November Updates

In the past few weeks, I’ve been working quite intensively on a long essay on Cecil Taylor’s poetry for what looks to be an expansive collection on Taylor’s work edited by Peter Valente. Having long thought a book like this should happen, I’m delighted it finally is! Taylor’s work has meant a lot to me for what seems like forever—certainly, since writing, or trying to write an MA thesis on his poetry back in 2011: a somewhat wobbly first step, or what Taylor himself would call an ‘Excursion on a Wobbly Rail.’

This latest iteration is part of what I think of as a suite of writing on Taylor’s work, particularly his poetry: a memorial post in 2018, a piece for Chicago Review in 2019, and an essay on Taylor and vodou for Point of Departure in 2020. It updates all that with some new reseearch—the conference on Taylor’s work at CUNY in 2019, Phil Freeman’s recent biography of Taylor, In the Brewing Luminous, a valuable chronological synthesis of existing materials and new interviews, and—not least—seeing a copy of Taylor’s unpublished poetry manuscript, Mysteries, of which the first page is above.

Besides that essay, I’m planning for other writing on Taylor, its final form yet to be determined, to find its place in two current manuscripts on music, Survival Music and Ensembles. Taylor’s work continues to mean a huge amount to me. An all-consuming music, an all-consuming vision. Here’s a bit of the work in progress:

In the film Imagine the Sound, Taylor speaks of making “the commitment to poetry”. But what did poetry mean for Cecil Taylor? Poetry was, I argue in this essay, where he theorized his artistic conception. It was poetry he credited with saving his life, and in turn, it became part of the way he understood the nature of life, his own life, and that of life in general; of how to live one’s life, of how to approach art with charm, with ferocious grace, and with the unstinting courage of conviction.

Lots to catch up on in the meanwhile....In the not too distant future, I’m hoping to post here some writing on Wadada Leo Smith and a report on the Berlin Jazz Festival. Some other things are in the works as well. For now, news and some capsule reviews, notices of new work...

—‘Dream in a Hailstorm of Riots’, a long piece on the new collected poems of Jayne Cortez, is up at the Poetry Foundation.

From the mid 1960s through the early aughts, Cortez wrote about the political crises of her times: Attica, Allende, Palestine, Rwanda. But like fellow African-American Surrealists Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman, she was as interested in transforming reality as in documenting it. She bursts generalities and stereotypes in startling catalogues of surreal images that build around repeated phrases like the riffs of an improvising soloist. In her work, observations of everyday life and political events turn into dream visions, apocalyptic landscapes, meditations, and exhortations that crackle with energy, rage, and love. Above all, she is perhaps the poet of what her generation referred to as “The Music,” the various traditions of jazz, the blues, and R&B that soundtracked the freedom dreams of the Black liberation struggle. Cortez wrote poems in tribute to musicians and led her own band, the Firespitters, for decades. Hers is a voice—both on and off the page—that speaks with authority, curiosity, and an unshakeable faith in the power of poetry to change consciousness and change lives.

—Honoured to receive this attentive review by Eric Keenaghan of Never By Itself Alone at Resources for American Literary Study. Eric’s own work on queer coalitions, and with the writing of Muriel Rukeyser is, are necessary projects of historical reclamation and reminders of traditions of principle, resistance, and the complex negotiations of struggle for committed writers in times of crisis—needless to say, perhaps more relevant than ever.

—An essay on John Wieners from almost ten years(!) ago, now in print in Utter Vulnerability: Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners, edited by Michael Kindellan and Alex/Rose Cocker, published by Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. This was the first thing I wrote after handing in my Ph.D thesis and it feels like a signficant part of the work I did since then flowed out of this way of thinking. It’s about love and poetry and fire and Wieners’s relationship to his first love, Dana Durkee.

This chapter addresses what John Wieners claimed was the most important romantic attachment of his life—that with his partner of six years, Dana Durkee—and the eventual ending of that relationship. As I’ll show, this loss can be said, in part, to have prompted Wieners’ fully-fledged entry into the world of poetry, prompting the composition of his breakthrough volume The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), and it seeps into the minute fabric of his language itself, whether through conscious acts of address, revision and removal, or sublimated elements of textual echo which at once memorialise and disavow the object of loss. By introducing this element of biographical resonance, I do not wish to reduce Wieners’ poetry to a pained lyric exceptionalism, the poet as an exemplary figure of suffering removed from the social conditions that produce that suffering. Rather, such information serves as a means of heightening the way loss and despair intersect with socially produced domination, and the problems of community and desire in the face of persecution and its constant threat. As Denise Levertov astutely noted in 1965, in Wieners’ work, “Confessional” subjects such as mental breakdowns and the pain and loneliness of queer love are “not autobiographically written about, they are conditions out of which it happens that songs arise”.

—And last but not least, I’m very pleased that CJ Martin and Julia Drescher’s Further Other Book Works have taken on Abstractive, the book of poems and visual art works I wrote with the great Candace Hill Montgomery last year (with some final tweaks this past month). More details will be forthcoming. For now, as a sneak preview, here’s a page of the manuscript….

Recent writing elsewhere

Some recent writing elsewhere...

Pleased to have poems alongside good company in Michael Klausman's and Patrick Tillery's magazine Luigi Ten Co: a sequence called 'Axis and Orbit' and a prose poem from something in-progress...

Thanks to Florence Uniacke for producing this beautiful pamphlet, Two for Notley, for the Cafe Oto summer fair, with proceeds going to the new trans health centre at House of Annetta.

One of the two texts in the pamphlet is an extended version of a text that first appeared on this blog. And a different version of that text is also up at Little Mirror--thanks to Hunter, Jen and Allie.

Also out, a piece on Steven Belletto's extremely well-researched new biography of the great Ted Joans, Black Surrealist, over at The Poetry Foundation: "Nothing to Fear From the Poet but the Truth".

Finally, I've introduced a paid option for my Substack, same name as this blog, over at this link. A paid subscription gets you access to any posts over 1,000 words, which go behind a paywall. The Substack-ification of writing (and the way it negotiates the sphere of paid writing, traditional media, precaritisation of readers and writers alike) is perhaps something to be ambivalent about, but it is, at least, a platform...

N.H. Pritchard, Albert Ayler...

An essay I began a few years ago on N.H. Pritchard, II, is out now in African American Review, with thanks to Aileen Keenan and Nathan L. Grant. Here’s the abstract:

In 1967, Wilmer Lucas wrote that N. H. Pritchard’s poems “decompose the reader by sight and sound.” This essay follows Lucas’s prompt in several ways. It examines Pritchard’s early poetry in the context of the New York art scene and the Umbra Poets Workshop, outlining his development of the concept of “transrealism” and the subsequent visual reorganization of his work, before focusing on the sonic dimensions of his poetry, and suggesting that his approach ultimately led him toward silence. The conclusion emphasizes Pritchard’s legacy in the work of new generations of experimental musicians and poets and its continuing relevance today.

And, since I drafted the essay, Pritchard’s previously-unpublished “exploded haiku” The Mundus, versions of which I discuss in a section of the essay, has come out as a book from Primary Information, edited by Paul Stephens. Here’s my blurb. 

Rumours of N.H. Pritchard’s long-lost poem, The Mundus began to surface a few years ago, summoning us to imagine the mystic, Black radical work to transform society. Pritchard’s was always a music of language, a chanting on the page, a sonic visualisation that troubles the edges of both poetry and music alike. He broke apart form at every level—word, letter, sentence, phrase—sounding out mutable mutating beauties and metamorphosing phonic propositions that resound into our present. It is a remarkable work by the standards of any time.

Meanwhile, over on the Jacket 2 website, Charles Bernstein has helpfully posted a funding letter Pritchard wrote in 1967, summarising the project, which expands, corrects and (hopefully) extends some of my guesses in the essay.

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Elsewhere...

A sequence published in the winter issue of Almost Island, with thanks to Mantra Mukim.

Reviews of the Donaueschinger Musiktage in the latest issues of The Wire (you can find also find a long versions in an earlier post on this blog) and the new Beam Splitter/Phil Minton album, along with a contribution to the magazine’s year-end reflections and charts. 

And stay tuned for reprints of out-of-print titles from Materials, which should be here in the next couple of weeks (hopefully before the year is out)...

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And finally…

A few days ago, astonishing new footage of Albert Ayler was uploaded by Jay Korber to his Youtube channel: one ten-minute piece from Munich and one full set from Berlin, both filmed on a 1966 European tour featuring the three-front line of the Ayler brothers and violinist Michael Samson. What’s perhaps most striking about these, given Ayler’s reputation, is the amount of time spent playing melodies. There are relatively few sections of the ‘free’ improvisations for which Ayler was infamous: instead, medley, melody, the ‘folk’ element of the music are more pronounced, not in the somewhat constrained pop forms into which Ayler’s music attempted to fit on New Grass, but as a continuous stream of cadential, decorated, ornamented, amplified, reiterated, singing declaration.

As Peter Niklaus Wilson notes in the recently-translated biography Spirits Rejoice: Albert Ayler and his Message, the Ayler band had been touring Europe as part of a package tour organised by impresario George Wein, what bassist Bill Folwell called the “B tour” to the star turns of Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Max Roach and Dave Brubeck. It was on this tour that what was for a time thought to be the only footage of Ayler was recorded at the London School of Economics for the BBC’s Jazz 625, tapes subsequently destroyed in a cull of old recordings (so does Britain value art). Samson recalls ecstatic response to the group’s music on some of the gigs from the tour, comparing their reception in the Netherlands and France to the Beatles, though this doesn’t seem to have applied to the West German gigs: the audience in the footage, respectable and be-suited, appear indifferent, if not hostile. Yet the music Ayler was making had been designed precisely to reach out, to create a collective experience whose call the audience seem on this occasion to have been unable to hear.

Wilson labels the period 1965 to 1968 as the transition from ‘free jazz’ to ‘universal music’, with melodic material less a “catapult theme” for improvisation than something which “take[s] on an unprecedented weight in the playing process - firstly, through their length (for they are now often relatively extended, multi-joint structures), secondly, through the chorus-like recurrence of thematic passages between the solos, thirdly, through the clear shortening of the improvisations”. Wilson sees this as “a populist quality Ayler consciously worked towards”—what Ayler described to Nat Hentoff in 1966 as “trying to get more form in the free form […] something […] that people can hum. […] I want to play songs like I used to sing when I was really small. Folk melodies that all the people would understand.”

Wilson also quotes Samson, who suggests that those melodies drew from Ayler’s past in the Baptist church, where communal participation through singing had a pride of place. Ayler’s extended songs were an attempt to create participation, ‘spiritual unity’ , to bridge a real or perceived gap with the audience in a collective experience (in the next stage in his music, he’d go further, adding words and singing himself, alongside musical-romantic partner Mary Maria Parks).

This was not an about-face, a betrayal of the abstract freedoms of Ghosts and Ayler’s earlier music—an accusation Ayler would face in response to the more overtly R&B-oriented New Grass—and nor does it invalidate or represent a progressive maturation from that earlier music. Rather, Ayler’s ‘free’ playing represents one dialectical outgrowth of the syncretic traditions of song his melodies reference: marching band music, church songs, the nursery rhymes or folk songs he’d heard as a child. The multiple overlapping lines of counterpoint or call and response concentrated to occur all at once, at the same time, in multiphonics and atonality, not so much tonality’s absence as its saturation, its density, all the keys at once. Likewise, the restatement of those formative elements, with the Ayler brothers playing counterpoint lines while Samson vigorously bows along in rough-toned obbligato, manifests an element that was latent in the free improvisations, just as those improvisations manifest an element that was latent in the kinds of melodies on which Ayler drew. As Wilson notes, Ayler is not improvising less than in the more abstract earlier phase, where those improvisations were clearly separated from brief opening melodies. Rather, his various decorative figures offer a nearly-continuous micro-improvised commentary on the melodic figures that, in more conventional jazz frames, would be understood as the ‘heads’ preceding the main business—the virtuosic improvised solo.

Noise is an extension of melody; melody contains within itself the sound of noise.

In his contemporaneous reception by the French press, Ayler was often positioned as either a kind of racialized musical primitive or a dadaist in the anarchic vein of European avant-gardists: either atavist revenant or European modernist, the actual, dialectic quality of his music was often not fully grasped. (Greg Pierrot gave a good paper on this at the International Surrealism conference in Paris last month.) This was, though, the changing same, the radical tradition: continuity and rupture, old-time religion and present-day revolution (spiritual, musical, or otherwise), the tiger’s leap into the past. So, while I refer to ‘folk’ qualities of this music—a term Ayler himself used—‘folk’ here, I think, stands as much for vernacular traditions outside or to the side of the developing pop vocabularies of the culture industry, enmeshed as those were with Cold War economic developments. It does so, not in the sense of the revivalism of the US folk movement, or indeed the European folk songs on which Ayler drew, for instance, for the melody of ‘Ghosts’, based as it is on the Swedish ‘Torparvisan (Little Farmer’s Song)’ (Gunde Johansson’s version is here), as a kind of musical romantic anti-capitalism. Rather, it’s shaped by the experience of modernity, as opposed to evoking a static, idealised image of a real or imagined past. It stands at once for particularity, for the personal memories of the songs first heard and sung that Ayler evokes in the Hentoff interview, that maternal transmission (recall W.E.B. Du Bois and his great-grandmother’s lullaby, his infant’s initiation into the sorrow songs), and for the collective dimension that—as Du Bois’ account of the sorrow songs reveals—those songs open onto. Like ‘jazz’ itself, it is syncretic, drawing in all the ear can hear: folk music not as backwater, tradition to the side, but as part of a relation to modernity, to the problems of the world, away from those labels that would limit, ‘folk’ as much as ‘jazz’. As Wilson writes: “From baroque to country music to the European avant-garde: in the abundance of these allusions Ayler’s music [of this period] really transcends every jazz idiom, no matter how broadly conceived, and makes one understand why Ayler shied away from the jazz label at the time, preferring to speak of the vision of a ‘universal music’”.

‘Ghosts’, said Don Cherry, “should become mankind’s National Anthem!” Nation within a nation, nation without a nation, internationale, outernationale. Spirits rejoice.

(Peter Niklaus Wilson’s book is available through wolke verlag, joining their impressive cast of recent titles including a first English-language publication of materials relating to the singer William Pearson, Timo Müller’s German-language biography of Anthony Braxton, Phil Freeman’s Cecil Taylor biography, the anthology Composing While Black…)

IKLECTIK Gigs

I'll be playing at IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Ln, London SE1 7LG, with members of Eddie Prévost's London Improvisation Workshop (Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Tony Hardie-Bick and N.O. Moore), Eddie Prévost, and John Butcher, on 14th February. Details here: https://iklectikartlab.com/electro-acoustic-responsiveness-improvised-trajectories/ 

And a couple of weeks later, on Sunday 26 February 2023, I'll be at IKLECTICK again for here.here | Social Virtuosity with Eva-Maria Houben, as part of the here.here series curated by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and Harry Whalley. Three new works by Eva-Maria Houben, written for Artur Vidal and Dominic Lash, will be performed, and there'll be a discussion with Eva-Maria led by myself and Emmanuelle. More details here: https://iklectikartlab.com/here-here-social-virtuosity-with-eva-maria-houben/ (Artur and Huw Morgan will also be performing more work by Eva-Maria on Friday 24th Feb at 7pm, St James Garlickhythe, Garlick Hill, London EC4V 2AF, UK. See: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/all-good-things-come-in-threes-music-by-eva-maria-houben-tickets-518929260387) 

The performance of Eva-Maria's Together on the Way last year was truly one of the most astonishing things I've seen (I wrote about it on this blog): these works really live and breathe in live performance, and if you can, I'd encourage you to try to make one or other or both of these performances.

Updates for January

Pamenar Press will be hosting an online launch for Present Continuous on 15th January, with responses from Linda Kemp, Ciarán Finlayson, Tyrone Williams, and Ghazal Mosadeq. In-person launch hopefully to follow in the coming months... The link for the event is here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-of-present-continuous-by-david-grundy-tickets-501266961977?aff=erelpanelorg

Also this month, Lisa Jeschke and I will be hosting a reading/discussion with Materials/Materialien at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Germany, on Sunday 28th, with readings by Laurel Uziell, James Goodwin (launching his new Materials book, Faux Ice), and Lütfiye Güzel, followed by a discussion about the first ten years of the press with Lisa and myself. A book table will also remain in place for the duration of the Halle's group exhibition, focused on the various stages of production of an artwork. Thanks to Elisa R. Linn and Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff for the invite.

News of four new books from Materials shortly to follow....