The Paradigm for Beauty

Matthew Shipp Trio: Elastic Aspects: Thirsty Ear, 2012

2012-02-03T14:17:00.000-08:00

No matter whether he plays solo or with his trio, in his recordings, Matthew Shipp appropriates a signature design that includes introduction, evolution, climax, denouement and conclusion. The quality of the music in each recording never shifts; its character does. His fourth recording with his trio, this group including Michael Bisio on bass and Whit Dickey on drums, Elastic Aspects demonstrates clarity of motion that goes unquestionably forward but never deviates from an intensity, even in its quiet moments, that denotes universal embrace.

This story is prefaced with a slow-tempo arco bass line layered over amplified, distorted drumming and piano. Shipp’s mid-range chords, which he exits with single treble notes, follow; and then, after a breath, the guts roll out. Bassist Bisio picks out a sturdy rhythm; drummer Dickey coincides with light cymbal to snare combinations; and the piano persistently relates thematic ostinatos. It is as if Shipp opens the gates for everyone to walk through. The tracks each have titles, but that fact matters only for reference, because the music unwinds effortlessly from one place to the next without a hitch.

A mixture of abstraction interspersed with formal, heavy and subsequently boppish melody melts off Shipp’s sure fingers; he forms stunning improvisations that climb, curve round or spread out like the limbs of a tree to their creatively alogical end. Even when he goes under the hood of the piano, as in “Stage 10,” his determination is measurable; his purpose is audible in the clipped –off resonance. In fact, hearing his technique on the sounding board juxtaposed with his keyboard work is educational. It arouses awareness to the intersections of his pedaling with his fingering. Shipp is concerned with the broadness of his reach and the details within. How he manipulates them both preaches to the bass and the drums their role in communicating his overarching message.

Shipp hands a large portion of the development of this music to Bisio, whose weighty, resilient arco solos, particularly in “Rainforest,” are exceptional. Bisio plays into his instrument; he is not tall so his gravity is centered where he places his bow on the strings. The sound he produces is bound in rhythm and unrelenting in expression to exhibit sensitivity to change and range. When he works within the group, his pizzicatos are strong, relaxed and thoroughly united with music’s direction.

Dickey dictates his own boundaries. He steers towards rendering the sound that much fuller: the cymbal hissing and the snare skin shaking signify his presence. His playing becomes a means to stretch the musical line as opposed to being hell-bent on “keeping the beat.”

Continually achieving recognition and praise in the world for his musicianship, Matthew Shipp always succeeds in doing what he is meant to do: which is to make new music and lay aside all the superfluous nonsense that flutters around him.

Track listing: Alternative Aspects; Aspects; Psychic Counterpart; Frame Focus; Flow Chart; Mute Voice; Explosive Aspects; Raw Materials; Rainforest; Stage 10; Dimension; Elastic Aspects; Elastic Eye.

Goldmine Brook, The Day After Christmas

2012-01-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

Video: copyright 2012 Lyn Horton
Music: permission pending from Glenn Branca, Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar, 2004

Ten Freedom Summers: Wadada Leo Smith and Me

2011-12-15T06:52:00.000-08:00

Anticipatory Moments
The First Interview
The Second Interview
Los Angeles
The Rehearsals
The Performances
Epilog
The Players
The Program for October 28, 29, and 30, 2011

Anticipatory Moments

Six months before the October, 2011, premiere of Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers, I spoke to Wadada on the phone. He told me that he had recently been awarded the largest grant ever by Chamber Music America, with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, to a Jazz musician for the composition of music. He would direct the grant towards the funding the completion of Ten Freedom Summers. At that time, our discussions did not center on the creation of his masterful work at all, rather on life’s interesting situations and his ensuing concerts and recordings. But at one point, I said, “Gee, I wish I could hear the music in Los Angeles…” to which Wadada replied, “Just go… Just go;” his voice was emphatic, instructive and endearing at the same time.

Los Angeles had been home for eight years of my life. First, when my Dad worked for Universal Studios before the studio laid off its people in the late fifties. I moved back to CA when I attended California Institute of the Arts, in the first year of its existence, 1970, finally receiving my MFA in 1974. Wadada has taught at the school for nineteen years. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would return. So the idea of going to Wadada’s concerts was simultaneously evanescent and concrete.

In June of 2011, Wadada’s Golden Quartet performed at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York City. He explained that at that concert his group would play five of the parts of the large piece. I thought: OK, I am going to go to that and let the music talk to me. At the time, I had yet to do any research on Ten Freedom Summers. But after the concert, because I was writing about it for my blog, it was mandatory that I report accurately.

I went to the page on Wadada’s website set up specifically to deal with Ten Freedom Summers. Then, only a few paragraphs appeared, describing the informational and structural sources for his large work. I wove this into the article and wrote about the quality of the music, still not completely certain of the context of what I was listening to and the impact it would have later.

In July, I made reservations to go to the West Coast. I would land on the 26th of October and leave on November 1st. On October 28-30, the piece was to be performed at Redcat, the CalArts operated performance space, around the block from Gehry’s compact, luxurious titanium bound Disney Theater; because I wanted to avoid renting a car, I arranged to stay at a hotel downtown within walking distance of my daily destination. This was working out perfectly. I told Wadada that I was coming early in hopes of being able to hear some rehearsals, which started on the 25th. He said that this was not a problem and we’d talk in the future about specifics. In the meantime, I reminded him, we had to plan a time for an interview. He said that we would have the chance and would let me know.

I realized that I had to do some serious delving into the subject matter of Ten Freedom Summers before the interview so I went back to his website and found that the information dedicated to the piece had changed radically.

At the website, Three Collections of music were outlined; each had six or seven parts totaling twenty-one. Linked to Wikipedia, the titles of the parts provided an endless cascade of history. The message that this sent carried inescapable seriousness: Wadada was presenting the background material for the music… background material that he had absorbed into his being throughout his life experience. I went to all the links; I printed out every page. I read every page—even the pages ancillary to the original ones. I looked up every subject on YouTube and spent hours watching video after video documenting most of the historical events that triggered Wadada’s music, especially the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

To read this material was to respond to the kind of directive Smith gives to his musicians in any of his groups. With the score as the key to intellectual and emotional research, the music is born. And so in the same fashion, I was preparing myself for the interview with Wadada, in which I would have specific questions but which would be altogether a conversation, where one subject would lead to another. And we would accompany each other outside of the Q &A box and arrive at a place which was completely unpredictable. Between the sushi and the red bean ice cream.

The First Interview

Sometime after Labor Day, Wadada called me from New Haven where he stays when he is on the East Coast. He wanted to tell me that he was on this coast, madly working on his music and copying parts, recording at Firehouse 12 other projects with which he was involved and visiting with his family. We were just about to close the conversation when I exclaimed: “But, Wadada! When are we going to get together for an interview? I will come to New Haven…” I said.

“OK, that’d be good,” Wadada agreed.

“We could meet for lunch at the Japanese restaurant near Firehouse 12…Miso…How about that?”

“OK, I know that restaurant. It’s great. Let’s do that.”

“How’s the 22nd?”

“That would work with my schedule. What time?”

“About noon…How’s that?”

“That’s great,” he said.

“I’ll see you then…”

On September 22nd, I walked into Miso, expecting to find Wadada at a table. The exact plan had been lost somehow through our communications. I asked for a table for two and sat down. I called him on my cell phone and left at message that I was waiting at the restaurant. He called me back and said that he would be right there. He was walking from his hotel.

About twenty minutes or so later, I looked up from my closed-eyed meditative state at the sound of his voice saying “Hello…How ya’ doin’?”

For the next two hours, our first interview took place. The noise in the restaurant rose and fell; a stereo speaker above our table spilled out popular music. Wadada placed the digital recorder I brought right next to him because he did not want one word he said to be missed. I asked as many questions as I could. I had no papers reminding me what to say. That was the beauty of it all.

Speaking with his own inimitable verbal delivery, Wadada responded to a variety of questions triggered by the flow of the conversation. Referencing August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle of plays which, themselves, deal with ten decades of the Black experience in America, Wadada described why he chose the particular ten year span from 1954 through 1964 as being significant for Ten Freedom Summers. Two events in black history which he felt could represent his viewpoint was the Supreme Court’s May, 1954, decision in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education where the segregation of the student body of schools was in violation of the United States Constitution as outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first African-American to be appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court in 1967, argued the case before the Supreme Court and won. And 1964 was the year that Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, followed by the Voting Rights Act, which, by law, designated that no person based on race or color would be prevented from voting. For Wadada, both of these occurrences signified the defining of the rights of Americans, no matter what their background or ethnicity.

Yet, I said, you wrote music that addressed the Dred Scott case in 1857. How does that fit in?

“The Dred Scott Case opened up the first public debate in this country in the Supreme Court about race…Who was actually an American citizen. It showed that the legal system at that time was not prepared to be all-inclusive in terms of justice let alone in terms of position—where people or a person are considered to be property. The final ruling [that slaves would never become citizens of the country] made clear that there are no rights that a black man has that a white person ought to observe.

“Truman is also in there for his Executive Order [9981 of July, 1948] which integrated the Army…

“There are many more examples of people during this decade who are just as important as activists but I did not want a chronicle of events. I wanted to place a piece in a context I created to show my reflections as a result of my impressions, my ideas about the impact of certain issues and how they were dealt with in America.

“Seventy years later after my birth, I am facing the same issues daily…No matter who is concerned…President Barack Obama or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall or anyone…If they are African-American, they [emphatically] are facing the same barrage of racial problems.”

But how is it that the laws against racial discrimination that were created and passed and signed, not implemented?

“If there were no laws legally banning actions [against racism], the situation would be worse than worse. Society defines itself based on two things: the cooperation of laws enabling the protection of its citizens and how well they are executed. For instance, when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 [and signed], LBJ said that he never intended for a little black boy to sit next to a little white boy in school. And, in 1957, LBJ [when he was in Congress] blocked Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act that would have done the same thing as the one he signed in 1964. LBJ got all the Southern Senators to vote against it!

“The irony is that all this stuff is kinda weird…Society has to address certain issues and when they address them, basically, they may be true because the legislation is pretty poor regarding carrying out something—health care to Social Security to Medicare…All those things passed years and years ago and it took twenty years before they had standards where they were even practical. Bad history of how legislation in this country gets passed…how it’s enacted…it usually takes a long time.

“The majority of this society does not believe in social justice at all…a majority. I’ll give you an example: Twenty six percent of white eligible voters voted for Obama; the remaining seventy-four percent voted for McCain. Another example: after the military was integrated, most of the jobs held by minorities and blacks are in the government. The mainstream of society does not hire them. That’s a pretty bad statistic, too. Another one, even worse…In this country in the history of litigation, there has never been a white man or a white woman convicted for killing a black person.

“It’s a real tough case when it comes to allowing your neighbor, your brothers and sisters, to become a part of the society; it just doesn’t work out and those are the actual facts.

“What I am writing about in my music is not those particular statistics. I am writing this music to look at what happens and tries to offer some kind of perspective on the spiritual and psychological reality of this thing—that is what I am trying to do. My hope is to transform people at any stage in their life—the beginning, the middle or the end—to see in some different way other than how the majority sees their American brothers.”

How do you think this transformation can occur and become an incentive for action? How will behavior change?

“Action will not be broad-based, but personal. You don’t have to join a picket line or throw a bomb through a window of a bank: what people need to do if, in fact, they understand the work of Ten Freedom Summers, is realize that all they have to do is change themselves, nobody else. That’s all they gotta do is change themselves, nobody else. And that change…I’m not asking for it to happen immediately…I’m asking that they use some kind of reflective consciousness all the rest of their lives and try to change.”

How did you make the transition from Mississippi to Chicago?

“I got to Chicago in a less direct way…I went into the Army. At about the age of twenty or twenty-one…two years out of high school. When I was in the Army, I was in the Midwest, the Southwest, the Southeast, in France and Italy.

Did you have any troubles in the Army?

“All black men and women have trouble in the Army…all those who aren’t white have trouble. The same problem with society is in the Army: ones of domination.

“Truman integrated the Army because he knew there was no reason not to.

“Racial difficulties were everywhere—New York, Chicago, New York, California—There’s not a place that didn’t escape it. And right now, it is the same. There’s not a place in the country that doesn’t escape that problem. The issue of human rights and the issue of women’s rights: they are the major problems that have retarded society so far and they will continue to retard society ‘til it stops. There’s not been a metropolis in the world that has solved their society’s difficulties. There have been temporary moments throughout history, but not many, and they don’t last long.”

Where did that happen?

“The Sun City in 18th Dynasty Egypt. Pharoah Akhenaten started it. Everybody believed the same way… respected each other. Akhenaten transformed the whole society, but only a few moved to the city of Aten—that was a place for all the believers and people who were human towards each other. When Akhenaten died fairly young-- his wife was Nefertiti—when he died, the city was almost in complete ruin. The whole spiritual philosophy had been eclipsed.

“More successful than Akhenaten was the movement the Prophet Muhammad led, in the early 600 ‘s, to the city of Medina. Medina is still a light for human interaction that is very well received. And during the time of the Prophet, they had the most balanced society ever. And it was all based on the revelations revealed to him [by the angel of God] and of the practice, that is, the way he practiced those revelations as the messenger of God.”

(According to Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions, page 230: “Exercising superb statecraft, he [Muhammad] welded the five heterogeneous and conflicting tribes of the city, three of which were Jewish, into an orderly confederation.... His reputation spread and people began to flock from every part of Arabia to see the man who had wrought this 'miracle.'”)

Tell me about Malcolm X. Was he an extremist?

“No, he wasn’t. Elijah Muhammad was asking for equal rights for black people and they [the Nation of Islam] were defined as extremists but they weren’t.

“When Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, he also met up with a lot of problems. He saw a lot of things that weren’t cool…That’s why when he came back and created his own organization, he asked people to leave their religion at home, because what happens is we can argue about religion forever but the politics can be changed based on consensus. By voting, the social system can be changed.

“The Nation of Islam was a personal religious system. It didn’t really follow Islam except that it took the name of Islam. The people did go on Hajj. Elijah Muhammad…most of his speeches were centered around the Bible. They all owned Korans, but they didn’t read them. They only read the Bible. It was an Islamic-Christian movement when you really get down to it.

“Malcolm X preached the same philosophy that Elijah Muhammed preached. And why does Elijah Muhammad want people to secede from the country? For a very good reason. They have been illy, poorly treated, illy educated, have been horribly unprotected by the police and other forces and what he proposed was that black people would take three or four of the southern states and that they would serve their own government and would create a much better society than they live in here. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a fair proposal that has existed in the history of the country. Other men have proposed the same thing. So it is not as radical and as hard to take as the propaganda of what Malcolm X said and how he said it.

“Malcolm X condemned the white men for what they had done for all those years. Who wouldn’t? It’s a bad extremely exploitive and violent history. Malcolm X, after he changed to Sunni Muslim practice, preached a 'self-reliance' philosophy with a new spiritual doctrine that was in line with Islamic practice throughout the world.

“After World War II, twenty-six-hundred men [This number is larger if considering the dates between 1882 and 1968. According the Ronald Davis, PhD, CalState, Northridge, the number totals four thousand.] were lynched the moment they came back home and they’d been at war! That’s an atrocious history. Most people in the South had no deep respect for these people. Uniformed blacks were disrespected. Whites were offended by black men wearing uniforms, decorated or not.

“So, yeah, I see the same thing. Those particular proposals have been around for years…Clearly, if something’s not done in another time zone, let’s say, you are going to find other proposals like that, because it is not much, much better.

“When you have the President of the United States attacked every day by nearly every news source in the country, and a Congressman jumping up in the middle of the State of the Union address saying mean-spirited stuff or have Boehner… and that other person, can’t think of his name now…when they go and meet the President and they interrupt him and talk mean in his presence…It’s the lowest that this society can drop. If the leader had been interrupted in any other society—totalitarian or a monarchy—that person would have been severely persecuted or killed. But the guy who interrupted Obama... he got re-elected!

“I believe in God and I believe that God did elevate this man [Obama] to expose this society completely and it’s being exposed. And the history that’s coming and will be written, not just by your American brothers but by everybody else. They are fluent in these things. They [those who are disrespectful] are going to be criticized in the most emphatic way.

“And those guys who aren’t dead…the Bill Clintons and the other two guys-- George and W—those guys—they are like devils—The reason I say that is that they have stayed in their offices. They should be out there every day trying to defend that man [Obama] and the office and they are not doing it. Do you know why? They want him to fail. Jimmy Carter is the only person who believes in Obama and Carter has been called a racist. The news people say: 'Oh, Jimmy Carter got it wrong today. He’s practicing reverse racism'…That’s bullshit. And sometimes you get tired of that…That is an example of our society today. You have a whole Congress of men and women who would rather see every bill that comes to them fail than be good for the nation of the people that elected them.

“Ten Freedom Summers chronologically goes straight from 1954 beginning with Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, which addressed all civil rights, not just education. It was an attempt at opening education up to everybody in society…People think that it just meant to African-Americans …It didn’t…It means equal education all across the board. And, then, to the Civil Rights and Voting Act of 1964, which was supposed to have the same effect. [Wadada spoke with emphasis the following words; his voice had an evenness of tone and the longer he spoke the more emphatic his voice became.] Every citizen has a vote and that vote counts and that person as a citizen of the United States of America is protected by the Constitution.

“So Ten Freedom Summers looks at both legal action and congressional action."

An historian, from the University of Tennessee, I think, said that the change in civil rights cannot necessarily be traced to a single person like Martin Luther King but also has to include what all the young people did, after Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat on the bus…People like The Freedom Riders…

“But, that’s what Martin Luther King did. There’s a misunderstanding there. That’s exactly what Martin Luther King did. He’s the one that started the movement of sitting in, protesting in a non-violent way.”

But from what I’ve seen, King did not get involved with the Freedom Riders…

“It’s the same thing though. They [the Freedom Riders] used the same principle he used. It was non-violent. They didn’t go down there [in 1961, from Washington, DC to Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi to end in Louisiana] and strike back when people hit them. They didn’t go down and start pulling out guns shooting. No, they didn’t. They rode on buses to go down and register voters...to register American citizens. That’s what they did. And that’s the same thing that he [Martin Luther King] was doing… I just think some historians get lost sometimes and they would like to find a new way at looking…and sometimes that [process] de-thrones the information. It’s inappropriate to say the Freedom Riders were not following the principles of non-violence…”

What you’re saying is, what you’re saying is and this is extremely powerful… (as I began to weep) …is that it’s the principle that is important…

“Yes. Exactly.”

As opposed to the people who try to expose the principles…

“Right, right, principles always work like that…they survive assassinations…Principles survive.

“One of the things that Martin Luther King did that people cannot see yet is that he actively sought after coalitions. He did that. Before him, no one was actively doing that. Who took that principle to an entirely different level? I am asking a question…”

Emotionally flustered in the recognition that our conversation had reached a climax that pointed to a universal truth that continually is shunned, but, paradoxically, is officially outlined in every document that bears meaning in the creation of American Democracy, I asked Wadada to rephrase the question.

“I said… that Martin Luther King began to establish alliances with different groups of people…ministers, different races of people, different classes of people, different social structures…and he did that because he knew that a society can never be changed by one group of people. He knew that. I’m saying who carried that same principle to the next level?”

You have to tell me.

“A guy named Barack Obama. He did exactly the same thing [as Martin Luther King did]…Obama wanted everyone to work together…”

Human fulfillment comes out of working together…

“Exactly, exactly…The whole idea about working together…That’s a social phenomenon that should change the world. And that’s what changing the world is based around…We are the world…Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie…They wrote 'We Are The World' together sitting on the floor. That piece 'We Are The World,' Ornette Coleman’s concept of freedom, you know, all of that, is about the same thing we have been talking about… People’s lives were transformed through those artists…and they are still probably some of the same people who keep the fire going for change in their hearts…They don’t need to stand on street corners because that whole notion is obsolete. Redundancy wears out its usefulness…We have this act of demonstration after Gandhi throughout the whole world and now that’s not useful anymore. But, still being able to organize at the grassroots level and get a person active… that’s still useful…You just don’t go into the streets anymore. You use your computer; you use your dollars or your credit card.”

We left the restaurant together. I transported him to the home of one of his daughters to babysit his grandchildren while his daughter was working. We said good-bye in the car after chatting a bit. The next time we would see each other would be in Los Angeles a little over a month away.

The Second Interview

As I went over the first interview, I realized that several points needed clarification. With the phone beside me, I sat in my studio midst a bunch of papers, on which I had scrawled questions; they were laid out in front of me on my drawing table. I wanted to ask follow-up questions about the reasons for choosing specific subjects to express in the music. And then I moved to more the more general ones.

When Wadada answered the phone, I began with the pervasive: Can you hear me? because the phone was on speaker so my hands could be free.

My initial inquiry turned to “The D.C. Wall: A Memorial for All Times” listed on his website as being the end of the “First Collection: Defining Moments in America.”

“The reason I chose that is that it dealt with the Vietnamese/Southeast Asia War and I think that, essentially, because my father and my second wife and I walked that wall one day and I thought it was…Let’s say it this way…My reaction to it was very emotional. I felt very, very sad that all these people had lost their lives in a war that really should never had been. So the War Memorial for those fallen people, those soldiers, was my aim…to honor that.”

The next section I want to ask you about is “Democracy.” For Golden Quartet.

““Democracy” is in the First Collection but on the program, it is on a different day [at the time, he said it would be on the first day, but, in actuality, it was on the last day]…because the program is different from the collection. The collections are based on how they were selected to be in ‘effect’ but the program is how they will be performed.

“The piece itself actually illustrates how Congress is supposed to work, not how Democracy is supposed to work, how Congress [emphasis in his voice] is supposed to work. Congress is supposed to deliberate on issues, debate them out, hammer out proposals and amendments and then, after that, they’re supposed to come to a conclusion. And that conclusion is supposed to be based on the best interest of the country [he raised the inflection in his voice] and all of its citizens, not a portion, but all [hard emphasis] of them…

“The way I set the piece up… that is, the composition…I composed each line for each instrument independently. There’s no collective…There’s no score that has collectively all the lines in it. No one could look at ‘Democracy’ and see all of them put together. What you look at is the trumpet part or the bass part, the drum part or the piano part and each one is complete within itself.

“And one other thing about ‘Democracy’… It was constructed over a wide range of what people call modes, but you cannot find a single mode in it the way I have orchestrated it. And that is by design and intent. The mode simply was a generating vehicle that was not to be the final goal. The final goal was to have this interaction of things crossing over, things being diametrically opposed and also bumping and knocking against each other as the work of Congress should do. And the final end of the piece, it comes to a single line that is unified. A single melody where everybody’s playing the same melody. And that represents the resolution that’s supposed to come out of Congress. In fact, a bill goes through twenty-six…thirty-six committees and departments before it is sent to be signed as a sound bill. So ‘Democracy’ represents all of that.”

What about the next section “Buzzsaw?”

“’Buzzsaw’ is one of the compositions and it’s about the free press, the myth of the free press. Unfortunately, the world does not have a free press anywhere…not in the Wall Street Journal, not in the New York Times, not anything. And by that I mean simply this: most of the news is conditioned by power as well. A board of directors…decides what goes out there. My idea of the news is that it is a practice unbound by whatever is in society—that they [the news platforms] tell the story no matter whose shoes it falls on or who it hurts and we don’t have that today…”

A telephone call on his phone interrupted Wadada’s talking. The he came back to our conversation.

“About Buzzsaw…I think I cleared up about the idea of a free press. It does not exist.”

The next part I want to talk to you about is “September Eleventh.”

““September Eleventh 2001: A Memorial” is about all the victims of that event…The ones that are killed in this country and the ones that are killed throughout the world. It’s a memorial for people who lost their lives through whatever these kinds of cultural clashes present in terms of violence. But it’s more of a spiritual piece than anything else. It looks at the spiritual loss in this way.”

The last one I want to talk to you about is “Courage to Dissent” which is piece number nineteen, according to the listing on your website.

“Piece number nineteen was going to be originally for percussion but that piece is not going to be performed and also I decided not to record it because we’ve got so much music, I may not record it.”

Then what is the last piece on the program going to be?

“The last piece on the program is going to be Martin Luther King, Jr.: Memphis, The Prophecy.”

With that statement, I hesitated to go on because even though the music had not been played and I had not heard the music in the same way that Wadada knew the music as composer, the very words that he spoke had finality to them. This was the only way the Ten Freedom Summers could end, addressing the closing of an era in King’s death that he, himself, predicted.

Then I said: I want to go back…Are the scores in traditional notation or do you have any Ankhrasmation?

“There’s no Ankhrasmation in any of these pieces. And the pieces are written on five-line staffs…what’s normally associated with traditional writing…but the music, itself, is not traditional, meaning that there is no bar line…there is no idea about a central beat…there is no idea about rhythmic content being metered off in bars or beats. It’s a far cry from the idea of something that’s traditional. For example: all of the music is based around short notes and long notes with brackets over the top of them that determine how they are configured. So that’s completely different from anything that’s happened traditionally. Traditionally, people would not be able to play it unless they were first given some kind of test by me. So there’s no Ankhrasmation there and it’s not traditional either.”

I want to address some of the gaps that I have found in our interview when we went to lunch that day…What was the reason you went into the Army?

“Same reason that anybody goes into the Army [there was such a lingering sadness in his voice, like he was singing a song]: You go, you go into the Army as a young man to get out of the environment that you were in before.” [There was a long pause.]

I asked him again how old was he when he went into the Army. When he said “a year or two out of high school,” I remembered that I had already asked him this question in the first interview, but what interested me was his talking about graduating from high school and going to Sherwood Music School in Chicago and to a number of colleges, even while in the Army.

“Everybody uses graduating from high school as a marker moving from a youth to an adult…But when I think of education…No, I’ll say it this way… I don’t think of education…When I think of people able to be smart enough to understand the way life moves, they already have achieved something remarkable. People do have formal education…but, in art, you don’t even need that—what you need in art is a heart and a mind. That’s why you have so many people that do go to school… they get doctorates and masters in music and…gosh…they can hardly make music or hardly create music. I mean…Yes, they can produce a piece of music but producing a piece of music is not art. Art is something that touches somebody and changes their life and nobody can teach you that.”

Impacted by Wadada’s words, because I had been one of those persons who had gone to school and worked to obtain both a Bachelor and a Master of Fine Arts degrees, I had to find some strength to continue and not break down. So I replied, “OK,” as I did to most of his answers to my questions, unless I had an immediate follow-up, and went on to something else, which, after all, was merely a continuation of the stream of our conversation.

Do you or did you ever believe that African-Americans should have their own Nation State?

“I don’t think it is a question of belief. It’s a question that goes like this…Do I ever believe that African-Americans can live in this society on the same level… referring to economics and sociology and the whole realm…as Europeans in America? No. I don’t think that’ll ever happen. And why I think it won’t happen? Because, you see, when there’s a group of people that access all the power, that is…the economic power, the social power, and political power…it’s really difficult for them to change. Now there might be some other things that change, but it won’t be a natural change like things progress and move...unless...and this is the caveat…unless there is a generation of the people, who have absolute power, and their descendants decided not to accept the advantage that they have. That would change it and only that. I don’t think there’s anything else that could change it. No law could change it; no one spiritual person could change it—It has to be a collective move by people who have power to deny the power that’s transferred to them each generation by their fathers and mothers.

“That does not stop living… that does not stop living…and I can give you my own example of it. During the time of slavery, there were still people making art and they were making compositions, and they were making dance…even though they were in the most adverse social situation in their life where they had no freedom. So because these things are not resolved, you know, it doesn’t stop life. And there are ways around the use of power to change the situation.

“Another example…that one man…our President Barack Obama showed another way. He formed a coalition where most people in it were not white. It was a coalition of Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans, so on and so on and so on with twenty-six percent of the white vote going to him…So it doesn’t stop life is what I am trying to say. The proof is what I just said.”

I said to Wadada that he had been making a lot of honest and true statements while we had been talking, the meaning of which had evoked great emotion in me. I wanted to ask him if he felt that his music protected him from being attacked for how he thinks. Very softly, he replied…

“No, I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so.”

Have you ever given lectures where you talk about these things?

“Yes…Yes. You can look at my whole history. Things I talk about now, I’ve talked about all my life.”

Now clarify for me what you meant when you were talking about Ornette Coleman’s concept of Freedom…

“What I was trying to say was this…That if, in fact, the Civil Rights movement had taken the music like that of Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, etc., that maybe we would be closer towards the notion of freedom even if it was self-contained... even if we made paradise out of what we have. Because the notion of freedom, in this instance, was mostly relegated, particularly in art towards the church and that’s one viable way of doing it but it’s also missing quite a lot that’s outside of the context of the church, which would be Ornette Coleman or Muhal Richard Abrams or Sun Ra or even other people like John Coltrane. Their principles of freedom in art are the same as the principles of freedom that work in life.”

Keep talking…That’s one of my questions…what does freedom mean to you?

“That’s kind of an unanswerable question because it’s not really what it means to you—it’s how you conceptualize your use of freedom. And my use of freedom is not inhibited by race and things like that because essentially what I believe as a free man is that I am absent of the fear of what other people would think about what I say or maybe whether they like or dislike what I say. I’m free of that fear and that goes all the way across every social angle… I exist knowing that already in my heart I’m a free man and I know that society itself cannot grant me freedom, ok? But I know for myself that I’m free. And what makes me free? Lack of fear and [slowing down his cadence of speech] Knowing… my… rights. What are those rights? They are designed in the Constitution of the United States of America. I understand those.”

What has happened in this interview, what you have brought up for me has allowed me to see racism and culture from another perspective. If people can begin to see racism and equality from another perspective, specifically through conversation and art, will that heal the wounds of the past or do we just have to keep going and not pay attention to the past?

“No…Let me say it this way…Everybody’s wounded. The person that denies another person’s freedom is also wounded in that act, you see. So, in art, what the artist does is provide a ritualized space for people to come to a conclusion with themselves and the universe. That’s what the artist does. You cannot point to one second in the music and say this is about freedom or this is about racism or this is about love or this is about hatred. You can’t do that. What this is about is that art itself allows individuals that golden moment with themselves where they are able to figure out how important it is to live. And while figuring out at that moment how important it is to live, they reduce the fear in themselves of death. And that’s liberty.”

With that, a long silence ensued and I began to cry. I was aghast with the force of his words. Nothing he said throughout either of the interviews was ever insignificant or non-germane to the subject at hand. Even though the way he presented his ideas was sometimes a challenge to interpret because he speaks in his own vernacular (as I have said before in my first encounter with Wadada to profile him), if I took the time to sort out the language, the words always were clear as a bell and made perfect sense.

The interviews had both unfolded like improvisations. Supported by vastly different life experiences and coming from different directions as interviewer and interviewee, both intending to make sense out of our conversations, Wadada and I had shaped a treatise of sorts, which, through transcription from recorded voices to the printed word, read as an essay that came to an extraordinary conclusion, with no constraints on time or subject. A conclusion reached through questions posed by a white woman, who grew up as a sheltered privileged youth to become an artist and writer trying to penetrate psychological boundaries, to a black man, whose boundless wisdom grew from his constant will to transcend perpetual, impenetrable barriers to his existence as a human being, who rose victorious as a musician and composer whose contributions to the world shall be forever accessible and meaningful.

Los Angeles

The view from the air of the Los Angeles sprawl overwhelmed me. I was sitting next to a woman whom I could tell was a woman of God. She identified with the power that this situation had for me. It was a power that overtook me only for a minute then its effect vanished. The times had changed; I came to the city that day for another purpose.

Walking from the hotel to the Redcat Theater, I chose a route that took me by City Hall. The lawn in front of the building was covered with tents; people were wandering around. Immediately, I knew that this was one location of the “Occupy” Movement…the 99% vs. the 1%. I heard drumming and one spokesperson preaching revolution through his megaphone. Very little disruption occurred. It was, perhaps the next day, that I heard the police, through their electronic megaphones, demanding that people get out of the street. It seemed fitting that the Occupy protests were multiplying across the country and, at this writing, in the world, during the performance of Wadada’s piece which focused on the civil rights of all individuals, everywhere.

The Rehearsals

Involving both Golden Quartet and Southwest Chamber Music, and sometimes, each separate group, the rehearsals for Ten Freedom Summers began on Tuesday, October 25th. I was able to witness them beginning on October 26th, 27th and on the afternoons of the performances for the rest of the week.

On the 26^th, Wadada and I met in the lobby of the Redcat Theater, exchanged greetings and moved into the performance hall. The quartet of bassist John Lindberg, pianist Anthony Davis and drummer Susie Ibarra assembled on the stage in the dark. At Wadada’s instruction, they began to change the placement of chairs and music stands, moving them more off to the left so that the quartet could come closer to the center. By doing this, the actual center of the stage was empty, which evidenced itself when rehearsal began with both groups. Wadada and the first violinist of the chamber ensemble would be side to side. All the other musicians would be arranged in a fanlike shape around the pair by natural default. Wadada would not have cared if I had told him that I overheard one lady, after the first night’s performance, stating to her partner upon leaving the theater: there are definite staging problems here…

Not privy to the schedule of rehearsals for both groups throughout the year before the concerts, I could only guess that these rehearsals had the purpose of ironing out details with Golden Quartet and Southwest Chamber Music musicians present in one space. There were also times when each group rehearsed separately. But the pianist, Anthony Davis, was the link between the two groups and needed to be around more than any other musician, except, of course, for Wadada.

The imperative of the rehearsals was to pay attention to the structures that Wadada had built into the score. He listened intently, sitting in his chair, his glasses propped on the end of his nose, watching his score; his arms were crossed and occasionally he lifted his left hand to stroke his beard. For the most part, he was mute.

When Wadada did look up to address any one musician, his words were encouraging. His pauses inserted moments of reflection on what the musicians were doing within the context of the music at hand. He never raised his voice.

With Golden Quartet, he would work out the improvisation in relation to the composed music. He played his trumpet when it was time. At other times, he would break the music and offer instructions. Wadada might say“Cue structurally...” “Let’s look at that for a feel for a second”…“Let’s go a little crazier on the improvisation”… “However you play the bars is fine with me—there are no routing numbers…” “Ok, one more time...Going to try a different ‘program’ with the drums...”

Rehearsing the quartet was a means to sort out where each instrument would come in, when it would go out and, most of all, how. The dynamic was discovered in the musicians’ playing and absorbing the character of the music; through conscious collaboration, each player knew what the other would do according to Wadada’s plan and also within their own parameters of improvisation.

When Southwest Chamber Music participated in rehearsal, and they were all seated, set to play, conductor Jeff von der Schmidt readied himself in front of the players and raised his arms to offer a downbeat, the language of the rehearsal changed. Counting in terms of rests and beats became mandatory. The music was tightly wound.

The chamber group exuded a crushing, diligently rendered precision that Wadada took in with grace. For this was his music, and he wrote it to hear it this way...it was a sound so contrasting to that which could and would come from Golden Quartet. On occasion Wadada would guide the group to loosen up and let the music flow; he offered an opportunity to the chamber players to relax and be free. Von der Schmidt lusted for definition. When I passed him leaving the auditorium on break, it seemed that his face paled with a worry no music would fall into the right places. Yet, somehow I felt that Wadada was confident that no matter what happened, the musicians had enough integrity that their unquestionable technical prowess and listening power would transcend any glitches and the world of his music would congeal.

As composer, Wadada filtered the rehearsals as they happened. He coached everyone to feel and simplify the approach to what they encountered in the music. He did not say that the music was not difficult. To von der Schmidt in the rehearsal of one particular part, Wadada said: “The internal solutions that you are coming up with…That is the way to go on this.”

Wadada consulted with von der Schmidt and the members of the chamber group often at their request. Wadada counseled players of his own accord. He was quiet and his gesticulations were minimal. His will... to invite the best out of any player... radiated.

All the music and its performance could be analogized to a how living organism reveals its vitality energized by breathing, heartbeats, and pulsations of a set of natural circumstances.

“The music tells itself what to do."

In the meantime, a run-through of the visual components was taking place. I knew that the huge screen filled with black and white or sparsely colored images behind the players would not only add dimension to the performance, but would also embrace the performers in an essential atmosphere. The identifiable historical photographs, manufactured magnified abstractions and adjusted live-feed video did not have to speak a thousand words; already they completed an experiential space for living, not being, in the music.

In a dress rehearsal on October 29, the only time photographers were allowed to take pictures of the performers, von der Schmidt commented: “As I noticed last night [the first night of the performances], it comes together in the present moment.” As I heard him say this, I thought: my goodness, what a breakthrough. Such a statement warranted celebration. Wadada and the music had penetrated a thicket of formalism that closeted the fullest expression of the reason that Wadada had brought the groups together, both in concept and in reality.

The Performances

The three nights of Ten Freedom Summers flew by. The story that was being told had a logic that surmounted any historical gaps that might have existed. The positing of the story beautifully balanced and intertwined the sounds of musical instruments associated with divergent genres.

Golden Quartet played twelve of the parts; members of Southwest Chamber Music played five parts; and the two groups played together three times.

The texture of the music moved gracefully from the subtle to the overt and back again.

The cries of the horn pierced the space to evoke sorrow and pain. Shalini Vijayan squeezed cries out of her violin with continuous high pitch bowing and screeching, screaming glissandos.

The blues were more often than not captured in these sagas, unveiled by Wadada's muted and natural trumpet. Behind the ring of his phrasings, Ibarra brushed the drumskins, touched the cymbals and snagged rhythmic figures. Davis rolled chords on the piano, pressed through endless arpeggios, rattled trills or gently tapped closing treble notes. Lindberg's mastery of the bass predisposed his capacity to hook into the larger body of the music with a sound that was more than sensitive to what the other players were doing and was more than providing a simple grounding mechanism. With constant strength and muscle, Lindberg circled and stroked the strings with his bow or leaned into his instrument to pluck out notes, whose deep tones penetrated the surrounding sound to send a message of gravity and substance.

The string quartet of the Chamber group played an inexorably reverent, elegant, awe-inspiring "Black Church," a space to breath between the calls for help that seemingly came out of "Emmett Till" and the transmission of the idea of commitment to claim human rights in "Freedom Summer."

Once the music started at any point, in a clear opening or disguised in a gradual change from one part to another, a cornucopia of sounds unleashed new textures, new phrases, new directions for the playing to take. “Medgar Evers” revealed a host of colors that came not only from different instruments but the way in which those instruments were played in contrast to one another: a voice, as in song, from the viola peeled against cymbal to snare brush figures; the flute fluttered against the plucking of harp strings; a bow bounced on the viola strings against the non-resonance of Lynn Vartan's hands hitting the marimba bars. “September Eleventh” was exceedingly somber: the trumpet bled with emotion; the bass notes hung onto particles of air; the piano painted a portrait of shock, stillness, and sadness; repeated light touches of a drumstick to the edge of the cymbal closed the piece.

The persistent intensity of the music culminated every night in a stunning instrumental nexus.

On October 28, the last part of the first collection, “Defining Moments in America,” “John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and the Space Age, 1960” closed the night. The booming resonance of the tympani overlapped the repeated phrases that created the resonance at the onset. A range of tonalities was carved out in instrumental waves of glockenspiel to clarinet to harp to piano to flute to marimba to concert bass drum. The music progressed to pinpoint the trumpet and violin. Golden Quartet 'felt' its way through the music; the Chamber Ensemble seemed to 'work.' This was a 'feel and work' collaboration, where the Golden Quartet fit into the Chamber group more than the reverse. The collaboration typified the kind of interaction that Wadada strives for and with which he is always successful.

On October 29, “Lyndon B, Johnson’s Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964” ended the “What Is Democracy” collection. This piece began with the syncopation of the percussive elements and carried on through repetitions and parenthetical closures offered by the piano and harp. Successive harmonious notes coming from individual instruments, throughout the entire ensemble, transformed into a steadily mounting cacophony within specific instrumental groupings. This conversation surrounded the sound of the muted trumpet and the violin’s long-bowed high pitches, which countered each other as a means to beg the question ‘What is going to happen next?’ That wonder was dispelled as the looping of musical lines from different instruments subsided and then picked up again in pace and volume. The lines constructed were jagged even though they were also synchronous. After a measurable swell, with the horn in the lead, the sound faded away.

October 30th was the final night of the performances. The last collection is called “Ten Freedom Summers.” It ends with “Martin Luther King, Jr.: Memphis, The Prophecy.” This last piece not only closed the third collection, but also the complete work. It was the nature of King’s influence through non-violence and collaboration that incited Wadada to focus on him. The music floated a bittersweet tunefulness over a turmoil elicited by the strings’ tremulous harmony in counterpoint with the bass clarinet’s reedy tones. By the end, Wadada’s trumpet song rose above the increased pace of the arpeggios on the piano which consistently landed in the treble, the expanding resonance from the drums, and the furious thumbing of the bass strings. Wadada beckoned for more sound from the members of his quartet. He walked to the piano as he played his instrument and then toward the audience. The music dropped out. Wadada held up the index finger of his right hand and then dropped it. The voice of Martin Luther King bellowed from the loudspeakers the memorable canon of words, "...I've been to the mountaintop...," from his last speech in Memphis before he died. His speech is about his imminent death in the face of his ever-growing faith that, in his dream, everyone in the world will unite as brothers without discrimination, without violence, without treachery, leaving history behind.

After King’s voice disappeared, Wadada held his head still in a prayer of silence. He nodded his head signaling the finish of his work.

The audience stood and applauded with exuberance. The players bowed. All of them on the edge of the stage.

Then, Wadada looked up to the audience and said: “What do you say?”

There was no reply.

“I’m asking a question…What do you say?”

There was still no reply.

“You say: Freedom.”

Epilog

The Freedom Summer to which Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers refers lasted for ten weeks beginning in June of 1964. Its purpose was to secure the right of Black Americans to vote in the state of Mississippi, where Wadada was born.

Sometimes, the most significant statements take the longest time to formulate. And, sometimes, the creator of these statements cannot even detect that the process is taking place. Wadada has written Ten Freedom Summers during his entire life, subliminally through his life experience and literally through a series of recordings, grants and fellowships.

“Medgar Evers” was written in 1977 for violinist LeRoy Jenkins.

“The Freedom Riders Ride” in the “Defining America” collection was commissioned in 2001 for Golden Quartet by the University of Florida.

“Rosa Parks” was recorded for the first time with bassist John Lindberg on Tabligh.

Southwest Chamber Music recorded “Black Church” on an album that was released in 2000.

“America, Parts 1 and 2” were recorded by Smith and Jack de Johnette on Tzadik in 2008 in an album called America.

“Fannie Lou Hamer” and “The Mississippi Freedom Democracy Party” was written during a Djerassi Foundation residency in 2008.

“Emmett Till” and “John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier” were commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music.

And “Dred Scott,” “Democracy,” “Buzzsaw: The Myth of the Free Press and Corporate Power,” “Al Hajj Malik Al Shabazz and The People of the Shahadah,” and “September Eleventh, 2001: A Memorial” were all composed while Wadada was a Guggenheim Fellow.

At a certain point, everything clicked and Wadada knew he was going to assemble a piece of music that was not just another means to improvisation, not just another composition, but a serious exposition on how he feels about his country and his place in it. When Wadada informed Southwest Chamber Music, who had just commissioned the piece “John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier,” that his intentions were to integrate all his pieces into one, the group decided to commission the last three pieces. Wadada could realize his vision.

Wadada knows that he has set a precedent with Ten Freedom Summers. This work oversteps any critical label of 'alternative.' This work does not conform to any other type of music as a conceptual whole or to any other music in specific structure. This piece of music is the first of its kind and the only one of its kind.

Text, except for direct quotations from Wadada Leo Smith, and Photos:
copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

The Players
Golden Quartet: Anthony Davis, piano; Susie Ibarra, drums; John Lindberg, bass; Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet.

Southwest Chamber Music: Alison Bjorkedal, harp; Jim Foschia, clarinet; Lorenz Gamma, violin; Peter Jacobson, cello; Larry Kaplan, flute; Jan Karlin, viola; Tom Peters, bass; Lynn Vartan, percussion; Shalini Vijayan, violin; Jeff von der Schmidt, conductor.

The Program for October 28, 29, and 30, 2011
Ten Freedom Summers

First Collection: Defining Moments in America
Optics [Ismail Ali]
Dred Scott: 1857 [Golden Quartet];
Malik Al Shabazz and The People of the Shahada [Golden Quartet];
Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless [Golden Quartet and Southwest Chamber Music];
Black Church [Southwest Chamber Ensemble];
Freedom Summer: Voter Registration, Acts of Compassion and Empowerment, 1964 [Golden Quartet];
The D. C. Wall: A War Memorial for All Times [Golden Quartet];
John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and the Space Age, 1960 [Southwest Chamber Music].

Second Collection: What is Democracy
Butterfly: Silver [a film by Robert Fenz]
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 381 Days [Golden Quartet];
In the Diaspora, Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions – 1 [Southwest Chamber Music];
Fannie Lou Hamer and The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964 [Golden Quartet];
Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years Journey for Liberty and Justice [Southwest Chamber Music];
September Eleventh 2001: A Memorial [Golden Quartet];
Buzzsaw: The Myth of a Free Press [Golden Quartet];
Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [Southwest Chamber Music, Shalini Vijayan & Wadada Leo Smith]

Third Collection: Ten Freedom Summers
Crossing [a film by Robert Fenz]
In the Diaspora, Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions – 2 [Southwest Chamber Music];
Thurgood Marshall and Brown vs. Board of Education: A Dream of Equal Education, 1954 [Golden Quartet];
The Freedom Riders Ride [Golden Quartet];
The Little Rock Nine: A Force of Desegregation In Education, 1957 [Golden Quartet & Southwest Chamber Music];
America Parts 1 & 2 [Golden Quartet];
Democracy [Golden Quartet];
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Memphis, The Prophecy [Southwest Chamber Music & Golden Quartet].

Carole Kim's BURROW

2011-11-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

"BURROW"

CAROLE KIM site-specific performance-based installation

THERESA WONG voice, cello

PHIL CURTIS electronics

SHEL WAGNER RASCH dance

LYN HORTON drawings

You are invited to the conclusion of a month-long residency at Lehrer Architects in Silverlake.

These performances will be both indoors and outdoors so please come dressed in layers.

DECEMBER 3+4 @ 7:30 PM

LEHRER ARCHITECTS

2140 Hyperion Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90027-4708

Google map

$10 suggested voluntary donation

ARTIST BIOS

Carole Kim is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on live video performance and performance-based video installation. She explores video for its most tactile, expressive and responsive potential as a live medium. She seeks an integration of media where moving image, sound, dance and space are on equal planes engaging in a dynamic reciprocating and mutually supportive dialogue. Kim's installations are hybrid spaces in which the illusory and actual (i.e. mediated and live) merge together in an "other worldly" environment. Her work has been supported by the Irvine Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Durfee Foundation, REDCAT, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), The Getty Center, The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS), Newtown, Turbulence.org, California Institute of the Arts, and The Center for Experiments in Art, Information, and Technology.

Theresa Wong is a cellist, vocalist, composer and improviser whose training in classical music and design fused during a fellowship at Fabrica Center in Treviso, Italy where she recognized the possibility of transformation in performance through improvisation and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Her current projects include: O Sleep, an improvised opera which explores the conundrum of sleep and dream life and The Unlearning, a collection of songs for cello, violin and two voices inspired by Goya's Disasters of War etchings to be released on Tzadik Records in September 2011. Wong has collaborated with such artists as Fred Frith, Luciano Chessa, Joelle Leandre, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Carla Kihlstedt, Ellen Fullman and dance pioneer Anna Halprin. Her performances have been included at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, The Stone in New York City, Festival Internacional de Puebla, Mexico, Unlimited 21 Festival in Wels, Austria and Radio France broadcast, A L'improviste.

Phil Curtis works at the intersection of music composition, sound design, and performance. Whether improvising with musicians, working in dance, opera or theater, or creating interactive music-visual instruments in software, he seeks to make hybrid forms that defy categorization. His work has been featured in a variety of venues for new and experimental art and music. Performances of his music have been given by the Nieuw Ensemble, the New Century Players, and the New York New Music Ensemble, and he has performed laptop electronics with Anthony Braxton, Thomas Buckner, Anthony Davis, Vinny Golia, Earl Howard, Wadada Leo Smith, the Loos Ensemble, and the New York City Opera. He is a member of the soNu ensemble, and appears on soNu's Sounds from the Source CD (Nine Winds Records, 2004), on Gustavo Aguilar'sUnsettled on an Old Sense of Place (Henceforth Records, 2007), as well as his own Slutskya (Acoustic Levitation, 2002). Current projects include musical sound design for Anne LeBaron's hyperopera, Crescent City, to be premiered in Los Angeles in April 2012 by the experimental music-theatre company The Industry.

Shel Wagner Rasch is a Contact Improv dancer, performer, producer, and teacher. Her Contact Improv scores and choreographic works have been well received both locally and internationally. She teaches at UCLA and is a recipient of the Lester Horton Award for Excellence in Choreography. Shel has a private practice as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Alexander Technique teacher and Pilates instructor and she collaborates with her husband, animator Justin Rasch, making stop motion animated short films and raising their three continual motion kids.

Born in Washington, DC, in 1950, Lyn Horton graduated from California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in 1971 and an MFA in 1974. She has studied with the late Douglas Huebler, the late Paul Brach, the late George Miller, Gerald Ferguson, Stephan von Huene and was Executive Assistant to Edwin Schlossberg for ten years. She has exhibited her work in California, New York and Washington, DC. Since 1970, her art has been in numerous solo exhibits, most recently at the Oresman Gallery of Smith College in Northampton, MA. Her work is in The Sol LeWitt Collection and others throughout the country. She is represented by CBS Art Collections. Horton is also a writer. Her writing focuses on creative improvised music and some mainstream jazz. Her writing has been published in Downbeat and regularly finds itself at JazzTimes.com and on her blog, The Paradigm of Beauty. Her work is archived on Jazzreview.com and AllAboutJazz.com.

The Art Group Behind Last Night’s OWS Light Projection | In the Air: Art+Auction's Gossip Column | ARTINFO.com

2011-11-18T13:44:00.000-08:00

The Art Group Behind Last Night’s OWS Light Projection | In the Air: Art+Auction's Gossip Column | ARTINFO.com

Top Ten, 2011

2011-11-03T05:49:00.000-07:00

1. Joe McPhee and Michael Zerang, Creole Gardens: A New Orleans Suite, NoBusiness;
2. Matthew Shipp and Matthew Shipp Trio, Art of the Improviser, Thirsty Ear;
3. Wadada Leo Smith's Organic, Heart's Reflections, Cuneiform;
4. William Parker, Crumbling In The Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake, Centering;
5. Daniel Levin Quartet, Organic Modernism, Clean Feed;
6. Mary Halvorsen and Jessica Pavone, Departure of Reason, Thirsty Ear;
7. Darius Jones Trio, Big Gurl, AUM Fidelity;
8.The Rempis Percussion Quartet, Montreal Parade, 482 Music;
9.Spanish Donkey, XYX, Northern Spy;
10.Klang, Other Doors, Allos Documents.

All Time Entries from Jazzreview.com, JazzTimes.com and AllAboutJazz.com

2011-10-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

http://jazzreview.com/component/k2/itemlist/user/72-lynhorton.html

http://jazztimes.com/contributors/17952-lyn-horton

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/contrib.php?id=2825

All the articles I have written are listed at these links. For the third, searching my name will give more.

Thanks to all.

A Way Out: No, I'm Already In

2011-10-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

In some ways, I am just so stuck. Stuck inside my box, which is a fairly large box, if one considers its contents: both metaphorically and ideologically.

Those who discuss the distinction between "inside" and "outside" the box are attempting to convey the difference between status quo and revolutionary, or between mediocrity, conformism, largely acceptable and edgy, non-conformist, individualistic, and rarely understood without explanation. Ambition is not primarily a factor in either although it somehow subliminally drives the activity of both.

But the association of ambition with the latter out-on-a-limb-ness (yet another metaphor for the innovative) deprives it of its honesty and beauty. Rather motivation and incentive and necessity trigger the formation of that which is next but never realized until it presents itself through the creative process.

The creative process is an overused phrase. What it means. What it means is an undefinable, ineluctable, formless span of time. I certainly cannot understand it on the level of brain science. But I know when it is happening. It takes me over and simply lets me go where I want to go. My emotions are relegated to a back seat. Thinking in the language I am working with flows. I intend less to make a statement. But, then, the process winds down and I become conscious and, only then, can I begin to mold what I am doing and truly make a statement.

The vocabulary of the creative process changes from one language to the next. Take your pick: music, visual art, writing, performance, film, photography, acting. I do not want to open the door to any argument of what is and what does not take claim of the creative process. We pursue it all the time whether we like it or not. It is the means to move from one task to the next. Some of us are more organized about it than others. It is a product of the heart and mind. And I am not the first person to say that. Nor am I the first person to write on the gist of these words.

Another element that propels the creative process is desire. The desire to latch onto the transmitting of a congealing of chemistry in the universe. I have to believe that everything impales on everything else as influence. No escape is possible, because we are living. At least I am now. And whatever has been left by the living, now departed, can be deep within us. It is more the 'however' we need to heed. How we harness the energy that penetrates us with past discovery and the reign of the spirit over a slice of humanity.

Successful (in terms of fulfillment) artists never really know what they are doing. And if they start to analyze what they are doing, they catch themselves, and stop. Analysis of what artists do is for the observers, the listeners. Analysis means examining whys and researching the past as opposed to describing how and inherent impact on the future. Analysis has nothing to do with investigating feelings, only picking out the mechanics. The capacity for awareness stemming from both within and without is far different from the capacity to analyze and impose views down from some morass of supposed knowledge.

Someone once told me that if I feel pain, it means something is happening. That same person told me that he sheds tears when he reaches enlightenment. There is no logic to the juxtaposition of the quick stories of that insight and instance. But I can say that spinning wildly away from them is meaning, endless meaning that has no verbal approximation. Does the sun shine? Does the human being live or move from day to day senselessly?

Because I am an artist, my sources for how I work and what the result becomes arise from assimilation of living. Growth in the art depends on the deepening of experience and filling the cracks as the art is expressed. The culminations of every stage of experiencing life within the art infuse the imagination with fireworks, opening doors, exuberance, deeper feeling, deeper self-understanding in relation to everything. Not only to the art making tools, or the musical instruments or typewriter, but how the hell to use them in the appropriate configurations.

And when I am at that stage, my elation scatters wide over the terrain of possibility. I have the terrain to stand on. That is where I begin. Its constituents are language, love, confidence and having the right-sized shoes.

Photo:
Before The Storm, August 27, 2011
copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Broken Partials, Matthew Shipp and Joe Morris, Not Two Records, 2011

2011-09-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

In the beginning was an African ritual in which the ring shout and the innate rhythm elicited by the stomping of feet represented a cue for a communal gathering of spirits. Throughout history, the purity of the ring shout has changed to evoke and provoke more than was ever intended. A music evolved most often associated with the blues. The blues became “jazz” and “jazz” has so many offshoots that they sometimes have no name except “sound.”

Broken Partials is a duet between longtime collaborators, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Joe Morris. The recording’s salient focus is how the sound develops from “Broken Partials, One” to “Broken Partials, Eight.” The redundancy of the title describes both the improvised steps that constitute the whole and the infinitely brief hiatuses between and within those steps.

Concision of motion on their instruments clarifies the process that the musicians go through to tell their story, the outcome of which is unknown until the resilient pizzicato on the bass simply ends the recording. The subject of the story that they are both telling is how they play their instruments. Chords counteract sensible sequences of notes that transform from one to another through tremolos, runs, walking lines, arpeggios, ostinatos; snapped, pounded and repeated single notes; and the rare indications of melody.

The tempos may be laid back occasionally but the tempos only become important if it cannot be understood that they are part and parcel of the reason that the music falls into shapes that intersect, run parallel, blend, or split. Tempos and pitch, chord, key, phrase, interaction, separation and understated, underlying rhythm indivisibly define the improvisation. No matter how abstractly the music is explained verbally, words can never equal the abstract beauty of the music as it lends itself to the passing of time.

Awakening, Nicole Mitchell, Delmark, 2011

2011-09-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

Touted as the country’s best ‘jazz’ flutist, Nicole Mitchell has really got it going on. In Awakening, she collaborates with her group to give a sprightly, endlessly energetic and sensitive take on her own compositions. She works with Chicago musicians: guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Harrison Bankhead and drummer Avreeayl Ra.

Mitchell believes in melody, harking back to traditional forms, but she also wants improvisation to infuse her music with freshness. That fact reveals her playfulness and interest in molding mood.

Her fellow players hook right up to her lines. Parker not only strums, but also launches himself into solos that are not foreign appendages to the whole unit’s exploration. He never explodes on his electric guitar; he moves around mellifluously between pizzicatos and chords, a soft, thorough and utter complement to Mitchell’s metallic struts, leaps, flutters, and voice-like 'brrrrrrs' and sirenic 'oooohs.'

Bankhead is a model bassist, holding onto and maximizing harmony with Mitchell's strikingly melodic sequences of high-pitched tones. In fact, the harmonic spaces between the flute, guitar and bass are perfectly poised. After a non-scattered intro, “Journey on a Thread” seems to exemplify the most exploratory of the tracks, highlighted with Bankhead’s popping the strings on his bass in a lengthy well-grounded solo.

“More Than I Can Say” features Parker playing a carefully plotted pizzicato that sets the tide for this slow tempo Latin-inspired piece. Mitchell spins the sound of the flute in the background and Ra interjects rolls on the toms with a persistent cymbal sibilance. Mitchell eventually takes the tune, laden with romanticism, supported in part by the way in which Ra teases the way for Parker’s re-emergence. Once Parker resumes his fingered line, one can imagine Mitchell listening, off to the side clutching her flute in her arms like a baby until she and Parker come together at the end for the close.

Photo by Lauren Deutsch

Nicole Mitchell married Calvin Gannt in July of 2011. She left Chicago for Long Beach, California. On her September 1, 2011, Facebook page, she wrote this note:

Dear Chicago,
You will always be my home! You've been so generous, so loving, and even kicked my butt when I needed it! I've been squeezed by the heat, the passion and the storms into who I am. You'll always be at my core. I loved being invisible, swallowed up by the crowds full of dreams like myself, and I loved submerging into the sounds of hope and determination that makes Chicago cutting edge. The Iron and concrete, the spirit lake of serenity and aqua blue meditations. The parks and most of all the beautiful people. I've been called away to California. I'm looking forward to more growth and more challenges with my new life. But I hope to always be present and rooted in some way to you, Chi.
Love Nicole

In the title cut of her album, "Awakening," which also concludes the disc, it seems that she projects a feeling through her playing that she is eventually going to broadcast that she will leave her hometown; for at the end of a soft, moderately paced, sometimes melancholy flute song, the flute's sound simply drifts away in a descending slur.

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Track listing: Curly Top; Journey on a Thread; Center of the Earth; Snowflakes; Momentum; More Than I Can Say; There; F.O.C.; Awakening.

Out of This World's Distortions, AUM Fidelity, 2011

2011-08-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

Farmers By Nature bandleader and drummer Gerald Cleaver wrote the brief liner notes to his group’s record, Out of This World’s Distortions. They begin with this sentence: “Craig, William and I are trying to get to the root of things (no pun intended).”

Yet, upon taking another look, one discovers on the album cover itself a photograph of trees and on the inside, underneath the liner notes, a shadow of the head on a marble statue perhaps of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the wilderness, and, underneath the disc, a panoramic view of tree tops obviously photographed from the ground. Roots are implied in these images. Roots of trees…roots of nature...roots of improvised music…the very origins of growth and development which portend a certain solemn beauty of sound.

The trio of Craig Taborn on piano, William Parker on bass and Cleaver on drums presents a unique statement. The piano gives lightness to the heaviness of Parker and Cleaver’s combined tone that pulls it out of the ground. A strong basis for the music is repetition, no arpeggios and little tendency towards decoration. In other words, this is serious work, as in tilling-the-soil work.

Delicacy does not escape the stream as is demonstrated in Cleaver’s touch with the mallets to the toms or sticks to the cymbals, and Taborn’s tickling of the treble notes and sturdy phrasing on the piano, or even in Parker’s sure-fingered pizzicato and bowing that draws out a sinewy resilience from the bass strings. The delicacy is not without intention and matches the directness of the rest of the music.

Communicated throughout Out of This World’s Distortions is a sense of onward-ness. There is no stopping the transmission of the straightforward musical message heard in every solo and every thoroughly integrated collaboration among the threesome. The message begins with a quiet celebration of Chicago sax player Fred Anderson, who passed away the day before this album was recorded, and ends with a wave of a march that gradually fades away into the distance in the actual playing, not by means of mastering in the studio.

Track listing: For Fred Anderson; Tait's Traced Traits; Out Of This World's Distortions Grow Aspens And Other Beautiful Things; Sir Snacktray Speaks; Cutting's Gait; Mud, Mapped.

Absence of Moi

2011-07-27T07:10:00.000-07:00

I have been on vacation.

Am gearing up for new expressions...

New points of view.

The one above is under Tumalo Falls in Oregon.

Photo:

Planetary Unknown: David S. Ware, Cooper-Moore, William Parker, Muhammad Ali, AUM Fidelity, 2011

2011-06-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

It was just about a year ago that David S. Ware was preparing reporters for the upcoming recording that would address the collective anxiety presented by the oncoming year of 2012. His secrecy about the band members with whom he would record did not prevent him from talking about the fact that the album would be totally improvised: an unusual performance ethic for Ware until his return to the stage with a 2009 solo live performance on saxello, stritch and tenor, which became Saturnian, released by AUM Fidelity in 2010.

The new DSW quartet, Planetary Unknown, is made up of David S. Ware on saxophones, Cooper-Moore on piano, William Parker on bass, and Muhammad Ali, the brother of the late Rashied Ali, on drums. It is the first time this group has played together. The group can tune into the fact that Ware's huge blustery tone has changed since he no longer stands to play. He sits. But, Ware plays the hell out of his saxophones, which include the tenor on the first three cuts, sopranino on the second three and the stritch on the last. He has honed a focal point with his instrument which, in ways, surpasses the character of his playing in his original longtime quartet with pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist Parker, and drummer Gerald Cleaver.

Ware’s playing is linear as opposed to broad because his physical space is confined. He is his own center, his own vessel, his own vortex. He vibrates wholly within himself; he challenges the variations he can create climbing up and down the key pads. He plays every note and all the ones in between. The members of the band respond to that. The music is controlled, inexorably intense and whirls around the configurations that leap from the saxophone. Several times, the intensity abates and a calm spell is cast through the instruments. That might be interpreted as a discovery in the meditative state where “the intellect cannot go” and peace enters in, especially evident in the longest cut, “Passage Wudang,” and also in“Divination” and “Divination Unfathomable.”

Cooper-Moore’s piano work can run rampant over the entire range of keyboard but always becomes coherent, necessarily, for backing Ware. His solo in “Divination Unfathomable” isolates this range; his solo intro to " Divination" is remarkably melodic. The same is true for Parker. His pizzicato strives for a rhythmic statement which dips in and out of earshot; the resonance of the bass strings, however, never wanes. His arco playing touches dissonance; his final pizzicato solo in the last cut reconfirms his steadfast groundedness.

Drummer Ali stays in the background; the cymbals hiss steadily and without much differentiation. At times, he skips across the snare. In “Duality Is One,” a duo with Ware, Ali alternates using his hands and sticks on the snare at the beginning and then maintains cymbal-snare combinations to magnify the extremes of the variations that Ware states on the tenor. In fact, the entire band serves Ware in this way so that he can build his musical line and go from simple to complex without having to rely on himself to re-enter the musical space.

The cadence and pattern of Ware’s speaking voice comes through more than once in how, on the horns, he repeats the same phrase, restrains himself or presses a split-tone for emphasis. His arpeggios are concentrated and their richness motivated by the search for the next set of expressions from his internal being. The last “Ancestry Supramental” is a gloriously rhythmic close, boasting stops and starts that are a complete surprise and which present an everlasting memory that reverberates in the final strike of the cymbal, inseparable from Parker’s last pluck and Ware’s last blurt on a slow downward scale run.

Track Listing: Passage Wudang; Shift; Duality Is One; Divination; Crystal Palace; Divination Unfathomable; Ancestry Supramental.

http://dlf.tv/2011/david-s-ware/#

Knives From Heaven, Thirsty Ear, 2011

2011-06-20T06:13:00.000-07:00

At the opening of Knives From Heaven, a condensed, high-pitched, seemingly helium-laced, voice announces “Matthew Shipp,” which is followed by an obviously sped-up version of pianist Shipp’s playing the introductory chords of one of his own pieces. An electronic blip is heard and it is more than evident that this album is about sampling and repetition over acoustic improvisation. Then comes the rap, “Half-Amazed,” unfurled by Beans. And there is no going back.

It is always interesting to note that Shipp and William Parker, whose bass playing audibly comes out of the pervasive sound in “Deadpan Stare,” become involved with projects that are ultimately only about electronics when they, themselves, are totally consumed with creative improvised music.

The music on Knives From Heaven conveys a hip-hop message. Hip-hop has evolved as the new classic popular music. That Shipp and Parker produce sounds engaging enough to Hprizm to incorporate into a highly rhythmic spectrum, which includes ample beat-boxing, compliments the musicians’ open-mindedness in permitting this application of their music. Sometimes, Shipp’s piano playing, without any adjustment, imitates a digital rendition of itself. So, in this way, it makes sense that Shipp would decide to dip into an electronic field. The same goes for Parker, who can turn on to and create any rhythmic statement on the planet.

But more than that, a platform for hip-hop that has class in the quality of its sound production is worth pursuing. This album’s intensity does not go over the top; the raps are straightforward; and the music is intelligent, simply being switched off at the end of its forty-three minute run.

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet: Freedom Summers

2011-06-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

Wadada Leo Smith

New York in June

Among the multitude of musical events in New York City at the beginning of the summer was the three-concert Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT). The second of these concerts was held at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a rock/jazz club located on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. The performance was by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet. In its inception, Golden Quartet was comprised of Smith, pianist Anthony Davis, bassist Malachi Favors Magoustous, and drummer Jack DeJohnette. But within the past year, the quartet has included Angelica Sanchez on piano, John Lindberg on bass and Pheeroan Aklaff on drums. Sanchez is the newest member of the group. Lindberg and Aklaff have been working with Smith for years.

Of Golden Quartet, Smith says:

Golden Quartet is an ensemble of master composers / performers, whose experimental practice utilizes the quartet form, which is the purest foundation of musical expression in jazz /creative music and western music culture. As multi-instrumentalists they are concerned with a practice and research that involves an array of complex systemic forms, where the musical languages of compositional / improvisational / ankhrasmation are merged seamlessly in their interactive development in the quartet and are manifested in the performance dimension as a single music language. Golden Quartet’s music is fiery, explosive, and surges with a positive improvised energy force that’s constructed with polycentric melodic / sonic / rhythm units. The ensemble’s textural and structural materials reveal a musical terrain that is creatively rich and architecturally clear in form.

The descriptive intentions for Golden Quartet also summarize the entrails of Smith's music. He is aware of and practices the rudiments and subtleties of composition transforming in and out of improvisation. He brings his music to the group, of which he considers himself a part, and then the group collectively reflects the music back on itself, attending to the nature of quality, the ultimate musical conversation and the most intense self-examination during the actual performance. This is a demanding enterprise for musicians, but the result produces crystalline music that is unequaled anywhere.

On June 5, 2011, Golden Quartet performed five parts of Ten Freedom Summers, a work that is comprised of three multi-part collections of "compositions/improvisations." This NYC performance was made possible by Chamber Music America's "Presenting Jazz" Program and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The performance of the entire composition will take three nights, scheduled in October, 2011, at REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles.

Smith describes his piece more specifically:

Defining moments in the History of the United States of America, Ten Freedom Summers is a large work inspired by the activity of the civil rights movement from 1948, when President Harry S.Truman signs the Executive Order 9981 to Dr. Martin Luther Kings' Memphis speech in 1968.

Ten Freedom Summers is composed for Golden Quartet and Southwest Chamber Music, an ensemble of nine performers. Over the years I thought that I would compose a tribute to the civil rights movement, centered in the activities of three decades 1948-1968, much in the same way that August Wilson's plays comment on ten decades of the African-American experience in America, but through musical composition/improvisation.

Golden Quartet's Performance at LPR

Despite technical problems and friction between the guest performers and the management, the impact of the music reached far beyond what was no doubt expected. Smith's performance ethic transcends any troubles. He is serious and steadfast, proceeding with a course of action that shall not be thwarted in any way, shape, or form. His behavior transfers to his group members. They are faithful to his direction, graced with the compassion that puts all doubt and uncertainty to rest.

Smith was a beacon from which everything flowed. Not only did the traditional notated score guide his players, but Smith did as well, signaling with both his instrument, his body and his hand from what point, from what instrument and for how long any one section could begin and end. He pointed with his index finger to communicate an instruction for the music to change; he swiveled his entire body as he played the horn to coral the entire band. He was controlling and letting go of the music at the same time. There was as much group involvement as there were solos, duets and trios. Smith stepped out several times and allowed his music to flow as he listened. The ensemble's diligence applied to playing was palpable; its tenacity fully engaged.

Smith and John Lindberg

Smith opened and closed the doors for improvisation within the music. That is the beauty of how he shapes it. He imparts to the music his sense of how other musicians can learn new methods of expression; in fact, that is factored into Smith's compositions. As a result, what the trumpet announced thematically or improvisationally, the remaining players absorbed and elaborated on through what they themselves chose to do in response. If the choices of the individual musician did not exactly fit within Smith's notions of how the motion should be going, he would let the musicians know, similarly to the way a conductor leads an orchestra. Smith projected his desires for the ensemble's dynamic gently, succinctly and with a confidence that transmitted his character, which is respectful and peaceful, but totally involved with the presence of the present.

Angelica Sanchez

Smith's words about Golden Quartet say it all. Nothing can be added except the sound of the music itself. The energy that came across during performance was inescapable and so was the mood and the feeling that reached out to uphold the original impetus for the musical statements. In these five parts of Ten Freedom Summers, the textures that were created defied disintegration. The tension that held the music together was perfectly defined and there was not one iota of extremism that could burst the music apart. The group crafted an intricately woven web of nuance, breath and strength of doing. The trumpet sang songs that elicited grandeur, melancholy, but no defeat. This music told stories, as certainly the entire multi-section work will do. Every phrase, every melody, every bit of cacaphony or set of harmonies will be analogous to reading each word, each sentence, each chapter of an epic book about African-American experience, to which Smith has and will continue to contribute.

The players in Smith's quartet each possessed their own space. As they claimed it individually though, so their responsibility grew. They were beholden to render the music that Smith had given them to play as a once in a lifetime occurrence. The significance of that responsibility could be seen in their faces, whether any one member of the quartet, including Smith, played alone or in relation to another player.

John Lindberg

In particular, Lindberg held forth on a pizzicato solo where the tightness of the strings invalidated the idea of resonance. On the other hand, when he activated the pedal to give the bass breadth and depth, towards the beginning and at the end of the concert, the bass became another instrument, evoking another realm of sound which enveloped the atmosphere with a wealth of fullness. As did Aklaff, with a smack on the tom, enter into a rhythmic vein which rarely disappeared, only rose and fell in volume and complexity as the composition demanded. Sanchez's cultivation of how the piano moves through the music both sparkled and was grounded, inseparable from the collaboration that was taking place.

Pheeroan Aklaff

In just one set allowed the quartet, there were two brief breaks in the music, when the audience had no idea what to do. Had it not been for Smith's removing his horn from his mouth, looking out from the music into the space before him and raising his arms as if to say "there it is," the audience would not have responded with applause.

The last piece spoke as if to paint a portrait of hope. In a solo, Smith's trumpet created waves that washed on a sandy shore. The sun rose at dawn. And the power of triumph at that one metaphorical instance blossomed. The emotion evoked was intense as Smith moved the valves on the trumpet quickly, effortlessly, moving from the decorative flair of a trill, to a gripping melodic structure. His trumpet sound vibrated with reverence to his history and the history of his people.

Some of the unanswered questions that arise within that history were posed throughout the music. One could sense them. One could sense drive, intention, thriving, striving and woundedness as the vitality and temperament of the notes transformed.

Donning a jacket that acquired a golden tone due to the way in which the stage lights were cast upon him, Smith played as if to pierce the air with dedication, dedication not only to the composition of his music but also to its capacity to communicate. A testimony to engaging the hearts and minds of those who care to listen and, most of all, learn.

All photos copyright 2011 Lyn Horton
Text, except for quotes from Wadada Leo Smith. copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Wadada Leo Smith's Organic: Heart's Reflections

2011-05-26T06:31:00.000-07:00

The jewel case holding the two discs of Heart’s Reflections from Wadada Leo Smith’s Organic sports a simple cover image of alphabet-like curved gold and black lines on white and red fields. On that is superimposed the title of the record. On the back is a listing of tracks and performers on a deep brown field where a nearly invisible full circle is also inscribed; its diameter is almost the width of the jewel case.

Open up the case and the visual information explodes. On the left is a stunning full frontal photo of Smith playing his trumpet and on the right is poised the first of the discs on which is printed a reproduction of one of Smith’s scores that shows horizontal bands of bright colors through which flows a line signifying changes. The three page bi-folded liner notes themselves exhibit additional portions of Smith scores and a detailed roster of information, spelling out who solos when in each piece and where they are identifiable in the stereo channel field. Flip the cd holder and the second disc is revealed bearing the same colorful score reproduction. A photo of a golden grass field through which a fence runs appears on the inside back.

Organic has fourteen members, both male and female. The complete sound of the instruments spans a range of extraordinary balance. No instrument hits a shrieking peak except for the trumpet, and the drums and bass lend heavy weight when called for compositionally. The music, all written by Smith, expands on the nature of contrasts, the necessary intensity of fluidity, melodic coherence, controlled dissonance and the inexorable presence of rhythmic design. Violin, basses, guitars, piano, reeds, electronics, drums and Smith’s single trumpet comprise an ensemble whose transmission of the composer’s intention “to transform the music” never waivers.

Throughout the performance, a distinct pattern arises of conversation between clear-cut solo and duo presentations over the landscape of the “collective” sound. Smith’s trumpet is both the grounding component and the initiator for improvisation. He sets the standards for, corals the performers within and integrates his own playing throughout the organization of musical evolution. His trumpet never disappears in the collective; it shines, glorifies joy, conjoins with spirit, and magnifies peace in relation to its creative sources. He instills the same goals in the rest of the players. This is reason that the sound unwinds easily without sharp turns or undesirable clusters of sonic disturbance. The motion of the music is biomorphic. When it has resolved, the sound simply stops.

The titles of the pieces refer to Smith’s experience: from his practice of the Sufi tradition to his metaphorical appreciation of nature to his nods to writer Toni Morrison, trumpeter Don Cherry, and violinist LeRoy Jenkins from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music in which Smith used to participate.

This recording musically describes the layers of life that Smith has further scrutinized, which have everything to do with the present moment as it is guided by feelings, the gift of the breath and how to offer love.

Personnel: Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet, electric trumpet; Michael Gregory: electric guitars; Pheeroan akLaff: drums; Brandon Ross: electric guitar; John Lindberg: acoustic bass, electric acoustic bass; Skúli Sverrison: electric bass, six-string bass; Angelica Sanchez: acoustic piano, Wurlitzer electric piano; Josh Gerowitz: electric guitar; Lamar Smith: electric guitar; Stephanie Smith: violin; Casey Anderson: alto saxophone; Casey Butler: tenor saxophone; Mark Trayle: laptop; Charlie Burgin: laptop.

Track Listing: Disc One: Don Cherry's Electric Sonic Garden (For Don Cherry); Heart’s Reflections: The Splendors of Light and Purification (tracks 2-9) (for Shaykh Abu Al-Hasan al-Shadhili): The Dhikr Of Radiant Hearts, Pt. I; The Dhikr Of Radiant Hearts, Pt. II; The Majestic Way; The Shaykh, As Far As Humaythira; Spiritual Wayfarers; Certainty; Ritual Purity And Love, Pt. I; Ritual Purity And Love, Pt. II; Disc Two: Heart’s Reflections: The Splendors of Light and Purification (tracks 1-3) (for Shaykh Abu Al-Hasan al-Shadhili): Silsila; The Well: From Bitter To Fresh Sweet Water, Pt. I; Well: From Bitter To Fresh Sweet Water, Pt. II; Toni Morrison: The Black Hole (Sagittarius A)/Conscience And Epic Memory (For Toni Morrison); Leroy Jenkins's Air Steps (For Leroy Jenkins).

Matthew Shipp: The Art of the Improviser

2011-05-16T07:19:00.000-07:00

Nothing but smart musicianship is evident in pianist Matthew Shipp’s double disc set, The Art of the Improviser. Both discs are live-date recordings. The first, recorded at the Troy, NY, Arts Center in April, 2010, is one continuous set from Shipp’s trio. Michael Bisio plays bass and longtime trio member Whit Dickey, the drums. The second disc is comprised of an equally tight Shipp solo gig at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC two months later.

Turning fifty years old in December of 2010, Shipp reached a milestone in a musician’s career that is commonly noticed, as if age signified creative maturation. Over the years, Shipp’s innate musical intelligence has gone unchanged, but his improvisatory language seems to have acquired more of a nuanced fluidity and engaging character through his discovery of fingering subtleties integrated within an increase in fluctuating rhythms.

A three-pronged organism operates in the first disc, where each musician yields to the other with ease. Identifiably the leader, Shipp tows the thematic ropes for his own tunes as well as for Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train.” The introductory “The New Fact” reveals Bisio inheriting a trio-built line in a stunning pizzicato solo that induces stone-cold silence from Shipp, Dickey and the audience. In the next “3 in 1,” after Shipp’s lengthy piano ostinato, Dickey, in his own solo, outdoes his restrained, understated drumming self, with a relentless, downright breath-taking, even-handed face-paced snare-tom-bass drum drive; he treats the cymbals on a par with drums. Shipp’s shining moments on this side are everywhere: his playing glistens like a multitude of stars across the darkest of nights. The most intensity comes mid-album when he does not leave the middle register of the keyboard for nearly sixteen minutes, alighting accentually on a treble or bass note.

Shipp’s solo performance reflects his inexhaustible exploration of timbre and touch. The reverent boldness with which he approaches the keys widens the improvisatory field in between a specific thematic concept and its parenthetic reprise. As Shipp moves from “4-D” to the concluding “Patmos” without breaking, the repetition of phrases and figures constructs the spatiality of his language. It is a means to render his gestures simultaneously recognizable and brand new. His take on “Fly Me To The Moon” demonstrates a conscious determination to alter perceptions of the familiar. An exquisite balance of straightforward musical design and profound sound generation testifies to the pianist’s God-given genius.

Matthew Shipp, Michael Bisio, Whit Dickey (The Matthew Shipp Trio)

Matthew Shipp (solo piano)

The Art of the Improviser (2 discs)

Thirsty Ear

The Holy Grail of Credibility

2011-05-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

Writing every day religiously is a pattern of existence that I have not established yet. When I do, the writing will come more easily and I won't have such angst about the process. It has been bad enough submitting my words to the people who write for a living to edit; or thinking anyway after the product is spewed out that I do a pretty good job.

When the subject matter of my words is general rather than zeroed in on a specific record or event, the writing is not so full of uncertainty. That is for the reason that no other person can question it.

But when I do write about recordings and concerts and people, even, then, I go on record with my statements and they are read by those who seek "veritas."

Back in 2004 or so, I had been practicing being a serious scribe about creative improvised music for several years. I had earned the label "critic" from those who did not write about the music I followed. I was looked upon as a vehicle for publicity by those who put on concerts & musicians who wanted me to pay attention to them. As the years went on and I kept writing, it was incumbent on me to let go of the pressure I felt to write anything about music otherwise I could not do it.

Writing an article is like giving birth. And when I am done with one, I feel relief for a day or two and celebrate and then have to think again about what is coming next. In that zone of thinking, I get a lot done. Now that it is spring, I can go outside and fiddle in the garden. I can actually walk a couple of miles like I used to every single day, instead of resorting to riding the stationery bike in the mudroom for fifteen or twenty minutes. I can clean the dust off the furniture that accumulates without my noticing until my thumb prints are visible on the trinkets that decorate the table tops or the light at a certain angle shows the bunnies as I walk by. Or, and this is the most pleasurable I think, I can go to town and walk up and down the main street window shopping. Dreaming.

What creates the angst in me is: Do I assess the music I am writing about in ways that will make sense to the reader? Or that the reader will believe? Do I hear everything? Or do I talk about it well enough that hearing every detail is unnecessary? See, the writing is supposed to point in a certain direction.

A few years ago, a well-known writer for a well-known online jazz website asked me a question about a record from Europe that he wanted to order, obviously worried that my supportive comments about the record could have been off the mark. My confidence about my words led me to urge him to buy the record. Not long afterwards, he emailed me to say that he had bought the record, listened and said that my observations about the music were "right on." Not only did this give me a pat on the back, but silently I absorbed this reassurance and said to myself: OK, Lyn, keep going.

And even earlier than the above instance, when my writing was infrequent, yet thoughtful, and the number of CDs that appeared in my mailbox did not amount to nearly what comes in now, the president of one of the longest operating creative improvised music recording companies emailed me to say that he truly believed that my reviews had gained "credibility."

The musicians reputed as great music-makers in the world of creative improvised music have never wavered in their belief in what I do. To receive accolades from these musicians gives me more incentive to continue than those I might receive from other jazz critics. I feel more a part of the world of the musicians than that of the jazz writers. Sometimes and sometimes not, in the jazz publication world, I feel like I have to fight to write and have the words be accepted.

Evolution occurs with the survival of the fittest. Last time I went to the doctor, he said I was doing great.

So, I say: OK, Lyn, keep going.

Billy Bang at His Best

2011-04-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

Speaking of This Earth

Mr. Billy Bang knows nothing but reverence to his violin, the music he makes with it and the inspiration behind the music. He takes nothing for granted. He is in love with his life and how it means to be alive. The inherent quality of these characteristics were expressed intensely, energetically and with determination when tiny Mr. Bang stood with his violin as a larger than life soloist on a moderately-sized stage in a moderately-sized hall, packed with dedicated listeners. At UMass Amherst, last Wednesday night, October 19.

Bang‘s music flows from his bow as it meets the strings. Obviously. But, it is how the bow meets the strings that makes the difference. It is the attack that makes the difference. His mastery of the attack pervades his musical statements, whether they are meant for him alone or are orchestrations of solos from his pieces for group. It is the attack that creates the signature for how the music is shaped. It is bad form for me to write about style. But Bang has a style that rings solid and true. It is honest and consistent and allows for continuity that rarely sees a break. The breaks come in the form of whole beat rests in a place in which they are planned, or the split second before he lands the bow on the strings and clarifies the end of one phrase and begins the next. The continuous-ness of the music is the telltale sign that the music is Bang’s and his alone.

Bang places atmosphere and energy and patterning into his playing, which combined is entirely distinctive. It is all about the story. If he could speak his story, it would be as continuous as the music. For when he speaks, his words fall out of him like the music, like water...like a river. The cadence of the music, that is occasionally overtly rhythmic, can be anticipated. This is different from being predictable. Bang’s cadence drives the music, impels its constancy, through repeated stroking methods, as they are lengthened and shortened, and shift from key to key, from consonance to dissonance, then shaped to be close and warm & intimate. The Bang Cadence.

Sure, he has serious statements to make and you know when he makes them because his bow digs into the strings, the pitches become stringent, his body wraps itself around his violin. Yes. He is so adamant and directed that he contorts himself around the box of the instrument to hold the strings below where the neck and the body of the violin meet and squeezes and twists the strings with the bow …. And when he repeats glissandos so that he lifts himself off the stage or pulls the bow down the strings so fast and hard, one, two, three, four times so that he bounces up and down on his toes --- it is then you want to weep.

It was not until the last number that Bang used a pizzicato: high and dry. And typically non-reverberant. But that is an aside. What Bang had done is sing from the mournful to the marching to the joyous. There was no mistaking any of his intentions. The “thereness” of Bang is unmistakable.

Like a whirlwind that stays in one section of the stage and radiates light as he spins into another zone, Bang solidly claims his position as incomparable musician. Fearlessly, speaking his mind.

Originally published at Jazzreview.com

Joe McPhee & Ken Vandermark: A Meeting in New York

2011-03-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

The Stone is a vanguard not-for-profit music venue, founded by composer/musician and MacArthur Genius Award winner John Zorn. The space is located on the corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street on the Lower East Side in New York City. Described by some as a hole in the wall, it is a pretty well-designed one. The interior walls are brick but they are covered with black velvet curtains that fall from a high ceiling to a concrete floor. The room is about two and a half times as long as it is wide. At one end of the space, brick is still exposed; a small room with a white door has been built in the corner. Black plastic folding chairs fill the room. The wall seen on entering is covered with sheet-rock, painted white, and on it are displayed Peter Gannuskin's black and white photographs of the musicians who have curated performances throughout its six year history.

On March 18, 2011, a landmark event occurred...landmark, because Joe McPhee and Ken Vandermark have never played in a duet before, except on those rare occasions during their tours with Peter Brötzmann's Tentet, when these two musicians can and have.

Before the music began, McPhee told the story of how he and Vandermark began their musical relationship. In his written words, the story goes like this:

In 1993, there was an interview in "Option" magazine with Ken Vandermark in which he had really marvelous things to say about my music and its influence on him.  When he began playing the saxophone his dad gave him a copy of my Hat Hut recording Tenor and told him if he was going to play tenor, he should check it out.  For better or worse he took the advice. It so happened that I was in Vancouver, B.C., for the jazz Festival as was Ken and I ran into him as he was boarding a bus en route to his concert and I thanked him for his kind remarks.  He invited me to the concert and his band proceeded to play one of my compositions from Tenor, "Goodbye Tom B."  I was not only impressed at their version, but it was the first time I had ever heard anyone play my music, and it was obvious that Ken was seriously into it for some time.  This was not done to impress me.

In 1995, Ken invited me to Chicago for my first visit there.  I arrived, we met, went into a studio and recorded our first CD, A Meeting In Chicago, all in a single take with no rehearsal, before playing our first concert later that night at The Empty Bottle.

With that preface, the musical interchange between these two reedsmen commenced. It was almost as if a father and his son were playing together. Vandermark seemed to soften in volume on his tenor deferring to McPhee, when, in fact, he provided a strong assured backdrop in front of which McPhee could launch himself on soprano sax. Instrumentally, the match was perfect. The high and the lows. The sparkling with the blustery. McPhee held forth with distinct phrases that became one entity, which Vandermark complemented harmonically, often merging with McPhee's sound. They did not imitate each other but carried strikingly different weights and interwove musical lines that created a whole densely packed body of abstract song.

Witnessing the two men listen consciously to each other was thrilling. McPhee kept his eyes closed the entire time; Vandermark did as well, though at times cast a meditative gaze towards the floor. Both were concentrating on the togetherness of their mutual sound; both were exercising their sensitivity to each other.

After each break, they changed their instruments. With those changes came the explorations of new integration of other timbres. After playing the soprano, McPhee switched to a silver Holton pocket trumpet, which was his Father's. This was the first time he had ever played it. Vandermark picked up his clarinet.

McPhee then revisited his soprano while Vandermark continued on the clarinet. This pairing was the most exquisite of all; the two instruments seared the air. The musicians played round and round each other. Vandermark turned red in the face, he was blowing so hard, not only to support his circular breathing, but also to maintain his dedicated presence, which was more than significant in response to McPhee's endlessly curving phrasings.

McPhee sought out the resonance of the space with his horn. Back on tenor, Vandermark refrained from playing with an extreme forward motion, where his instrument is so far in front of him in the metaphorical sense that he needs to expend an overabundance of energy to keep up with himself. Rather, he demonstrated an extraordinary awareness of how McPhee drew the lines, as they flickered, and popped, became boisterous, lyrical and melodic, even at one point introducing the theme from Coltrane's "After the Rain."

The passion they both felt was palpable. McPhee shone in his ever-present capacity for varying the extent to which he presses forward or quiets down, repeats his phrases or invents new ones. The rhythm maintained by the two was introverted. It existed as an inherent factor, an underpinning, in the structure of the improvisation. Only once, when McPhee tapped the mouthpiece on his pocket trumpet, was an overt rhythmic gesture detectable.

In visual art terms, the music simulated Cubism and Post-Impressionism at the same time. The two musicians contrasted each other with drastically opposed elements and directions or they completed each other, just as a bright yellow swatch of paint juxtaposed with one that is blue on the same surface fools the eyes as being green from a distance.

The music that McPhee and Vandermark played with the bassist Kent Kessler, in A Meeting In Chicago, in 1995, was inspired, evoking the sparks that occur when a warm collegial relationship begins. The blending was so fluid that the musicians shared only their compatibility. At the Stone, the contexts had changed. Since 1995, McPhee has become well-known in the United States because Vandermark removed him from his purely European audience by bringing him to Chicago; and Vandermark's career has skyrocketed not only in Chicago, but internationally. The music at the New York gig exuded confidence, and an evenness of expression that the Chicago recording only hinted at.

This concert displayed a camaraderie and intimacy rarely seen in the improvised music world. It is a well-known fact that McPhee is a romantic and the truest of friends. Yet, Vandermark guards the projection of his feelings and is not effusive. His feelings transfer to the fixed vigor within his playing.

At the end of the evening, the two musicians embraced just as they had at the beginning, after McPhee's verbal introduction when he described Vandermark as one of the greatest guys on earth. The night had revealed that Master and Apprentice may part ways in continuing the development of their own voices, their own groups, their own sounds; yet, they can always reunite in unparalleled splendor.

Matthew Shipp Trio: The Art of the Improviser Live

2011-03-13T11:58:00.001-07:00

I have been writing about improvised music for close to fifteen years. A few times, I have made mistakes in technical language or citing the wrong composer's name for a standard. Even though it gives me a minor headache that these errors passed me by before I let go of the articles to be published, I realize that, in the long run, these mistakes are no big deal and they do not override the content of the writing-only put a scratch in it that can usually be rubbed out by an editor or by a vigilant musician.

I trust myself to open my ears fully to take in the music well enough to describe my feelings on how I hear. I am nervous though every time my fingers hit the computer keyboard to start this process, because, to paraphrase Anne Lamott, you have to rid yourself of all distractions by stashing them metaphorically in jars so that the mind can calm down.

Within the last few weeks, I have been to several concerts. A couple of years ago, I decided that it was tedious to take notes at concerts and then review them, under time constraints that put me on edge. Honestly, I just wanted to enjoy the music.

But, on March 7, 2011, in New York City at (Le) Poisson Rouge, the Matthew Shipp Trio played in celebration of Shipp's new release, a double CD called The Art of the Improviser, on the Thirsty Ear label. This concert was so good that I was compelled to write about it.

The gig sang out its singularity; it was incomparable to any other concert I attended recently, where the groups' numbers ranged from one person to seven or more. The trio simply works so consistently and tightly that its impact as one organism defies criticism and invites only praises. And for an improvising group to have formed a web that is so closely knit is indeed rare and notable; in fact, kind of remarkable.

Shipp is indubitably the leader. He strikes the match that initially lights the fire. The pianist forges ahead in a state of consciousness that is apart from any that, collectively, we can know. Bassist Bisio and drummer Dickey board this plane of burning energy with equally as much fervor, supplying Shipp with the support he has earned and deserves.

Shipp has acclimated himself to chordal structures; yet, those structures find new definition, new positioning between more rhythmically nuanced and less intense, subtly arranged, phrasings. Those phrasings become the breathing room for the blasts that follow, whether in renderings of a jazz standard or gospel tune, towards which Shipp leans, or of a childhood song like Frere Jacques, which he once described as a "means to get out his frustration by pounding" the keyboard with double-handed chords.

An inappropriate word to describe Shipp's music is abstract. He has developed his own musical language and logic, which bows substantially to the history of piano-playing, but is not exclusively riveted to that history. The music rallies around his spirituality as it paradoxically merges with his intelligence, itself invested in the awareness of the stars, planets, intergalactic gases or dust and the unfathomable mystery of the way in which totality and beyond works. His music is a means of demonstrating that he just does not care about everyday drudgery and would rather be breathing fresh air than standing in a subway car. His music operates as poetry; the shifting in and out of formalized repeated resonance to lullaby is intentional. That he has been touched by a Yogic master is Shipp's gift to his audience.

The bold broadness with which Bisio performs, either using pizzicato or arco technique, clearly shows his passion for his instrument and the music he plays with it. As he looks up with his eyes closed and his lips un-pursed, his facial expressions tell of a deep sensitivity to weaving his sound throughout the large picture painted by Shipp and Dickey. When he solos, he wills himself as a one-man orchestra. It isn't the separate notes he hits that matter; it is how he connects from pizzed pitch to gliss to bowing. The imaginable throbbing of the vibrations that surround him resembles how force fields can exude from any radiant form.

Bisio has an amazing sense of rhythm that does not wane for a second as he progresses in a tuneless mode of stroking the strings. Often he stomps his right foot - a manifestation of an inner pulse wanting to free itself from his body as well as from his instrument.

His neck at a measurable angle from the static trunk of his body, Whit Dickey produces a steady stream of restrained percussiveness from his drumset that nearly becomes the axis around which the trio rotates; his drumming acts almost as a drone. His arms could not possibly flail uncontrollably because of the way in which the sound comes off the cymbals more than from the skins of his drums. Yet, when he solos, he lets go of the restraint that penetrates playing with the trio and his arms dance more and the sticks go higher into the space above him and they descend onto the drums more often. The sound is clean and strong. His sitting position remains the same. Dickey does not lack momentum; he is total momentum, inexorably so. With that momentum, the trio is buoyed in streams that ripple into rivers and oceans that rock with swelling waves.

At this gig, Shipp listened as Bisio and Dickey soloed. With his arms and elbows on the edge of the piano above the keys, Shipp's listening pose was stunning. His pause provided as much music as his playing would have. Shipp did not play a solo; his interaction with the band was his solo.

As Shipp's music has evolved so his capacity to create a distinctive statement has increased. But his maturity has always existed because his motive to make music never disappeared. Critics fuss and fume about his verbal overstatements and liken him to every pianist they recognize within his playing, but Shipp is only Shipp. Just like Kandinsky is always Kandinsky. Believe it and believe in the inspirational embrace which their art imparts.

Text and photos: copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Knowing

2011-02-16T14:02:00.000-08:00

There was a time when I believed that life was going to last forever. My days were absorbed with my son and chores and doing my art when I could. Lately, I have come to realize that the present moment is more important than ever.

When the chance to seize it confronts me, I consciously take it.

But when I feel at odds with myself, my mind flip flops: past to future to past to future. That dynamic is my present; how present is that?

The plans to complete a drawing or write a blog entry or write an article about music are mental exercises. The doing of any of the aforementioned grinds and plows through present time.

Stabilizing my body sense with my poetic sense regales balance and peace. The desire for that balance and peace is larger than the actuality of the states.

Worrying about either then or later is ridiculous. Analyzing and haranguing is all intellectual for me. None of any of it is in my gut where it needs to be. Where the mental meandering stops and the oneness with the universe begins.

Writing words resembles playing music. That I never achieved good comprehension scores on standardized tests does not surprise me. When I read, I do not take away details; I consume the larger ideas, which are incorporated into my manner of thought. I have always done this. My best memory of the act of absorbing large ideas is a time when I was sitting in my family's kitchen by the window at night. I think that I was alone in the house; the light was dim. My feet were propped up on a chair to the side of the one on which I was sitting. I was reading Bertrand Russell's Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. Not one iota of a quotation could I give from it; nor could I lay out a synopsis of the book. I remember the feeling I had reading it: I loved being able to understand the ideas. It is all I cared about at the time. My mind needed the engagement of understanding Bertrand Russell.

The paragraph that I just wrote flowed out of me like the notes from an instrument. A steady stream of description unwound out of no where. No, from somewhere. From my heart, my cache of feelings, my will to express myself to make a point.

Knowing is knowing only in the meaning of the word, not in the realness of the feeling of the knowing.

Tears well up in my eyes when I consider that there are so many knots I would like to unravel, so many stories I would like to tell. I hunger for the opportunities to continue to record my stories.

The groundwork has been laid for how words shall unlock themselves from the shackles of my brain, the chemistry of confusion, the heartlessness of false hope and the torrents of illusion.

I have had enough of skipping down the garden paths. Metaphorically. I care about the real paths; the ones I negotiate my way through. Even if those paths reveal themselves in ways which are not verbal. Imagery will suffice.

The lushness of possibilities of language I will go on exploring. Grieving about my inabilities to get on with it should not be an option.

But I do grieve.

Each day.

I get over here and then I am there instead of here.

And I will ask myself where have I gone? And I will catch myself in another ramble.

Saying nothing and meaning everything.

Photo: Studio Shot, January 2011

Take Me to the River

2011-01-26T08:31:00.000-08:00

More often than not, when I visit the water, its unstoppable motion and infinite gurgles take me to a place in my mind that is peaceful. The phenomenon of water itself overrides my heady turmoils, my rants of self-deprecation, the seemingly continual aches and pains within my physical being.

Water is a vehicle for tuning out the cacophony of the barrage of information with which I am hit every day. There is only so much of computer networking that I can face or in which I can even participate.

Paradoxically, the computer is the tool I need for promoting my interests and my writing. Look at this blog for heavens's sakes.

If I remove myself from the currency of cultural time which happens to be technological, I truly deny the essence of human evolution. Whatever is going on out there beyond my immediate reach, I can bring into my environment somehow through this machine. Yet the drawback of this machine is that it takes me away from human contact, which, as a social being, I desperately need.

Granted a state of hermit-tude aids in focusing, concentration, and a chance for introspection can happen in no other way, I can spiritually die if I do not break the solitude and breathe the air, tread on the ground, listen to the birds, smell the flowers, let my fingers get numb, perspire, bump into people on the sidewalk. Whatever is there for me to do.

I am seeking an intimate embrace.

The embrace that comes from the poetry of feeling closeness to myself.

The closeness of the one I am with. Stephen Stills meant his lyrics: When you're down and confused, Love the one you're with.

Yet, if I can inhale safety and love without the presence of anyone, I am in the intimate embrace I am seeking. I am in The embrace of God. God never wavers in His Love.

God takes many forms but I am with Him always. Just as the memories of those whom I love accompany me all the time. I can take them wherever I go. They experience whatever I experience.

I can go to the stream; I can go to the river; I can go to the ocean; I can stand in the rain.

I am close to my true self, which is endless, unprotected, intangible, uncontrolled, a simple project of awareness. With or without the water.

Where The Calm Lurks

2011-01-17T13:20:00.000-08:00

And let us pray:

Oh, Holy Father, where are we going? And how are we reaching our destination?

Can You help us to find the greatest of all solace which is along the thin line between Light and Shadow, between the Material and the Spiritual, and the Known and the Unknown?

If what I ask is a truly substantial question, how is it that its relevance dissipates so easily?

Is it for the reason that I do not care? Is it for the reason that I am overwhelmed with the burden that being on earth rests on my shoulders?

Herein lies the poetry that is the closest to the realization of my soul. The words come through like the water flows.

The stream of words that captures the evanescence of my thoughts. How some thoughts are meaningless and others when expressed have enough coherence to communicate to some one else.

I offer the words; the reader receives them.

I cannot find the secrets of the brain without being a scientist. I cannot determine how the mind works without practicing some other vocation other than the one of writer or visual artist.

But what is knowable is that I can read this and make sense out of it. I can be happy with the simplicity of the meaning of the words, which in some ways is sheer nothingness.

Being compelled to write the words is the key to their power.

It is as if I were drawing a line to add to the other lines which make up an entire drawing.

No word that I write has not never been written before. Not in the same context. But in conveying a similar idea. That I need the words to give meaning to my existence, whether that existence is indicated in detail or as an overview. Nonetheless. Here and now, I am writing prose, construable as poetry, sentence after sentence, phrase after phrase, word after word, letter after letter. In silence.

The music is in the background.

So is the snow falling outside of my studio window.

So is the love in my heart.

Video:

My Top Ten

2010-12-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

If you have not seen my Top Ten anywhere else, here it is...Enjoy.

New Releases:

William Parker Quartet, Uncle Joe’s Spirit House (AUM Fidelity)

Matthew Shipp, 4D (Thirsty Ear)

David S. Ware, Saturnian (AUM Fidelity)

Vox Arcana, Aerial Age (Allos Documents)

Dave Rempis and Frank Rosaly, Cyrillic (482 Music)

Joe McPhee, Dominic Duval, Jay Rosen and Mikolaj Trzaska, Magic (Not Two)

Wadada Leo Smith, Ed Blackwell, Blue Mountain’s Sun Drummer (Kabell)

Hamid Drake and Bindu, Reggaeology (RogueArt)

Mike Pride’s From Bacteria to Boys, Betweenwhile (AUM Fidelity)

Odean Pope Ensemble, Odean’s List (In + Out)

Missing the Water

2010-12-10T16:47:00.001-08:00

The form of water that has invaded the season is now snow. I do not mind snow. Because it is an insulator. What I do mind is missing the sense of flow that the motion of water conveys. Granted snow is a product of the flow of the weather and each snowflake changes with every second, especially in the melting of the crystals. But those changes are invisible to me on a microcosmic scale...as the grey days pass into sunny, bright ones and the wind gusts die down and the air is still.

Change seems to be invisible except as periods of time pass. I turned sixty this year. So far I feel the same as I did when I was fifty-nine, a day earlier than my birthday. Yet, in August of 2009, I had major surgery, which led me to the couch literally, for months. I could walk, yes; but I could not do as actively as I had before the surgery. So what happened was that over time, what would happen to any person happened to me. I gained weight and in all the wrong places.

My diet has been as effective as it can be. I bought a stationary bike. I use it as often as possible. I am actually in a good mood most of the time. But I have this one pair of pants that I wear for work pants that are tight. On some days, they feel less tight than on other days. It is discouraging. It seems that over that period of months and now it has been over a year and a half, I lost feeling good in my body.

*********************************

Billy Crystal: It's not how you feel, it's how you look and you look MAHVELOUS, dahling!

Believe me, it is not easy using the best creative parts of me to transcend the physical. But, I have to. Even when the transcendence is delivered with a sense of humor.

**********************************

Gazing at the water is a peaceful means to focus. The water is powerful. It has weight, but no meaning. The sound of the pounding excites me; I am inspired by that over which I have no control.

The belief that I can live out the rest of my life happily and pursue my personal fulfillment must be all-pervasive and that belief must ooze out of my pores and be filtered by them at the same time. I have no control over what happens for the rest of the day, much less the rest of my life. Casting away dread is a major step in letting myself go in the directions I need to go in. Then I have to make mistakes. Mistakes are vehicles for taking hold of what is possible, otherwise, how would I find direction? And be fearless about turning the corner, turning the page, whatever metaphor is applied to mean: going for it! So I can sleep at night, for heaven's sakes.

When I meditate, I am with the universe. I take no form as does the water or even my body. I am not even particles. I see nothing and breathe. Thinking of the sound of the water is a gateway to emptying my mind, which is itself a pathway to another time and another place that I knew nothing of before I meditated.

I am not missing the water, only the external physicality of it. I dream of being one with it. Now and now again. After all, water is part of my constitution. My dreams should be easy to come by.

Voice of the People: A Discovery

2010-11-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, violinist Shem Guibbory introduced me to a recording which he produced through his project, Innovative Music Programs, Inc. Guibbory's intent is to bring attention to that which becomes hazy and under-recognized. Founder of the IMP in 2002, Guibbory used his organization to create a vehicle for music programming and to develop a network of venues and artists. "This network now [in 2007] empowers the Company in two ways: 1) to offer broad, powerful capacities to serve communities and organizations around the world, and 2) to help members more fully develop and express their own artistic and creative potential."

Consistent with the mission of IMP, Voice of The People, carries with it a theme common to members of every branch of the creative world such that deeply-rooted traditional culture can be revivified and translated into many forms in order to be appreciated within a present time context. That contemporary creative languages are easily accessible in a world that changes so rapidly embraces and supports the very idea that ancient cultures can be lost until someone stops for a moment and realizes how the pace of life is overtaking the maintenance of the human spirit.

The recording was released in the summer of 2010. Subtitled "Chamber Music for Violin, Soprano and Piano," it transcends the idea of casual entertainment. Underlying every piece is a subtext that concerns the oppression of originality and vital human forces. This music resuscitates the value of culture, its irreplaceable value, in the global context.

Represented on this album are two composers, the young and vibrant Gabriela Lena Frank (b.1972) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975).

Frank's heritage is multi-faceted. Her mother comes from Peruvian and Chinese descent and her father, Lithuanian-Jewish. Already established within her approach to her art is an inherent recognition of the significance of the integrity of culture, whether or not her work reflects her own history. Latin American culture has been the source of inspiration for her music. She has crafted her knowledge of its folklore, poetry, music, mythology and history into a signature Western classical musical language.

On Voice of the People, are two of Frank's works. The first is based on a series of photographs by Peruvian photographer Martin Chambi (1891-1973). Written for piano and violin, "Sueňos de Chambi" (trans. "Dreams of Chambi") are precise and specific.

If the musical notes could be translated into words, they would describe accurately the motion, the human characteristics, the sobriety, and the joy in the photos which enliven her senses. Guibbory's adamant and certain strokes of his bow sometimes lead the piano played by Sonia Rubinsky into spaces which often allude to out of the ordinary rhythmic constructs for classical form.The violin and piano might diverge and connect as if two partners were going their separate ways in the same direction.

In "Sueňos," Guibbory's expressivity reaches those intimate places that exude strength and tenderness simultaneously. Similarly, Rubinsky's solo piano in "Adoraçion para Angelitos" does not shy away from allowing a minor key mood to shape the phrasing into a lullabye-like melody, evoking the photographic scene of the decorated pyre on which dead child lies in repose, ensconced in white and surrounded by floral wreaths and talismans.

In another piece, Guibbory's violin also calls from afar through the interaction of downbows coupled with pizzicatos. A bow action that rips through the high register or tends to a exuberant rhythmic tremolo conjoins with the piano as it was meant to, as the piano's partner and friend, perhaps in a lively traditional dance that has been practiced repeatedly, no doubt, for centuries.

That Chambi's photos have been translated to a new medium fulfills not only the composer's intentions but also allows the tension between pictures and words to be alleviated for a few moments and felt in ways that allow the listener's imagination to let go and move into a visual field. The seven photos, corresponding to the seven recorded works, as well as an explanation of the composer’s choice are viewable at the IMP website.

The second of Frank's compositions, “Cuatros Canciones Andinas” (1999) For Soprano and Piano, finds its roots in the poetry of Quechan Indian José Maria Arguedas (1911-1969). Words from the composer about her perceptions of the poet are also found at the IMP website. With the piano accompaniment of Craig Ketter, soprano Susanna Eyton-Jones conveys the bleakness of Arguedas view of the "civil" beast that inflicted itself on native Peruvian culture to modernize it.

Eyton-Jones’ inflections in her Spanish tongue add a dramatic component to the music that would not exist if she were not singing. This is evident in “I Am Nursing A Fly,” a song which talks about the paradox of feeding of a fly, which also is a purveyor of death. Her rendering of the text of “Yunca,” a lost Peruvian language dating to the 1600’s, is gripping to the core, the piano tolling intermittently like a bell behind her penetrating soprano tonality or being pounded with bass chords to emphasize her spoken words. Frank’s music speaks sensitively of the tortured existence of the poet, whose desire to remain pure in his Andean lifestyle did not succeed.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is well-known for his obstinacy in committing to his music, despite the unyielding barriers he struggled against during the Stalinist regime. According Laurel E. Fey, as told in the introduction to her book, Shostakovich: A Life, "...To an extent unique among his artistic peers, Shostakovich managed to survive successive Stalinist cultural purges to rise again to unparalleled heights of national and international acclaim...To many of his contemporaries his music extended a vital cultural lifeline, a latent 'chronicle' in sounds of the harsh emotional realities of their times." “Sonata for Violin and Piano” (1968, Op. 134) , written originally for David Oistrakh (1908-1974), is performed on this record by Guibbory and pianist Elizaveta Kopelman. “Sonata for Violin and Piano” is the only piece of its kind by the composer.

This duo’s phrasing of the piece emphasizes the music’s exquisite tempos, not unlike how words might be spoken or descriptive of how the meaning of words might be felt. There are breaths in between words. The inflections, accentuations and punctuation change as the bow travels over the strings, not so much ornamentally, but as a result of Guibbory’s technical facility; he is exacting when it comes to dissonance and double stops; he hints at melodic structure or melts into it as if he were one with it; he marches through or caresses pizzicatos without a hitch. The piano holds the ground for the violin to act freely. Its lower tone, even when played in the treble clef, lifts the violin’s lines into a plane of its own. The piano and violin blend in their differences rather the similarities of what they do in the same measures. The Largo and Andante of the last movement of the Sonata clears the way for an ultimate expression of both instruments, its close at once poignant and hopeful, the violin at its highest peak, the piano at its lowest and then the two together in a questioning mode at a mysterious end.

The voices in this recording are not only the voices of the composers, of the instrumentalists, and of the soprano, but also the voices of the silent ones. Those owned by the people in Chambi’s photographs; of the poet, who committed suicide, having spent his life making metaphors of cultural eradications; of the 20^th century Russian composer, who echoed the personal pain of being silenced. Those are the voices that have laid the groundwork for what can be said now and the way in which it can be said. Those are the voices that no longer can be silent.

copyright 2010 Lyn Horton

Blue Mountain's Sun Drummer

2010-10-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2010, Wadada Leo Smith asked me if I would like to do the cover art for a release of music that he recorded at Brandeis University in 1986 with drummer Ed Blackwell.

I said that I would be honored.

I did several drawings and sent the last image to him, thinking I had visually summarized the music.

But, he picked the very first one, which I had done off the top of my head, without really thinking about the music. It is called "Horn and Drums;" it was the most free and uninhibited image of all the drawings I created and has everything to do with the music.

Time Has No Edges

2010-10-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

It takes courage to get out of bed in the morning and realize that everything is going to be new, just as yesterday, everything was also new, but today, is in the past.

We may think the same thoughts that we thought yesterday, but within a different frame work. I may go to the grocery store today with the list I made yesterday.

I may follow my morning routine, but eat and drink my coffee in an altered sequence from the one that I followed yesterday.

I may sleep in the same bed I sleep in every night, but have a sore back this morning.

I may want to write this blog entry now, whereas a few minutes ago, I had no idea that I was going to start writing.

I may do another drawing using the same kinds of lines that I used on a drawing last week, but the drawing has another way of being, another circumstance for viewing.

Within the last six months, each Sunday, I have been accompanying a close friend of mine, who is a photographer, to places I never knew existed. These places ooze with spectacular vistas, or overwhelmingly earthy smells, or exceedingly sensuous environments, or glass-like slippery rocks, or miles and miles of trails through thousands of trees. They are places to absorb the natural temporary circumstances, because tomorrow those circumstances will change. A lush waterfall will have become a series of delicate trickles or the leaves may have fallen off the trees or the temperature might have plummeted 60 degrees and snow will be where dusty footprints once were.

The passion which directs me to write these words to describe the aforementioned are meant capture the moment, not in a photographic way. Rather in a way that reveals the moments' transition into other moments, that reminds me to breathe and enjoy the air, that triggers endless ideas, opens my heart and mind to clarity and the pristine qualities of vitality and the fleeting notions which are only steps to other fleeting notions.

Writing occupies my time when I am exploring the truth of what goes...How is my everyday life, without psychology. The way in which situations present themselves. Without any premonitions, astrological explanations or calendars of events. More with acts of impulse that are ready to go within the subconscious.

Repeating myself is not boring. I am reviving whatever is repeated. I am giving it new energy. New color, new tone, new means to evolve.

How invigorating poetry is, not to be bound by editorial rules and guidelines.

Which poem is better than another?

Which take on a record sounds better than another?

Why do I tear up a drawing that has been hanging with a group of similar ones?

The group looks better... no diverging principles of content?

What are, in fact, the details that are a matter of concern? Too many squiggles; not much sense in the way the lines penetrate the plane; no means to balance the impact of the squiggles and the straight lines. The details must make a big difference. The drawing I dispensed with was dumb.

How is it that the music I am listening to grips me and infuses me with the will to move to the rhythms and dance with the resonance of the vibes? For what reason do I choose a certain kind of music to embrace me with a sense of time that comes only in this certain way?

How do I know that the breeze coming through the window is transporting a system of weather conditions that will cause me to cover myself with more blankets when I sleep tonight? I know because the temperature did drop about 30 degrees within the last hour and the window now needs to be shut.

A good way to derive satisfaction is to do something I have never done before. Like finally taking a camera with me, albeit a little dinky one, to all these glorious places my friend and I go to so that I can drink in the intensity of the way the leaves rustle in the wind, while my friend seeks his best camera shot within close proximity, within a distance where I can easily call to him, if I need to.

And tomorrow, which words will I choose to use for what purpose?

The answer escapes me.

I do not know.

The Impetus for Agglomeration

2010-10-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

Language has different meanings for everyone. Everyone speaks his/her own individual language even though the spoken parts are the same. But not everyone translates one kind of language into another. From speaking language to a musical or visual one.

Generally, the sequencing of words is antithetical to thought. This is the reason that grammar no doubt was designed so that some kind of uniformity be imposed on the way in which words come out so that, when assembled, they could be understood by those who can understand.

But, poetry, art and music are not about sequencing necessarily; they arise from the whole mind without any rules: they originate automatically.

I like combining words and pictures. Not in the sense, that a picture means a thousand words, but that pictures, stationary or moving, imprint concepts in ways that words cannot.

Maybe the combination of words and pictures is really my work. And that continually separating them is causing unnecessary struggle both in my writing words and my making pictures or drawings. Perhaps I am on to something here. Perhaps the natural basis for verbal and visual events is their combination, at least for me. Maybe I am fighting an internal battle for no reason.

But then, I have to consider that many of the words I write are about music rather than for the sake of being themselves. In the largest sense, I can deal with the combination of three languages. Many mixed media events. Yet, I sacrifice the purity of the three different, distinct languages.

So what am I after? I am after the space where the mind is at peace when involved with any one of the three languages on which I focus. When I am mindless in my mindfulness.

I am not a musician: I write about music. Apparently with a viewpoint that is oddly clarifying. Because the impulses the musician goes through every time he/she improvises or composes formally, bear striking similarity, I feel, to the ones I go through when I am pulling together strange visual marks on surfaces.

That water has come to pre-occupy me of late has everything to do with achieving mindfulness. To listen to the water's roar invests me with its power. Water can carve any path that it finds. A product of nature, not a result of the decision the water makes. No complaints, no worries, no emotions, no suffering. That the earth is partially water is a blessing. For us. Recognizing how fluid motion happens teaches me to let go.

To let the words move into space effortlessly, to let the marks in making art come from within without question, to interpret music as the moments allow and give the reader the poetry that the interpretation is.

Solo, in and out, a filter through miles of useless energies, to burn pure light and be essence.

Art as the First Course

2010-09-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

Making visual art is easy for me. Writing is more of a challenge. I started writing when I began to immerse my life into music, because I was catapulted into solitude after my ex-husband left me, lo, these many years ago. My focal points had shifted. I turned inward. There was no one to talk to except myself.

Writing is a challenge because it is not my first language for expressing myself as visual art language is. That I have chosen to write mostly about creative improvised makes the most sense to me; it happened fortuitously.

That I would approach an art form that was relatively new to me and that required a real effort to become comfortable with is no surprise. My visual art is concerned with simplification-- boiling an idea down to its essence. Improvised music elevates that essence in clear view and expands on it within temporal, music-making parameters that are known only after the music is performed.

Every time I hear a recording or a performance from a musician I know or not, the music is totally unexpected. The performance space is like a blank piece of paper. The musicians are the vehicles for filling the space, like the artist who is responsible to that empty surface. Their instruments are the tools, just like pencils, pens, brushes, markers are for the visual artist.

I am giving a talk on my work in a couple of days, October 1, 2010, to be exact. In this talk, I will trace 40 years worth of work. At first, culling through hundreds of slides, I became so depressed. It was as if I was experiencing the processes of making the art pieces and then choking on endless repetitions of their object-ness.

William Parker once said to me that he never listened back to what he had recorded unless it was for a specific technical or mechanical reason. I can understand why. Why would anyone want to revisit the scene of the improvisation? Whatever one does later will always be different. The only possible explanation for returning to one's work after it has long been accomplished is out of curiosity, to find out how much integrity the work really has.

I find often that when doing new work, some of the old is reflected in it. To my amazement, the "old" part may be, as far as I am concerned, at the beginning of consciousness, when I began to know what it meant to wield a pencil or in a larger context, have an idea, for Heaven's sakes.

The idea seems innocuous enough, but the idea causes struggle. My mind is built a certain way; it is happy living in a routine, a realm of sameness. Pushing out of the routine is basically like pulling teeth without Novocaine. The amount of objectivity required to move the idea in a new direction is paramount to the evolution of the work.

How that idea plays out in the world is unimportant in the ideal sense. I have to keep reminding myself that it is more satisfying to do the work than to have it on the cover of Artforum or Art In America, for instance. In some ways, I would be lying, because that is all I want. That is what I vociferously told this "manager" I had years ago. Well, he was thrown in jail because he double-dipped in fees (he skimmed from duped clients as well as the artists) and his representation of artists was a fraudulent act or so the Attorney General of the State of New York at the time believed.

I have made many mistakes. I am hoping that the era of my life where I make the wrong choices is over. Because I am coming into the second cycle of my time here on earth according to the Chinese calendar. The mistakes I have made still irk me no end. Going through the "what if.." question and answer sessions consumes time and is useless.

My talk is supposed to involve the correlation between improvisation in art and music. The one to one correspondence does not necessarily exist. But the direct reason for my being able to write about music is that I do the art. I go through an automatic act. I feel every line. Then, after awhile, the experience subsumes the singularity of each line. I am in a kind of heaven. The problem is staying there and not being distracted, which I am, by other tasks. Perhaps, I would not do well in a retreat or an artists colony because I need to do dishes, or the wash. But maybe I don't. Maybe a retreat would calm me down and ameliorate my propensity for distraction. Like one long meditative process, where I have reached down into my soul and am relaxed and determined enough to stay there.

copyright 2010 Lyn Horton

What I Do on the Internet

2010-09-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/contrib.php?id=2825;

http://jazztimes.com/community/profiles/17952-lyn-horton

Everything is integrated and sometimes, listing all these places might be redundant, but at least, we become one big happy family this way.

Stepping

2010-08-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

In creation, there are moments where the creator can see or hear that which has never been seen or heard before. These are types of epiphanies, I suppose. But at the same time, these moments mark measurements of growth that have occurred and, more importantly, the bases on which growth will spring.

Growth is a matter of change. No musician I talk with has ever not said that growing in the music requires listening to oneself and in a sense objectifying what is heard. I do not know how easy it is to turn music upside down, or sideways. I suppose it is done through knowing the musical language so well that inversions are easy.

One pianist I know turned around a piece of Chopin so that it was completely unidentifiable as Chopin's. The piece became a mystery and I appreciated it for how I heard it. Not knowing Chopin in every detail abetted my inability to recognize what the pianist had done in a tricksterish way. There is no doubt in my mind that such analysis and rebuilding of Chopin's work could have only influenced his own. Small measures of learning allow great steps to be taken in the next act of creation.

No one can invest in development without taking risks. I climbed two stories worth of rocks a while ago not knowing that I was going to do it; I only thought I was going to go up a few feet to reach a certain spot. I have never climbed rocks in my life, much less in my bare feet. Now I know that I can do it again.

Looking at a blank piece of paper is a scary proposition. I do not think people do that much anymore. Rather the object of gaze is a computer screen or some other unconventional surface. Visual artists will use anything, from pools of water to a pile of nails. For improvising musicians, the blank piece of paper is the time-space ahead of them and how they will use it with their instruments.

The question is what carries creative people to the next step when the gates open and a rush of doing occurs? It is so different and the same from person to person, no matter what the art. To note is that inside each person is some sort of storm of experience. As if the epicenter and simultaneous axis retains the core of existence of every creative being and the whirlwind that rotates from the center is filled with the varying life poetry whose influx is particular to each artist.

So as I write, I am speaking in a language of all time in which there are no words, no pictures, no sounds. I have known this language throughout my entire life on earth, throughout the suffering, the joy, the hardships, the personal internal triumphs. The smiles, the moods, the aloneness, the solitude, the false conclusions, the mental anguish, the revelations of the truths where superficiality is shed like the skin of a snake.

Although creation can be excused in a purposeful exercise in abstraction, abstraction is only a shadow of how it really happens. The creator lives to step away from those shadows. The shadows of the past, the shadows that outsiders imagine, the shadows of an inner being. Creation is a means of exploding out of how we are bound.

The result of the creative act can disappear as fast as it arrives. When it comes to music, the sound resonates to the point of extinction; when it comes to art, the art object may become stuck in materiality until it decomposes but the true idea of it will have moved into another place; because in the making of one piece of art, the next one is forming.

Creation is a means of aligning ourselves with everyone else no matter how resistant the artist may be to do that. It's gonna happen anyway. The individual on earth will de-atomize, as the process of art progresses, and radiate into the universal consciousness. The church of all, the apse of unity, the Rose window through which heavenly light penetrates.

Video: Matthew Shipp live at A38 in Budapest, Hungary, September 5th, 2008,

opening for Joe McPhee, Roy Campbell, William Parker and Warren Smith

Ceiling of the Angel Orensanz Foundation Building

Savoring

2010-08-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

Too often, one can plow through life believing, or not even believing, rather mindlessly thinking that being here, alive on earth, is a matter of fact, not for appreciation or awareness thereof.

That I have titled this blog The Paradigm for Beauty means that I want to write about the experiences that I appreciate in my life. I am also interested in the consciousness required to witness experience and see, hear, touch, smell and feel it.

Just because I write about creative improvised music and make visual art does not preclude the fact that my capacity for enjoying birdsongs is non-existent.

I think that being female contributes a lot to how I think and how I use my senses to invest experience with significance. That the birdbath on my terrace can be viewed from my dining room table offers the opportunity for participating in a natural world, albeit a limited one, one without jaguars and lions, whales, and seals.

In silence, sound is abundant. All winter long, when the windows are shut, the nature of the sound has everything to do with the interior and logically the internal. When winter approaches, I am ready for it. I am ready to focus on my internal spaces. I am ready to batten down the hatches, seal up the cave and seemingly hibernate: infrared photography would reveal this bundle of energy roaming the house, pausing for a while, then roaming again. What the photo would not show is the way my mind is operating, developing ideas for my art, listening to music for the purpose of writing about it. Once it is March, I yawn with anticipation of the changing light, of throwing the windows open and letting the exterior invade the interior.

The spring calls me outside. The smells of the earth beckon me to sink my fingers into the dirt to care for my garden. I want to feel the breezes and the rain on my face. I want to fall asleep without laying a heating pad on my chest. That time eventually comes every year. The temperature of the inside of the house equalizes with the temperature of the outside so I do not have to raise and shut the windows all the time, having become an anthropomorphic thermostat. And when the windows are open, so my longing to be one with the universe pervades my psyche. It is the sounds that take me to that cosmic plane. It is the revivification of the colors that re-sensitize my notions of change. I become healthier because my body is taking in the energy that is more evident, more noticeable than it seems to be in winter, although I know that is not true.

Change is continuous. One tends to compartmentalize instead of embracing the whole. It is the whole that is changing; we are part of the whole. Knowing that we are simply contributors to the change of the whole is a matter of consciousness. We are not controlling it; we are filters. Like every other living entity. Filters for experience.

Too often, we are caught in the web of our imagined function. We are led by our own ideas of who we are, instead of recognizing that the energy we expend physically is irretrievable and we are decaying with every breath we take. However, our spirit is enriching itself, the longer we live, the more we breathe, the more we listen, smell, touch, taste and look. We are blessed and we have to remind ourselves how, every second of every waking moment.

Photo

Creativity As Life Tonic

2010-07-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

Asking the question "where does human creativity begin ?" is silly.

It is like asking the questions "what is art?," "what is God?," "what is the origin of the universe?" Answers to these questions concern definitions, which require parameters, demand objectivity and possibly deep analytical scrutiny. Answers to these questions defeat the phenomena to which the questions refer. But, the latter statement can only be declared when all three questions have been answered by those who believe they can answer them and, in fact, do. I am guessing that the number of qualified artists, art historians, theologians, physicists, astronomers and phenomologists have offered innumerable answers to these elemental questions and will in the future.

If I am going to be creative, I am not going to take a course in "How To Be Creative." Doing creativity is an act of consciousness in the same realm of awareness that guides daily automatic activities.

In a conversation with a photographer, I was discussing the tenet that creativity just is and that no number of 'how to' books could ever substitute for the actual doing of the art. He argued that in gathering technical information, it was necessary to learn from 'how to...' books in order to make the photographs he took close to how he wanted them to look. I am guessing that, in his art, it is detail that is of the utmost importance and framing the subject offsets any compositional issues. Through his lens, composition is a moot point. Nothing is set up; he pays attention, adjusts, and clicks.

His intentions are fulfilled. How he follows his intuition in order to decide whether he trashes the photo or not, only he can determine. He learns from every photo he takes. He see what works and what does not work and assimilates one photographic session in search of the next.

So I said in reply: Your looking through the viewfinder and choosing what you see is the same thing as my drawing the first line on a piece of paper. That first line tells me what to do in the rest of the drawing just as the first picture you take tells you what changes you want to make for the next picture.

Between the first line or the first photograph and the second line and the second photograph, the creative mind has taken over. No description in the world of this phenomenon can ever equal it. This phenomenon is ecstatic, irreversible, and done. Just done. It is a step toward newness. Art that is newer and edgier than the old art, which could have existed ten seconds ago. The phenomenon is also moving its owner into a plane of heightened, indescribable, meditative awareness.

There are those who never discover this plane of awareness, no matter how long they have worked in their medium, no matter what. Perhaps working within some media does not permit awareness to be a part of the work. Perhaps the choice of medium is a means to diverge from any possibility of achieving awareness. Perhaps sheer obstinacy destroys the state of mind that is required to attain awareness. Superficial pursuit of the "great statement" incorporated with an adequate delusion that it is achievable will always lead to emptiness, nothingness, zilch.

Pieces of art are not Masters or PhD theses. Pieces of art are the shining stars that lead artists to wherever they are going. Artists are never satisfied with what they do. Having finished one photograph, one drawing, one painting, one anything, they are looking to the next one because they were witnessing the process of the work in the present and can taste the future.

Sure, you gotta have the tools. But all the tools in the chest mean nothing unless they are used properly, applied towards an end that is merely a beginning.

Creativity is the water that springs from the fountain of youth. Seizing the moments when it functions injects artists with energy, life, light, and the will to carry on. They do not have to say a thing.

Photos

Grasping The Essential

2010-06-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

On June 12, 2010, The International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, CT, began its eighteen-day long series of events. One of the first was a lecture by Jock Reynolds, the Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, on the work of Sol Lewitt, specifically focusing on the 25 year retrospective of Lewitt's Wall Drawings at MASSMoCA in North Adams, MA.

Aside from urging members of the audience to go to MASSMoCA to experience the three-floor installation of one hundred and five drawings spanning Lewitt's art-making life within 1969-2007, the year he died, Reynolds focused on the installation process. The process for every wall drawing is extremely basic, simple and systematized though arduous and detailed-oriented. For

each drawing, there are few elements. How these elements are combined creates a finite number of possibilities. Sometimes the drawings have plans instead of instructions. The placement of every drawing is determined by the drawings in close proximity and always in relation to the architecture.

One example that Reynolds concentrated on to illuminate the idea of Lewitt's own act of conceiving was Wall Drawing #260. This drawing is done with oil crayon on a painted wall; primary blue happened to be chosen for this installation. There are twenty different components, made up of straight lines, broken lines, arcs, not-

straight lines. One hundred sixty combinations of those components create the wall drawing. The components vary according to their position within a square, e.g. a straight ruled line is positioned horizontally on center, vertically on center, or diagonally from each corner, left to right, right to left.

This drawing is as basic as the Periodic Table of Elements. It is quintessential. It addresses the elemental in creation. That it is so pure allows seeing it in imaginative ways. As Reynolds talked about this drawing, he described it as "lines dancing across the wall surface." And they are. The square by square layout of the combinations disappear and the eye can travel up and down, back and forth, across and around without constriction. The eye engages in an improvisational viewing process. Strange, unpredictable arrangements of the wall surface are demarcated by the placement of the lines.

But more significantly, the drawing uses repetition as a means to express that everything really is different in time-space even though it may look the same; the drawing shows change within specific parameters. One cannot appreciate it unless all preconceived notions of the structure of art are put aside. Then, realizing that the best art houses very simple statements that release the mind from complexity takes a step in the direction of totally surrendering to its impact. The act of looking becomes a process of absorbing and becoming mesmerized. Entranced. One with the art.

Later on that evening, a production of Lucinda Childs' "Dance" took place at the Shubert Theater. It is a collaboration among Childs, Lewitt and Philip Glass that originally was created in 1979. The piece spans sixty minutes; three parts each last twenty. Reynolds' words about Wall Drawing #260 revivified the "Dance" performance extensively by connecting the act of drawing with the act of the dance as accompanied by the music. Three separate art forms merged, evoking a spirituality that transcended tangible dimensions.

Seeing this work now, forty years later not only reinforces its sheer elegance, but also presents a picture of the texture of this type of art at its peak, when it was not yet beginning to lose its freshness in relation to its invention. The concept of maximizing slight moderation had evolved out of minimalism in response to Abstract Expressionism and all the gunk associated with painting with the exception of Jackson Pollock, who threw the act of improvisational painting into the public eye. Pollock was more of a conceptual artist than people realize. Rothko, similarly so, but at the opposite imagery pole. Ironically what followed Conceptual Art was an equally gunky era in the 1980s which aspired to self-involvement, self-importance, the bigness of big, the most sensational of sensational, money and the marketplace. Only a few artists represented the latter. But their activity gave permission to anyone to do art and call whatever they did art and this was not based on Duchamp's contributions to art's evolution. It was about the glut of artists who were coming on the scene and making a living off bunches of eclectic, derivative emptiness. The soul of art evaporated.

There is more soul in the spareness of the work of Lewitt, Childs and Glass at this point in time than one would expect. That soul was shared by many artists who came after 1979. But somehow, I missed them. I was trained in the era of purity of expression. My soul is deep, my compassion endless. My art is infinite.

Is the Picture Big Enough?

2010-06-08T13:58:00.000-07:00

Life poses many choices. I gotta pick something every now and again. Hopefully, the choice I make is the best one for the moment.

But, how am I ever to know? I cannot live in parallel universes or at least I do not think I can. Is multi-tasking a form of operating in parallel universes? Now, I am listening to music, writing this blog entry, drinking water, eating tamari-roasted almonds and trying to take care of my aching back.

A friend once impressed upon me that since I was alone and the world lay before me, I should take advantage of every second of every day. I don't know exactly how he saw me doing that. But he drinks a helluva lot of coffee and I don't, so maybe his perceptions are generally speedy.

Since the time my friend freely gave me that advice, my emotional, spiritual and expressive lives, which are integrated more closely now than ever before, have guided me through my choices. The sky may be the limit, but choosing within that limit is the challenge. Imagining the limit is the challenge. Adapting to readily identifiable givens seems to be the first step to establishing "the limit."

By "limit," I mean answering the question who am I? within my art. How clearly can I describe what I have chosen to describe. At some junctures, my writing and my art have been so baroque that determining what is going on has been extraordinarily difficult. The endless verbosity has flowed like a river; if spoken, the words translated as meaningless stream of consciousness. Oddly enough, in the art of creative writing, that is called "generative prose." Buried within that generative prose was the writer's voice. It is still taking shape. In the art, I started out over thirty years ago with a vision that is pure, but in order to secure that vision, the work had to become so impetuous and impulsive that it was a relief to find some inkling of the source for the purity. Buried within the mess of marks and uncharacteristic imagery was a clear, unadulterated visual statement. It took forever to re-establish it.

The art and the writing have strangely developed a voice that was always there. I just had to shape it, hone it, and keep manifesting the principles I always believed in. Aye, those principles were the crux. Sustaining them meant that I was building the skeleton. I simply had to make it stronger and the bones constituting it had to be as dense as possible.

Improvised music sometimes may sound like no musician knows where he or she is going. William Parker once said, and certainly his statement is shared by all improvisers, that an improviser has to have chops. Just like the athlete has to have muscles. It is only then that the musician can succeed in going where he knows he must go. Chops allow freedom. Expressiveness becomes a matter of course, something you can do and do well. Responsiveness to oneself or to someone else is automatic. No labor involved.

Art and writing can be as temporal as music given intentions of the artist. But the refinement and the editing, respectively, can take more time...before the picture is framed or the writing is copyrighted, published or simply finished as an example of one of those satisfying creative efforts.

So as the motion from one creative act to another may involve more than one state of consciousness to reach a destination, I am still traveling towards the original celestial limit. My mind is like a chemical multi-directional conveyor belt. The limit will never be reached, because I have no idea where it is. All I can do is relish the trip and not postpone the joy. Wherever that is, however that can be achieved. And joy is the impetus behind the choices. I have to remember to enrich the major choices with the details that can accompany them. I can wear a white shirt, a black jacket and jeans, but what do I wear underneath? Lace or cotton underwear? And how about jewelry? And mascara and lipstick? I mean how far do I go to accessorize? Will I still be recognized?

More than A Moment

2010-06-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

Reading about music, in general, gives me the opportunity to soak in information, opinion, ideas about culture and develop a repository from which I can draw for my own writing. This is not unusual, I am sure, for many writers. If I stay within the well of a human history of time, it is without doubt that some shred of what is important to me will remain in my brain for use later on.

When I first started seriously reading about "jazz" and improvised music about ten years ago, some books I would slide through merely picking up the gist of the content. Which was ok, because even though I did not know the implications of what I was reading, I still knew where the information was located if I needed it for reference.

The dancer, Twyla Tharp, in her 2003 book, The Creative Habit, adamantly advocates for passionate involvement when reading. She claims that if a book has no markings in it, the reader has passively traveled through the book. Marking up a book means that the reader has noted revelations that are meaningful and has learned from the text. Tharp gave me permission to mark up books. Using dull pencils, I underline, write comments in the margins, draw stars beside important passages; I turn page corners to identify important passages that I have marked or fold an entire chapter's worth of pages in half to prompt me to read the chapter again.

After I finish a book, I put it on my bookshelves in the music section, which, needless to say, has grown since I dedicated a part of my life to the music about which I write. Interestingly enough, I have returned to few books to research information. But one of those books is As Serious As Your Life by Valerie Wilmer, which, I believe is the most important book on the beginnings of the recognition of improvised music that there is. I have returned to others but have found remarkably that I absorbed more than I thought and, when I write, whatever I absorbed just rolls onto the page when necessary.

At first, I had no context in which to place myself when reading or a basis for developing a viewpoint. Lo, these many years later, the niche for writing that I wandered around to find I have established for myself: creative improvised music. Although I can listen to traditional and mainstream jazz, I hear it for what it is and what it might mean. The filters that my mind applies in listening, do the job of allowing me to recognize immediately when music has some guts to it or something to understand and think about.

At the present time, I am reading The Blue Moment by Richard Williams. Although I am only partially through it, I can say that his approach to Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," is absolutely extraordinary and blows all previous attempts to assess the significance of this record out of the water. Williams casts a nod to Eric Nisenson and Ashley Kahn for their books presenting information about this landmark recording. But what these books did not do is surround their central theme with the shape of the world coming into the time of the recording in a way that is so sensitive to culture and the consistency of culture that reading the book is satisfying and I feel as though I am visiting a museum, rather than a newspaper stand. With all due respect, the intentions of Nisenson and Kahn may have not been to surround their subject in the same fashion as Williams does.

My reading experiences of histories and biographies are memorable when the authors give me the richness of a whole world. Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, has done that. Diedre Beir's biography of Samuel Beckett has done that. Robin D.G. Kelley's biography of Thelonious Monk has done that and so has George Lewis' history of the AACM, Roxanna Robinson's biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, James Mellow's Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company, editor S.P. Rosenbaum's The Bloomsbury Group, Jeremy Bernstein's biography of Einstein and the history of earlier 20th century physics.

These books, among many others, paint pictures of eras and invite me into the interpreted experiences of the creators of art, literature, theories, music. As someone who creates, I understand the words I read, not completely because I am not in the time period nor am I the person being written about. But I am in the books. I am part of the creative energy.

What A Blog Can Do

2010-06-03T09:11:00.001-07:00

Blogs function like mirrors, the personal kind that are hidden neatly in a purse or a back pocket. A long time ago, I wrote a blog on MySpace. For some odd reason, a few thousand people read that blog. The specific subjects varied along with the days on which I wrote them. Those blogs were about healing from years of loss of those persons I loved. And they were also a means to practice writing and get my chops, as it were. Develop my writing muscles. The stronger those muscles are, the easier it is to write concisely, sparing readers of the fat that so often covers over the real time spontaneous honesty.

As my life became more busy with my work, I stopped writing the MySpace blog. I printed out all the texts and deleted them. Now every entry is a link to articles I have written for Jazztimes.com or AllAboutJazz.com. I also have a Facebook page, a Facebook fan page, and a website.

This blog, I have yet to find a shape for...In other words, it will shape itself. Every day I post will be another day. Every posting will reflect what the mirror can reflect.

I am a minimalist. I appreciate decoration, only if it is attached to a clean skeleton.