Alternate Narratives in Free Jazz (re: Paul Motian)

[clifford_thornton]

Tthe fact that Dixon's music has far fewer explicit spiritual or ethnocentric overtones than, say, Shepp or even Ayler makes it asynchronous with either historical narratives of free jazz as "freedom music" or, using a very disagreeable and denigrating term, "Angry Black Music."

(my bolding) - yes, that is very true. Of course, Dixon was very fond of Ayler's music, and his solo trumpet work is some of the freest music I've ever heard (because it's so damn singular). His work is extremely emotional, frighteningly so, but in a way that hits you very differently than, say, Shepp would or Babi Music or something along those lines. I think one has also to think of Bill's work visually rather than purely sonically. He was an abstract painter and organized sound in a way that aligns itself with large-scale color field paintings. Favorite art quote ever, from Bill, when I said her work seemed to be enjoying a resurgence of critical attention: "when was Lee Bontecou ever not hip??"

Then again I'm of the mind that some of the most directly-linked music to Ayler's Spiritual Unity is the SME of Stevens & Watts (Face To Face, Birds of a Feather et al), and I think most people tend to disagree... so what do I know?

[uli]

"I can also tell you that Gordon Emmanuel, a white vibraphonist who was raised by a Black family in South Chicago, was barred from the AACM in the late '60s once the organization structured itself as a Black music/arts collective. Emmanuel identified as socioeconomically coming from the same place, but on the surface (racially) that wasn't what the organization wanted/needed at the time. It created a fairly big rift, as a matter of fact."

Not that it makes any difference but Gordon Emmanuel was raised by the Cranshaw family(adopted brother of Bob Cranshaw) in Evanston, north of Chicago,

[clifford_thornton]

Re: European free music, I wonder how the narrative would've been different if Dixon/Silva made that UK tour in 1964-5? Didn't come through because of the British one-for-one laws, apparently Tubby Hayes was supposed to play gigs in NYC but it all fell apart.

"I can also tell you that Gordon Emmanuel, a white vibraphonist who was raised by a Black family in South Chicago, was barred from the AACM in the late '60s once the organization structured itself as a Black music/arts collective. Emmanuel identified as socioeconomically coming from the same place, but on the surface (racially) that wasn't what the organization wanted/needed at the time. It created a fairly big rift, as a matter of fact."

Not that it makes any difference but Gordon Emmanuel was raised by the Cranshaw family(adopted brother of Bob Cranshaw) in Evanston, north of Chicago,

Yep, that's what I was referring to. Interesting tidbit, huh?

[MomsMobley]

Part of what sparked this dialogue for me was reading the liner notes to the Motian ECM Old and New Masters box, where Ethan Iverson says, "There have been many great free drummers, but I believe Motian might have been the greatest." This is absolutely the first and only time I've heard someone say this, but considering Motian's association with the hugely influential Jarrett American Quartet, the Frisell/Lovano trio, Liberation Music Orchestra, etc. etc., a case can be made for his status as premier player in free music--I have not seen this argument anywhere in any of the crucial texts on American free jazz.

just need to sit in to note that even as 'provocation,' that's an astonishingly inane statement by Iverson (big surprise). 'American Quartet' is dogshit, not even Dewey can redeem that crap, its "influence" wholly baneful & looky looky (here comes cookie), there's Motian-ex Bill Frisell doing the omniverse's worst imaginable "Americana" Beatles covers! what a legacy.

tho' I think this is a worthwhile discussion, the idea of "a" narrative is inane-- was, is, always will be. There was, in fact, no such thing & to whatever wht extent one has been propagated by simps on both sides of the aisle is a reflection of their own ignorance, unwillingness to do the historical research.

Edited September 16, 2014 by MomsMobley

[clifford_thornton]

inane/manufactured as it might be, the discourse on "free jazz" certainly seems to posit a narrative of the '60s, based for the most part around The Father, The Son & The Holy Ghost (Coltrane, Pharoah, Ayler), Ornette and Cecil. Exploring what else was out there, in Chicago, the West Coast, Europe, Japan and elsewhere is quite interesting and shows that the landscape was much more varied.

Then again, as much as I really still enjoy picking up As Serious As Your Life, it's hard to imagine a book on free music of that era being written without the initial focal points of Coltrane, Ayler, Sun Ra, the AACM and CT. I mean, I'd love to read one on Dixon, the Bleys, Archie Shepp, Horace Tapscott and Smiley Winters, but it seems like you've gotta have both the well-known and the obscure to really see how and where the chips fell.

[MomsMobley]

inane/manufactured as it might be, the discourse on "free jazz" certainly seems to posit a narrative of the '60s, based for the most part around The Father, The Son & The Holy Ghost (Coltrane, Pharoah, Ayler), Ornette and Cecil. Exploring what else was out there, in Chicago, the West Coast, Europe, Japan and elsewhere is quite interesting and shows that the landscape was much more varied.

Then again, as much as I really still enjoy picking up As Serious As Your Life, it's hard to imagine a book on free music of that era being written without the initial focal points of Coltrane, Ayler, Sun Ra, the AACM and CT. I mean, I'd love to read one on Dixon, the Bleys, Archie Shepp, Horace Tapscott and Smiley Winters, but it seems like you've gotta have both the well-known and the obscure to really see how and where the chips fell.

That's true CT though it's been so long since I looked at Val Wilmer, I don't recall to what extent she qualified her group portrait. (Would she even have known who Horace Tapscott is? That Sonny Criss album kills but...) Granted, the same-- or at least similar-- things have happened in classical historiography, especially the inane vilification of Schoenberg, though that at least admits-- & even promotes-- a counter narrative and-- let's face it-- the level of general discourse of significantly higher (though not without its knowledgeable cranks, cf. Richard Taruskin). Debussy and Schoenberg and Bartok, not either/or, etc.

This is one reason I've felt uncomfortable with the "fire music" schtick, not always to objection but it's hard to argue in its favor other than as the title of one specific Shepp album.

Matthew Shipp was on WKCR last week with Mitch Goldberg and the subject of the show was the Giuffre-Bley-Swallow trio, Matthew being a huge Bley admirer and always ready to zing Keith Jarrett also. Look ma, no drummer!

Not a huge Smiley Winters fan but she definiitely had her moments, "Odds Against Tomorrow," natch, &

Edited September 16, 2014 by MomsMobley

[clifford_thornton]

Yeah, I assume Shepp didn't pick the title for that record, though I'm not totally sure. Early Shepp was far from bluster - lots of interesting arrangements on that & other records, certainly he was a fan of George Russell's work (Dixon assisted Russell as a copyist to help make ends meet), which you can hear especially on the first side of F. M.

I'm sure you're right about Debussy, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg - less well-versed in early 20th. c. composers.

[ep1str0phy]

I’d like to preface this by saying that I, again, appreciate the civility of the conversation, as I hazard that these are issues that many scholars in the music have been reluctant to discuss at length. I acknowledge and support that notion that there is enough historical and critical distance from the revolutionary music of the 60’s that it’s worthwhile to both reassess our collective understanding of the music and begin to evaluate work that, for reasons of geography, style, and even performer background, might be regarded as more “marginal.”

Let me put it this way--had we not had Steven Isoardi’s The Dark Tree (detailing the UGMAA), George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself (AACM), Benjamin Looker’s Point from which creation begins (BAG), John Szwed’s Space Is The Place (Sun Ra), etc. etc., would we not be having this same discussion about the artists and organizations omitted? Having grown up in Los Angeles and come of age listening to the remnants of the UGMAA, I think it’s scandalous that we had to wait until 2006 before someone published a book about LA’s experimental black jazz.

And to speak to what Leeway has been saying, I admit that I have not been careful enough about either my turns of phrase or the parameters of discussion. I can see how the phrase “swept under the rug” might be interpreted as conspiratorial, and I 100% do not believe that this is the case with either the musicians involved or most of the critics who came of age after the revolution of the 60’s tapered off. Rather, and I think colin re-articulated my points quite nicely, this is more a case of a handful of musicians being marginalized for making music that does not fit cleanly into pre-existing historical narratives. It just so happens that, in this case, the narrative is highly racialized (due to the classic conceit that free jazz and black freedom movements are inextricably linked), and many--though not all--of the marginalized musicians are white.

Any discussion to this effect will have to acknowledge two key concepts, neither of which is particularly controversial (though I encourage anyone to correct or amend anything I say here):

(1) The majority of the key innovators in free jazz/the 60’s avant-garde/the new thing were black: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor having historical precedence, Albert Ayler and Sunny Murray representing the effective “big bang” of full-blown arhythmic free jazz, Sun Ra and John Gilmore operating on a parallel but interconnected track, Bill Dixon occurring historically early but making largely tangential music, and Archie Shepp representing the key icon of the “second wave” players. Arguments can be made for Don Cherry and a select few others, including some white musicians (Paul Bley chief among them), but by and large, most of the key exponents of this music began as sidemen of the aforementioned. The next set of key innovators emerged in the late 60’s with the AACM and free jazz in Europe.

(2) Some of this music was better, or at least more important, than some of the other music. It’s nearly impossible to make an argument that an excellent music under-recognized in its time, such as Jimmy Giuffre’s, is as historically important or influential as, say, Ornette Coleman’s music on Atlantic. The prevailing historiographies on this music, including stuff like As Serious As Your Life (Wilmer), The Freedom Principle (Litweiler--I’m being careful about this, because that dude is on this board), Ekkehard Jost’s Free Jazz, and even stuff like Kofsky’s Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music or Jones’s Black Music, are organized accordingly: to give prominence to the more historically resonant music, with much more inconsistent coverage of less influential artists. This is only sensible.

(1) feeds into (2)--that is, you will be very hard pressed to find any prominent text that takes a hard detour away from the list of musicians I included in (1), allowing for me being a dumbass and forgetting a really important, Coltrane-grade name.

This is what I mean by “narrative”--if you are starved for information about jazz or American improvised music from this vintage, you will more or less have the same story regurgitated by writers of varying type and nature. This embodied narrative tends to gloss over both historically present black musicians (e.g., Giuseppi Logan, Jacques Coursil) and white musicians.

What we are left with is an ethos that tends to conflate the the story of free jazz, by and large, with Black American freedom struggles. This is taken from the Ward/Burns Jazz book, because it is by design sort of a high school text book on the music, and is summary on purpose:

(from the section “We Insist,” pgs. 438-439 of the paperback)
“Some young musicians now saw it as their mission not only to revolutionize the music but to reclaim it for their community, to reassert what they believed to be its African roots, to reject every vestige of the European tradition that had been an integral part of it from the beginning... The poet LeRoi Jones made himself the movement’s unofficial spokesman. New Thing musicians, he said, were “poets of the Black Nation,” “God-seekers,” who were free. That is, freed of the popular song. Freed of American white cocktail tinkle... the strait-jacket of American expression sans blackness.”

This is all very genuine with regard to both Jones’s stance at the time and the way much of this music was interpreted in contemporaneous liner notes and journals. Now, many have discussed what is wrong with the Burns/Marsalis school of jazz revisionism, but what strikes me as particularly racist is the fact that the aforementioned passage is couched in a convenient discussion of late Coltrane (on the subsequent pages)--this is narrative construction by virtue of conflation, and it’s staggeringly similar to what critics like Frank Kofsky were doing in the 60’s: i.e., ascribing a revolutionary ethic to the music by association.

Read the bulk of Kofsky’s interview with Coltrane repreinted in Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, and see this in action. Trane is pretty taciturn and Kofsky is intensely leading. Every time Kofsky tries to take the interview in a direction that expressly addresses race, economic inequity, etc., Coltrane turns it around and says stuff like “I don’t know,” or simply agrees with what Kofsky says. One can read the interview to understand that Coltrane is a revolutionary figure whose music is more about peaceful change and spiritual awakening than militant confrontation--this is the interview that the “I want to be a force for real good” quote is taken from.

On the other hand, check out Kofsky’s interview with Marion Brown, taken from the liner notes to Three for Shepp:

Q: Can white people play jazz?
A: If you mean by “can,” have any whites ever played jazz reputably well, I would say: Yes. But if you mean by “can,” can they play in a manner that they have not manifested heretofore, I would say: I don’t know... But for black people, jazz is--it’s their baseball.

This is Marion Brown, one of the key second wave saxophonists and one of the few early free jazz altos to engage full stop with energy music, confronting an extremely on-the-nose line of questioning from an aggressively revolutionary jazz critic. You can look at this a couple of different ways, but it sounds like a non-committal response to me. Keep in mind that Marion Brown played and recorded with Burton Greene, Bobby Kapp, and a host of other white experimental musicians--Kapp is on Three for Shepp--and this is never addressed in the printed interview.

This is how I interpret this: what we have on the one hand is a genuine effort on the part of historical jazz critics in the 60’s--these are the guys who were in the shit, like Kofsky and Jones--to draw a straight line between free jazz as a music and Black Nationalism as a political philosophy, and on the other hand post hoc discourse that by the very nature of the music will talk mostly about black musicians and occasionally conflate music that was only subtly racially charged (e.g., Coltrane) with an overtly charged philosophy.

I ask absolutely anyone of interest to dig through the canonical interviews, liner notes, articles, etc., and compile all of the incendiary racialized statements made by Trane. They are scarce. Ornette sort of “invented” the term free jazz, and the amount of his music that might be considered explicitly political is minute--we’re talking about Crisis, “We Now Interrupt for a Commercial,” and maybe a handful song titles.

No, I would not argue that a conspiracy is at work here--it’s much more mundane than that: it’s generations of fans, critics, and musicians regurgitating lazy, simplistic critical discourse without frequently and fervently dissecting primary sources. I do not know what Trane was really thinking, but who the fuck else does? The mindsets of guys like Trane, Brown, Ornette, Cecil, and so on were diverse and complicated--the fact that we even discuss this stuff as a singular genre is itself, admittedly, absurd.

This is where I get back to the contributions of white guys--you cannot argue, say, that Bill Folwell was as important to Ayler’s music as either Henry Grimes or Gary Peacock, but he occupies as much of the historical narrative (he was Ayler’s bassist for a while) as people like Grimes or even Lowell Davidson, both of whom have undergone a degree of critical re-discovery as of late.

I’m not advocating for an (to use another fraught term) “even playing field”--this is dumb as shit, because, again, Folwell is not the model for Ayler bass players--that honor would go to Gary Peacock or Henry Grimes. What I am asking is that we take time to even-handedly look at all parts of the historical strata and begin to re-evaluate the prevailing attitudes--why do we talk more often about Frank Lowe than Gato Barbieri when discussing free jazz? Is it because one or the other is more important to the story of the music, or because the latter started making commercial jazz and no longer fit into the rubric of a music that is all about confrontation and deconstruction?

Give me Black Beings, I’ll raise you In Search of the Mystery. Say Brown Rice, and I’ll say Orgasm. Gato moved on from this music, but he was still there, and his story is as important to the history of free jazz tenor as anyone in the 60’s short of the impossibly high tier of Trane, Ayler, Pharoah, and Shepp. You could make similar arguments for Motian.

Clifford addressed my intent behind bringing up both the Jazz Composers Guild and Bill Dixon, and it’s the same story: look at the primary sources, look at how people reacted, look at the embodied narrative that we have after compiling all the secondary and tertiary sources. Fuck no, I would never mean to say that Bill Dixon was less black than anyone else, and that’s precisely my point--what I’m saying is that he was interpreted that way, and we are still confronting the implications of that.

I’ll finish this overlong screed with a secondary point: we are not living in a post-racial musical society, and we probably never will. For example: would anyone argue that it’s easier to live as a jazz musician in a financial environment that gives precedence to project-oriented work? Where does this leave jazz musicians, many of whom construct their working projects from pre-existing repertoire that is largely improvised? Factor in the fact that jazz is sometimes understood (speaking of narratives) as “Black Classical Music,” and you see the problem. On a personal level, I don’t think that figuring Motian’s place in the narrative of free jazz is anywhere as important as getting Ornette Coleman his still overdue due, and everything I’ve written here takes a back seat to that discussion--but that’s a whole other story.

Edited September 17, 2014 by ep1str0phy

[clifford_thornton]

Amen, brother.

[MomsMobley]

This is all very genuine with regard to both Jones’s stance at the time and the way much of this music was interpreted in contemporaneous liner notes and journals. Now, many have discussed what is wrong with the Burns/Marsalis school of jazz revisionism, but what strikes me as particularly racist is the fact that the aforementioned passage is couched in a convenient discussion of late Coltrane (on the subsequent pages)--this is narrative construction by virtue of conflation, and it’s staggeringly similar to what critics like Frank Kofsky were doing in the 60’s: i.e., ascribing a revolutionary ethic to the music by association.

Kofksy is a middlebrow jackass; just because he was a so-called "Marxist" middlebrow changes this naught, as his non-jass works demonstrate. He may or may not be an "interesting" foil-- fuck, he might as well be useful for something but ofay was in way over his head in every possible way.

Jones was an intermittently great poet/prose writer, "interesting" polemicist & more than half a horse's ass as "critic." If we just called him an "experiencer"-- though not Anthony Braxton's ideal "friendly experiencer"!-- everyone would have been much better off.

Indeed, thought of Anthony is perhaps instructive for this whole discussion, as HIS capacious aesthetic is far closer to demonstrable & reasonable intuitied historical truths than the bulk of most books. Not that AB is the world or The Word but...

Also, tho' I love Tapscott, his relative lack of discography in addition to geography is partly to blame. Hell, tho' he's white, look at the relative lack of acclaim/interest Vinny Golia gets... I can understand, sorta, if you're a woodwinds hater but otherwise...

Re: Peacock or Grimes, are you familiar w/ the great Steve Brown? (It's doesn't matter if it's unlikely Peacock or Grimes did; indeed, if Peacock knew anything about Bill Challis he couldn't suffer Jarrett's 'standards' crap regardless of the $$$.)

And as for "energy music," it's pretty hard to take the category as such seriously EXCEPT as part continuum & judged according to those standards.

Remind why I should give a f about Paul Motian again?

(Would be very interesting to talk to Cecil about dance, however, esp. re: Balanchine and Michael Kidd.)

Edited September 17, 2014 by MomsMobley

[JSngry]

When it comes to "narratives", follow the money and go from there. Not that that's bad (it's not) or good (it's not), it just is. I mean, do people get by in this life on just because?

And lest this be perceived as a flip/shallow remark, consider that the entire concept of economic empowerment/self-sufficiency is still the driving force of our time, of most if not all times, and hello Malcolm, hello real Black Nationalism, not just about "racial pride" and such, hello HELL no, about far much more than that. People needing to follow that money back into their own house, hello that, ok?

It's a big world and at the same time, still, a very, very local one unless and until somebody gets the word out, and why do they do that if they're already content with where they are?

Again, neither bad nor good. And consider the possibility that some people don't really have a need to be heard yet other people have a need to get them heard.

Me myself, I don't put much stock in "narrratives" per se, because all they are are stories told by folks who are trying to get you to see things their way at the expense of you seeing it somebody else's way, or to at least get a part of your market share as to how to see things. I'm kinda like, fuck that, ok, because everything that happened DID happen, ok, and everything that IS happening is happening, ok, so no matter how much of it I get hip to, it's never all of it, right? Because if it was, oh, then I would not be "here". Simple as that.

Consider this as well - I've recently been hearing about "quantum computers", so if quantum reality is going to be digitized and codified the same way Newtonian reality has been (and yeah, I know it's not that simple, but I am), then all that means is that there's some other sort of new dimensionality physics that we've yet to discern move ahead/in to. Only it's not really "new", right? It's just not yet been perceived by "us". So ok, Paul Motian si, Paul Motian no, whatever, all you really need to know is Paul Motian, and everybody else for that matter, because that is what really happened, and that is what really is happening, and that will always be what is happening - everybody, everything, always. A "narrative" only serves to steer you, and steers end up in the slaughterhouse. Not that you won't end up there anyways, but at least make the effort, am I correct?

So ok, Chinary Ung, important? Not important? How about I don't care, this is a very new name to me and I like what I am hearing, so...one more everybody in the everything at the all the time. It never stops, really. It really never does.

[uli]

When it comes to "narratives", follow the money and go from there.

Is it true that the mafia paid Ornette not to play for two years?

[clifford_thornton]

Kofsky definitely was a jackass but that book, ridiculous as it could sometimes be, is a fascinating read. Ditto a number of the articles in Jazz & Pop at the time. They do give context, jackassed or otherwise. Especially for those of us who weren't around to experience things first hand. And I do still enjoy LeRoi Jones' / Baraka's critical writings from the period, political in-crowd pandering though it may be (only Guild people he had any interest in were Shepp, Tchicai and Ra).

Really wish Anthony would have signed off on that interview we did - it's great, but he's a busy guy and couldn't find time to fact check it.

Golia has made 10x the records Tapscott did, probably more. Excellent musician although the recordings don't always get "there." True, nobody really pays any attention to those early Nine Winds LPs, which are quite fine. Also dig his artwork on the cover of Music from Two Basses (he was a visual artist first, then a reed player).

Edited September 17, 2014 by clifford_thornton