|
Reader Info
|
Entries associated with the tag "Free Jazz":August 12th - 4:09 p.m.
Last week while taking in the Jazz em Agosto festival in Lisbon, I caught a superb set by the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet, which has made a quantum leap from the already impressive sound on its debut album, last year's The Middle Picture (Firehouse 12). The group, which will make its Chicago debut in November as part of the Umbrella Music Festival, mixes fluid lyricism with post-Braxtonian complexity (trumpeter Bynum, reedist Matt Bauder, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and violist Jessica Pavone have all studied and played with Anthony Braxton). The material the group played in Lisbon--as well as its sharp execution--proved that it's evolved significantly since the Middle Picture sessions in 2005 and 2006. Bynum, who's based in New York, has a slew of new work planned for the upcoming year, including a sextet album in November. And he recently released Double Trio (Engine), recorded at New York's Festival of New Trumpet Music in 2006 with fellow trumpeter Stephen Haynes, guitarists Halvorson and Allan Jaffe, and drummers Warren Smith and Tomas Fujiwara. The horn men both contribute original tunes, and they interact like two brains running in parallel but plugged into a common power source. Bynum is gearing up for yet another recording this week here in Chicago. It'll be the first album by a quartet that bassist Nate McBride led years ago in Boston, which also includes versatile saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase and drummer Curt Newton (an early collaborator of Ken Vandermark's). The quartet will make its Chicago debut with two sets on Wednesday at the Hideout. Today's playlist: July 16th - 6:52 p.m.
Octogenarian trumpeter Bill Dixon has never had a high profile--for many years he taught at Bennington College rather than focusing on gigs and albums, and his radical extended techniques and open-ended compositions have made him an outsider as far as the jazz mainstream is concerned. But for the past couple years he's been on a tear, at least for him. In 2007 he made his long-overdue Chicago debut with two concerts, including a collaboration with Rob Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra at the Chicago Jazz Festival. Earlier this year Thrill Jockey released the studio album Bill Dixon With Exploding Star Orchestra, cut around the same time as those concerts, and it makes a nice addition to a discography short on large-group projects. Now comes 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur (Aum Fidelity), another large-group release, recorded live last year at New York's Vision Festival. The ESO album situates Dixon's abstract smears, blurts, and whinnies within a propulsive, dynamically rhythmic framework, but the group on 17 Musicians veers into more abstract territory-- concise nuggets of improvisation generally emerge from either ominous clusters of long tone or pointillistic scatterings. The group is loaded with brass players--Graham Haynes, Stephen Haynes, and Taylor Ho Bynum on trumpet, Steve Swell and Dick Griffin on trombone, and Joe Daley on tuba--and the reedists and percussionists generally cede the front line to them, painting colors rather than tracing lines (though Warren Smith lays down some thumpin' tympani parts). The 13-part suite creates an ebb-and-flow effect, with the reeds and horns surging by turns amid throbbing drum rolls and calmly snaking solo lines. The work's centerpiece, the 23-minute "Sinopia," is where Dixon best makes his presence felt as something other than conductor. It leaves room for some intimate dialogues between instrumentalists, but there's no missing the leader's entrance. With puckered blurts, upper-register trills, and rubbery bleats--most of them enhanced with ghostly delay--he stalks across the landscape, his utterances punctuating the arrangement like shadow puppets dancing across an illuminated screen. And even when the piece is more geared toward an ensemble sound--which, to be fair, is most of the time--Dixon shines brightly with his mastery of texture. Today's playlist: February 7th - 12:31 p.m.
New York tenor saxophonist Stephen Gauci kicks off a long weekend in Chicago with a promising quartet gig tonight at Elastic with bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, reedist Dave Rempis, and drummer Tim Daisy. Haaker Flaten appears on Gauci's newest album, Nididhyasana (Clean Feed), an all-improvised session billed to his quartet Basso Continuo, which is named after a form of accompaniment used in Baroque music. There's no Baroque connection here, but the "basso" bit obviously refers to the presence of two bassists--Mike Bisio is the second--who do indeed give the music a low-end continuity. In fact, the lucid, intuitive interactions between the bull fiddlers sometimes threaten to overshadow the braided lines and temperate counterpoint of Gauci and trumpeter Nate Wooley--though there are extended sections where only one horn plays, when everyone's going the group almost sounds like a double duo. When Gauci was nine years old he discovered he had hearing problems, and the condition has only worsened over the years--he currently wears hearing aids in both ears. But now, in his early 40s, he plays with such fluidity and buoyancy that you'd never guess. The quartet from his Elastic gig plays again tomorrow night at the Velvet Lounge and as a trio (without Rempis) on Saturday at Heaven Gallery. Finally, Gauci plays the Hungry Brain on Sunday night with vibist Jason Adasiewicz, drummer Frank Rosaly, and bassist Anton Hatwich. And yes, I've noticed the string of photos of saxophonists here in the past week. Today's playlist: John Doe, A Year in the Wildnerness (Yep Roc) December 4th - 7:01 p.m.
The 10th anniversary festivities for the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet continue this week with performances by a number of killer spin-off projects. On Wednesday at the Hideout the superb reeds trio called Sonore (pictured) reconvenes. Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, and Mats Gustafsson formed this configuration about four years ago and recorded an excellent album called No One Ever Works Alone (Okka Disk, 2004) that challenged the status quo of the all-saxophone group, keeping things fully improvised but generating pieces marked by the kind of compositional logic that arises when musicians share sensibilities and thoroughly understand one another’s art. Both on the record and at a stunning live gig back in 2004 at the Empty Bottle, the trio ran a sort of musical relay race, using spontaneous riffs as launch pads that the other players either embraced or rejected. But rather than the hot-potato back-and-forth, these guys focus on sustained development and intense interaction. Two nights later at the same venue Brötzmann closes out the celebration by playing in two powerful groupings that have both recently been documented on knockout albums. The Fat Is Gone (Smalltown Superjazz) was recorded live last summer at Norway’s Molde Jazz Festival, and the music delivers the kind of raw, explosive energy you’d expect from Brötzmann, Gustafsson, and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, although there are some exceedingly pretty, restrained passages amid the din. Again, the rapport of the musicians is evident in spades—a sort of telepathic intuition you don't normally expect behind sounds this urgent and visceral. Finally, Guts (also on Okka Disk) captures a terrific 2005 gig by Brötzmann, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, bassist Kent Kessler, and drummer Michael Zerang at the Bottle. The longtime cohorts of the rhythm section were seriously locked in during the performance, laying down deep, bluesy, highly elastic grooves or scraping out refracted harmonies streaked with grainy textures, providing excellent foundations for the aggressive yet often lyrically tender horn play on top. Today’s playlist: November 14th - 2:45 p.m.
Chicagoans have had numerous chances to hear Swedish guitarist David Stackenäs over the last decade or so. He was part of the important Pipeline Project that truly opened up the creative exchange between Chicago and Stockholm, and he’s performed here as a member of Tri-Dim (with Håkon Kornstad and Ingar Zach), Ken Vandermark’s Territory Band, and on his own. Tonight he plays solo and in a trio with Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello) and Michael Colligan (dry ice) at the Hideout. Stackenäs has consistently impressed me with both his range and inventiveness, adapting his skills and sound to each given context while retaining a signature sound—an approach that emphasizes color and texture, limning the work of others with ear-opening harmonies and noisy shadows. On Agape (Creative Sources), his duet album with saxophonist Martin Küchen (a member of the energetic free jazz quartet Exploding Customer), he demonstrates his expertise with gestural, abstract tendencies. While his partner concentrates on unpitched breathing sounds, Stackenäs masterfully alternates carefully selected bits of high frequency feedback and string scraping, striking his axe with various unnamed devices (I’m not sure, but on some passages he appears to be using handheld electronic devices that nick the strings in rapid succession). The pair engages in a lovely, richly nuanced dialogue. His contributions are more maximal on the excellent debut album by the quartet Boots Brown—reedist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Johan Berthling, and trumpeter Magnus Broo—released on the recently formed Slottet Records. The music starts out as if it were an off-kilter homage to west-coast verities, with Broo (of Atomic fame) and Gustafsson dancing around one another like Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan and Stackenäs laying down Jim Hall-worthy chords. But things change quickly. The combo covers a lot of ground, and though a mixture of unusual restraint and chilled sonorities is at work throughout, this is ultimately free improvisation of the highest caliber. Although Boots Brown don’t hesitate to draw upon idiomatic antecedents like that west coast chamber sound, the real focus is on spontaneous give-and-take. Stackenäs finds an easy reconciliation of Hall, Derek Bailey, and Keith Rowe, and sounds exactly like himself all the while. October 24th - 5:41 p.m.
John Corbett, co-owner of the Wicker Park art gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey, has a substantial history with the German free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. Back when Corbett was still booking jazz at the Empty Bottle he brought the horn player to town often, allowing Brötzmann to establish the kind of fervent following that’s exceedingly rare in his field, especially for someone so uncompromising. Corbett label has reissued many of the Brötzmann's key recordings for FMP Records through his Unheard Music Series imprint, and he’s also writing a Brötzmann biography. Brötzmann also happens to be a fine visual artist. Back in March of 2003, before he opened his gallery, Corbett organized an exhibition of Brötzmann's early work at 1926 Exhibition Studies Space, a small gallery owned by the School of the Art Institute, where Corbett teaches. Recently he’s been busy curating another Brötzmann show, this one devoted to new work. The show features “large format works on canvas and small scale assemblages, as well as an assortment of older pieces.” Corbett vs. Dempsey has also produced a 96-page catalog, 200 copies of which include a CD of previously unreleased music by Brötzmann and bassist Harry Miller. The exhibit opens on Friday, October 26, with a reception from 5-9 PM; it runs through November 30. Then on Saturday at 2 PM Brötzmann will give a brief solo concert on alto saxophone and clarinet; it's free. Today’s playlist: August 20th - 2:27 p.m.
Last night I dropped the new reissue of Machine Gun by the Peter Brötzmann Octet into my CD player. It had been a few years since I listened to the 1968 album, an indisputable milestone in the history of both free jazz and European jazz, but it still hit me with the same abrasive, ear-cleaning force as the first time I heard it. The German label FMP released the album with some alternate takes on CD back in the early 90s, but it failed to distinguish which were the masters and which weren’t. The new edition, dubbed The Complete Machine Gun Sessions and released on John Corbett’s Unheard Music Series label, not only makes that distinction clear, but ups the ante by adding a live version of the title track recorded two months earlier at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival, with additional saxophonist Gerd Dudek. (This performance was previously issued on the UMS release by Brötzmann called Fuck De Boere). The packaging also includes some great photos taken during the time and new essays by Corbett and Brötzmann. The personnel alone would guarantee this album’s importance—Brötzmann was joined by fellow reedists Evan Parker and Willem Breuker, drummers Han Bennink and Sven-Ake Johansson, bassists Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall, and pianist Fred Van Hove, some of the most towering figures in European jazz captured early in their careers. But the music itself is downright titanic, one of the most ferocious and simultaneously joyful examples of spontaneous expression ever recorded, pushing the screaming saxophone style of Albert Ayler well past the brink of volatility. Although “Machine Gun” was the nickname Don Cherry gave to Brötzmann, it also describes the staccato sax outburst that opens the piece, giving way to a scalding chaos, one brilliantly undercut by some post-R & B sax riffing here and there that was inspired by Lionel Hampton’s classic “Flying Home.” The other two pieces are just as relentless, channeling the same primal energy while mixing in discrete bits like the almost kwela-like section that intercedes Van Hove’s “Responsibility/For Jan Van De Ven.” There have been loads of manic free jazz records made over the last four decades, but nothing has yet topped Machine Gun. Tomorrow is the reissue's official release date. One more thing: I apologize for being AWOL last week—a burst hot water heater is my main excuse—but I’m back in full effect. Today’s playlist: Louie Ramirez, Ali Baba (Fania) July 2nd - 2:12 p.m.
The superb Boston pianist Pandelis Karayorgis is spending the week in Chicago, renewing old musical acquaintances and making new ones. Tomorrow night he’ll take his Wurlitzer head-to-head with fellow pianist (and ARP synthesizer whiz) Jim Baker at Hotti Biscotti, along with drummer Steve Hunt, bassist and guitarist Brian Sandstrom, and electric bassist Nate McBride. But for me the most exciting gig happens on Thursday at Elastic, when the trio of Karayorgis, McBride, and clarinetist Guillermo Gregorio will reconvene to celebrate the recent release of Chicago Approach (Nuscope), a dazzling album recorded here in the fall of 2005. (Karayorgis also recently released a duo album with Ken Vandermark called Foreground Music on Okka Disk, but they won’t be playing together on this trip.) Karayorgis collaborated regularly with McBride back when he still lived in Boston and appeared on Gregorio’s first album, Approximately (Hat Art, 1996), and Red Cube(d) (Hatology, 1999). He and Gregorio both share a strong affinity for the music of reedist Jimmy Giuffre and pianist Lennie Tristano, and in some ways the instrumental format of Chicago Approach suggests an homage to Giuffre’s great trio with pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow. It includes a lovely reading of Giuffre’s “Variation” as well as a spin through “Spring Signs,” a piece by pianist Don Friedman, an associate of Tristano-disciple Lee Konitz. But close listening makes it clear that this trio has its own set of concerns. Nine of the 15 selections were freely improvised, but the spontaneous structures these musicians devise give the music an austere, composed feel. All three men are sharp listeners, reacting in a flash to one another’s gestures and darting melodic lines. On the surface the performances are subdued, but that belies the weight of the performances and the skilled on-the-fly harmonies. Following the trio set at Elastic, Karayorgis and McBride will be joined by saxophonist Keefe Jackson and trombonist Jeb Bishop for a set that will include tunes by Karayorgis and Thelonious Monk.
June 26th - 6:54 p.m.
Four of the city’s finest free-jazz bassists will converge on the Hideout tomorrow night as part of the club’s Immediate Sound series. In conventional settings the bass often gets short-shrift, tracing out chord patterns and providing the form for an ensemble, but these players are all strong improvisers who masterfully braid rhythm with texture and melody. Josh Abrams, Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, Nate McBride, and Kent Kessler will play in a series of duos, trios, and quartets.
Earlier in the evening the excellent trombonist Jeb Bishop will give a rare solo performance at Corbett vs. Dempsey as part of the closing for the gallery’s current exhibition by Ted Halkin and Katie Kahn. March 7th - 1:03 p.m.
The onetime Chicago label Okka Disk has just released a fascinating and powerful document of the city’s free-jazz history—from the generally fallow late 80s. Fragments is an LP-only release of an intense duo concert with German reedist Peter Brötzmann and the explosive electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock, recorded at the Elbo Room in December of 1989. Back then many of the best gigs by out-of-town out jazz cats were organized by a nonprofit called Southend Music Works, which during the latter half of the 80s provided an oasis of progressive music at an ever-shifting array of venues: some River West loft spaces, Elbo Room, and even their own dedicated space on Michigan Avenue for a short time. If it weren’t for this organization, things would’ve been a lot drearier in Chicago. Half a decade later, things had improved dramatically. This particular concert happened near the end of Southend, when they programmed a short series at the Elbo Room—I also remember hearing the String Trio of New York and Iva Bittova there. Brötzmann and Sharrock had been playing together as members of the heavy-hitting free jazz/heavy metal juggernaut Last Exit, and I’m pretty sure this date was the first time Sharrock had played in Chicago in many years—he later did several gigs at Lounge Ax—and the anticipation was palpable. During the early 70s Sharrock had developed a kind of electric-guitar analog for the mind-warping free jazz of Albert Ayler, although his work on a record like Monkey-Pockie-Boo with his wife, Linda, sounded more like escapees from a mental institute let loose in a recording studio than Ayler’s gospelized screech. I remember this concert began tentatively, but soon picked up loads of steam. Early on Sharrock stuck to more restrained, lyric passages, but prodded by Brotzmann he soon raised the energy level. Although the grinding blues passage on “No 2” is a bit cheesy, other sections find the guitarist summoning roiling blasts that go head-to-head with his partner's fire breathing. During an alternately tender and searing section of solo clarinet playing there’s a brief pause and some laughter; I still remember Sharrock exclaiming, “Damn, Pete!” after a particularly forceful passage, and I’m willing to bet this was it. Malachi Ritscher recorded this performance, and it’s clearly one of his earlier efforts; the sound is clear enough to capture most of the details, but he’s in the midst of the crowd (you can hear a waitress ask a patron if he needs another drink). One odd thing is that Brötzmann, who designed the album art, credits only himself with composing the music, which is strange since these duets were clearly improvised. Sharrock should share the credit. The release comes in a numbered, limited edition of 1,000, and it’s pressed on heavy-duty 180 gram vinyl. February 20th - 10:51 a.m.
Former Chicagoan Weasel Walter hasn’t exactly mellowed out since he moved to Oakland a few years ago, but the notorious provocateur has loosened up. Perhaps it was the change of scenery or good old-fashioned age, but the Weez has become less doctrinaire and rigid than he was during his Chicago days, whether that means retiring his horned buzz cut and war paint or returning to the high velocity free jazz he started out playing in the earliest days of his long-lived Flying Luttenbachers, when folks like Hal Russell, Ken Vandermark, and Jeb Bishop were members. He recently released a new CD by the Weasel Walter Quartet called Revolt Music on his Ug/Explode label and it's unabashedly free jazz, albeit hyper-charged and relentless. (Some things don’t change.) Walter kind of sounds like a Sunny Murray lp played at 45 RPM, all stuttering kick drum and careening cymbal splash, occasionally so free of space it sounds like a drone. A number of saxophonists appear on the album’s eight tracks--including former Chicagoan Aram Shelton--while bassists Damon Smith and Randy Hunt fill out the group, laying down plucked and bowed lines that writhe within the maelstrom, flailing like downed power cables. Famed guitar master Henry Kaiser makes a cameo on one track with a ferociously corrosive solo. There's interplay going on, but at such high speeds it’s often hard to make it out. Walter is still playing “brutal prog” with the current incarnation of the Luttenbachers. The recent Cataclysm added Orthrelm’s Mick Barr to the line-up and included, among other stuff, a version of Messiaen’s “L’Ascension." But on his current US tour--which, oddly, skips Chicago--he’s playing free jazz in numerous incarnations. For years Walter complained about being ostracized by the Chicago free jazz community, but he’s certainly managed to find heavy-duty companions recently. Among the people he’s playing with on the tour is former Sun Ra saxophonist Marshall Allen, Kaiser, ROVA saxophonist Jon Raskin, and bassist Lisle Ellis. Could a Chicago reconciliation/love fest be far off? February 5th - 1:49 p.m.
Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great that the Sun-Times, which usually fails to acknowledge that jazz even exists in Chicago, finally got around to running a piece that tries to shed some light on the bustling scene that hovers around the Umbrella Music group. (The piece dubs these open-minded players Wild Onions, “since they're the free-jazz weeds in Chicago's mainstream-jazz garden.” Never mind that these so-called weeds are often the ones earning the most international attention.) But I think the story’s misinformation does more harm than good.
October 2nd - 7:19 a.m.
Philadelphia vibraphonist Khan Jamal isn’t very well known outside of the jazz world, but within those ranks he’s long been one of the most reliable voices on the instrument, an elegant player with a deep sense of the blues and a probing creativity. In the 60s he was involved with the jazz avant-garde, coleading a group called Cosmic Forces with reedist Byard Lancaster and later working with drummers Sunny Murray and Ronald Shannon Jackson. But a recently reissued recording from 1972 shows that, in that particular moment, he was in a class by himself. Drumdance to the Motherland was recorded live in October of that year in a subterranean coffeehouse in west Philadelphia, on the campus of University of Pennsylvania. It was issued some time later in an edition of 300 copies on Lancaster’s Dogtown label—it wasn’t supposed to be a fetish item, but at the time 300 copies was all he could afford. The record was never really distributed outside of Philadelphia, and nearly three decades later it became a highly sought-after collector’s item. The disc's rarity is one thing, but the otherworldly sounds captured within its grooves are quite another. The group morphed out of the Sounds of Liberation, a jazz-tinged R & B band that opened for many soul stars of the day, and on Drumdance to the Motherland they play a weird mix of free jazz, psychedelia, dub, and Afro-futurist mayhem. The album was just reissued by Amherst's Eremite, which is a free-jazz label, but this recording transcends most stylistic borders—it’s way out there. It’s a wonderfully murky recording, and thanks to the live mixing and dub effects provided by the live engineer Mario Falana (brother of entertainer Lola Falana, sez the liner notes) it’s hard to believe that it was performed live and totally improvised. It’s not that the four pieces sound like well-formed compositions—they’re loose, rhythmic jams with simple motifs arising with endless permutations every few minutes—but this quintet had its shit down, and somehow Falana’s mixing made an integral part of the band. (Maybe he was the Martin Swope of free jazz?) Some of the electronic effects were made by the musicians themselves; drummer Dwight James attached a device to his snare that created an echo effect. The thick polyrhythmic grooves and an elusive sonic haze certainly suggests the influence of Sun Ra , who had moved his Arkestra to Jamal’s Germantown neighborhood two years earlier. On the fifteen-minute “Inner Peace” guitarist Monnette Sudler —who’s long been a steady mainstream presence on the Philly scene--uncorks a lyric solo that’s as spacey as it is bluesy, while Jamal switches instruments to play some snake-charmer clarinet. However freaky things get, the five musicians maintain a sublime degree of communication, carefully reacting to and prodding one another. Ultimately this album delivers a stunning demonstration of the free-jazz ethos applied to a fairly nonidiomatic, deeply spiritual sound world, and it sounds as fresh and unusual now as it probably did back then. September 12th - 10:34 a.m.
In the fall of 2004 Chicagoan Jeb Bishop, who ranks among the world’s best jazz trombonists, started a year-long hiatus from playing music, limiting himself to just a handful of gigs during that time. Since 1999 Bishop has been suffering from tinnitus, the product of his years of playing rock music. Before devoting himself to jazz full time, Bishop played in various bands in North Carolina, including Metal Pitcher—a pre-Superchunk outfit with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance—as well as his own Angels of Epistemology. In Chicago he joined the even-louder Flying Luttenbachers, playing bass in the group for a couple of years. He struggled to play through the condition for years, but eventually it became too much for him. “It was increasingly a problem for me psychologically, and some of the symptoms were making themselves felt on stage, making it harder for me to perform,” he told me yesterday. His decision meant he was no longer a member of several key ensembles, among them the Vandermark 5 and the Brötzmann Chicago Tentet. But last fall he returned to the stage and has been a reliable presence ever since. “I pursued a couple of therapies for the problems that did help," he says. "The damage can't be reversed, and the ringing is still there, but I've learned to cope with it a lot better than I was before, and I don't feel bothered during performance the way I did previously.” Bishop recently performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival with the Lucky 7s, a ensemble of Chicagoans and some displaced New Orleans players that formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (Fellow trombonist Jeff Albert still lives in the Crescent City.) And this month his quartet the Engines—with drummer Tim Daisy, bassist Nate McBride, and saxophonist Dave Rempis, is playing every Tuesday at the new Velvet Lounge. In November Bishop will join some powerful company when he joins Alexander von Schlippenbach’s German free-jazz ensemble, Globe Unity Orchestra, for a 40th anniversary concert at this year’s Berlin Jazz Festival, enhancing a powerful trombone section that also includes Paul Rutherford, Johannes Bauer, and fellow American George Lewis. August 30th - 7:06 p.m.
Some worthwhile stuff floating around the good old Interweb . . .
August 24th - 1:47 p.m.
Few jazz artists have ever had the sort of spectacular aura created by Sun Ra, the legendary big-band leader who claimed he was from Saturn, outfitted his Arkestra in silky, astral-themed finery, and gave performances that mixed vanguard technique with show biz spectacle. Although he was in New York during the heyday of the New Thing—the free-jazz movement propelled by folks like Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman--Ra resided in his own universe, though he shared the New Thing's bold sense of exploration. The seeds for Ra’s one-man revolution were sown in Chicago, where he moved from Alabama in the early 50s. A fascinating document of his Chicago years has just surfaced in a slim volume called The Wisdom of Sun-Ra, published by the local art press WhiteWalls. The book collects typewritten broadsheet screeds that Ra wrote and distributed on city street corners in the mid-50s. Until the appearance of this book, edited by occasional Reader contributor John Corbett and WhiteWalls editor Anthony Elms, only one of the broadsheets was known to exist: a leaflet Ra had given to Coltrane in 1956. These dense missives combine early Black Nationalism, biblical allusion, and elaborate—if fantastical and absurd—etymological theories (“Negroes belong to the race of Mu. Another way to spell Mu is moo. Moo means low. That’s the cow’s word. Negroes are Mr. Moo.”). These writings were aimed directly at African-Americans, and many of the pieces embrace a unabashedly provocative tilt that sought to excoriate complacency and lack of self-knowledge. But there are passages that have a broader, more timeless significance. In the opening broadsheet, “What America Should Consider,” he sounds eerily prescient regarding America’s arrogance: “The kingdoms of the past fell because they grew too proud and self-satisfied. There is no room for self-satisfaction in a living world because there is too much to learn and do.” The Wisdom of Sun-Ra includes beautiful reproductions of the dog-eared broadsheets, with full transcriptions in the second half of book. As interesting as the writings are in their own right, they're also offer powerful insights into the personality and philosophy that was central to Ra's later work. This collection kicks off a series of projects that shed light on Sun Ra’s early days. On October 1 the Hyde Park Art Center will host an exhibition, Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-61, that collects invented instruments, album covers, original copies of the broadsides, and drawings from the bandleader’s Chicago days. (The opening reception is on October 15.) Two weeks later a complementary exhibit called Interstellar Low Ways opens in the same space, collecting work by artists related to or inspired by Ra. On November 11 and 12 the museum hosts an academic conference on Ra’s legacy that will include roundtable discussions, performances, readings, and presentations. Confirmed to attend thus far are John Szwed (author of the definitive Ra biography Space is the Place), Robert Campbell (Ra’s assiduous discographer), Graham Lock (the British jazz scholar), and a number of art historians. There will also be concerts happening around this time with a Ra theme; Ken Vandermark and Thurston Moore are among the scheduled performers. |
|
©1996-2008 Creative Loafing Media All Rights Reserved. We welcome your comments and suggestions.