LISTENER AS OPERATOR - Howard Slater.pdf

8/14/2019 LISTENER AS OPERATOR - Howard Slater.pdf

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L I S T E N E R A S O P E R A T O R

By Howard Slater, 14 October 2009

The 'compositional improvising' of jazz, from big band to free to AACM, is, in its shared precarity,

'tellingly inarticulate' !writes Howard Slater in this month's Mute Music Column

Throwing handfuls

of pebbles on

the hollow tree

sprinkling of tones

thuds of sunder

coastal cymbals

Pre!history

In the beginning there was rhythm. Thank fuck there was drumming before language. Hope there in the

heartbeat, the well untempered random learning to talk. Banging on tree trunks' says drummer Andrew

Cyrille. And not just to communicate a message, a warning against the advent of vowels, but a belongingtoo, an intuitive belonging to the sustaining of the other's flow. Keep it up. Keep it backed up but non!

repressed. Keep it pre!articulate, tellingly inarticulate'. Make mistake room inside the random rhythms.

An inclusiveness. Bird song. Pipe drip. Roger Blank, a Sun Ra drummer, says, You've got coordinated

independence which demonstrates how important it is to get into a collective individuality. And that's

what the four limbs are about.' There's unity in ego abeyance, unity in listening to be touched. A collective

individuality !an Arkestra, an Art Ensemble !not mass individuals, but constructive sidemen presiding

over the solo's demise; invisible no names' like in the time before proper nouns to come. Or, as another

Ra!ist, Ronnie Boykins, titled an album ten years in the pipeline, the will come, is now'. The will come' is

to mutate: the collision of four limbs and three drums on an open urban plain, four limbs, all bone and

muscle, becoming sensitised feelers banging out insistent resistance until walls fall... and yet still able,

simultaneously, to brush a sprinkle of stones and fondle the forlorn into a quiet, reviving paroxysm.

Music and Agony !1"

How many times has it been said, I can't live without music'? Or it was music kept me going when she

died'. There's something in emotional precarity, the end of our world, the withdrawal of hope, which

music can match. I think of a story I heard. A man gripped by the tension of an anticipatory loss. A man,

like many men, suffering from a blockage in the chest that gripped upwards toward the dry throat, a

blockage so tight and welling that reservoir of tears' can pass as an actually lived clich "it's then you know

you're in trouble' he said... when clichs and sentimentality ring through to undam our intellectual

defences'#. This clogged blockage was eased, he said, by a sudden pitch shift, a minor vortex in Mahler... by


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a little crystal!forming diminuendo on a keyboard... the song at the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate

Factory. But more:

there was this accompanying need to hear myself moan, to make the agony resound through my chest, to

suppress a howl into a bass croak and hear this elemental kind of music, the sounds of a not yet syllabiccavity. This, too, broke the blockage, the thoraxed mucus of solidified tears.

With callous distance I think of the sound poetry of Henri Chopin, its attesting to a communicative level

akin to bare life'. At an even greater distance I recall a book and look up a Klossowski phrase, for even

though language is the usurper, it never allows us to speak of our unintelligible depth.' The sad thing is,

though, that this depth', in such agonising moments, is hardly that far away. The depth' is rising to the

moebius surface and it "the unintelligible emotional polyphony#doesn't speak an abecedarian language. It

sounds like birthing pangs, like an untrained tongue roving to clack the palate, like unmetered croaking

babble, like the psychic suffocation of human capitals. So, the musicians tip us off like theorists never can:

every human being has a non!tempered psyche' "Ornette Coleman#, an alterity, an unmeasurable

polyphony that's made to denounce its squwaking ambivalence by the last bar in a linear easing. And this is

what it sounds like.

2009 O.C.

The first time I heard Ornette Coleman's voice was not so long ago and I repeated it, kept pushing the

button. He was in Stockholm at the Golden Circle and it was 1965. With boyish enthusiasm I immediately

likened it to the voice of Eric Dolphy as he celebrates and yet mourns, in light tones, the passing of the

music he has just played: when you hear music, after it's over it's gone into the air. You can never captureit again'. Like Dolphy, Coleman had this same diminishing!to!inaudibility type of voice; gentle and

deflective of attention. With a further defensive connectivity I linked both of these voices to a phrase by

Caribbean Surrealist, Ren Mnil, transgression of your own limits through embracing the groundswell of

blind sincerity'. So, then, the last time I heard Ornette Coleman's voice was more recently at the Royal

Festival Hall. It had become inaudible. He bowed over the microphone and spoke in a millisecond

whisper. And yet Mnil's impossible sincerity was audible all night long, it was unmistakable. The voice

and the saxophone reached a symbiosis; the breath, that most precious of facilitators, seemed, in the

harmolodic' language that followed in flows, to give an added flesh to his recently reported words: I play

things that heal people. You know what healing is? Something that brings tears and clarity to the heart.'

Healing may well be to hear a player who is ahead of the melodic line or behind it, who strays into a

territory that can sound off' and out' whilst still firmly stooled in an auditorium especially designed for

gridwork renditions. It's here we are gathered before a 79!year old man who plays to repudiate his

legendary status, who is defended by audience members "turn Ornette up!'#because, who knows, do we all

sense his vulnerability before high expectations and low lung power? Is it this sense of a shared

vulnerability that heals? Is it the keyed approaching of an impossible blind sincerity' that heals? His risk

taking is still intact and there is a supportive sociality created from a generalised recognition of

precariousness' that Judith Butler suggests makes the senses more receptive. Our own vulnerabilities travel

towards these sounds so as not to repress our emotional precarity, have it elided by a too tight

identification, but to have it as a key part of our receptivity to the music. We are being held by sound.

Compositional Improvising


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Ornette Coleman was not alone in overcoming oxymorons. Whether this aim of his to play improvised

compositions' is a matter of an unwieldy language that doesn't quite articulate his experiential practice or

an expressive practice that dismantles language by means of a telling inarticulacy' could be a continuing

point of debate. But, for me, this compositional improvising is representative of a defiance of the logic of

language on the part of musical practitioners. How can these words fit together and make sense?! Is it,then, an indicator of freedom' in music to be able to escape the confines of a language!enforced logic and

address affect instead? Did the use of notation in jazz represent a compromise between the two extremes

of free!form and staved? Was notation a mediator that gave these internally exiled jazz musicians a sense

of respectability? Did it assuage the sorrow in Eric Dolphy's voice? Or is it something much more simple?

Richard Muhal Abrams, a founder member of the still extant Chicago!based Association for the

Advancement of Creative Musicians "AACM #and active proponent of this liminal zone of compositional

improvising, has said basically musicians are performers, composers and all, at the same time. You write

music when you stand up and practice your instrument.'

For Abrams, composition seems to be something that musicians are instinct with, a form!making

immanence, but it is also a co!operative and collective practice, a relational proximity of singularities.

Following on from this what we have, then, is a further defiance of a language that can neither fully

articulate collectivities "the personal pronoun#nor the all at the same time' of simultaneities "too tense

restricted#. That the AACM, like Sun Ra, resuscitated the ensemble sound of the big band is, with

hindsight, a step forward into a remaking of the work of the past. Here, after be!bop's softening up of the

song, there was room for simultaneous collectivities that were a little out of time. Abrams, in an interview

with Ted Panken in 2007, cites Ellington and Fletcher Henderson as his early guiding lights in

composition "a black compositional tradition that would go back to a pre!jazz New Orleans and one that

is overlooked as soon as the word notation' is mentioned#. The jazz approach to composition is tellingly

different. As Graham Lock informs us, Ellington composed solos that sound not only like improvisations

but like improvisations characteristic of specific players.' A kind of composed singularity effect!ing a non!

classical form of jazz composition. So, if we take Ellington's bands we not only hear a well!oiled collective

as insistent as history will be, but we also hear ensemble tones backing soloists and soloists soloing inunison. The sound of a future mode of organisation. We hear dance numbers, but also the onset of mood

pieces like The Mooche' "1928#that struggle free of the form of the blues into something multicoloured

and drenched in whatever!polyphony.

Abrams and the AACM took their cue from this autodidact jazz route of the big bands and in the mid

'60s, as free jazz took hold, they worked on a more measured and spacious sound that allowed, in the

manner of The Mooche', for a tonal palette to be created by, at times, unusual instrumental combinations.

As Abrams told Panken, sound precedes music itself' and it is the freeing of sound from a metered tempo

and the need to interpret standards that marks not just the AACM but the Arkestra too. Abram's piece,

Levels and Degrees of Light', pits a choral singer with vibes, brushed cymbals and clarinet to make an, at

times, indistinct wave!like piece reminiscent of something much more akin to an avant!garde chamber

orchestra. But, in not eschewing the dirty timbres of free jazz, theirs is a punk classical that establishes a

tension point between the more classically derived avant!garde musics of the '60s and this organic

experimentation that took its off!centre approach into the jazz clubs of Chicago's South Side. Indeed,

lacking the university backing of the former, the AACM "a musician!led self!institution that sought the

creative and representational control of their music as well as an alternative pedagogy#was entirely

financed by its membership to the degree that Val Wilmer says, perhaps over!effusively, that the AACM

engendered the idea of musical socialism'.

One of the most widely appraised of the AACM's records is Roscoe Mitchell's Sound"1966#. This recordprompted jazz writer John Litweiler to declare: Music is the tension of sounds in the free space of silence'.

His is an apt description of a title track that is as unexpected as it is form!forming "here we can hear an

antecedent of such contemporary players as Taku Unami, Mattin and Radu Malfatti who have made


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pieces that are almost entirely filled with the free space of silence'#. On Soundthe musicians play their

instruments in unconventional ways, puncturing the half!silence with slides and slips of merging tones that

range from a historically informed articulacy to a telling inarticulacy': the ghost of blues and be!bop slide

up to breath!flatulence, spit, keys and blats, rasping flies, hi!hat shakes, arco cackle, etc. There is, then, a

dramatic element that doesn't so much unfold towards crescendo as hover immanently over the piecewhich makes the listener expectant and highly receptive to the range of expression on offer. The

vulnerability of the unconventional playing as well as the fragility of incorporating silence and inarticulate'

proto!expression, receives its support in the players' mutual risk taking: whines, moans, whimpers,

rumblings. There are no virtuoso solos to speak of but a kind of gut bucket turn taking. This backs up

George E. Lewis' statement about AACM music that individual style is radically devalued in favour of a

collective conception that foregrounds form, space and sonic multiplicity'. Such a multiplicity is furthered

by Mitchell's introduction of little instruments' "chains, whistles, bells etc. #that would otherwise be

inaudible but whose use also adds a kind of humility to the piece: the little sounds get to be heard as an

inclusion of the voiceless as well as being an indication that music is beginning again from an enticing

degree zero. So, was Sound' scored? Was it notated? Was it mapped? I don't think so, for as Mitchell's

later group, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, seem to demonstrate, such compositional improvising comes

about by means of affinity dynamics' "Anthony Braxton #. All the players were members of the AACM,

each was composing themselves and the resultant collective practice overcomes the oxymorons! The rift

between theory "notation#and practice "improvising#is not only overcome, but both notation and

improvising are practised and heard in a light that casts doubt on either term's coherence. With music we

need not be the slaves of language....

Tellingly Inarticulate "1#

When Mark E. Smith semi!sang Let's get this thing together, let's get this thing together... and make

it...bad' and when Sun Ra spoke of there being no mistakes, that if someone's playing off key...the rest ofus will do the same', we're not only in the terrain of an affinity dynamic that permits the impermissible and

defies expectation whilst creating collective bonds, we are in the presence of what poet Nathaniel Mackey

called telling inarticulacy'. There have been many terms for this: dirty timbre, dirt music, freak playing,

skiffle, punk, messthetics, noise, etc. So when Mackay speaks of the way that some jazz!playing conveys a

sense of apprehension and self!conscious duress by way of dislocated phrasings in which virtuosity mimes

its opposite' we are in an area where music assumes an acutely political mantle. Militating against expected

industry standards of production "the Fall'sDragnetas well as the Slits' Yalbum spring to mind #as well asagainst an alleged musical coherence that befits those automated by a common sense consciousness, this

approach to non!virtuosity and making it bad' is a direct affront to notions of specialisation and

commodification that not only restrict our confidence to participate but dull our senses. The self!same

creates a lull and a dulling of the senses that can be awoken by the sudden shocks of an off!note or a

staggered, stuttering rhythm. There's something enchanting about Sun Ra's percussive tracks onAtlantisthat sound, to too trained ears, like a bunch of kids randomly banging stuff in a room. Or, the way King

Oliver, a lot less smooth than Louis Armstrong, suddenly seems to have stuffed some broken glass down

his trumpet. Such a reference to the beginnings of jazz is not without relevance as telling inarticulacy' is

there at the root of it all: sandpaper used on a snare drum before brushes were invented, the intrusion of

the saxophone into the New Orleans combos as if it were an alien instrument. This inarticulacy not only

seems to respond both to the non!tempered psyche' and to an emotional polyphony by means of its

putting strict meaning into abeyance and addressing the affective, but it also seems to place us in the

presence of a coming!to!articulation; something that could be prior to commodification. This latter,

because it is a result of an affinity dynamics' that legitimates it, carries a sense of meaning as being made

in the collective moment. So, telling inarticulacy' is a constant reminder that our creative powers need not

be alienated by some debilitating version of virtuosity and, in that there is always a guaranteed audience


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for telling inarticulacy in the fellow musicians, that these creative powers have a constitutive force that's

based in shared precarity...

Howard Slater is a volunteer play therapist, bookkeeper and sometime

writer living in East London

Ensemble Players

Ronnie Boykins, The Will Come, Is Now, New York: ESP, 1975/2009.

Judith Butler, Frames Of War: When is Life Grievable?, London: Verso, 2009.

Ornette Coleman,Dancing In My Head, Verve, 1973/2000.

Eric Dolphy,Last Date, EmArCy records, 1964/1991.

The Fall, Dragnet, London: Rough Trade, 1981.

Phil Freeman, Faith Healer', The Wire, June 2009.

Pierre Klossowski,Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, London: Athlone, 1997.

George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself !the AACM and American Experimental Music, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Graham Lock,Blutopia, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958, New York: De Capo, 1984.

Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, Sound, Chicago: Delmark, 1966/1996.

Sun Ra,Atlantis, Chicago : Evidence, 1969/1999.

Valerie Wilmer,As Serious As Your Life, London: Serpent's Tail, 1992.


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L I S T E N E R A S O P E R A T O R " 2 #

By Howard Slater, 1 July 2010

What happens when musicians smash the metronome of developmental time and the prison!house of

language?, asks Howard Slater in this month's Mute Music Column

On the way to a full silence the mark of language

brands the body with a reminder of the time

!Delphine

Tellingly Inarticulate !2"

At a recent performance at Freedom of the City 2010', trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith reversed

virtuosity for a moment. Virtuosity being no virtue, time stood still a little, time that normally in these

moments races ahead with a neurotic fidgetiness, here almost descended into a silence that could have

prompted vague paranoias. Is it finished? Has it kiltered? Can I hold this abeyance, this break to the flow

that is my desire to be led? What could this respite be a prelude to? From the silence came a sputtering

tubular saliva phisp. This sound was no perfectly sounded slaver of a too!smooth dirty timbre befitting the

studiousness of a chamber quartet. The latter are tellingly articulate and they tell of a time that must be

filled with meaning, a time in which silence would be a disastrous trapdoor that devolves the institution of

the performance. Silence here would be like a strike, a go!slow, a cheating of the audience, a plateau phase.

For Wadada Smith, and maybe his lineage assists us to relax in this, there seemed to be an aimed!for

silence from which the muttering of his trumpet began again to speak articulately. Here, in this brief

moment of brass smears, the struggle for the means of expression, an ever rejuvenating staple of jazz, was

staged again. A building up from the wavering foundation; a hiatus in time to alter the density of the space.

Writing, in 1973, of his approach to improvisation, Wadada spoke of there being no intent towards time

as a period of development. Rather time is deployed as an element of space...'Where does developmentend? In a kind of untouchableness? A kind of constantly arrived!at elevation that suppresses the struggle of

beginnings? In some ways such telling inarticulacy as Wadada's "this time#can extend the affinity

dynamic' out to the listener and away from the stage in a kind of lateral depth'. The element of space'

that is deployed in the breakdown' is, as ever, a kind of interior' space that raises the question of our

being!with' not only the performers, but our fellow audience members. Beyond a virtuosity of

development there could be, with a telling inarticulacy that wills its own vulnerability, the offer of a social

relationship: a development of our relationality not only in the moment, but as that which begins again in

a musically induced reposing of an affecting exposure to bare life; a laying bare prior to a constitutive

moment.

Out Of Time

Maybe Wadada's statement rings out like a blat for other improvisers. You can, when hearing the

constantly undulating solos of Eric Dolphy on such tracks as Iron Man', be in the presence of an arrow

that's flying directly to somewhere we know not but which we do know doesn't arrive at a target. It sets

off from some place that could be notated but notesin potentiaseem to split up into atoms that forms a


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cloud around the line' as it moves. The choice in the milliseconds is which of the note!atoms to hop to

whilst seemingly playing as the crow flies'. So, again, direction' or directionless' seem hardly the right

ways to speak of such solos as these and say those of John Coltrane on Stellar Regions'. Instrumental

proficiency in these and many other cases seems to be about sounding instinct, bringing impulse to bear

against time in an intoxicating suspension that, in outflanking language, somehow seems to suspend time.

For someone such as Dolphy, who jammed with the birds and fluted with the waves, it was hardly

timeliness he was after. As the authors of his musical biography have attested, moments on his still much

acclaimed Out to LunchLP have a double time feel' and Dolphy himself spoke about incorporating freetime' in his, well, compositions; a desire that extended, he informs us, to replacing the piano "that seems

to control you'#with the more open and spacious sound of Bobby Hutcherson's vaporous vibes. Is it

possible then that the continuing appeal and who knows, resurgence, of interest in free jazz' may well be

informed by a desire to escape or seek respite from the heavily demarcated chronosof the abstract time of

capital; the sucking up of time that seeks to forever defer disposable time'? For, as opposed to the three

minute pop song that seems to be the perfect cultural form for the music industry, "i.e. constantly

consecutive and conducive to the production of quantity#, our sense of time when we listen to, say, a free

jazz ensemble piece is one that is not over before it's begun. Such abstract time, a time of instant

gratification, doesn't give us a now' that is long enough to open and establish a relationship to time in.

Not only this but there is, as part of the time!slip of free jazz, a sense of simultaneity "duet unison'#

whereby the present moment of listening becomes a condensed deceleration of duration that doesn't run

towards developmental meaning but makes time thick. Dolphy: The bass follows no bar line at all. Notice

Tony. He doesn't play time, he plays'.

Image: Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane.

Intempestive Atopians'

Temporal dynamism, then, somehow needs the presence of more than one and when, either bereft of a

being!with' or in an attempted effort to devote living attention', it is the ensemble sound that most easily

allows us access to our component selves, to the society of our intra!psychic groupishness. An interior

population, then, could be an indication that we are present to ourselves at the same time that we are

present to the multiple pasts of ourselves. It is an indication that our emplacement is always intertwining

with a displacement. Coming up for air after listening to such a tempestuous track as the Utter Nots' by

Sun Ra and his Solar!Myth Arkestra, it is as if we need a time of readjustment to avoid the psychical benz

that has made us intempestive atopians' "not only do some of Ra's piano lines sound out of place, other!

roomly, there is, after a steady unison pulse at the beginning, a kind of percussive flailing that doesn't so

much mark time as attempt to break its partitioning effects#. All the component parts of our self, parts

that contain the precipitates of relationships, seem to have been provoked into parallel lives' by the

component parts of the ensemble and the concentrated fury of the soloists as they each take it to the

brink of inarticulacy. The bundle of affect we brought to the listening was not assuaged by a naming

ceremony', there wasn't feeling as such, neither was there specific emotion. Most definitely there was not

some self!centric unity, some boundaried possession of our social experience made possible by a single

track, but an utter not' of dispersion, a diffusion of an abated self in non!controlled time'"the date of the

session can't be pinpointed and the track feels much briefer than its stated eleven minutes#. The

intempestive', then, should maybe not be taken as a transcendence, nor be mistaken for nostalgia. Sun Ra,

with his ease of musical access to different times and his sustaining investment in different places, has

perhaps made it more clear to me that this supposed cacophony is meant as a complete refusal of both

time and place as they are now structured "an utter not to it#. It is as if some form of communism has been

audibly experienced; a communism that gives us a glimpse of some kind of ontological thickness' that


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encourages both an amended reissue of the past' and a lack of debilitating fear before the trauma of the

narcissistic wound'. Proust: ... my actual life... appeared to be comprised in a larger reality which had not

been created for my benefit.'

Music and Agony !2"

Feelings of disassociation from time and place accompany the wound of the bereaved who can no longer

rely upon the presence of a loved one, no longer rely on that narcissism, that reflected love, that, in other

circumstances may well have been the submerged sop of dependency, may well have provided the

modicum of temporary unity for a centripetal self!image. The ego, its ideal, may well have need of a

gradual disassembly, the prop of which, the being!with as the prop, has now been removed. The affective

stakes are raised in a such way that ideological sublimation and rational appraisal prove insufficient to

meet the demands of amorous mourning. A certain conserved idyll meets the absence of its ongoing

propellant. Are those who bear this affective state drawn to music so as to be nearer to their fellow

intempestive atopians'? Can their music ease the ache of a hole rather than fill it? As they said of Dolphy,

there is a direct emotionalism' at play. There seems to be less between us because there is less language

there to take the place of the affect, less language to draw us towards misunderstanding. It's almost as if

sincerity and language could be in inverse ratio.

This space of listening, as a potential space that is neither too close in its offer of sympathy, nor distanced

enough to be a cold unaccompanying, is, as Winnicott has put it, a space of relaxed undirected mental

inconsequence'. So, in their active passivity, are the bereaved drawn to music for its qualities of a lightly

guided daydreaming, for its offer of a free floating attention' that could just as well drift into a temporary

forgetting? Again the indirection' of many of Dolphy's solos, which nonetheless sound out with a velocity,

a passage, are such that there can be a passing!through, a momentary overcoming of acute discomfort that

at least provides a cessation to an, albeit natural, intense self!focus, replacing it with the revivifying call of

another. There is a drawing out. There is a being taken to the horizon to get a better view. There is more

and more of an offer of less and less mediation.

We Dare to Sing'

There are times during Offering' by John Coltrane where the mediation of the instrument, its being a

prop, is replaced by a sense of directly hearing a kind of semiotic of the impulses'. Here, an embracing of

spontaneity, with its limiting of an over!preparation, allows for an access to affect and a propulsive, non!

abstract time that allows for these affects to unfurl at their own speed'. As Coltrane enters a solo phase he

repeats a motif in a tight and circular form, the solo seems stuck, but as it swiftly returns and returns it

grows in breadth, it adds tangents of off!time', of inarticulate sax!cracks. It becomes like a catherine

wheel that spins back to the start but gives off random and fortuitous sparks that speak of a temptation to

break the tightness of the repetition by harnessing the friction of competing affects.

On the track We Dare to Sing', another tenor saxophonist, John Tchicai, in duet with drummer Tony

Marsh, creates a similar effect of suspension. He begins this piece with a kind of wordless wailing that falls

somewhere between singing and mourning, celebration and self!effacement. The track confidently stages

inarticulacy by beginning from this kind of zero craftless' position of vocalising. Before Tchicai blows a

note on the saxophone we hear the bare life' of breath that summons up the temporal dynamism of the

intempestive: singing as ritual, as catharsis, as joy, as a distribution of vulnerability. Tchicai dares to sing,

dares to offer something less than polished, but he also stages a kind of founding contrast between the

unmediated breath of wailing and chanting and a channelled breath that figures his tenor as a recent

machine. The suspense of this track, then, is announced from the outset: what follows the voice? Is it

words and language or something prior to these? Is there something in a language made impermanent that

can be rejuvenated by the unmooring sounds of affect?


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Diabolical Vocason

The power of those that use the human voice as their instrument may lie in the risks entailed in doing an

uncivilized violence to the founding rigidities of language. There is something agonising and off!putting in

hearing what sounds like the most unmediated of musical practices through which music, its hopes forcoherence and meaningfulness, are sorely profiled. Such vocalising may not so much be tending towards

language as withdrawing from it, retracting from a social contract. At times, listening to Demetrio Stratos

or Phil Minton can have the simultaneous effect of being close to someone in pain, close to a primeval

event and close to the communicative sounds of a rejuvenated species. We're in a forest, a tunnel, an

ancient plain... the dictionary is burning. Stutterers know this splintered harmony and interrupted flow

and they are aware too of the alienating facial contortions that become necessary for speech to come out'

as a cough, as a deep inhalation of bubbled breath. There are sonorities here, there are what sounds like

fragments of words, vowels and consonants ringing out from an unfamiliar place in the vocal tract, there

are technical tricks "annotated ad infinitum in Trevor Wishart's book On Sonic Art#. But there is also thewonder of a telling inarticulacy' that sounds!out with a visceral presence unmediated by the desire for a

speech!led individual continuity "the hall of mirrors set up by the approximations of language#.

Are such performances as these discomforting in that they are akin to a regression, to a staging of the

dialectical interrelation between infancy and adulthood? Is it that they challenge us to a non!conditional

living attention' in which in!bred judgment is suspended? Are they refusals to bring the dispositifs of

language to bear once again and have ourselves be the object of the already communicated? Do these

geckering screeches' disturb us in their bringing into a public space the warded!off sounds of the pre!

articulate; the sound of suffering "phn"that is well and truly exiled from political representation? Stratos,inspired by his daughter's babbling, offered as his motivation that the richness of the vocal sound gets lost

in the acquisition of language'. Could this mean that such vocalising can awaken us to a bodily capacity

that has been lost, the repressed sounds that we carry within us which remain unexpressed since there are

very few situations permissive enough? Are wordless affects summoned in this way? Can this, in turn, mean

that there is always something that outstrips us: a potential in redirecting breath, an immanence ofinfancy? Is lip flabber' more liberating than discourse? Luce Irigaray: saying ourselves can't happen

without transgressing the already learned forms.'

Image:Kicking Robin Page's Guitar Around the Block, Yam Festival, New York City, May 1965

Non' & Un'

A new wave of post!reductionist improvisers seem to be experimenting with this combination of telling

inarticulacy' and minimum mediation. At times it appears to have an autotraumatic import. It wants to

run the risk of ridicule', it wants to leap from a great height' to subject ourselves and the audience to an

obscurely unsettling test'. This move from taking the audience as an object to affront becomes a self!

affronting abjectness of unworthy performers' before the total' subject and multiple criticalities of the

audience. The offer of participation, or immersive engagement of the audience, is, somehow sidled away

by the creation of a dense atmosphere' or lateral depth' that makes any perfectly formed discourse object

of critique seem weighty with its own self!mediating bid for power. If an immanence is created in the

stead of the known knowledge of expectation, it is a kind of unthought known' that can fill the

reductionist silence, not with the delayed intention of the musicians, but with a distributed vulnerability

and palpable tension. What does such music sound like? In Paris on 1/12/2009 it was the sound of two

people sobbing. In a studio in Berlin it was a sound of blastering noise followed by a whimpering that

reduced a Wirejournalist to hateful invective. On 29/2/2010 in Dundee it was described as creepy' or,

later, as being like a group therapy session. On 2/8/2008 in Niort it contained the disintegration products'


10/23

of several psyches and a passage of crawled, close!up mutterings pierced by phylogenetic screams of

refusal. In a booklet accompanying the latter it is possible to read telling inarticulacy' in a description of

an intentional process of uncrafting': The practice of uncrafting does not just imply the negation of

technique, but the unleashing of a generic potency proper to incapacity'. With no plan "we did not know

what we might do' #and often with no props "four microphones/an unfamiliar instrument, etc. #the selfexposure of these performers is akin to a deterritorialising turbulence' in which the child screaming

quietly the emperor has no clothes on' is not in the audience but in the performative space. In this

moment if no sound is communicated then what could well be communicated is the shared incapacity

"how we've been spectacularly incapacitated#: I can only be what these inarticulate words make of me: a

broken subject, un!unique and spurning the edited time to pretend; a spoken subject: exposed, banal,

bereft and plummeting before acculturated expectation'. Music poetency?

Howard Slater is a volunteer play therapist and

sometime writer living in East London

Ensemble Players

Ray Brassier, Jean Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama & Mattin,Idioms & Idiots, w.m.o/r, 2010.

John Coltrane, Stellar Regions, Impulse, 1994.

Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra,Humiliated, Tochnit Aleph, 2009.

Eric Dolphy,Iron Man, Giants of Jazz, 1969/2002.

Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch, Blue Note, 1964/1987.

Luce Irigaray, The Way Of Love, Continuum, 2004.

Mattin & Taku Unami, Distributing Vulnerability to the Affective Classes, Rumpsti Pumpsti, 2010.

Phil Minton & Roger Turner, Drainage, Emanem 2008.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way !Part One, Chatto & Windus, 1981.

Jacques Rancire: Communism: From Actuality to Inactuality' in Dissensus, Continuum, 2010.

Vladimir Simosko & Barry Temperman,Eric Dolphy !a Musical Biography and Discography,Da Capo Press,1971/1996.

Wadada Leo Smith, Notes #8 pieces", excerpted at http://music.calarts.edu/~wls/pages/philos.html

Demetrio Stratos:Metrodora, Cramps, 1976/1989.

Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra, The Solar Myth Approach, Vol.1 & 2, BYG/Actuel, 1971.

John Tchicai/Tony Marsh: We Dare to Sing' on Duets, Treader, 2005.

D.W.Winnicott,Playing & Reality, Routledge 1989.


11/23

L I S T E N E R A S O P E R A T O R " 3 #

By Howard Slater, 20 November 2012

In its encouragement of a group expression that supports musicians to play beyondthemselves and to evolve singularities within a shared reservoir of artistic richness, Howard

Slater finds in jazz a response to the experience of slavery; one that evolved outside channels

of sanctioned expression, and which preserves and propels a collective being. This is his third

column for Mute Music

We are still black

And we have come back

Nous sommes revenus

We have come back

Brought back

to our land Africa

the music of Africa

Jazz is A black power

Jazz is A black power

Jazz is An African power

Jazz is An African music

Jazz is An African music

We Have Come Back


12/23

Tellingly Inarticulate !3"

Rough and beautiful in the nobility of coarseness

$Frank London Brown

The above dedication is a verbatim transcript of words spoken as the Archie Shepp set kicks into action at

the 1969 Pan African Festival in Algiers. The music that follows contains a mlange of Shepps jazz outfit

accompanied by Tuareg percussionists and Algerian musicians and singers. At first the speaker of the

above dedication continues on with his words listing figures from jazz history, but this verbal honouring of

the general intellect of jazz is soon drowned out by a practical rendition of a cultures social wealth. Not an

ostentatious display, not a string of solos, but a confluence of intensities backed by an incantatory

drumming and the sharp sound of reed flutes. As the rock and pop scenes go global, there is here, at the

Pan!African festival, an almost subterranean internationalism. The excitement of being back whilst being

welcomed by Algerian musicians is palpable; a meeting point for something more or less inarticulate from

the perspective of the prevailing rock scenes of the time. For instance the 12 tone system is rendered

inexistent; non!standard pitching thrives and the outlines of the instrumentation, the perspective of

background and foreground "especially in the massed percussion#, are blurred to the point of amorphous

joy.

Collective culture, then, sounds a little like this. It dispenses with the sad articulation of the negative in

favour of its being harnessed as a drive. It doesnt seek the con of the quest for perfection. It seeks itsmotivating succour in a group!process that cannot but re!articulate the negative as the pleasure of

disalienation. From Bennie Moten to Duke Ellington to Sun Ra to Shepps ensemble in 1969, an

unquestioned togetherness informs the sound as it merges together singularities in a tone!palate that, as

Cedric Robinson has said in reference to the radical black tradition, preserves the collective being.1

Preserves? Yes, because that tradition has had, in the main, to maintain itself outside those very

organisations "such as the Labour Movement#that one would have thought were pre!disposed to it; and,

being outlandish, its wavering non!admittance could be misrepresented as an impulse towards

transcendence rather than a material effect of racism. So, Shepp and Co. sound inarticulate because such a

collective culture "here celebrated as a jam session of black consciousnesses across continents#cannot

delineate itself as a single bounded institutional entity. They form an assemblage of enunciation that could

be said to resist reification by being out, by not having to speak articulately. They ignore the discipline

enforced by the tenets of music, by musically claiming, as Aim Csaire said in his resignation from the

French Communist Party "PCF#, the right to initiative, the right to personality.2

The right to free jazz. The right to singularity. Claiming these rights and claiming them via the wordless

illicity of colliding continents and the partial egocide of a heavy hearing of the other, is to claim that the

alienating line between the individual and the collective, is here and in countless other ensemble jazz

moments, not so much surpassed but corroborated as non!existent in the first place and preserved in the

music of jazz from a moment prior to bourgeois enlightenment. This prior moment "disqualified from

history#that goes back further than a memory of the land, has been celebrated in the form of musical

praxis by such as Duke Ellington who called!out the collective black tradition in such tracks as Rhythm


13/23

Pum Te Dum, and albums like Liberian SuiteandBlack, Brown and Beige. Such a musical praxis, from the

crafting of the very instruments "the banza or strum strum which eventually becomes the banjo#through

derisive singing and the prohibition of slave dances to Ellingtons symphonic history!writing, makes jazz

an ongoing moment of politicised disalienation. It is an implied politics, a praxis that, making its own

form as it moves, is often unintelligible. It is tellingly inarticulate because, caught up as many of us are inthe unavoidable pathology of individuality "its inferiority!fears and interior walls#, we cannot hear the

liberation!from!self as a politicising practice that singularises itself by means of an assemblage "be that, in

this case, the jazz ensemble or the black radical tradition#, because this would be to similarly face the

trauma of psychical placelessness across time; a kind of dispersal to points of inarticulacy where the

boundary between self and other dissolves but, and aptly, the 'new' begins.

Music and Agony !3"

I am sick of these weeping half!days

$Henry Dumas

In Black Skin, White MasksFrantz Fanon offered before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires aneffort at disalienation.3It is an agony to kind of know that freedom, like love can take on mythic

proportions. These very proportions garner an idealistic hue that further trap us within the painful limits

of a bourgeois self. A heavily signposted way!out gets blocked. So, the interpellation of aims and ambitions

take the form of ego!ideals and the concomitant activation of a de!communalising narcissism not onlybuild internal walls against a recognition of our interior world as a social!psyche, they ward!off the

dangerous outbreak of singularities. Is Fanons advice to make an effort at disalienation partly connected

to arriving at an awareness of our social psyche? To become, as strange as it may sound, disalienated from

an individualism that, deep rooted, disbars the notion of a self as already a collective? Free Jazz, without

having to articulate a politics, seems to effortlessly concur with such propositions.

Image: Earliest known image of a jazz band. The cover of New Orleans newspaper The Mascot, 15

November, 1890. 'Robinson's Band Plays Anything'.

Such a disalienation is agony enough. One is placeless, no longer the centre of anything. One is

interchangeable. One can only labour abstractly. But isnt there in the sound of jazz some supreme

overcoming of the temptation to an alienating negativity? Listening to many jazz players it is possible to be

enlivened by the very lack of shame of the singularities that are set free by means of the music.

Singularities are maybe embraced in the assemblage of jazz not simply as a harnessing of a mythic

Dionysian creativity, but as a result of the urge!inducing agony of genocide that Black Codes and then Jim

Crow Laws set going in the American South: Anyway, when we got there in the woods, everyone started

crying and turning their heads away in horror. I looked up at the man. I knew him, yet he was so messed

up I could not tell who he was. He was naked and theyd put tar on him and burnt him.4As hard as it is to

write that out its maybe necessary to have this as backing to our appreciation not just of the spleenage!at!


14/23

the!reed of players like Ayler and Sanders, but also to honour the supreme effort of jazz musicians to

maintain their propellant positivity. More than that, is it not the experience of Jim Crow barbarism that

binds these jazz musicians to a collective notion of their self as black from which basis singularising

becomes an easier next step to take? A step unfraught by the guilt of standing out and standing up and one

that is no longer afraid to express. A hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation trumpeter andensemblist Philip Cohran could say: Were all denied the privilege of expressing what is in us.

The knotted agony of not being able to speak up or protest "an inculcated terror of the self as Calvin

Hernton refers to it #comes undone and the dam is burst by the mid 60s. The liquid lyric moans, as poet

and communist activist Claude McKay describes 20s jazz, are transformed into the guided rage of having

so much to say that words are bypassed by the dense emotional simultaneity of free jazz propulsion. That

Calvin Hernton, writing of his childhood in the American South, speaks of taking a beating from his

grandmother for regularly chatting with a white girl "a danger he could not perceive at the time#, and that

he talks also of a social life that has to be closely self!monitored down to a control of glances, is just one

element of racisms psychic damage that surely must inform free jazz as a disalienating force. Calvin

Hernton: I am not absolutely certain at what age I became conscious of my colour as a limitation on

where I could go, sit, or with whom I could associate.5Such constant vigilance may train the mind in an

acuity of perception and contextual sensitivity that, as agonising as it is, could well inform the later ease of

a non!fanfared collective awareness and free space for singularities that marks those early 60s assemblages

such as Charlie Mingus Jazz Workshop, Sun Ras Arkestra, Horace Tapscotts Pan Afrikan Peoples

Arkestra, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians "AACM #and Philip Cohran's

Artistic Heritage Enemble.

Jazz and Organisation !1"

Where no one is more alone than any other

$Joseph Jarman

There can be no agonising terror of the self "a block to singularising#when the shared trauma of racist

genocide comes to bind you tightly to a collective notion. The same could well be said of exploited classes

in general upon whom is meted out an ongoing psychic damage that ends up in self!loathing, affective

insecurity and the internalisation of inferiority "its epidermalisation in the words of Frantz Fanon#. These

latter can amount to a terror of the self, a terror of subterranean force that can be a serious hindrance to

the consistency in any coming together. Whether this supra!personal fragility be dealt with as an isolating

retreat or as an appeasement of the terror of the self by recourse to the ideological mediations of a joining

up of ego!ideals, the terror can be both repressed through the ongoing act of an abstract belonging as well

as projected "as repressed#into forming the wayward unconscious forces of the group. The organisational

form that results can come, after Didier Anzieu, to be one that could be described as bearing a group

illusion: There was a desire in the group for a superficial unity to plaster over the contradiction between

declared principles and actual behaviour.6


15/23

The problem for groups may well lie, then, in these declared principles that become a disconnective

abstraction, that determine the meaning of group membership and that give rise, not to singular

expressions, but to a guilty vigilance that comes from conformity. Throughout the history of jazz, save for

the sizeable Pan!African and Black Nationalist political hue of the 60s, there has been scant recognition

of its ensemble practice as providing methods and means of organisation for political movements. LarryNeal, viewed as a co!founder of the Black Arts Movement, still had cause, in the 1980s, to bemoan this and

urged his readers to consider &...'a system of politics and art that is fluent, as functional, and as expansive

as black music.7Perhaps a factor in this lack of fluency is the blockage created by the subterranean

persistence of, as Fanon said, self!evaluatory comparison and the quest to fulfil the ego!ideal. In other

words the persistence within organisations of forms of bourgeois individualism "personal merit and self!

fulfillment#mediated by organisational forms that militate against what Aim Csaire called for as he

resigned from the PCF: the deepening and co!existence of all particulars.

From swing to the be!bop era, the space to solo, to singularise within the assemblage, was given to all

musicians in the combo. Extemporisation around a theme "or in other parlance, playing with particles of

the general intellect of the standard#enables these particulars to be co!extensive with other particulars.

In the world of free jazz one could say that the mlange of particulars "simultaneous soloing#forms the

universal itself! So, what to many ears, say in the Archie Shepp track mentioned above, is a mess, is not

only an un!recouperable mess "deliberately inarticulate#, it is the sound of the overcoming of a terror of the

self by means of creating together the incomparable through which the question of merit does not arise.

Neither does it seem that the contradiction between declared principles and actual behaviour arises: the

principles arent declared but outline a problem of action. So, in the 1969 track we are not listening to a

group illusion that stems from the fear of wrongness and ambivalence, but to an almost definite

disalienation that, being a group!effort, does not have to watch itself. Here improvisation adds!to rather

than detracts!from the ad!hoc organisational form as the indefiniteness of not knowing how the music is

going to sound is a non!declaration of principles, but yet is a declaration of co!existent singularitiesattempting disalienation by means of the jazz ensemble and its historical preservance.8

By the late 60s it could be perhaps remarked upon that the era of combo, the steady line!up group "i.e.

Coltranes classic quartet, Colemans too#were being replaced by looser, ad!hoc, almost nomadic,

groupings of musicians and a temporary assembling when studio time was being paid for. The form of

organisation of the swing era, the big band with its large personnel and long!term performance

engagements, was maybe, after the 1944 Cabaret Tax, becoming less viable. The be!bop combo could be

said, as Will Menter mentions, to replace the band leader/arranger with a lead soloist and an equal

opportunity to solo "rather than maintain the backing riff so elegantly scored as tone!parallels by Duke

Ellington#. This form of the combo was adopted by the likes of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, but

they began to break up this form of organisation by adding to their combos and as with their large

ensemble pieces "Free Jazz and Ascension respectively#there was a step, as with Mingus, Max Roach and

Sun Ra, into re!articulating the backing!riff of the big band, but this time atonally: an inarticulate and

confident move that, at the threshold of the civil rights movement, tells of an organising rise in black

political consciousness. So, it is not like there is some supercession of organisational forms as we are want

to believe by a system that would rather have us forget, but an infusement of a collective tradition in which

the general intellect figures as, after Cedric Robinson, an ontological totality.


16/23

However, if we focus on the late 60s and this sense of the ad!hoc session we are maybe in the realm of the

meeting of singularities that bring with them an instilled and moveable collective awareness: an

ontological totality of belonging to a history that is shareable and shared!in. At his first audition for theAACM in Chicago, Wadada Leo Smith reports that he was playing together in an ensemble with other

musicians and then one by one his fellow players stepped down and began talking in a huddle, leaving

Wadada to play alone. One could say that in this moment Wadada was left with the terror of the self as

well as being made aware that, as far as the AACM was concerned, there was no group illusion in the

AACM; that declared principles and actual behaviour would be resolved by a singular praxis within a

collective assemblage "that Together Alone is the title of an LP by AACM members Joseph Jarman and

Anthony Braxton is perhaps testament that they had a similar experience to Wadada Leo Smith #. Such an

experience seems to suggest that as an individual player you are nothing special, but as an individual player

you have to have the confidence in your instrument and its place in the tradition: you have to be able to

singularise without becoming an individualist "be prepared to improvise!amidst#and to be a member of the

AACM without losing your particularity "play to enhance anothers score#. Such an incomplete musing

may be an example of the functional fluency that Larry Neal was calling to be more widely applied as a

politics.

Jazz and Organisation !2"

How do individuals enter into composition with one another?

$Gilles Deleuze

The ongoing debates about spontaneity and organisation, about structure and structurelessness can maybe

be tempered by the example of such organisations as the AACM. The AACM has been noted for the

special place it allots to both composition and improvisation. One seems not to be valued over the other

and its maybe that there is a synthesis in AACM practice that leads us in the direction that Larry Neal

urged. That said any synthesis is not visible as a declared principle, but as a singular praxis that differs

from Roscoe Mitchell to Muhal Richard Abrams to Anthony Braxton to Wadada Leo Smith; each of

whom, Will Menter informs us, have all developed their own notation systems and ways of using notation

within improvisation "composing themselves#. This goes against the grain of hearing in free jazz a pure

visceral spontaneity as some level of organised sound is sought!after by those who learned through the

AACM. However, it seems to be that the improvisatory element is that which brings through the

emotional counterpoint, that in a sense, brings in the non!accordant sounds of the tellingly inarticulate

that is at the roots of the black jazz tradition. When Wadada Leo Smith spoke recently of his work with

an orchestra on his Ten Freedom Summers, he reported that in order to bring flexibility to the orchestralplayers he wrote music that was impossible to play: My instruction to them was while youre playing this

and you cannot completely play it correctly, keep going forward. At some point its going to breakdown

completely $at that point youre improvising.9


17/23

In terms of organisation it is the emotional counterpoint, an attention given to the terror of the self, that

gets lost amidst the declared principles of the group; the struggle to express articulately enough that,

without recourse to the tellingly inarticulate "the breakdown of the playing#makes us give up trying to

speak "or more aptly, give up trying to play#beyond ourselves. In his discussion of Roscoe Mitchells

Little Suite, Will Menter offers that what marks out this piece "and it applies to other pieces by AACMmembers#is that it sounds spontaneous overall, even though one is aware that it must have been

substantially pre!structured.10He goes on to suggest that this is achieved through ensuring musicians

oriented their playing towards the growing music as opposed to individual expression "my emphasis#.Perhaps one cannot discount that both are in operation as individual expression is not placed in the

service of a bravura performance "the sections of this piece are too small and collage!like#, but in service of

the partially structured score that is in!formation as the piece progresses through time. However, the

organisational advantage that can be gleaned, and which Menter mentions in relation to Mitchell, is that a

method of distancing has been developed which meant that no longer must every sound that was made be

taken at face value as a serious personal or collective expression. These latter two, the face value of

individualism and its competition for recognition and the pathology of its illusory supercession through

group membership alone, are the bane of organisations as they can still be experienced.

We Dare to Sing !2"

What we could not say openly we expressed in music

$Duke Ellington

This modulation of improvisation and composition, of what was formally instinctual and impulsive being

acted upon and informing a grounding structure, does not so much mean that either one is replaced by the

other, but that when both are taken together there is an expansion of the ontological totality. There is, as

Cedric Robinson puts it, a breaking of the evolutionist chain.11Instead of succession and development

that pampers to the bourgeois logic of hierarchies and linearity, instead of a carpetbagging there is a

contributing!to, in this case, the black radical tradition that is jazz. Muhal Richard Abrams urged his

collaborants in the AACM to add copiously to an already vast reservoir of artistic richness handed down

through the ages.12Such adding!to resonates with the distancing necessary to elude bourgeois

individualism whilst at the same time liberating expressive and impersonal singularities. A fine example of

this can be heard on Arthur Doyles solo sax and vocal rendition of the 40s tune Nature Boy. Whilst

much of whats being said here is far better expressed by Arthur Doyle is it not by such means, a

preserving the collective being, that the guilt of self!expression is appeased? Is it the ontological totality,

the belonging to something multi!personal and meta!categorical, that can dare us to sing?

Richard Wright wrote of jazz as the rhythmic flaunting of guilt feelings and Calvin Hernton wrote that

each in our idiom hold the nightmare of our singularity.13Both Wright and Hernton "as members of a

radical intelligentsia#seem to me to be expressing something that a replenishing jazz tradition helped

them to overcome. For Wright in the 40s and 50s it may well be that the voiceless and inferiorised have

no right to express themselves and those that dare to sing do so, but yet feel guilty to transgress both the

taboo on their expression from a racist society and from being misconstrued as trying to escape from their


18/23

own communities "c.f. Charlie Parker and heroin#. For Calvin Hernton, on the other hand, the 60s seem

to throw up the sense that the terror of the self "its traumatic disalienation#is what both inspires and

holds back self!expression as a process of singularisation. There is a massive risk, Hernton seems to be

saying, in expressing yourself within a bourgeois context that tempts one to lose oneself through what

Aim Csaire refers to as walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the universal.14

Image: Engraving by Granger, after a sketch by James H. Moser, The Negro Exodus, 1879. The wharf atVicksburg, Mississippi, from which many black migrants departed following the end of Reconstruction for

points North and West.

But this singularity is no nightmare when it takes as its ground the multiplicities that have formed it and

with which it communicates. That the jazz ensemble figures as a collective assemblage of enunciation from

which some dare guiltlessly to sing is a testament to the preservation of a collective being that contains

within it the attempt to disalienate. This attempt is made almost unavoidable because of the abreactive

proviso to much jazz playing. Nat Hentoff says of Charlie Mingus that he expected his men to learn their

parts through what their own feelings tell them about the music. This isnt a technique of playing the

right notes but, as an abreaction of feeling, its maybe more a matter of playing between notes and, as a

player, bringing to the part the unwritten states of feeling that cannot yet be named. This shared

abreactive premise to the music, audible as plaintive anger and rough sonority on Mingus Faubus Fables,

may make it possible to say that individual expression as such is annulled in favour of processes of

singularisation that can be expressed as simply as in these words of AACM member Fred Anderson: All

music is basically the same, but what makes it different is different cats have different ways of speakingand communicating15These different ways could be the source of guilt, the nightmare of our singularity,

in that without the abreaction of feeling they can become aids to separation, but they are also the

challenge of performing and enacting a complex communication "a modulation of feeling#whereby neither

is dominated nor subsumed by the other, but complemented and encouraged to make a composition of

the assemblage, to be disappearing in the elasticity of a form. If we dare to sing we may find that the

structure no longer expresses us, but that we, instead, come to form an assemblage, a re!iterative structure

that is expressive of us: the anonymous singularising solo of the general intellect.

Howard Slater is a volunteer play therapist and writer. His

book,Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings, was published by Mute Books in January 2012.

Appendix One

Tellingly Inarticulate


19/23

In his sleeve notes to Max Roachs We Insist! Freedom Now!, Nat Hentoff records that there was an

impromptu squawk from Coleman Hawkins tenor sax on the track Driva Man. Hawkins is reported as

saying: No dont splice it... when its all perfect, especially in a piece like this, theres something very

wrong. This track sung by Abbey Lincoln with lyrics from Oscar Brown Jr is still seen as one of the more

forthright political jazz records of any day:

Git to work and root that stump,

driva man will make you jump.

Better make your hammer ring

Driva manll start to swing

Aint but two things on my mind

Driva man and quittin time.

When his cat!o!nine tails flies

Youll be happy just to die

This record was out around the time of the Greensboro student sit!in in 1960 and was released on Candid,

an independent record label. Another strong statement was made by Charles Mingus on his Faubus

Fables track. This latter features an ongoing call and response between Mingus and drummer Danny

Richmond:

CM: Name me a handful thats ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.DR: Faubus, Rockefeller,

Motherfucking Eisenhower. CM: Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

DR: Two, four, six, eight: they brainwash and teach you hate.

Yet again Hentoff writes up in his sleeve notes for this album a comment made by Eric Dolphy: I play the

notes that would not ordinarily be said to be in a given key, but I hear them as proper. The squawk, the

non!key, the emotional counterpoint, proper.

Appendix 2


20/23

We Dare to Sing

A great song arose, the liveliest thing born this side of the seas. It was a new song. It did notcome from Africa, though the dark throb and beat of that Ancient of Days was in it and through

it. It did not come from white America $never from so pale and hard and thin a thing, however

deep those vulgar and surrounding tones had driven. Not the Indies nor the hot South, the cold

East or the heavy West made that music. It was a new song and its deep and plaintive beauty, its

great cadences and wild appeal wailed, throbbed and thundered on the worlds ears with a

message seldom voiced by man. It swelled and blossomed like incense, improvised and born anew

out of an age old past, and weaving into its texture the old and new melodies in word and in

thought.

$W.E.B. Du Bois

Appendix 3

Jazz and Organisation

each man!string

doing his own thing

vibrating at the

each!to!each volume

sounding at the

each!to!each pitch

all being heard

at the same time

no one pushing

no one behind

each knowing eachs


21/23

rhythm and sign

Henry Dumas "from Greatness#

Appendix 4

Music and Agony

Hair $braided chestnut,

coiled like a lynchers rope,

Eyes $faggots,

Lips $old scars, or the first red blisters,

Breath $the last sweet scent of cane,

And her slim body, white as the ash

of black flesh after flame

$Jean Toomer "Portrait in Georgia#

Discography

Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1984.

Anthony Braxton & Joseph Jarman, Together Alone, Delmark 1974/2008.

Aim Csaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez in Salah M. Hassan, Documenta "13#, 2012.

John Coxon in conversation with the Author.

Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, City Lights, 2001

Arthur Doyle, Nature Boy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6l6rAyZeN8


22/23

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860!1880, Free Press 1998

Henry Dumas,Knees of a Natural Man, Thunders Mouth Press, 1989

Frantz Fanon,Black Skin, White Masks, Paladin 1973.

Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969.

Calvin C. Hernton,Medicine Man, Reed Canon and Johnston, 1976.

Claude McKay, Selected Poems, Dover 1999.

Will Menter: The Making of Jazz and Improvised Music: Four Musicians Collectives in England and the USA ,

Phd Thesis, University of Bristol, 1981.

Charles Mingus,Mingus Presents Mingus, Candid, 1960/1989.

Ken Rattenbury,Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer, Yale University Press 1990.

Max Roach, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, Candid 1960/1989.

Cedric J.Robinson,Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North CarolinaPress, 2000.

Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley, Black, Brown and Beige $Surrealist Writings from Africa and the

Diaspora, University of Texas, 2009.

Jean Toomer, Collected Poems, University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Archie Shepp, Live at the Pan!African Festival, Get Back, 1969/2002.

Footnotes

1Cedric J.Robinson,Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North CarolinaPress, 2000, p.171.

2Aim Csaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez in Salah M. Hassan, Documenta "13#, 2012, p.36.

3Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Paladin 1973, p.165.

4Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969, p.99.

5Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969, p.55.

6Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1984, p.149.

7Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley,Black, Brown and Beige $Surrealist Writings from Africa and the

Diaspora, University of Texas, 2009, p.240.


23/23

8Ornette Coleman in ibid., p.28.

9Ben Beaumont!Thomas, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith: The black experience is American experience,

The Guardian, 23 September 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/23/ishmael!wadada!leo!smith!

int...

10Will Menter: The Making of Jazz and Improvised Music: Four Musicians Collectives in England and the USA ,

Phd Thesis, University of Bristol, 1981, p.138.

11Cedric J. Robinson, op. cit., p.276.

12Will Menter, op. cit., p.100.

13Cedric J. Robinson, op. cit., p.302; and Calvin Hernton,Medicine Man, Reed Canon and Johnston 1976p.51.

14Aim Csaire, op. cit., p.38.

15Will Menter, op. cit., p. 21.

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