Nathaniel Mackey: A Special Issue || The Creak of Categories: Nathaniel Mackey's "Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25"

The Creak of Categories: Nathaniel Mackey's "Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25"Author(s): Richard QuinnSource: Callaloo, Vol. 23, No. 2, Nathaniel Mackey: A Special Issue (Spring, 2000), pp. 608-620Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299886 .

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THE CREAK OF CATEGORIES

THE CREAK OF CATEGORIES Nathaniel Mackey's Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25

by Richard Quinn

Nathaniel Mackey's intermedia play on Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25

compels us to rethink much of what we know about music, language, sound, and

poetry. Strick is a text-recording of boundless hybridity, a cross-fertilization of jazz and poetry which opens cognitive hatches to a world where conceptual dualisms (I/ they, meaning/nonmeaning, sense/nonsense) disintegrate before the fertile power of that which rationality excludes. Linking his project to the work of Federico Garcia Lorca and Lorca's invocation of cante jondo (deep song), Mackey enacts a specific recitation of cante jondo in order to trace the ineffable in poetic/musical practices. In both Mackey and Lorca, one finds "an espousal of not only cross-cultural but intermedia fertilization and provocation," the appearance of a collective, polyphonic presence ("Cante Moro" 71). In Strick, this presence appears not as a product, but as a

process of improvisation, or what I will call an "aural oscillation" between the dualisms of word and note, poetry and jazz. In this sense, Strick operates simulta-

neously as a critique of exclusionary tendencies and a positive project bringing the once expelled back into a shared history.

Mackey points to this project in Strick's liner notes where he explains "strick" as a term. While strick refers directly to unwoven strands of hemp, Mackey hears in strick "those words which are not really pronounced in that word [stick, strike, struck, strict], but there are overtones or undertones of those words, harmonics of those words. The word, then, is like a musical chord in which those words which are otherwise not present are present." Behind "strick" as straight referentiality, we hear an absence made present through word as music, through "harmonics" in which strick as sound becomes freeplay. Or as Paul Naylor argues in Strick's liner notes, the "matrix" of words and music "resonates rather than reconciles," all in a process of mutual reinforcement and mutual disruption. With Strick, Mackey both recasts mean-

ings and revives the dispossessed, an assertion of silence as sound which ultimately displaces silence and sound as poles in an exclusionary rationality.

In this essay I argue that in order to interpret Mackey's jazztext, we need a hybrid discourse which draws from both musicology and literary studies, one which ex-

plains without categorical determination, for otherwise we fall into the very trap from which Mackey seeks to spring us. The advantage of this hybrid language is greater sensitivity to texts which require more than a single interpretory process. A hybrid discourse can follow the contours of a text which "is transmitted on frequencies outside and beneath the range of reading," one which relies on signifying sound as

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well as indexical language (Moten 213). We need a lexicon that can illuminate

contemporary practices, like Strick, which blend sound and sense to hint at, point to, and suggest rather than delimit, determine, and mandate. We must find a language which can say the unsayable and speak the unspeakable without doing violence to either. I suggest words like "ensemble," "process," "cut," "gap," "improvisation," and perhaps most importantly, "oscillation" in order to elucidate Strick on its own terms.

We should perceive the development of this new critical lexicon as a shared quest rather than as an individual endeavor. All interpreters of innovative poetry and radical music struggle to find a vocabulary adequate to the material which calls us. We wrestle over material which exceeds the boundaries of received genres by drawing on media usually kept separate, and in some cases subordinated, one to another. We have only to think of the critical gap between considerations of song lyrics and those of literary prosody for such separation to become clear. Despite this

gap, however, some texts like Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice (visual media and

writing), Aldon Nielsen's Black Chant (African-American music and poetics), the

essays in Charles Bernstein's Close Listening (poetry and performance studies), and those in Adalaide Morris's Sound States (poetry and acoustical technologies), have

sought to break through the generic boundaries. This essay participates in this effort

by proposing a vocabulary which draws on improvisational performances in jazz as a way of interpreting the radical Strick.

One way to begin is to think about Naylor's comment in the liner notes that "In Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, Nathaniel Mackey, Royal Hartigan, and Hafez Modirzadeh bring poetry and music together in an enactment of shared origins that is as unique as it is challenging." Opening Naylor's statement, we find the seeds of our new lexicon. The words "together" and "shared" suggest a common term in jazz discourse, ensemble, which defines Strick as a jazztext of many voices. "Origins" calls

up Lorca's duende and cante jondo as the powerful assertion of ancestral traditions and lost kin. "Enactment" suggests the improvisational, processual, or what I will call an aural oscillation, a movement in sound which critiques word, thought, concept or

category as rigid products. Not in Naylor's statement, finally, the common terms absence, cut, and gap might be employed to imply the space in which Strick as oscillation performs its work.

To get a sense of how we might enact these terms, let's take a quick look at Strick's first song, "Song of the Andoumboulou: 16." This poem originally appeared in print in 1994 and maintains a more or less traditional poetic form. As printed, "Song 16" uses line breaks to score the poem as speech, but on Strick, the text becomes much more improvisational. Mackey runs lines together as poetic prose, playing off and with Hartigan's percussion and Modirzadeh's tenor saxophone to form a sound oscillation between jazz and word. At some points, language is foregrounded; at others, music takes center stage, not as one might find on many albums with clear demarcations between instruments and voices, but with a disrupted eloquence. The

song opens with sounds of the sea rushing up on shore, an idyllic image leading to

Mackey's first words:

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They were dredging the sea, counting

the sand. Pounded rocks into gravel,

paid a dollar a

day, sang of the oldest

fish like family, tight

flamenco strings distraught...

Some ecstatic elsewhere's

advocacy strummed, unsung, lost inside

the oud's complaint... The same cry taken

up in Cairo, Cordoba, north

Red Sea near Nagfa, Muharraq, necks cut

with the edge of a

broken cup...

"They," we soon learn, represents all of us, an exterior "they" converted into an interior "we," a suggestion of collective history sung through "tight flamenco strings distraught" and "the oud's complaint." An instrument of northern Africa and south- west Asia resembling a lute, the oud complains like a crying voice, or a wailing instrument. "Distraught" and "complaint" link the poem to painful practices (Lorca's cante jondo and duende discussed below), the pounding of "rocks into gravel" for "a dollar a day." The strumming of "Ecstatic elsewhere," as one might strum a guitar, becomes an "elsewhere" asserting itself through sound, though "unsung" and inarticulate. As poetry, the opening of Song 16 appears as language performing an image of loss. Yet in some respects, it remains indeterminate. The sufferers' multiple identities hide behind the flamenco and the oud. Details of Cairo, Cordoba, the north Red Sea, Nagfa, and Muharraq submerge as the poem flows onward.

The poem's sounds heighten this distress. The opening sea falls back before the rising wail of Modirzadeh's sax, a wail growing increasingly distraught, oscillating with Mackey's voice as improvisational activity. The crying saxophone shatters the comfortable image of individuals "dredging the sea" just as Mackey speaks "paid a dollar a day," calling attention to the injustice of a collective history grounded in slavery. Strick's opening song enacts the complex matrix of sound and sense, the

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totality of expression, which will run throughout the recording as an aural oscillation and improvisational practice.

As motion, the aural oscillation negates poles as poles, substituting for polarity a complex matrix. This matrix includes polar concepts as both synthesized and independent in an uncontradictory, non-dualistic presence. Synthesis and independence, unity and individuality exist together. Within the web, poles exist both relationally and independently but never dualistically, as "both/and" rather than "either/or." Jazz, language, meaning, sound, non-meaning, poetry, and a host of other concepts all coexist but never as opposites or denials of other concepts, notions, ideas or dreams. Jazz and poetry synthesize into jazzpoetry but also exist separately as jazz and poetry. Sound and meaning appear as soundmeaning but also remain distinct. Sound, jazz, poetry or any other concept couple and uncouple with other notions at will. The structure of linking sound largely to jazz and language exclusively to poetry, for example, no longer operates. We are in a fluid non-structure unbounded by the limits of a cognition which would dismiss the untranslatable, unabsorbable, or uncommod- ifiable. As Mackey might put it, language gets distended in a wail.

Strick is a jazztext whose aural motion dismantles not only the jazz-poetry dualism, but also that of the individual and the group, foregrounding utopian freedom. The effect is similar to what Ronald Radano finds in the "fusion of disparate artistic realms" in Anthony Braxton's music, namely, "the convolution of dominant hierar- chies relating to class, race, and social identity" (5). Here, as Gillian Rose puts it, "the structure of the Same and the Other is destabilized" (84). In clarifying oscillation as applied to Strick, Amiri Baraka's excursus on jazz and blues, Black Music, seems particularly useful. In it, Baraka calls this aural motion "the changing same" and marks its activity in jazz as the interplay between individual ego, represented by the improviser, and a collective musical tradition, represented by the group. This interplay is "the freedom to exist (and the change to) in the existing, or to reemerge in a new thing" (200). The pole of "existing" within the tradition (the band) momentarily appears alongside the pole of "change" (the individual improviser) before an oscillation (the performance) or "reemergence" begins, synthesizing the improviser and band while allowing each to retain its individual characteristics. This oscillation subsumes "one" and "many" into a new formation: the ensemble. In the ensemble, one is the individual, the group, and more.

In jazz, oscillation often appears as improvisation, a term that "describes how something is done, not what is done," foregrounding ongoing experimentation over final satisfaction (Durant 269). Like the oscillation, "improvisation is always changing and adjusting, never fixed, too elusive for analysis and precise description; essentially non-academic" (Bailey ix). Derek Bailey's book, Improvisation, reminds us that improvisation outruns us as movement, always just out of our totalizing reach. Yet, improvisation does have an important relationship with both academic products and those generated by larger, capitalist forces, undermining the ability of academia and capitalism to reify thinking/living into easily digestible goods. Improvisation, Alan Durant reminds us, "foregrounds-in its practice as well as in its name-the relationship between the product of performance (the musical 'text') and the process through which that product comes into being: it sets the notion of music as something to which

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you listen back in the context of music made by someone. As something people do for themselves, too, improvisation stresses independent activity rather than passive consumption" (253). Like oscillation, improvisation disinters movement, creativity, and activity from the artifacts arrayed before us like so many boxes on supermarket shelves. The musical text comes to life as a developing creation rather than as a commodity to be consumed. In large part, Durant argues for improvisation as a utopian force, one which foregrounds hidden labor and serves as a tool for fighting against our alienation from that which we produce. Improvisation then, "is a point of counter-identification against systems of control, hierarchy and subordination" (270).

In jazz and Mackey's jazztext, improvisation and experimentation relate to artifact and concept in a more particular way. Mackey describes this relationship in an interview with Ed Foster:

when somebody is standing up there improvising, the last thing they're doing is creating stuff that's just happening as they create it. They have recourse to a process of selection and combination that draws on a repertoire that they have developed through repetition, that they have developed through going over the same stuff over and over and over again and working things out. There's quite a reflexive and, I would insist, intellectual process that goes on in the music that tends to be obscured by the myths about music, what it has been made to symbolize, what black people have been made to symbolize ... ("Interview" 57)

Mackey points to the generative role of tradition and intellect within improvisation. Calling on prior knowledge, the jazz musician works toward the perfection (albeit an unattainable one) of her playing process through intellect and careful selection from the tradition of established sound practices. In improvisation this does not mean rigid mimesis but its application as inspirational material and intellectual motivation. The "repertoire" constantly changes as new materials are added and old ones refined through practice. In this way, "repertoire as object" always remains "repertoire as working model."

Mackey's reading of improvisation also addresses the Western connection between "black people," primitivism, and anti-intellectualism. Taking his cue from Amiri Baraka's contention that "the academic Western mind is the best example of the substitution of artifact worship for the lightning awareness of the art process," Mackey undermines these connections through attention to a sophisticated art which breaks the taut connections between groups and concepts (quoted in Discrepant Engagement 32). His project is a de-essentializing one.

De-essentializing, for Mackey, involves the continued disturbance of anything which wants to sit comfortably. Again, improvisational jazz provides the most suitable vehicle for the disruption of stasis. Mackey argues that "obliquity or angular- ity (a word used frequently in reference to the music of Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy, and others) challenges the epistemic order whose constraints it implicitly brings to light. This it does by insisting upon the partial, provisional character of any proposition or predication, by advancing a vigilant sense of any reign

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or regime of truth as susceptible to qualification" (Discrepant Engagement 43). Under- mining absolutes, angular, improvisatory jazz calls attention to itself as the critical other of static forms, a "qualification" of truth or what poet Jack Spicer calls the "outside" to knowledge. For Mackey, John Coltrane's method recalls the revolution- ary potential of sound: "A deliberate affront to the dominant culture's canons of musicality, 'honking' challenges and delegitimates that culture's distinction between music and noise, its imposition of hegemonic expectations as to what constitutes acceptable sound" (Discrepant Engagement 29). Strick is imbued with such improvisational honking.

"Song of the Andoumboulou: 18" provides access to oscillation, improvisation and honking. A section midway through begins:

As though what they say was all we had, that words be would, would

words, where they pointed not beside the point though almost,

we made of how many who could say?

No we of romance we contrived

coupling... No nation's we, collectivity's wish...

"They" in the first line points to "words" in the second, suggesting that words are not all we have; we have sound, music, jazz, and even poetry as free language. The notion that "words be would, would words" rings with alliteration, a heterophony with "words" encircling "be would, would." "Be" is an existential expression of ontology and an imperative but also a sign of existence, "to be," whereas "would" is a proposition, a claim for existence, a possibility, "would it be possible." Between "words" appear both the already recognized and the hope for recognition, the gap in which both included and excluded meanings meet. This idea of "where they pointed not beside the point though almost" iterates a complicated semantics. To point is to indicate, though to indicate is almost "beside the point" when engaged in the reclamation of meanings. Indicating can be imperialistic, pressing sense on someone rather than allowing idiosyncratic speech.

The following lines further stir the sound stew. "We" is the inside not yet joined to the once outside "they," and "we" see ourselves as arrogantly absolute-how many who could say? "We contrived coupling," the joining of signifier to signified in a one- to-one relationship, suggests a romantic connection between ourselves and words and a limited logic. Words become boundaries, for Mackey, which mark the history of occluded meaning and excluded life. His dream is for "No nation's we, collectivity's wish," a wish for Diaspora and the formation of an ensemble connection.

Mackey's sound incantation continues in Song 18 as

Aberrant sky, stone hoisted on stone...

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Rethought what Andoumboulou meant...

Squat world, squat fractious allure, failed creation, angels

at the root of it, inept. Tossed into ruins overlooking the city,

pocketed rock, wordlike, wrestling with

sound, stir without end, voice borne up by what ailed it, dreamt articulation, dreamt wordless

rapport... Dreamt entanglement, torn at the

roots. Dreamt entrenchment, not of dream but inveiglement, voice,

thrown obliquity, bled. Sound so abstruse

we struck our heads, "Where did it come from?" Point song. Point-

lessness. Words wanting not to be words...

In a "squat world" which denies aberrance, to be "aberrant" is a good thing. Further- more, rationality's "failed" claims of ultimate teleological success oscillate with the "ruins" and the "inept" of the actual world hyper-rationality brings us. In this oscillation, failure and success no longer appear as opposites but as part of the larger system; what is failure and what is success if successful rationality only brings failure?

Mackey escapes pure pessimism here through the insertion of "dreamt / articulation, dreamt wordless / rapport...," the possibility for communication through "wordless" sound. We seek, Mackey says "voice, thrown obliquity" as a complicated sound

thwarting easy absorption, creating a pointless "point song" whose value is in its

unwillingness to rigidly indicate. The pointing is an oblique pointing, "words want-

ing not to be words" as set significance, but as motivic sound, "wordlike" yet "wrestling with sound."

As in Song 16, the poet's language joins with a more instrumental sound practice in an ensemble. Throughout the sections of Song 18 cited above, Hartigan drums on a West African donno while Modirzadeh repeats a similar phrase on a flutish suling. These instruments interact with Mackey's voice, solidifying his words at certain crucial points with polyrhythmic bursts of sound. Dubbed over these rhythms, Modirzadeh limps on a zoma, an instrument which produces a sound somewhere between a saxophone and a kazoo. The zoma problematizes the rhythmic nature of the other instruments (including Mackey's voice). Closer to the end, near the words, "voice thrown obliquity," the donno and suling break out of their patterns and grow more distressed, an expression of obliquity prompted by the zoma. As the zoma continues to interact with the language, fracturing meaning through its occasional

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foregrounding of dissonance, Hartigan pounds the donno unmercifully for a few beats just as Mackey sounds the word "obliquity," creating a consonance between word and music through dissonant sound. As in Strick's other songs, we hear an

angular jazz which undermines strict epistemologies. Instruments cut back and forth on alternate scales and speak strange music of alternate lives as language and music obliterate the consonant-dissonant duality. By the end of the section, with "words

wanting not to be words," the instrumental sounds subvert conceptions of language and music, transforming each temporarily into the other.

Yet this transformation, oscillation, and improvisation do not operate purely in the

poem but in an already complicated structure of categories which comprise the world.

Consequently the oscillation must seek to clear a space in which to do its work. This

space immediately becomes a presence to be reckoned with. Mackey invokes absence as "lameness" or "phantom limb" along with Lorca's duende and cante jondo to contest monolithic power. "The phantom limb reveals the illusory role of the world it haunts," Mackey argues, suggesting that "Lame or limping ... like phantom, cuts with a relativizing edge to unveil impairment's power, as though the syncopated accent were an unsuspected blessing offering anomalous, unpredictable support. Impair- ment taken to a higher ground, remediated, translates damage and disarray into a dance" (Discrepant Engagement 236, 244). The "syncopated accent" or oscillation relativizes the relationship between dominator and dominated. The supposed absent, the "phantom limb" as a mark of lameness and of prior dismemberment, appears as both a critique of unjust power and a mark of empowerment transformed into dance. The limb/p mediates between the articulate and inarticulate, presence and absence, rationality and irrationality, inside and outside. In explicating the limb/p, Mackey invokes "the Fon-Yoruba orisha of the crossroads, the lame dancer Legba. Legba walks with a limp because his legs are of unequal lengths, one of them anchored in the world of humans and the other in that of the gods. His roles are numerous, the common denominator being that he acts as an intermediary, a mediator..." (Discrep- ant Engagement 243). Legba dances between and within multiple worlds, maintaining the totality as a web. His undulant dance both reflects historical oppression and

performs a creativity heretofore unknown. The phantom limb necessitates stumbling and falling but also becomes a figuration of shared experience. The limb marks the "records of experience that are part of the communal and collective inheritance that we have access to even though we have not personally experienced those things." These are records of the world that "word did rise up from" before human meddling codified and split it into binaries, a reflexive reminder of loss. The aural oscillation and phantom limb, improvisation and absence, work to dismantle duality while

constructing a matrix of a richer, processual, and shared origin. Mackey frequently sees music performing functions similar to those of the phan-

tom limb. "Music as phantom limb," he argues, "arises from a capacity for feeling that holds itself apart from numb contingency. The phantom limb haunts or critiques a condition in which feeling, consciousness itself, would seem to have been cut off"

(Discrepant Engagement 235). Music acts as reminder and assertion, the haunting invocation of the non-representational. The notated music and improvisational ele-

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ments work together, notes and silences intimately bound like thinking and feeling in a vibratory assertion of totality, made manifest in the phantom limb.

"Song of the Andoumboulou: 17" enacts this limb/p, through both word and sound. The antiphonal dialogue between voice, tenor saxophone, zoma and kulintang (Phillipine gong chime) which runs throughout the song, breaks down as the poem fades:

Pocketed a rock which would be his reminder, lidless witness,

wide-

eyed stone... Shrunken stump hoisted rootless, petrified light.

World hollowed out, the Andoumboulou

beckoned. Echoed aboriginal cut,

chthonic spur

The dialogue ends and the saxophone and zoma begin to limp, an arduous

dissipation with lengthening silences. The silences or "cuts" problematize the easy dialogue of the earlier sections through a foregrounding process in which nonexist- ence (musical silence) becomes wailing presence. Like rationality confronted with the outside "irrational," the kulintang seeks to fill this silence with an increase in tempo. Eventually, however, the kulintang renounces its attempts to banish silence and retreats, joining the limp and capitulating before the power of the outside. The instrumental sounds improvise with Mackey's voice in mutual creation, an assertion of the phantom limb: "Shrunken stump hoisted rootless, petrified light," moving through the "aboriginal cut," outside dreams calling forth the Andoumboulou's

suppressed voice. "Song of the Andoumboulou: 18" ends in a similar way, with the donno dancing and the suling and zoma limping. Once Mackey reads the last lines, "Stone / hoisted on / stone," the suling and zoma drop out and the unmediated dance

begins, though only temporarily. Left to his own devices Hartigan takes up the limp where Modirzadeh leaves off, a slow decline into silence, a point where virtuosity is

replaced by its opposite and where predictable rhythms break down before the assertive phantom limb.

Lorca's duende also speaks through the limb/p or what he calls the "wound." "We have said," Lorca writes, "that the duende loves the rim of the wound, and that he draws near places where forms fuse together into a yearning superior to their visible

expression" (50). Duende surrounds the wound, sounding through the space the wound creates. Again, the wound marks pain, a negative marker and a geography where pleas for inclusion can be enacted. As a term, duende is multivalent. Christopher Maurer tells us the "duende (from duen de casa, 'lord of the house') is a Spanish household spirit fond of hiding things, breaking dishes, causing noise, and making a

general nuisance of himself.... But in Andalusia the word duende is also applied to the ineffable, mysterious charm of certain gifted people, especially flamenco singers.

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The Andalusians say that a cantador has duende" (xi). Mackey defines duende as "a conversation with the dead, intimacy with death and with the dead" ("Cante Moro" 75), while Lorca calls it "the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds" (25). Finally, Lorca characterizes duende as a "power, not a work; it is a struggle, not a

thought... it is not a question of ability, but of true living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation" (43). Duende is the sounding of death and of

"living style," of tradition ("ancient culture") and improvisation ("spontaneous creation"). It is both a "conversation" with the dead and death in monologue, a scream and a poignancy, death and love. In short, duende is the sounding of totality, of past sufferings and future possibilities as a processual "style" rather than a conceptual "thought." In this way, duende acts as motion, a re-construction of the world where the once excluded margin screams through the now problematized center. Mackey marks duende in Coltrane as "a surge, a runaway dilation, a quantum rush you often hear in Trane's music, the sense that he's driven, possessed-ridden .. ." ("Cante Moro" 83). Possession is crucial to duende, particularly as regards improvisation and jazz. Musicians feel duende as possession and disruption. Double bassist Chuck Israels describes duende as a "plunge into that world of sounds .. . [which] becomes your world instantly, and your whole consciousness changes" (Berliner 348), while Steve

Lacy calls it "a leap into the unknown" that thwarts "years of preparation and all your sensibilities" (Bailey 57-58). Duende sounds and one's world is overturned, one's consciousness altered. Listen to musician Ronnie Scott:

what seems to happen is that one becomes unconscious of playing, you know, it becomes as if something else has taken over and you're just an intermediary between whatever else and the instrument, and everything you try seems to come off, or at least, even if it doesn't come off it doesn't seem to matter very much, it's still a certain kind of feeling that you're aiming for-or unconsciously aiming for-and when this happens-inspira- tion-duende-whatever you like to call it-a happy conjunc- tion of conditions and events and middle attitudes-it will feel good. (Bailey 52)

The duende problematizes Scott's speech with pauses, turning it into fragments of discursiveness, disturbing attempts to codify even duende itself into a linear, cognitive demand. Scott acts as intermediary, like Legba, while duende runs through the

linguistic and musical language with which he improvises and seeks to describe his

practice. Duende warps language (whether linguistic or musical) and turns it into

pleasure. A material manifestation of duende, cante jondo or deep song is the process through

which Strick does its work. Deep song is a wedge in the cogs of polarity, a song run

through with darkness, deathsong of a dismantled collectivity banished by the ego, an amorphous reminder of crippling loss, a living memorial to exclusion. In deep song, jazz, and poetry, Mackey tells us, "the arrival of duende ... is a sound of trouble in the voice. The voice becomes troubled. Its eloquence becomes eloquence of another

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order, a broken problematic, self-problematizing eloquence" ("Cante Moro" 73). The improvisational voice marks sound as conflictual, coming from the musical/poetic material as "trouble" rather than lyric promise. Yet, Mackey reminds us, duende is promise of another order: "the cultivation of another voice, a voice that is other than proposed by one's intentions, tangential to one's intentions, angular, oblique-the obliquity of an unbound reference" ("Cante Moro" 79). Duende appears as the

recouping of loss, a re-establishment of multiform collectivity. Absence, loss, limping, and impairment become abundance rather than deficit.

"Song of the Andoumboulou: 21" works with duende specifically. It begins:

Next a Brazilian cut came on Sophia picked. Paulinho's

voice lit our way for what seemed eternity,

"Cut" represents "cut" in a musical sense, as a recorded song, but also cut as gap or phantom through which duende and the denied assert themselves. "Paulinho's voice" is singing, musical expression, but also the voice of a "seemed eternity," the timeless articulation of an occluded past sounding itself into existence. The language here carries many valences.

Endless

beginning. Endless goodbye. Always there if not ever all

there, staggered collapse, an accordian choir serenaded

us,

loquat groves hurried by outside...

"Endless beginning. Endless goodbye" maintains this motif of timelessness, particularly as the problematic limping of time ("staggered collapse") as "always there." Duende comes through the "accordian choir" as reminder of the rushing "outside." The final section of Song 21 works most fascinatingly with these notions of duende, language and sound:

Lag was our true monument. It was an apse we strode under,

made of air. There inasmuch as we exacted it, aliquant amble,

crowds milling around on corners began

to move, the great arrival day we'd heard so much about begun,

sown even if only dug up again.

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Call it loco, lock-kneed samba... Multi-track train. Disenchanted

feet... It was the book of

it sometimes going the wrong way we now read and wrote...

Split script. Polyrhythmic

remit

This idea of "lag" as monument points to Mackey's enduring fascination with want. Monuments are usually icons or talismen in the spatial gaps which comprise the world. To assert "lag" as talisman is to assert delays or gaps as having a similar presence. "Strode" and "amble" link Mackey's collective subject to the flaneur, a 19th- century wandering figure who represented both the promise of a labor free society and a negative image of diminished productivity. Like Legba, the flaneur moves within the break, both inside and outside the material world, a mediator which converts binaries into a complex signifying system. The wandering flaneur is both producer and consumer, between and within the interstices of social practice.

In this section we also find "milling crowds" or a collective flaneur moving about streets on an ambiguous day of festival. Beginning to "move" signifies some kind of awakening to our mutuality, that which to this point "we'd heard so much about" but which never materialized. The materialization of a collective movement represents a

utopian moment in which an absent plurality is "sown" over the earth. Mackey calls this movement, "loco, lock-kneed samba... / Multi-track train. Disenchanted feet," linking it to music, dance, and locomotion on pluralized tracks, a counter-statement to the one- track mind. The word "polyrhythmic" further down reenacts this multiple movement.

As in the other Songs, the instrumentation (Mackey's voice included) plays off the words to both enforce and problematize them. As a utopian expression, Song 21 includes some of the most tranquil music on the recording. Hartigan's drums and Modirzadeh's flute work together monophonically-though not completely. Occa- sionally off beats, as an expression of duende, punctuate the rhythm, an acknowledg- ment that not all is blissful. These disruptions to the rhythmic flow call attention to music as limping, imperfect, always incomplete. The instruments open Mackey's poetic discourse to sounds of distress, that which traditional notation and language banish. A fascinating fact of Mackey's work, he consistently seeks to rupture his own

language, a self-reflexivity working to prevent absolute semantic closure. Mackey's poems never seem to end, remaining open as improvisational pauses (rather than

stops) without telos. On Strick, most songs, including Song 21, struggle to an imperfect closure through a disturbed instrumental coda. The songs do not sound a definitive word followed by absolute silence but insert silence slowly into the

language through the gradual foregrounding of already fading instruments. This

fading indicates a reluctance to end absolutely, a subtle reminder of the jazztext as

non-teleological process. And again, we have the aural oscillation between once existent poles: sound becomes silence and silence, sound.

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CALLALOO

Mackey's efforts to reassemble the collective through ensemble practices pays off in Strick. The jazztext combines, dismantles, oscillates and improvises in order to form a

complex web of sound, language, meaning, and music that undermines all our claims to absolute knowledge. The absolute always excludes, in Mackey's estimation, and he seeks to generate a version of totality which opens outward rather than closes inward, a multicultural ethic which, through its status as process, avoids commodification. Paul

Naylor writes in Strick's liner notes that Mackey's poems "bring together the traditions of African-American music, Caribbean and Arabic poetry, and West African mythology, among others, with the Western traditions of philosophy, poetry and music" to question the rigid discourses surrounding these forms and to return them to humanity. In short, Mackey's project appears not as a tokenistic multiculturalism but as "a discrepant note meant to call attention to the problematics of rubric-making, a caveat meant to make the act of categorization creak" (Discrepant Engagement 21).

WORKS CITED

Bailey, Derek. Improvisation. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993. Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones). Black Music. New York: William Morrow, 1967. Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1998. Durant, Alan. "Improvisation in the Political Economy of Music." Music and the Politics of Culture. Ed.

Christopher Norris. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989. 252-82. Foster, Edward. "An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey." Talisman 9 (Fall 1992): 48-61. Lorca, Federico Garcia. Deep Song and Other Prose. New York: New Directions, 1980. Mackey, Nathaniel. "Cante Moro." Disembodied Poetics. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico

Press, 1994. 71-94. . Discrepant Engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. . "Song of the Andoumboulou: 16." River City 14.2 (Spring 1994): 90-95. ."Song of the Andoumboulou: 17." New American Writing 11 (Summer-Fall 1993): 36-40. . "Song of the Andoumboulou: 18." The Poetry Project: The Newsletter of the Poetry Project Ltd. 149

(April-May 1994): 8-9. ."Song of the Andoumboulou: 19." The World 49 (April 1994): 104-6. ."Song of the Andoumboulou: 20." Moving Parts Press chapbook. ."Song of the Andoumboulou: 21." Apex of the M 1 (Spring 1994): 99-100.

."Song of the Andoumboulou: 22." Apex of the M 1 (Spring 1994): 101-4.

. "Song of the Andoumboulou: 23." Sulfur 34 (Spring 1994): 73-76.

."Song of the Andoumboulou: 24." Sulfur 34 (Spring 1994): 77-80.

. "Song of the Andoumboulou: 25." Sulfur 34 (Spring 1994): 81-83. -. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25. Paul Naylor, Liner Notes. Perf. Mackey, Royal Hartigan

and Hafez Modirzadeh. Spoken Engine Co., 1995. Maurer, Christopher. "Introduction." Deep Song and Other Prose. By Federico Garcia Lorca. New

York: New Directions, 1980. Morris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: Univer-

sity of North Carolina Press, 1997. Moten, Fred. "Sound in Florescence: Cecil Taylor's Floating Garden." Sound States: Innovative Poetics

and Acoustical Technologies. Ed. Adalaide Morris. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 213-34.

Nielsen, Aldon. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Radano, Ronald. New Musical Figurations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

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Documents

Nathaniel Mackey: A Special Issue || The Creak of Categories: Nathaniel Mackey's "Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25"