Microgroove by John Corbett

8/20/2019 Microgroove by John Corbett

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MI CR

O GR

O OVE

forays

into other music

john corbett


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MICRO-

GROOVE


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forays

into other music

john corbett

MICRO-

GROOVE

duke university press

Durham & London 2015


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on

acid-free paper♾

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

Typeset in Quadraat, Orator, and Officina

Sans by Graphic Composition, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Corbett, John, [date]

Microgroove : forays into other music / John Corbett.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5900-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-5870-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-7553-1 (e-book)

1. Avant-garde (Music) 2. Music—20th century—History

and criticism. 3. Music—21st century—History and

criticism. 4. Improvisation (Music) i. Corbett, John,

[date] Extended play. Continuation of: ii. Title.

ml197.c769 2015

780.9’04—dc23

2015003795

Frontispiece: Two panels from Uncle Gaspard Joins the Bograt

Navy © Michael Hurley, reprinted with permission, all

rights reserved.

Cover art: Joe McPhee, 1970. Photograph by Ken Brunton.

Courtesy of Joe McPhee.


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in memory of fred anderson,

ornette coleman, von freeman,

steve lacy, bernie mcgann,

and koko taylor


7/28

I hate music, what is it worth?

Can’t bring anyone back to this earth.

Filling the space between all of the notes,

But I’ve got nothing else, so I guess here we go.

• SUPERCHUNK, “Me and You and Jackie Mittoo”


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Preface: Tympanum of the Other Frog • xv

Acknowledgments • xixIntroduction • 1

One. On the Road, Into the Cul-de-Sac

Joe Harriott and Bernie McGann: Flying without Ornette • 15

Michael Hurley: Jocko’s Lament • 21

Mayo Thompson: Genre of One • 33

John Stevens: Unpopular Populists • 36

Peter Brötzmann Tentet: Freeways • 40

Steve Lacy: Sojourner Saxophone • 49

David Grubbs: Postcards from the Edge • 57

Voice Crack: From Nothing to Everything • 67

Two. Exigeneses of Creative Music

Milford Graves: Pulseology • 71

Out of Nowhere: Deleuze, Gräwe, Cadence • 79

Carla Bley and Steve Swallow: Feeding Quarters to the Nonstop Mental

Jukebox • 85

Misha Mengelberg: No Simple Calculations for Life • 93

Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink: Natural Inbuilt

Contrapuncto • 109

Form Follows Faction? Ethnicity and Creative Music • 116

Anthony Braxton: Ism vs. Is • 123

Anthony Braxton: Bildungsmusik —Thoughts on “Composition 171” • 129

contents


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xii contents

Paul Lovens: Lo Our Lo • 132

Clark Coolidge: The Improvised Line • 136

Nathaniel Mackey: Steep Incumbencies • 142

Sun Ra: From the Windy City to the Omniverse—Chicago Life as a Street

Priest of diy Jazz • 153

Fred Anderson: The House That Fred Built • 162

Three. Ululations and Other Vocal Stimulants

Sun Ra: Queer Voice • 169

Jaap Blonk: Uncommon Tongue • 170

PJ Harvey: Mother’s Tongue • 179

Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound

(coauthored with Terri Kapsalis) • 182

Liz Phair and Lou Barlow: On Music, Sex, tv , and Beyond • 194

Liz Phair and Kim Gordon: Exile in Galville? • 205

Koko Taylor: The Blue Queen Cooks • 212

Brion Gysin and Steve Lacy: Nothing Is True, Everything Is

Permuted • 217

Four. The Horn Section

Ornette Coleman: Doing Is Believing • 233

Roscoe Mitchell: Citizen of Sound • 244

Fred Anderson and Von Freeman: Tenacity • 250

George Lewis: Interactive Imagination • 258

Mats Gustafsson: MG at Half-C • 264

Ken Vandermark: Six Dispatches from the Memory Bank • 270

Ken Vandermark and Joe McPhee: Mutual Admiration Society • 278

Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker: Bring Something to the Table • 285

Five. Track Marks

Oncology of the Record Album • 297

Discaholic or Vinyl Freak? Mats Gustafsson Interrogates John

Corbett • 301

Twenty-Seven Enthusiasms: A Spontaneous Listening Session • 308


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contents xiii

A Very Visual Kind of Music: The Cartoon Soundtrack beyond the

Screen • 313

R. L. Burnside and Jon Spencer: Fattening Frogs for Snake Drive • 322

Before and After Punk: The Comp as Teaching Tool • 331

Raymond Scott: Cradle of Electronica • 336

Six. Melodic Line and Tone Color

Peter Brötzmann: Graphic Equalizer • 343

Albert Oehlen: Bionic Painting • 347

Albert Oehlen: Mangy—A Conversation and a Playlist • 352

Christopher Wool: Impropositions—Improvisation, Dub Painting • 359

Christopher Wool: Into the Woods—Six Meditations on the

Interdisciplinary • 366

Sun Ra: An Afro-Space- Jazz Imaginary—The Printed Record of El

Saturn • 371

Seven. The Texture of Refusal

Helmut Lachenmann: Hellhörig, or the Intricacies of Perceptiveness • 379

Guillermo Gregorio: Madi Music • 387

Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others • 391

Afterword: A Concise History of Music • 417

Grooving On: Selected Listening • 423

Credits • 443

Index • 447


11/28

The moon was a drip on a dark hood.

Dad hit the brakes as we drove up to the water’s edge, grinding gravel, dustrising in the dusk air. The sound of the car silenced the nightlife, but only

temporarily. Arms folded on the windowpane of the Ford ltd station wagon,

we waited for the frogs to crank back up.

I was eight years old. My family lived up the street, in a suburb of Virginia

Beach. Inlynnview Road bisected the larger waterway into two parts: a pond

that opened out onto an even larger body of water, and a smaller pond lopped

off on the other side, fed by a viaduct, surrounded by overhanging trees, a bit

swampy with algae and lily pads, but with a clean and flowing water supply

that kept it fertile, green, and full of critters. For a few years, this was my

preferred playground.

Engine off, night on the horizon, my father and I awaited the first frog, a

scout who would croak bravely into the abyss. A regular pulse, sometimes like

the pluck of a tenor banjo. Very soon others would join, first a few, tentatively,

then louder, then more, until the pond was transformed into an amphibian

amphitheater. A cacophony of belches, a vortex of peeps, several species of

itsy animals bellowing longingly into the night in hopes of finding a hookup,

depositing eggs or sperm, then paddling or hopping off into the dark having

accomplished the one-night stand, froggy style.

When the full chorus was singing, my father whispered to me that I should

pick out one particular frog and try to listen only to it. It was more difficult than

I expected, but I found that with some effort I could differentiate the sound of

a specific animal—I suppose I recognized its voice—and isolate it from the

others. Now, he said, keeping that one in mind, try to hear another one at the same

time. Struggling, I did. But the rhythm of the first one was a bit faster than the

other, so they kept coming together and then moving apart, cyclically, drawing

me away from the first one. Croak, croak, croak, croak-croak, croak-croak,

preface

Tympanum of the Other Frog


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xvi preface

croak-croak, croak, croak, croak. Listen to the new voice in relation to the first one,

he said. I did, and the first frog became the base from which the second frog

veered, like when the blinker in the car doesn’t match the blinking of a street

sign. OK, now if you can, switch them. This was even trickier, but when I man-

aged, it was like a door opened up in my head. Suddenly, the second frog wasthe baseline, the original one was the variable. And right away, I could do this

with any of the hundreds of frogs bleating in the dark.

My dad was teaching me about polyrhythms. Setting me up for Steve Reich

and jazz. That’s already pretty mind-blowing for an eight- year-old, but there

was more. I couldn’t put a name on it, but I also understood that he was show-

ing me something deeper, a principle. If I was able, by shifting my focus, to

change the rhythm I was hearing, then listening must be a relative activity. A

listener has to make decisions about how to listen. It’s not just a passive thing.And in order to do that, to put yourself into the right space to be able to make

informed listening decisions, you have to pay attention.

During many nature trips, frogging or birding or fishing, my dad instilled

a sense of this fundamental respect for paying attention, using eyes as well

as ears. It probably saved my life a couple of times when I nearly stepped on

poisonous snakes, noticing them just in time. If you don’t pay attention, you

don’t notice the snakes. But attentiveness is a luxury in our lives; the focus is

so often made for us, to optimize and economize our experience. I guess it’s

one of the pleasures of watching Orson Welles, his love of the long shot and

deep focus, his avoidance of the close-up and the cutaway. There’s plenty to

notice in one of those shots, but you have to pay attention; nobody will point

at it and say, “Hey, nimrod, look over here, this is the important thing.”

Try this: go to a pond and look at the water. Stay there. Keep looking. Wait

longer. Bored? Stay there. At some point, you’ll start to notice things. Maybe

a turtle’s head will pop up, a dark area will turn out to be a lurking fish, you’ll

see the googly eyes and bulbous nose of a frog. They were there already. You

hadn’t noticed them. I did this once when I was in junior high, outside Phil-

adelphia. There was a stream I’d been walking past regularly for a couple of

years. I stared at a clump of leaves submerged against a rock in the bed of the

stream. Zoned out in adolescent daze, but armed with my beastie attentiveness

training, I was amazed to realize that the leaves were alive and were in truth

a hellbender salamander. No doubt, that will be the only time I see one in the

wild. Glad I noticed.

The trick to being attentive is one thing: still thyself. This is the ultimate

message of the frog pond. Before you can become an active listener, before

you can explore the tapestry of croaks, you have shut down all the stuff in your


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preface xvii

head. Get over yourself. Forget all your fancy ideas, your elaborate plans. This

recognition has an ironic component—you have to be receptive, all ears, in

order to get to a place where you can choose how to hear. That’s one of the

most profound aspects of John Cage—in order to become a critical listener,

his music often suggests, you have to dispense with your ego. If you are inthe woods and all you have in your brain are thoughts and conversations and

preconceptions, over that din you’ll never notice anything new. Nothing will

surprise you; you will only continuously confirm your suspicions.

Consider the time-honored cliché of the classic western—the observant

Native American notices the broken twig, sniffs the dirt, says he’s been here, the

ground is still warm, locates the outlaw to the awe of the flat- footed honky posse.

There’s something to it. The world—natural or cultural, no matter—is there

already, waiting to be observed. In order to do so, you have to be patient andhumble and get yourself out of the way.

It’s a different frog pond these days. The prevalence of electronic gadgets

in our daily lives makes deep observation even more difficult; our attention is

ruthlessly interrupted by other messages claiming greater importance. Those

gadgets should become part of the landscape, something that we have to pay

attention to, to place among the other sounds, so that we can hear them for

what they are, and, in the long run, so that rather than reacting to them auto-

matically, we can make decisions about how we hear them.

Imagine we’re there in the dark, back on Inlynnview Road, froggies sing-

ing, and the cell phone rings. OK, no judgment, I’ll let it ring, try to hear it in

relation to the other sounds, see what it adds to the chorus. Perhaps I won’t

choose to defer all the others to the phone’s tones, making it the baseline frog.

I’ll strip it of its singular urgency, neutralize it, just for a minute. It’s a sound,

no more or less, mingling with other sounds, not only frogs but toads too,

trilling and chirping in the warm evening air.


14/28

This book has had four different introductions. In 1999, I began to assemble

material for a new collection as a follow-up to my book Extended Play (1994).This period found me writing extensively for music magazines, contributing

liner notes, and essaying periodically for academic publications. There seemed

to be ample work to choose from, and the emergent document seemed to

have a shape and substance complementary to the previous book. It began to

feel like Extended Play Volume 2. I put the manuscript together, wrote an initial

introduction, sent it off to the press, got positive feedback and a contract.

Then I put it aside.

At the time I wasn’t sure why; now I know. It wasn’t ready. It needed a

scrupulous chopping. Moreover, something had started to shift and deepen

for me. I had to give it more time, work more, build it up and take things out.

Think of ceramicist Ken Price: layer upon layer, then the sanding down, ac-

cumulating in order to reveal what is underneath. About five years down the

line, I revisited and reworked it, and out in the woods of Michigan’s Upper

Peninsula, I wrote a new introduction. Then I put it aside, again. This time, it

was on the shelf for a shorter period; I went back to it again about two years

later, but at that point, in the mid-oughts, I had embarked on a new, very time-

intensive adventure opening an art gallery, and I once again put the collection,

as well as its third intro, on ice.

Late in 2013, I opened up the manuscript again and found it newly exciting.

This time, I was brutally honest, extracted many earlier parts that didn’t make

the cut, and added a batch of newer chapters including a series of writings

linking music and visual art. On a writing retreat in southwest Wisconsin, I

composed the final version of the introduction and put the pieces in a defin-

itive order.

A book that takes fifteen years to assemble is inevitably indebted to many

colleagues and associates. I would be hard- pressed to name (or remember)

acknowledgments


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xx acknowledgments

all of them, but a number require acknowledgment. I’ve learned immensely

from the guidance and insight of editors at several periodicals, especially Kiki

Yablon, Philip Montoro, Jason Koransky, Ed Enright, and Aaron Cohen. Kevin

Whitehead, who lived in Chicago for some time, was and continues to be a

bright light from whom I have drawn as much illumination as possible. Withthe brilliant Lloyd Sachs, Whitehead and I hosted a radio program, Writer’s Bloc,

on wnur , also very inspiring and informative for me; later the show added

two more great journalists, Art Lange and Peter Kostakis. That rich environ-

ment contributed immensely to this endeavor. I miss the Lightning Round.

Fundamental appreciation goes to all the interview subjects represented in

this volume. Several of the musicians and artists are now close friends, and

for their comradeship, constancy, and trust, as well as the way they challenge

me, I thank Peter Brötzmann, David Grubbs, Joe McPhee, Albert Oehlen, andChristopher Wool. Mats Gustafsson is the best buddy a vinyl freak could want

(shhh, be very quiet!), an open ear whenever needed. Several artist-friends not

in the book were deeply inspiring to its completion: Josiah McElheny, Phil

Hanson, and Charline von Heyl. For twenty years of return visits to his base-

ment, where I have learned so much, I bow to my friend Milford Graves. Over

the course of a decade starting in the ’90s, I was fortunate to work closely with

Ken Vandermark, and I thank him for many insights into the stressful world

of a working musician. In the same period, I benefited greatly from time spent

with Bruno Johnson of Okka Disk records. I wish we saw more of one another

these days; in spite of family and entrepreneurship, he too has felt the irre-

sistible gravitational pull of the music. My alte freund Kurt Kellison, cofounder

of the Unheard Music Series, is another key inspiration for Microgroove. Many

colleagues and pals have aided me directly or indirectly, including Bruce Fin-

kleman, Pete Toalson, Scott Black, Malachi Ritscher, Lou Mallozzi, Anthony

Elms, Susanne Ghez, Hamza Walker, Susannah Ribstein, Brian Ashby, Ben

Chaffee, Julia Hendrickson, Emily Letourneau, Nicole Sachs, Judith Kirshner,

Ihno van Hassalt, Mitch Cocanig, Mike Reed, Dave Rempis, Josh Berman,

Michael Orlove, Frank Alkyer, Rachel Weiss, Sheryl Ridenour, Adam Abraham,

Kate Dumbleton, Bob Snyder, Pam Wojcik, Rick Wojcik, Scott Nielsen, and

Leslie Buchbinder. Props to my wonderful and supportive extended family:

James, Joyce, Jack, and Jennifer Corbett; Jayne Hyland; and Tim-Bob Fitzger-

ald. Most recently, I have been engaged most pleasurably working alongside

Jim Dempsey, the master of analogy, whose style and humor are undergirded

by his sensitivity and intelligence.

For waiting it out with such supportive good spirit, I thank my editor at

Duke, Ken Wissoker. My dear amigos Katie Kahn and John Sparagana have


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acknowledgments xxi

given me invaluable feedback on the manuscript. They are as responsive and

spontaneous as creative souls could be, and they helped nudge me to excavate

the book. Dinners with them and Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish are a staple

measure of sanity in an unclear time. Likewise, trips to Grafton, Wisconsin,

to visit Gina Litherland and Hal Rammel, trusted sources of counsel and in-spiration. Most of all, my better half and editorial conscience, Terri Kapsa-

lis, who patiently endured abandoned titles, discarded chapters, and all four

introductions—the world is falling down, hold my hand.


17/28

Everything starts as an encounter.

As abstract as thinking and writing and talking about music can be, it allbegins with something concrete, material. The bump of Pusha T’s My Name

Is My Name as its soundwaves enter my aural canal and meet my eardrum. The

surprise of a fateful afternoon jaunt to a neighborhood record store on which I

happen upon Michael Hurley’s Blue Navigator, marveling at the Hurley-penned

comics on its jacket. The rush of picking up Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink

from the airport in my vw bug—long, tall Han, feet on the dashboard, pum-

meling them with a stray drumstick. Encounters with sounds, objects, people.

The sense of encounter, a basic exchange that music engenders as a social

activity, is reflected in conversation, dialogue, argument. Think of the notion

of a “band,” “ensemble,” or “group”—social convergence is encoded into

the very words we use for fundamental musical units. I’m sure this is why I

remain committed to the question-and-answer format in much of my music

writing. Sometimes in an encounter you hit a vein, other times it yields only

a nugget, a shard, a precious memory perhaps too small to build around.

In a Parisian flea market, casual discussion with the vendor, and suddenly a

box of white label test-pressing 1970s African singles appears. A ride across

Boston interviewing Ornette Coleman from the backseat of someone else’s

car in which he shares a magical experience with Thelonious Monk. Thai food

one-on-one with Cecil Taylor talking about his favorite divas.

Now and then, an encounter backfires. In 1986, I arranged an interview

with On-U Sound guru Adrian Sherwood. His work seemed to me to be the

most advanced production around; I loved how he manipulated voices, layered

sounds, truncated melodies, toyed with dynamics, and brought an aggres-

sive dada-esque sensibility into post-dub mixology. We met at a café during

a lunch break from my day job. He invited two guests: singer Mark Stewart

and drummer Keith LeBlanc. I was starstruck and delighted. LeBlanc was the

introduction


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2 introduction

legendary force behind the Sugar Hill Gang, and then later was Sherwood’s

go-to for all things nonreggae. Stewart’s were the most explosive and exciting

of Sherwood-produced efforts, his William Burroughs–like vocal paranoia in-

fused into dance music defaced by an ied. More important, Stewart had been

the singer in the Pop Group, the British post- punk band that, truth be told,had introduced me to freely improvised music; improvisor Tristan Honsinger

ornamented their 1979 single “We Are All Prostitutes” with trademark cello

and mumbling. Gateway drug for this lifelong user.

We all sat down for a coffee. I broke out the tape recorder and kicked off

with a question about the politics of production. Sherwood knitted his brow

and explained that he didn’t prescribe politics to the artists he produced, they

could say anything they wanted. Stewart and LeBlanc stared at me. I made

another pass at the idea, but Sherwood was already put off. “Man, you gottacome see these sneakers I found down the street,” exclaimed LeBlanc to anyone

who would listen. “They’re totally silver and white!” Stewart chimed in that he

wanted to make sure to hit all the thrift stores, that American secondhand over-

coats were not to be believed. “C’mon!” they both said, and leapt up, ending the

interview before it had started. I went to see the sneakers, just out of curiosity.

Stewart sought his coats alone. That night, Mark Stewart + Maffia played an

incantatory set, the singer’s snarled rant dropping in and out intermittently

while LeBlanc and Doug Wimbush laid down an irresistible g-force beat.

• • •

Out of hundreds of interviews, a few others have gone south. Aborted diner

lunch with Mayo Thompson where the conversation looped unnaturally—I

think he was just messing with me. A phone interview with organist Jimmy

Smith that turned from belligerent into buddy-buddy as soon as I mentioned

being a fan of barbeque—I swear to the god of soul- jazz. As in its precursor,

Extended Play, the bulk of Microgroove is predicated on the encounter. In Micro-

groove, there are a greater number of interviews, fewer academic essays. That,

in part, reflects shifts in my own orientation, a move away from an investment

in the language of poststructuralism coupled with a long engagement with

the production of cds and the presentation of live music. Having explored the

theory/practice divide, I guess I’ve come up on the practice side. Or maybe the

service side.

The twenty years since Extended Play are evenly split between music and

visual art. I had started organizing concerts in 1985, but in the period be-

tween 1996 and 2005, it was my primary occupation (never my main source

of income). For a decade I presented live music, nearly a thousand concerts


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introduction 3

altogether: a weekly series and annual festival (co-organized with saxophonist

Ken Vandermark) at the Empty Bottle, Chicago; a yearlong stint as artistic

director of the Berlin Jazzfest; lots of independent production. At the same

time, with Kurt Kellison of Atavistic Records, I inaugurated the Unheard Music

Series, releasing around seventy cds of creative music, as we put it in an earlypress sheet, “scouring the dustbin of history.”

Then, in 2004, Jim Dempsey and I opened an art gallery together, a move

that confounded some of my musical colleagues but one that grew directly

and organically out of the work I’d been doing in music. In 2000, with Terri

Kapsalis, I became involved in saving a large cache of Sun Ra artifacts from

oblivion, eventually donated to the University of Chicago Library and Experi-

mental Sound Studio’s Creative Audio Archive. I’m still deeply engaged with

those materials, and, along with a concurrent stint as chair of ExhibitionStudies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I think this provided the

natural transition from live music to visual art. At Corbett vs. Dempsey we still

periodically present live music in the gallery, and now we have a record label;

I’ve organized musical programs at the Guggenheim in New York and the Art

Institute of Chicago, curated exhibitions of Brötzmann’s artwork and Sun Ra’s

archive. These worlds turn out to be more connected than you’d think. And

fronting the music you love is a hard habit to shake.

For many years, I subscribed to Laura Mulvey’s statement of intent, “the

destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon,” all along feeling that there was

an underlying ellipsis in this profound dictum. To disrupt the pleasurable

consumption of mainstream narrative cinema, to interrogate its secret meth-

ods, to break the comfort zone of continuity—these activities felt right, they

seemed so good. But there’s the rub: the destruction of one kind of pleasure

often creates another kind of pleasure. The joy of creative critique. The glee

of deconstruction. Much of the music I was interested in was already engaged

with something like that kind of interrogative practice. I recall my first con-

versation with guitarist Derek Bailey, in which he told me that he couldn’t

imagine any reason that a person would come hear him play unless they were

attracted to the sound of what he did. Wow, I thought, you’ve got to be pretty

deep down the rabbit hole to find that sound attractive. To say it’s an acquired

taste is perhaps wrong. I think it’s music that demands a different mode of

listening, and when heard attentively, seriously, and critically, it reveals a whole

system of pleasures, some predicated on the destruction of conventional mu-

sical norms, some operating in their own autonomous zone of attractions.

There are still several essays rooted in poststructuralism and deconstruc-

tion in Microgroove. More than providing specific references or terminology,


20/28

4 introduction

at a formative stage in development an immersion in poststructuralist and

critical theory and cultural studies helped shape my thinking. I feel that it

actually changed neural pathways. One does not need to write the word “text”

to approach an object of study with circumspection. In Deleuze’s widely cited

phrase, theory has given me a tool kit. Then again, so has dub reggae andfreely improvised music. So has hip-hop, which I rarely write about, and Greek

rembetika. And jazz. And vinyl. And Christopher Wool’s paintings. These are

all lenses, kits, to me equally valuable. If theory is a source, bury the source.

Let it grow anew.

• • •

In the introduction to Extended Play, I waxed lyrical about the radical potential

of shuffle play. It was a new thing then. I had no idea how central it wouldbecome to my way of listening. At the time, I could shuffle between five discs;

now I have an iPod with forty thousand tracks, and I can randomly access music

for months without repeating.

I’ve been thinking about jukeboxes lately.

Strictly in terms of musical selection, my iPod now does the job of a jukebox.

A sort of hyper- juke. I can let my little selector do all the work, keeping me

entertained for hours at a stretch, consistently teasing my brain by introducing

impromptu blindfold tests into my day. But shuffle only really works for me, I

now realize, if I pay attention to it. If it’s just background, it takes all the inter-

est away and can homogenize even the greatest music. If I need background, I

prefer to listen to something more concentratedly programmed, like an album

or an artist or even just a genre.

On the other hand, by shifting my attention, the activity of shuffling can

take on a different significance. In recent months, I’ve taken to pretending that

my iPod is a deejay. That way I can judge its performance. Sometimes it’s in

the zone, and sometimes it loses the thread. But when I attend to the iPod as a

sort of miniature disc jockey, there’s something at stake in its juxtapositions,

transitions, good choices, and fumbles. My colleagues think I’m a bit weird,

I suspect, when I blurt out: “iPod is on fire today!” But that’s how I feel when

it abuts two things that really somehow work, but would never have seemed

like a conscious match.

I’m old fashioned by now, with my grandpa iPod. Most youngsters are

streaming, or they use algorithm-based programs like Pandora that choose

songs based on some initial personal preference data, like Amazon does—if

you like this, then you’ll probably like this. I’d rather have a means of access

that doesn’t assume what I’d want, that’s not trying to please me. Those per-


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introduction 5

sonal preferences require a static subject, but I’m on the move, always curious;

I want to learn new things, make unexpected associations. I might be inter-

ested in something that the little algorithm would never know, might think

I’d hate. That’s why I’m a sucker for the chance aspect of shuffle. I love the

notion, attributed in philosophy to David Hume and in biology to Lamarck,that chance is but our ignorance of causes. It suggests that there’s some reason

beyond our grasp. Maybe that’s as close as I get to metaphysics. But I like it

because it’s not the product of a corporate investigation; my interest is not

predicted exclusively according to music I’ve liked in the past and superficial

affinities it might have with music I don’t know. I want curveballs thrown into

the mix. That’s why chance is my deejay.

Looking through my singles recently, I thought about how much jukeboxes

were like that, how they were harbingers of the possibility of random play,the idea that a machine could make cool decisions. Here you have a format,

the seven-inch single, which is a standard unit. Anything could be put on it;

wildly divergent music could be programmed using the same automaton. Two

record covers in my singles collection caught my attention, and I immedi-

ately imagined them played back-to-back on a jukebox. Here’s Red Garland

Quintet, with the beautiful graphic of a record in cross section, nifty arrow

pointing down into the groove like a stylus. Superbad hard-bop, with a top-

flight lineup, Blue Mitchell’s trumpet, Pepper Adams’s baritone sax, and the

Joneses (bassist Sam and drummer Elvin) on rhythm along with their leader.

It was, quite literally, music made for jukeboxes, a black-and- white picture

juke sleeve released alongside the color lp version.

Now switch radically to a beautiful, extremely rare single by the British

improvising groupamm. This gem, which, like the Garland, has been reissued

oncd, features short excerpts from a forty-five-minute performance by the duo

version of the group, with Lou Gare on tenor sax and Eddie Prévost on drums.

I love the idea of a groovy jazz jukebox session interrupted by a spacious, noisy

spate of improvised music. It’s the kind of thing that my iPod might kick up,

but there’s the added thought of the actual vinyl whirling around in the juke,

the heavy tonearm slapping down on the disc, the vinyl living its ephemeral

existence, serving its life’s purpose, to make us listen, to entertain us, maybe

to make us think and feel something we haven’t thought or felt before.

• • •

Why micro?

Microgroove. Smaller grooves. Grooving in small places by small assem-

blages with small audiences. (Makes me think of an early Pink Floyd title: “Several


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6 introduction

Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving

with a Pict.”) A celebration of things content to stay small or resigned to the

fact that without changing their underlying principles or aesthetics they will

not grow all that much larger. No barrage of pr will make improvised music

a pop commodity. It is a subset of a fraction of a portion of a minoritarianactivity we call music listening, buried within the entertainment industry; the

very fact that it’s of almost no value unless you actually pay attention to it

automatically means it will never be especially popular. For that matter, an

avalanche of radio coverage could not possibly make Helmut Lachenmann’s

delicate “Dal Niente” into a hit, even in the already rarefied world of classical

music, itself a rather unpopular micro-environ. Cat Power may have covered

Michael Hurley’s songs, but that didn’t fling Hurley’s surreal lyrics and lemon

drop intonation to the top of the charts.The music in Microgroove is not all small. PJ Harvey and Donna Summer

and Liz Phair couldn’t be classed that way. But I think, in their variances of

enormity, they can still be shoehorned into this title in a sense of finding little

meanings in big music—reading against the grain is an activity that loosens

classificatory borders, making transit from small to big and back more ten-

able, enjoyable even. Some of them actively engage in what Martin Scorsese

has referred to as “smuggling”—the illicit bringing of unwarranted ideas or

images into a mainstream work.

This writer certainly has his straight-up, dead center mainstream pas-

sions, even if they’re not the ones he writes about most often. The twenty

years represented in this collection reflect but hardly exhaust my interests

and preoccupations in that period. I listen to pop and rock, entertainment

music plain and simple. Lately, I’ve gone back to Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood

Mac, and Cheap Trick, discovering things in them I’d missed when I first

loved them. Albert Oehlen turned me on to neo- soul artists like Van Hunt,

Bilal, and Omar, suggesting that if the world made any sense these artists

would be on the radio, which reminds us that in the ’70s, Stevie Wonder

and Marvin Gaye were on the radio. They were huge. And incredible. When

I have found myself writing about majoritarian musics, it is often in search

of aspects at their periphery. As a reviewer rightly observed in reference to

Extended Play, I’m never particularly interested in getting to the “essence”

of a music; that would be hypocritical coming from someone who takes

pleasure, as a listener, in the details, the surfaces, the contradictions, the

texture, the edges, the forgotten or repressed or ignored or discounted or

discarded components in excess of any music’s essence. The inexhaustible

margins of audio activity.


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introduction 7

• • •

The specific term “microgroove” refers to a new technology introduced in 1948

and patented bycbs Laboratories that advanced the development of lp albums

by cramming more music into each square inch of disc surface, allowing the

standard twenty-minute side to take shape. In my private semiology, this is a

reminder of how much my own experience of music is filtered through record-

ings. I am, as is virtually every contemporary person, a child of the microgroove

revolution. This micro was the vehicle for the initial explosion of the popular

music industry, an irony that is never far from my mind.

The title Microgroove is also a link to Extended Play. Only a few months after

the microgroove technology was introduced,rca debuted the “extended play,”

or ep, the direct result of which was the emergence of the seven-inch single.

These two books are closely related, carrying some of the same themes and

some identical interview subjects. Anyone familiar with the former book will

perhaps notice that where there were individual entries on Fred Anderson and

Von Freeman (both dearly departed in the meantime) and Peter Brötzmann

and Evan Parker (now very active septuagenarians), in this book the same

musicians are found conversing with each other—an interview strategy I have

enjoyed deploying for DownBeat and other publications. Thus, I hope these

discussions can profitably be read in relation to the ones in Extended Play. HanBennink and Sun Ra reappear, and Mats Gustafsson, who is just a glimmer in

the introduction of the earlier volume, is now one of my closest friends and a

verified free music superstar.

I have tried to approach certain artists from different angles. Brötzmann,

for instance, appears three times here: in conversation with Parker, in a tour

diary, and also in a reflection on his work as a graphic artist. A profile of Sun

Ra’s Chicago period is augmented by a specific look at the graphic design

approach of his El Saturn label. I was a third wheel in two conversations,separated by four years, that involved singer Liz Phair; it’s fascinating to see

the differences in tone that arise over that span, and the ones that might be

attributed to the gender of Phair’s other interlocutor, in one case Lou Barlow,

in the other Kim Gordon. Several figures are considered solo and with an-

other musician. Ken Vandermark appears in successive chapters—a personal

reflection on nearly thirty years of knowing him, and in conversation with Joe

McPhee. Steve Lacy’s ambulatory lifestyle is the topic of a profile written a few

years before his tragic death, based on a weekend spent with him and IreneAebi at their apartment in Berlin; another chapter written in a less personal

manner considers Lacy’s highly collaborative nature as it manifested in his


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8 introduction

work with writer Brion Gysin. My interview with Misha Mengelberg proved too

rich for the article I originally published, and I have opted to reproduce the full

conversation, contrasting it with a three- way dialogue adding his career-long

compadre Han Bennink. Two of the most important and influential contem-

porary painters, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, each make a pair ofappearances in Microgroove: Oehlen in question-and-answer interviews, one

free ranging, one based on a specific body of work; Wool in two essays, one

considering the musical currents in his paintings, one based on a specific set

he designed for a dance troupe and composed at the request of choreographer

Benjamin Millepied. In all these cases, I was interested in presenting multiple

points of view, to suggest how a different vantage in time, place, modality of

writing, or circumstance of interview can yield new ideas. My experience tells

me that such a notion is arguably most fruitful when dealing with rich worksand complex artists. It’s a shakier proposition to approach superficial culture

from different viewpoints.

Some new and expanded areas of orientation appear. I dedicate a full chap-

ter to contemporary classical music, and elsewhere I explore contrasts and

continuities between music and painting, graphic arts, poetry, and fiction. If

there is a deep difference between the two compilations, it is mostly felt in the

way they are organized; while I chose to segregate the chapters according to

writing mode in Extended Play (academic, journalistic, interrogatory), here I’ve

let the literary as well as musical genres freely mingle, grouping the chapters

into rough thematic zones. This time out, I’m the deejay.

The “other” of the subtitle has two tributaries. First, from the academic

side, it’s a holdover from the 1980s, when the notion of “the other” had

achieved something of a pandemic reach into the critical community. (It be-

came the discursive fetish that Jean Baudrillard had so pointedly observed in

the word “fetish” as it was deployed by Marxists a generation earlier.) A student

of semiotics, I wrote on otherness as it related to psychoanalysis, feminism,

Marxian critique, and subaltern studies. “Other” was a dialectical term pitted

against the dominant center of the social map—white, middle-class, male,

heterosexual, and any combination of the above. It was a useful, if much too

versatile, concept, but after a period of overapplication it has gone the way of

terms like “apparatus” and “suture”—supple, seductive terms that eventually

lose their frisson. (At one point in grad school, my friend Jalal Toufic and I

joked about writing something titled “Why (B)other?” to poke a bit of fun at

this and another insufferable theory tic: witless parentheses.)

In “other music,” the “other” comes from a less tony place as well. On

undergrad afternoons when I should have been reading Wittgenstein or


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introduction 9

Barthes or Mulvey, I often went awol to Boston, where the record stores were

numerous and well stocked. One feature not exclusive to Beantown that I

especially liked was the existence of a catchall for uncategorizable music. A

white plastic separator card proclaimed: other . Not this, not that, but the

other. Something that doesn’t fit. I found myself burrowing into that inexactsection, truffling for the odd Fred Frith item or Borbetomagus rarity. A long-

lived store in New York City now bears the name Other Music. A fine store

with a fine handle.

The intervening two decades between these two books have given me added

confidence in one aspect of my endeavor. I believe that we will one day un-

derstand improvisation to have been a paramount contribution to culture in

the twentieth century. Maybe the central contribution. It is a feature of many

contemporary artistic practices, and its philosophical implications are yet tobe fully grasped, but there’s no doubt that improvisation has been explored

most richly in music. This, of course, is the topic for a more focused argu-

ment, one that I’m beginning to formulate. When I look at the choices I’ve

made of who to interview and write about, I am convinced that it’s because

Ornette Coleman, Milford Graves, Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, Peter

Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, Carla Bley, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, and George

Lewis are among the greatest artists of our time, their work roughly equivalent

in significance to the radical innovations of cubism or abstraction in painting.

In the company of equals, they are more equal than the rest, their obscurity in

the mass ear notwithstanding.

• • •

There are record collectors whose entire focus is on the esoteric. Scarcity

and unknownness are taken to be signs of quality, perhaps confirmation of

a conspiracy in mainstream culture to hide the really great stuff. These guys

dig up some of the most astonishing things, genuine lost treasures. There’s

a whole pecking order of them, a rare record royalty. I feel an affinity for this

way of thinking, I recognize, because I distrust the popular filters through

which most cultural productions must pass in order to be registered in the

mass imagination. If history is written by the victors, sometimes the victors

have dull taste, hence the singular importance of the cratedigger. But there

has to be more than raw rarity at play. The records must reward the observer,

somehow, some way. For me, this normally means the music has to be com-

pelling. Sounds obvious, but some collectors are not interested in the sound

of the music—if it has a weird cover, was issued privately, and fits into some

oddball category, like new age free jazz or Native American cowboy music,


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10 introduction

that’s more than enough. From the standpoint of music as affirmation of the

spectacular diversity of human endeavor, no doubt it is. I recall finding an early

’70s seven-inch with a picture sleeve in a going-out-of-business Lisbon record

store by a Portuguese band called the Korean Black Eyes—five ultrahip Korean

women leaning over their guitars and saxophone, playing a version of Sly &the Family Stone’s “Higher” that is a testament to the creative possibilities of

cross-cultural misunderstanding. I dig this kind of wild- world wacko- ness.

It can be a brilliant demonstration of the poetics of failure or the positive po-

tential of geographic isolation. A night listening to records with ne plus ultra

cratedigger David Hollander is like a trip to another planet. With a gleeful

smile he’ll drop the needle on a delightfully inept soul track, rock back on his

heels, take a beat, and finally, with a maniac’s intensity, blurt: “Do you realize

we’re in the freaking twilight zone?!!”On the other side of the fence, I know well-informed and critical people

who have absolute faith in the mass cultural filtration system. And lest we be

blinded by our enthusiasm for the little known, the fact is that the system has

shaped some sensationally fantastic music. In the soul realm alone, the pro-

ductions of Stax, Atlantic, and Motown are among the great achievements of

Homo sapiens. Many of the hen’s teeth singles that diggers have excavated are in

truth made by people trying to replicate the best-known artists. James Brown

in particular has been mauled by several generations of near-miss imitators,

sometimes to wonderful or hilarious effect. Anyone who offhand dismisses

JB, Ray Charles, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding on the basis of their stature is

little more than a sanctimonious ideologue. Sometimes things left by the side

of the road deserve to stay there, and sometimes things that stand the test of

time are the Darwinian champs. Now and then, nothing scratches the itch like

Sam Cooke or the Drifters. But if you believe that the whole soul diva story is

covered in Aretha Franklin’s greatest hits, go get yourself some music by Betty

Harris or Jean Wells and prepare to have your mind changed.

• • •

Micro. Other. It’s too crude a formulation to pit Big Bad Big-ness against

Scrappy Li’l Micro-Otherness in some imaginary timeless epic battle. There

are subtler forces at work, a mottled topography of independent and insti-

tutionalized artistic interests, intricate and submerged lines of distribution,

unevenly cast webs of information. But sometimes a well-placed reductive

dichotomy can help clarify things, and in this case it holds true enough: the

large/small divide in cultural production and consumption is a gap that must

be reckoned with.


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introduction 11

Obviously, technology has altered everything about how we access and

utilize music, for better, for worse. Downloading dominates. People wear

headphones all day, every day, making listening into an asocial activity. Am-

ateurism flourishes on YouTube, as does a vast repository of historical clips.

Head over to Ubu Web for a holy shit moment of free vanguard fun. (Gottahand it to a once preposterous- sounding Friedrich Kittler, who prophesied

a central bank of cultural productions linked to users by some sort of fiber

network. Introducing . . . the Interweb.) Observe the demise of magnetic tape,

the waning years of compact disc. We hear regularly about the death of the

music industry, how the online marketplace has destroyed independent record

production, how centralized the music world has become.

That’s not my experience of it. A restructuring of the major label model

does not signal the end of recorded music or the last gasp of music itself.There are certain places where losses can be detected: I find fewer venues,

even online, where really incisive writing on music happens in the journalistic

realm. But thanks to musician-theorists like George Lewis, David Grubbs,

and Vijay Iyer, creative music is taken seriously in academic circles, enhanced

by the experience of practitioners. There are more small labels than ever, at-

tending to all sorts of wee little musics. And the microgrooves of the past are

being incessantly mined; Dempsey and I recently spent hours in a London

store obsessively specializing in obscure rockabilly and the wildest, weirdest

r&b. In Chicago, multiple venues present improvised music on a weekly basis.

Worldwide, the audience for creative music has grown exponentially, with

folks taking regular trips down some of its culs-de-sac. Via podcast, anyone

can hear almost any kind of music they’re curious about. A whole generation

of hipster rock bands has grown up plumbing the mysteries of microgroove

via previously unimaginable research tools—listen to the way that Grizzly Bear

and Dirty Projectors integrate their innumerable influences. These are salad

years for music fanatics and omnivorous musicians.

Maybe the divide between micro and macro is falling apart. That would be a

positive development. Or maybe everything is just scaling down. Expectations

are changing. In terms of cd sales, no question, what constitutes an accept-

able number has been reduced. And why not? Ten thousand people is a lot of

people. We sold about that many copies of Peter Brötzmann’s Nipples when

the Unheard Music Series reissued it. That’s plenty. I fondly recall March 10,

1996, 10:00 pm, at the Empty Bottle, when two hundred people crowded the

club to hear Joe McPhee play in Chicago for the first time. Vandermark and

I both looked around in disbelief. There will certainly never be a mass au-

dience for McPhee’s music, it won’t top the charts, which is OK. McPhee’s


28/28

finely etched, unvoiced wind sculptures on pocket trumpet wouldn’t work in

a stadium setting. His music requires the sort of concentrated, close listening

that giant crowds can’t tolerate, even on some physical, squirmological level.

No matter that it’s not a household music. There are still people who would

want to listen to McPhee and other “others”—we can infer that from just thissingle event and from the nine more years of concerts Ken and I presented

at the Bottle. Curious people, people who would give the work the attention

it deserves without concern for the fact that not a soul who’s friends with

anybody they know had ever heard of Joe McPhee. Open people who want to

know about the music. Ones who merely haven’t found it.

Yet.

It is to the encounter with that patiently unaware listenership, as well as

to the fortunate folks who have already discovered other music in all its man-ifestations, that Microgroove is dedicated.

Documents

Microgroove by John Corbett