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So far as its music goes, the segment of the avant-garde world I'm part of--sound-oriented, free improvisation--is not known for its social vision and political content, and I wouldn't expect it to be otherwise. To be sure, none of the musicians I know and play with have expressed anything but scorn for the current political order, and would probably welcome the kind of massive change that would transform our society away from its current path. But what can we do that our non-musician friends cannot do? In the cultural marketplace our reach is extremely marginal; our music is not reviewed by any but obscure connoisseur journals and e-zines, and our audiences normally number less than a dozen. We can voice our opinion about the war, but we have no cultural authority and would hardly be listened to; to think otherwise is self-flattery substituting for impotence. Moreover, words being the medium of social vision and content, on the rare occasions when we use words at all in our music it is only ironic or garbled, hardly meant to be taken literally. The kind of music we are committed to does not lend itself to political messages, and even if it did we would be preaching to the choir.
We do form a kind of "affinity group" which, like others opposed to the current government recklessness and empire-building, is emboldened by the trust of friendship to act politically in normal ways, such as to participate in demonstrations that might expose us to danger. We can form march bands, as many improvisers recently have done in various locales, that lend a semi-anarchist spirit to the demonstrations, though this does not actually engage the kind of focus we give in performance of our art. In terms of performance, Tom Djll's Mockracy in Oakland (March 2003) is a fine example of an improviser orchestra expressing a political direction through satire, simply through the (non-improvised) structure he organized for the piece. There were no explicit politics involved, and the spectators were just an extension of the players, for the objects of satire are not expected to attend. Like most political work, it was in-house. It was not without political meaning however, for such events deflate the rhetoric of politicians, curing us of lapses when we forget our distrust of them, and they strengthen the community that feels alienated and helpless in the present situation. But free improvisation, the art form, is not the motive force here, it is used in a context that advances a meaning that does not derive directly from it but from the way it is used.
Being artists who speak with sound we have nothing to verbalize in our music, can issue no declarations or insights into war, empire, or even the hierarchical star system, for that matter. But what we do is not irrelevant to the questions of social order. Creative work is so inherent to our lives that we often forget that we have chosen to pursue it not to achieve a respectable social role but because it opens us to new experience, that is, experience that we can find nowhere but through our own search, our creative work. Anyone with whom we share this experience has made a similar choice; like us they have been engulfed in the commodified, mediated culture and have found it not only trite and boring but inhuman and oppressive. This manipulative culture of entertainment that encircles us poses as the solution to human need, but it is one of the concurrent and contributing problems. What is vital and living and fresh is what we pursue; we are experts in this field, or at least are aimed in that direction. And what is vital to human life and growth tends to challenge the forces in society that feel secure only in a cushioned, conformist atmosphere, who can only speak of tolerating dissent if it is kept at a distance from their own ears. Lost in our tiny cubicle, absorbed in our work, we forget that there is good reason why we are not given more space in this culture. If we were actually heard by society at large our voices would seem to represent anarchy, dysfunction, incomprehensible noise and cacophony. Music is expected to reinforce order and stability, not stand aside and wonder about the nature of order, as we do. Our society might honor the kind of visual art that comes from the same inner sources as ours, but what we do with sound is our voice, and the voice cannot be enclosed in a museum. That is why we are marginal, ghettoized-that is, if we do nothing to counteract this.
The predominant forces in our society do not want it to be renewed by cultural offerings but rather titillated, fed junk, and then rocked to sleep by what the cultural conveyor belt spews forth. Our contemporary simulacrum of democracy has been the marketplace, the invisible hand, which offers people the chance to purchase their own manipulation, and even knowingly welcome it. And of course people have trouble rejecting the mediated experience; it would be painful to many not to cave in to the lyricism and romanticist diversions they are offered, the fantasy arousals that are then symbolically defeated.
Under the banner heralding an expansion of offerings over the past thirty years there has in fact been a restriction, a hardening of the cultural shell; it has been crude and calculating, and we are seeing the results. It is evidenced by the segregation of the avant-garde from the general public, its dismissal as esoteric, which closets it with classicist snobbery. Jazz has been standardized, provided with a museum, and cleansed of its bristly free players, who often spoke with contempt of conformist society and the powers that be. Moreover, in the early sixties popular classical stations even in some rural areas used to regularly include the challenging music of Stockhausen and electronic innovation; such music has been exorcised from all but the most marginal stations and programs. What Susan Sontag once called "the modern public," which expected to have its notions challenged and even upset by a performance, has all but disappeared.
Free improvisation is alienated from cultural rules even further than the rest of the avant-garde, in that it does not require that its practitioners even demonstrate traditional instrumental competence, since it sees such demonstration as problematic, perhaps even detrimental, in the creation of music at the edge of the known. But what most sets this music apart from acceptable culture is that spontaneity is at its core, and as spontaneity is so lacking in our culture it invites participation. And if musicians do not spontaneously break out in song form then the culture that bases its security on repeatable, reinforced experience, and counts on chords being resolved on a sweet note, feels threatened. This is a challenge to the expectations people have in all social life, including politics. Even the politics of the left limits itself in this regard, and manipulates its followers, for people rarely feel that leftist politics could be the realm of spontaneous creative expression.
What is encouraging at present is that there is a new generation of improvisers, people who have apparently come to see this obnoxious, dominant culture of ours as stifling. Improv "scenes" such as never existed before have been cropping up all over north america, something that the old farts like myself might have dreamed of but were too cynical to expect. These new ears have not been created by the diehards, left over from the optimistic era of cultural revolution, but by young people saturated with the most manipulative media exploitation and cultural somnolence. And they are not following the leadership of the older cultural centers like New York; instead they form a network of players and small audiences that have discovered and validated this music for themselves through their own music, not subordinated to others. These are good, creative players, unhindered by the bitterness of those who've seen efforts fail over decades. Perhaps they have hopes of career success, but their music is anything but conformist. More power to them, I say, this is the kind of energy we need, this is liberating for all of us.
At the same time, these young players were raised in the Reagan eighties, in an apolitical atmosphere of individual self-advancement. The following decade wasn't much better in terms of social awareness and political participation. And so I have one word of advice, and I include myself here: if we're going to stick our necks out, let's not limit ourselves to musical choices. Let's not just seek out well-wishers and supporters for an audience, and not count cd sales as personal victories-that is the trap our culture has manufactured to contain dissident culture along with the mainstream. Instead, let's make the effort to play for people we can't imagine would like us. Get out of the improv ghetto and into the unknown, the small towns, libraries, prisons, where we don't know who will show interest, come in the door. Find the world, let the world find us. After all, it is the unknown response that can awaken us musically in ways beyond our imagination.
As for myself and the content of my music, I must say that I have been deeply affected by the murderous course those fools have put us on. Back in the Vietnam era I had been an activist committed to the revolutionary movement, and so when the trade towers went down I knew the political and military reaction that would come, and felt I'd have to get re-involved in political organizing. I had no desire to do so, and was stunned with a long depression because of the conflict in me. Back in the eighties my politics had been transmuted into music, which expressed much of my rage at the collapse of the possibilities for revolutionary change. But gradually I felt this rage crumble; for various reasons I needed to expand beyond it, and my music with it. I eventually became drawn into the music that has been mis-named "reductionist", and now play a music often quite different from my earlier, wilder impulses on stage. Recently, however, I've been listening to solos from the earlier era, and feeling connected to the explosiveness and intensity of unrestrained passion. I don't agree with the usual notion of an artist's linear development from one style or phase to another, and so I don't feel a conflict in playing sometimes with Dionysian fervor and sometimes with Apollonian restraint.
The question for me and I suspect for other improvisers now is, what effect is all this disgust with the war and the growing empire, and with our fellow citizens' keep-things-normal anxiety going to have on our music. Will our aesthetics wall us off from the world, will our frustration with impotence, our rage, have no impact on what we do on stage?
----May 2003
from the eighties
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3/83 This is Music, it is song that must be listened to, followed, listened into. It is made to be the center of your attention; without that it is an annoying interruption. It is meant to draw from you feeling in all its details. It plays with you, is a conversation with you, so open and frank it will embarrass if you try to separate your ears from how you experience reality…There is a beat here which denies the ridiculous constancy of the clock; it traces movement as it really is, finding its drive within its own needs--it taps the body not the foot….There is melody as well, identical with its process of creation, using everything as it appears, uncertainty, fear, finding its strength.…There is a delicacy and a passionate hardness, when challenged and stripped bare. It is raw but not harmful, because its rawness is itself celebration of dance, every sound an exuberance overflowing, basking in its own created luxury….It is, all of it, composed the same moment you hear it, with its birth still smelling as it is handed over. It is all growth, pushing up, running, certainly it's laughing, changing itself over, our child. This tease will ignore the yawning perfection and death of the finished replica, the cynicism of too much marketplace wanting approval before wanting itself….This music encourages your activity and your meditation. It promises to give you what you offer.
What I want is this: a music that is the outer form, the appearance in the world, the reality, of feeling, of desire, need, contradiction. I want a music deep into the present time, how we truly exist now, music which defines us and gives us the future we deserve. I want a music done for the love of playing, which for this reason has to exist, is surrounded by its existence. A music of intense pleasure, polymorphous, naïve, risking itself for its own sake. This music is here for us and won't deceive our hopes if we give everything to it."
--publicity for the lp Free Life, Singing, 1983
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Where does this music come from?
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I used to think--when I was just happy to have something so beautiful in my hands--that it came from my Self, the product of my life (and culturally some obscure offshoot of jazz). But when I started playing in public, I abandoned the idea that it was my possession; after all, was I just parading myself in front of others? That was not my motivation. When I was fighting to get the chance to play this strange music for other people, I had to clutch it closely to me for protection. When this period was past, I could let it go, and then saw it as in some way passing through me to others. This sounded good at the time but was a boring dead end; it sanctified my music instead of challenging it and opening it up.
Meanwhile my music continued to evolve, partly through the influence of my friend and sax player Todd Whitman, towards sounds not normally associated with the saxophone. In fact soon all my playing became engulfed in sound. I had earlier resisted sound-oriented music [some of the New York players and composers] as being too cold, a white protestant avantguardism, bizarre for the effect only. But I began to appropriate sound (as opposed to "real" pitch-oriented notes) through sheer sensual pleasure, which had always been the leverage point of my playing and evolving. The real notes are still there, but now in a new environment. I do not separate the sounds of my music from the universe of the sound that my ears are a part of in daily life. I am fed by the sound around me, and when I play an instrument it reappears partly as accident, that is, I find more in the sounds from the horn than what I intended. It is the perspective of music as sound environment that makes it more visual and concrete, even animalistic, raw. If when the "good tone" appears, dressed up so fine, it offers civilized comments on the melee but can't contain it!
--excerpt from Linear Notes, fall 1986
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free improvisation as a social act
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The following document, written in 1986, reflects conditions that, by the end of the century, had radically changed. It is reprinted in the interest of discovering the roots of current free improvisation. It is not to be assumed that the views here were shared by many other musicians.
I. 1 uu p84/z nieys ,wifzbt4l * Is aie wor dswordswordswo rds words word swords
grey into black on white, symbols out of gestures,
thought (Ha!) grabbed out of electric impulses.
waiting for meaning to coalesce,
to let it flow past the hazards of the dam, the knife trying to cut water.
Open and close, blood that won't reverse in our veins even if we tell it
II. What does spontaneity have to do with this social order, with any social order,
with the order of our self-socialized minds.
There is not a word we cannot say, and reverse our saying (but not time, as
the original mistake.) Our mind moves by regret, shame, erasure, over its landscape.
The contingent drifts into gray abstraction as we look towards the Model for guidance.
III. An axiom we know so well that we can't experience it at all: everything is free only at the moment of creation, born free, then repeated, but never re-experienced. The memory of the moment is always a new moment, but it in no way approaches the original because its impetus is tragic, nostalgic, covering up. Attempting to recapture, it is captured by the attempting, it can only seek to perfect, that is, to socialize, improve. The recycled experience cannot strike out with the fault of boldness; it is falsified, stylized boldness that is found in the Art World, that outnumbers and ridicules the original. The copy cannot explore what is unknown because it doesn’t know even where to look; it can only follow a map and discover more of what is already known.
IV. Free improvisation is, in its idea of itself, the only music that is not tragic in this way, not searching for the end, not seeking its perfection, not repeated, not corrected. It stands at the center of music because it is the insecure void between past and future, the void of choice. It puts the immediate human at the center, and that is frightening. It is neither perfect nor purposely imperfect because both of these have the Model at the center. Years ago art criticism snooped its way into the artists' studio behind the finished work, as an elaboration in time of the dead thing in the gallery. Free improvisation goes one step better; it says there is only the working, it is begun and finished at the same moment, it is whatever is actually happening, activity not even proclaiming its nakedness. There could be nothing more ambiguous, and resistant to consistency.
V. In Western cultural history, free improvisation is the rebel child of perfection, born in that world that intertwines so nicely the dream of freedom and the life of slavery. A society’s culture is repetition, mimesis, spiraling forward, eating and shedding skins. The solid meaning possible for us, what makes communication easiest and smoothest is created in repetition, and perfectibility through development. This resounds through the culture industry, from creator to consumer and back again through market feedback, passing thru corporation and government agency. Careers are built on perfection of' the product and guarantee of reproduction, and they form a synthetic, symbiotic unit with spectators. What artist can withstand the lure of feedback--acceptance, recognition, supportive community? But individua1ity, the supposed prize of our Western Civilization for which we are asked to suffer, does not integrate us socially, it alienates. So there is a strong tendency for free improv to call a halt to its moment and slice off a piece for consumption, that is, create an identity (language) and insert people into the moment. Improv can then become merely the childhood sandbox of the mature artist. "Improviser" thus becomes a reputation, a harmless label of past (alienating) experience, for those who have “moved beyond” experimentation, a symbol of paid dues. [This was frequently the case in the eighties, in contrast to today; improvisers were lured with the prospect of being upgraded to composer status.]
VI. To the extent that free improv is seen as Art (for some, the broad umbrella of the spiritually homeless), its fate is tied up with conclusions raised about it by Criticism. It must pass through the eye of this needle to be accepted; it must be understood, given its place in the schema of the given before it can be heard and seen. Within the Art-Critical World, things are judged pseudo-historically, a never-ending Hegelian succession of triumphs, each transcending the former. In this schema free improv, by the late eighties, appears as anachronism, an island of earlier freedom which never seemed to find its nostalgia buffs, with its links to the continent of culture now washed away except for a handful of stranded devotees.
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on free improvisation
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Free improvisation, as a conscious form of music, is a relatively recent phenomenon of the last few decades and is still practically unknown. Most people seem to be puzzled by it or have misconceptions, even fear. All other forms of Western art and popular music, including jazz and other structured improvisation, tend towards a conscious identification of the composer or player with the musical choices made. Some structure (song, style, or concept) is decided upon that has an identity set apart from others and given an individual meaning. It is prior to the event and one can judge whether the idea or style has been realized or not after the event. Free improv on the other hand tends to dissolve whatever structure or notions the musicians might bring with them, once the musical moment of choosing, of the actual playing, is entered. The only structure seemingly agreed upon is that all choices are valid. Yet without critical standards this would not be a form of music. Criticism in free improv generally hinges on whether idioms from jazz, rock, western art music, or even one's stylistic habits are being leaned upon.
All standards of "good music" are put in question, including that played moments ago. Our attachment to cliched formulas, our best ideas stand in the way, and we make efforts to discover and get past them. This is therefore a music constantly open to self-criticism and change, and hugely diverse, as each individual is expected to deal with his and her own evolution. Technical development on the instrument in the traditional sense is no substitute. One could even say it is optional, for some a hindrance, to the extent that it predisposes our judgment as to what we might think is musically valid for oneself.
No improviser can go for long without periods of severe self-doubt, wondering if the entire edifice of past playing has any value at all. This is not a music of self-indulgence, which would be to rest on one's accomplishment and perpetually duplicate one's habits, whatever gets the applause. A kind of musical insecurity is normal for those devoted to this music. A careful and attentive choosing is involved but not as means to an end. Since choice can go any direction outside what is known, this music tends toward an exaggerated full ear-open listening. In fact, since you do not identify with and defend your own sound, you find yourself listening to your very own playing with interest and surprise, reacting to it as you do to others'.
Free improv opens the door to dissolution, and an immersion in sound and silence. We hear a playful voice behind us ever suggesting, "why not this, instead?" Such self-criticism would destroy the music before any sound appeared, if we were involved in compositional pieces. But love of playing is stronger; to play for the sheer joy of it is nowhere stronger than in free improvisation. It is this that drives the music, this is the energy, not the sense of accomplishment, the creation of a product that meets our standards. All products are going to be lame, at least in retrospect, which is right around the corner. Playing revives us. Ultimately, though we might get lost in resentment, criticism, or the hope for social reward, we always have to come home to the act of playing itself. Here we find a basic acceptance of whatever we do, an ironic humor, an awareness of the vulnerability of the music, and of our ridiculous efforts to create something solid and valid in spite of our commitment to openness. If we were doing this alone or in units (bands), as in the image of western art and popular music, this vulnerability would be impossible to handle. But in fact this music IS the community of its players, one that is now and has been teaching itself how to be aware, to grow, to face disappointment, to ignore the public scorn that all self-conscious artistic communities have faced. In the end, we have nothing to go on except each other. And there's nothing sad or self-pitying about that.
This music reflects our disillusionment with the fundamental impulse of other modern, Western musics to organize nature, as represented in sound. We have a different way of dealing with so-called "chaos"; it is not our enemy, not even a matter to be fashioned into durable, self-validating human objects. We are "at play" with sound. Since our view is so dissident from normal assumptions, free improv cannot be expected to advance its players in the so-called music world of career and conquest. Try as we might! There are few of us who are acceptable in jazz clubs, few who have not cleared out coffee houses, to the consternation of the owners. The prejudice of our culture is towards structure-give us something, a token of structure, a name for the piece--that is what will validate the musician. The free players who have wide recognition outside the improv community are those who also play structured music, which is of course just fine, but it does instruct us about the preferences of our culture. We don't have any "best players" to offer, any more than a "best music". The improv that is classic has already been consumed by the present community of players; what is fresh is in process, and ready to be heard!
---liner notes to the cd Thaw, 1992, revised, 2001
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