (thanks to elvin jones, “gretsch freak”) – it doesn't have that swirling endlessness that makes alice coltrane's playing on, say, ‘live in japan’, ultimately boring (much as I love her harp-like-swirl and the use of the entire range of the keyboard, from lowest thud to highest tinkle - and tho' of course the boring and monotony as such are in some sense a crucial part of both pianist’s playing styles, in a way i'm not sure i've yet quite grasped or come to terms with. (Tho’ this might provide a clue:

The venerable Curt Sachs may have put his finger on what is at issue here in Rhythm and Tempo (1953), when he discovered that "rhythm" itself, to misquote Freud, is a primeval word with antithetical senses. On the one hand, rhuthmos (Greek) denoted river or flow. On the other rhythmus (Latin) denoted blockage or dam. Sachs's point is not that Greeks and Romans had different cultural coordinates (to a large extent they did) but that coiled within rhythm itself was a certain undecidability - perhaps the very same undecidability that Derrida traced in the connotative oscillations of "tympan."

John Mowitt, 'Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking' (Duke University Press, 2002), p.24))))

So there's this thing called 'selflessness' that coltrane recorded in ’65 - it's from those studio sessions that were included on 'the major works of john coltrane', a 2cd box set impulse released in the 90s sometime, and which i remember listening to after borrowing it from my local library (who for some reason owned this (now probably out-of-print) thing alongside art blakey and stan getz and MJQ and courtney pine (they subsequently sold off all this stuff, no idea where it went: perhaps some old-people's home now possesses 'ascension', 'om', 'selflessness' and 'kulu se mama' on two shining discs and plays it as dinner music)). that was the first time i heard 'ascension', and 'selflessness' is a side-note compared to that…but ‘side-note’ is the wrong turn of phrase entirely, this is *vital* shit. i hate it when, say, allmusicguide does one of their fucking capsule reviews where they go, 'o, this is fine, but not the best place to start if this is your first time with player x', relegating most everything to some deferred future where you're an ‘expert’ and can therefore ‘take it.’ to that I’d say, *launch yourself in*, yeah? - of course you won't fucking understand it, I still don't, coltrane himself didn't, this is at the limits, it's hard to understand when you're up in that air... - but, ok, I heard 'expression' and 'ascension' early on, and i loved the passionate melodics of the opening heads (‘ogunde’ is based on a folk song, after all), and i didn't really *understand* pharoah sanders at all, and in fact i actively disliked him, but these things take time, go on with it, get on.

('selflessness' and 'live in seattle', which are the things i'm going to write about here, both feature donald rafael garrett on bass and clarinet, which is ostensibly the reason i'm considering them both together. garrett's not someone who was much heard from, or about, but val wilmer's 'as serious as your life' posits him as one of those crucial mentor figures during the mid-60s (giuseppi logan as another), whose contributions to the music and to the scene were certainly not proportional to their scant and inadequate documentation on record. (http://www.bardoworks.it/rafael.html has some further info.)


Donald Rafael Garrett in concert in Pisa, San Zeno abbey, 1983

// now let's get on, 'selflessness' opening with one of those melodies coltrane was writing around this time, ostensibly as serene or joyous up-cry, but which turn into a kind of desperate keening -as if one wished *too much* for that transcendent, solving/dissolving joy, for that synthesis, for the one final note that would provide the answer to the thousand fractured, cycling notes played through before: coltrane himself blowing the melody strong, sanders dipping and diving around him, with some wonderful watery, rattley flutter-tonguing.

& rafael garrett's arco bass insists on being taken as a third lead melody voice, blending with the horns, rather than partaking in the strummed and thrummed deep-end accompaniment that jimmy garrison, the coltrane quartet regular, would have provided. – to illustrate this, let’s take the first ten minutes or so of 'evolution', from the 'live in seattle' recording, where Coltrane, Sanders, and Garrett (this time on bass clarinet) soar in imitative, roaring and meshing blasts and honks, while Garrison provides a solid rhythmic underpinning which seems to be going on its own separate box or booth, tethering down the 'out of this world' massed vocalised ecstasies of breath and air and metal, and essentially playing the flamenco-inflected bass solo which he then proceeds to deliver once the horns have stopped playing (this solo being a regular occurrence on Coltrane's live recordings). the absence of a drummer highlights just how 'free' the horns were capable of be(com)ing, of moving outside established licks in a flowing and melting and melding way: formally, one could describe this as ‘rhapsodic’ (in the sense that the term 'rhapsody’ comes from the Greek 'rhapsōidos', which itself comes from the combination of 'rhaptein', to sew, stitch together, and 'aidein,' to sing). & jazz itself is, perhaps, ultimately a rhapsodic form, based on fragments, breaks, discontinuities, allusions and quotations – at the same time that, as in hip-hop, *‘flow’* is central: propulsion, momentum, ‘looking ahead’. nonetheless, garrison’s desire to provide an established 'jazz' element does contrast with what the horns are doing (tho' to start off with his picked harmonics sound suitably 'exotic'); their flow reaches an extent to which it becomes *overwhelming*, dispensing with clock-checking time, with finishing a tune in ten minutes so that people can go and buy drinks, so that time itself becomes a felt, controllable thing, slowed down and speeded up at the musicians’ will – for the ultimate example of that, you’d have to look at those mammoth extended pieces by the Cecil Taylor Unit, where time itself stretches so much it almost seems to break, to fracture, to become meaningless.

well, now we’re here, hell, let’s just *listen* to the *whole* of 'evolution' – garrett's thin-reed wail on clarinet, notes bent, metallic melted to malleable shape-shift, transitioning into sanders' shronking and then that unbearably beautiful way he ends his solos with a kind of desperate lyricism, keening up-slide to notes. again, that *thin-ness,* not the full-bodied-ness we think of when we think of free jazz – say, Brotzmann or Coltrane himself – not that *filling out* of the sound-space: yeah, Sanders can do that, does do that, but what I'm talking about here is his use of *fragility*, a sense of self un-stable and breaking under the pressure and force of riots and revolutions and that late 60s belief in cosmic transformation; yeah, fucking *eschatology*, if you like, material transformation – sound is material, isn't it, it could speak another reality into being and not simply be contained within the glass-cash-register chinking register of the night-club / the record-label / the hit-parade / the culture industry. Uh, yeah, if Sanders' multiphonic explosions of simultaneous multiple notes, overtones, difference tones intend to vibrate the space into the fullest potential possible, the most filled wholeness - "every kinda chord you can hear under the fucking sun” - his solos at this time end with, say, two successive notes, the stalled beginnings of a melody, as his saxophone moves into being a voice, trying to sing a song to itself but now having to flutter-tongue burble and cry in woundedness – and it's the *transition* here that gets me, in this say, thirty seconds of music which expands out beyond itself as a non-melodic ear-worm which encapsulates for me what Coltrane could have and was constantly trying and failing to do - that failure as *built into the condition of the music*, the condition of music itself, the condition of the world itself that would not change as was wished – a desire that cannot express itself in logic, barely even in illogic, gesturing towards the "possible world," yeah, a "community of risk," someone in some other context said that.

that transition i mean is when sanders' solo is ending and suddenly, without warning on the audio version at least, coltrane, i think it is, comes out to the microphone and starts shouting, comes in roaring, 'OOOMMM' 'OORRRRHM' / 'OOOOOM' – 'OM', the primal word, the primal vocalised sound that sets the universe into being ("and god *said*, let there be light" - light and sound as one simultaneous flash, an explosion into being as the origin of the universe, some collective pre-evolutionary memory of the big bang) (see simon weil's fine article 'circling om') - that roaring is *almost* a parody of some horror-movie ‘black-magic’ voodoo roar, but it transcends that, it's not transcendent, it's a bellow of roaring animal pain outside language, outside the formal language of music, outside song - is not speech, is not song – is both – those moments when coltrane would take the horn out of his mouth; as miles davis had advised, but not to stop playing, instead to give vent to that roar of exhilaration mixed anguish…

more transitions (‘transition’ the title of a record from this year, coltrane’s music itself in transition, in creative mentor-exchange with the new thing saxophonists – sanders, shepp, carlos ward, ayler, john Gilmore – for whom he was a talismanic figure, the leader and legitimiser of the movement – tho’ he was equally influenced by their own side-slant attack; the ‘classic quartet’ splintering apart, that tension, between tyner’s static rhythmix and the way his playing cannot *help* but ratchet up in intensity and depth and drive when placed in the same physical space as coltrane’s boiling over; jones perhaps the prime force driving coltrane out into polyrhythmic ambiguity (that means, simultaneity), (*energy music*), himself frustrated (exhilarated?) by the wall of sound above and beyond him (reportedly throwing his drum-sticks at the wall at the end of ‘ascension’); garrison the one hold-over, once the transition to that final quintet was accomplished – and yet, it’s precisely that tension, that push-pull, that gives this music its power, and its *objective social content* – this the year of the watts riots – rip it up, split it up, all felt as personal upheaval, split and shatter into collectivity, that transition into new forms is *of course* painful, as any transition is, who knows where and what horror or beauty it could turn into, treading on thin ice, on air, tight rope tightened or loosening.)
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so, transition, when coltrane stops shouting and the horns go triple over garrison's jazz moves, when they're wailing da-naaaaaaahhhhh-nuh, da-naaaaaaaaaaah-nuh (I can't fucking 'transcribe this', as onomatopoeia or notation or whatever - it is un-fixable in that sense, less we develop the technology to contain it - and if we did that, then we'd be in some society where our understanding of what went beyond our current grain made life liveable, where wounded cry was not just some impoliteness to be ignored, ill-advised feeling-show)); when Tyner comes in under and it's like some floor locks into place beneath the horns, and then he solos, the relief of that, there's only so much reality or surreality or irreality you can endure... 7:08 into Tyner's solo, Garrison pluck-repeating single note, the music freezing into repeated locked-record-groove stasis, like stammer-stuckness, like Coltrane repeating the head to 'confirmation' twenty times in a row, seeing it from its different angles, its different permutations, trying to reach every possible harmonic implication, to see the whole thing from all fucking angles - but different to that, I suppose, in that repetition is used in Tyner as a particular dramatic effect, whether gravity pillar-thick chord or as harp-like arpeggiated swirl with thick deep-end muscle - a space he moved into at this time, 1965, which never before or since was quite the same, had a lightness to it that this gravity-insistence - well, it's that, but at the same time it suggests that moment when everything's gonna split open - it never quite does - well, the horns come back in and thick cluster bash, is pentecost tongues to "set fire and death on whitey's ass" (if you believe amiri baraka...ok, this is not hate music – or maybe it *is* - “what we need is hatred. from it our ideas are born” (genet) – maybe it is, and maybe the critics were right (the london evening standard’s jack massarik, & his infamous off-mic “torrents of hate” jibe when some coltrane was played on one of bbc radio 3’s afternoon jazz snoozefests) – but if they were right, they were right in a strictly narrow sense that made them see that hatred as mere perversity, misanthropy, nihilism;

any hatred that there is in the music would have to be inextricably linked to love, love and hate mingled, hate motivated by love - by which i mean that there has to be a sense of what *has to be done* (perhaps *hateful* things) if change is going to be more than just a willed-for moment of religious transcendence, reliant on the intervention of an on-high god we ceaselessly invoke with or without the hope that he will finally choose *now* to intervene - it is still an in invocation then, but an invocation to action, however direct or indirect, to change systems of oppression and exploitation, bigotry and misery. of course, coltrane has an odd relation to direct action, we see this in that awkward interview where frank kofsky tries desperately to make him into a post-malcolm marxist but only succeeds in getting him to talk about the need for universal peace...archie shepp, the disciple, no doubt encouraged him to raise the political ante, there were young black men in the clubs at which he played shouting 'black power! black power!', and maybe coltrane would have become more politicised if he'd lived until the 60s - but this is the same as the 'what would malcolm have done if he'd lived' argument that those on the left still engage in from time to time. (counter-facts, counter-histories are all very well, but they never happened, did they?)

oh, ok, back to 'selflessness' again, and finally: things move on out. i'm so used to thinking of sanders' playing as undergoing a trajectory, from wild yawping, coruscating, disturbing beauties with coltrane (and those couple of blue note dates, ‘symphony for improvisers’ and ‘where is brooklyn’ w/don cherry), and then, once coltrane dies and he becomes a leader in his own right, a more controlled use of the free playing as occasional effect, climax, or 'interlude', between burbling, mellow, melodic rambles over ethnicky grooves and repeating chords...but here sanders' playing is not just the squall or blast of sound i'd remembered it as; rather, he develops rather jauntily carnivalesque rhythms (in a very distant pre-echo of Sonny Rollins, circa 'Don't Stop the Carnival'), tho' this is done, it shd be noted, thru unusual and forceful tonguings or fingerings (or however it is he gets those effects).

dig too, on these recordings (on this and 'live in seattle'), how the two main horns, sanders and coltrane, sometimes seem to swap over, coltrane adopting sanders-esque howls, sanders sliding his own melodicisms alongside coltrane's prophet-like, authoritative pronouncements. i'm not using 'prophet' here as some un-thought-through metaphor: prophets (i'm thinking in the biblical sense here) use poeticised, metaphorical, fanciful language (i mean, 'revelations' is sci-fi before the category of sci-fi, right?) to call down the abuses and corruptions and degradations of current society; to predict the calamities that will befall the society if it does not change it ways (or have those ways *changed for it*); and to posit an alternative future in which that society is healed and mended and transformed. is coltrane not doing all three of those here, as far as the limits of his instrument and his epoch and his imagination will let him?

of this kind of *total engagement* there is still need.