Asymptotes, Voicings: Amirtha Kidambi, Julia Úlehla, and Darius Jones at Ironworks, 3 July 2022

Asymptotes, Voicings: Amirtha Kidambi, Julia Úlehla, and Darius Jones

at Ironworks, 3 July 2022

For there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musick of the spheares; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony.

—Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643) The second part, Sect. 9

 

Give or take a weekend ago,

the five available planets

looked to align like lit crotchets

along the predawn ecliptic’s

oblique stave: zircon studs glinting

in that sky’s freshly pierced left ear.

 

Jump to last night’s one-off trio—

voice, voice, and alto saxophone;

the local cosmos witnessed you

concoct an ad hoc almagest,

extemporaneous ravel

threading a three-body problem,

 

weaving nascent swathes of wordless

repair across the world’s ripe wounds:

vibrant fray, orbitals, vectors

of what songs justice wants to make.

      You urge us to attune, to hear:

Pure music is what you must face.

There is a tide in time, of sound.

 

 

 

This text is an experiment around responding to improvised music in lyric form. It was written during the morning of Monday, July 4, 2022 as a reaction to a profoundly engaging performance the night before—the closing night of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival—at Ironworks, a venue just outside of Gastown near the entrance to the Port of Vancouver on the Downtown East Side, which annually hosts a series of experimental and innovative musicking. The festival, now returned to in-person performances in the attenuated wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, has a long history of setting up one-time improvisational meetings of Vancouver-based performers with musicians who have come to town as part of the festival programme—many of which have gestated international collaborations. The evening of July 3 featured one such meeting, of Darius Jones, Amirtha Kidambi, and Julia Úlehla. New York-based saxophonist Darius Jones held a composer’s residency at Western Front in June-July 2019, commissioned by Coastal Jazz (under Artistic Director Rainbow Robert) and partially supported by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (for which I am the UBC site coordinator) to create a composition that engaged with some of Vancouver’s improvisers; he premiered his “Vancouver Suite” for strings at Ironworks—after a three-year pandemic delay—employing Jesse and Joshua Zubot on violins, Peggy Lee on cello and James Meger on bass, with San Francisco-based percussionist Gerald Cleaver on drumkit and himself on alto saxophone, on Friday, June 24. (I’ll say more about this piece in a forthcoming post.) Darius Jones has currently taken up another residency at Western Front, this time to develop a duo with vocalist and composer Amirtha Kidambi around the poetry and thought of Sun Ra; later this week, they will be performing and discussing some of their emerging co-creative work. Vancouver-based vocalist Julia Úlehla has collaborated with both Darius Jones and Amirtha Kidambi almost a decade ago when she lived in the New York area, so their trio meeting—while in some sense a first—also emerges from a shared history. (Please follow the embedded links for more information on their music-making.)

 

The poem responds to an extended (around 55 minute) free improvisation that these three offered that night. It’s a little hard to describe—hence, perhaps, my response in lyric form rather than denotative prose—but essentially consisted of layers of nascent texture and vestigial melodic lines. Darius Jones began by blowing breathy, whistling overtones through his saxophone, to which the two singers responded in kind, with murmurs and whispery phonemes that very gradually gained voice and thickness; collectively, they seemed to feel their way into various surges and ebbs of sound, layering lines that looped back on, crossed over, and raveled each other. At times, ghost tones and other phasing vibrations lifted up into the room, generating a resonances palpable on a listener’s skin and ears. The sound-space took on a profundity, manifesting not so much as volume but as deepening quiet, an increasing sense of presence to the music and to each other. There were no solos, but each made space for the others, attending to shifting interactions and mutually responsive discoveries. Both Amirtha Kidambi and Julia Úlehla bring sensibilities to their performances that are vibrantly rooted—at least in part—in folk traditions, and there was for me a keen sense of connection to the human planet in the ballad-like shared melody that appeared at the close of the piece, as if all three had arrived at temporary common ground. It was a deeply moving, spiritually engaging music; it was a tremendous privilege for me to have been there in those moments.

 

A few explanatory notes on the poem I hope might help. The prosody is not free, despite it being correlated to a free improvisation; the stanzas and metre are built mathematically around 3! and 4!—six- and twenty-four syllable groupings, cut across by an eight-syllable line, clustered in three (for the trio of voices) 48-syllable choruses—though the last stanza adds an irruptive extra eight. Tetrameter lines like these are often found in folk ballads. This pattern emerges retroactively from the last two (italicized, eight-syllable) lines, which are quotations from the writing of Sun Ra—in this instance lifted from a 2019 essay on his poetics by Harmony Holiday. The quick drafting of this poem lends itself, for me, to a kind of free forming that the final pre-set lines lock back into compositional place/space. The quotation from the seventeenth-century Englishman Sir Thomas Browne’s autobiographical Religio Medici coordinates the revisionist cosomology of Johannes Kepler with the Ptolemaic music of the spheres to describe a spiritual listening beyond listening. See also earlier medieval versions of Ptolemy’s Almagest. Kepler’s harmonic attunement is also the source for the Urania-inspired astronomical word-music of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The three-body problem is a mathematical quandary around chaotic motion caused by the shared gravities of three celestial bodies; apparently, Kepler fudged his calculus around such quandaries in order to make the idea of harmonic planetary motion work. An alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (Sun Ra’s planet of origin) took place on Friday, June 24, 2022, the date of the premiere of Darius Jones’s Vancouver Suite, and enacted a kind of orbital harmonics of that cosmic music. The reference to justice is an oblique gesture at the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the human rights precedents set by Roe v. Wade, which has been in the air these recent weeks, among other things. I’ve been reading Nathaniel Mackey’s Double Trio lately, too. For me, the poem counterposes Afrological and Eurological cosmologies, and wants productively, somehow, to negotiate with their cross-talk. At least, that’s the idea.

Darius Jones playing Sun Ra in 2019:

Sleeve Notes for Other Worlds, by Maggie Nicols and Peter Urpeth

Here are the sleeve notes I was invited to write for Other Worlds, a duet recording by pianist Peter Urpeth and vocalist Maggie Nicols, issued on compact disc in 2017 on the FMR label, although from the look of the website it appears to be out of print—copies are still available from Squidco and other distributors, I think. The music deserves wider circulation, and it was an honour to write this brief piece.

Other Worlds

These duo improvisations were originally made for the development of the soundtrack for Seán Martin and Louise Milne’s 2011 documentary, A Boat Retold. A few short sequences made the final cut. Fortunately, we can hear on this album something close to its initial and fully realized form: a pair of aqueous, intimate and mesmerizing extemporaneous suites. Maggie Nicols, I’m told, came to the title—or the title came to her—after re-listening to the recordings. The music she and Peter Urpeth share combines the exploratory and the attentive, shifting between moments of assertion and accommodation, of provocation and conversation, of sounding out and listening in. The phrase Other Worlds suggests not only a combination of allure and unknowing, of the worldly and the strange, but also a search by the duo for its own nascent, unfolding narrative, sound-tracking their mutual reach toward each other’s sound-worlds and outward, together: an opening up to the textures and audible flows of the living worlds around them. There are moments, at the beginning of the second piece, when the vocalist veers on her own into what seems like a kind of ur-Gaelic patter, syllables contingently and playfully feeling their way into what might be meaning, but never quite arriving, never quite coming to ground.

At least that’s what I hear, since I don’t speak Gaelic. She offers us something just the other side of words, distilling a ludic alterity that’s sonically palpable in the edgy grain and in the throat-singing overtones that come and go along her sometimes fierce, sometimes yielding melodic fractals. The piano functions as resonant accompaniment, drawing out and layering harmonics, supporting and deepening their exchange. But as each improvisation unfolds Urpeth quickly becomes co-creative collaborator; piano and voice variously merge and diverge, unknitting temporary concord into contrapuntal banter, then stitching threads and coaxing excursuses into newly discovered intersections and emergent, evanescent alignments. What I pick up on, as I listen, is the pianist’s decisive, responsive and protean touch, the haptic give-and-take of a genuine reciprocity—the point being, I think, to attend on their itinerant and vitally otherwise communion, a collision of quickened but separate attentions, and to follow where they go.

The sound of this particular recording is capacious, yet close. I overhear their shared and mutually shaped space, as notes seem to bounce and scatter along the walls of The Vortex on an empty afternoon. I find myself proximately immersed in their interchange, amid stream, virtually part of it. The music of Peter Urpeth and Maggie Nicols remains warmly open and consistently welcoming: an invitation. The poignant release that the closing minutes of the second piece enacts, as they let go of each other and as their lines come apart and dissolve into ambient sound—the voices of children playing outside the club, an outer world that has been present throughout the recording—offers a deeply moving enactment of what their music accomplishes, here: a lyricism of possibility, an open-hearted grace.

Remarks for Hovering at the Edge (IICSI Guelph Colloquium, 13 September 2018)

For Hovering at the Edge: Words, Music, Sound, and Song

IICSI colloquium at Guelph, 13 September 2018

(Panel with Sara Villa, Paul Watkins, Rob Wallace)

First Half.

I want to start by poaching a phrase from the title of Fred Moten’s hot-off-the-Duke-University-Press trilogy, which he admits to purloining from Christopher Winks’s translation of an interview of Antillean poet Édouard Glissant by the filmmaker Manthia Diawara. Here it is: “Consent not to be a single being” (xvi). The implicit network of voices caught up in that performative translation suggests, already, the layered irresolution, the refusal and the excess that Moten names, following on a reading of C. L. R. James, the “not-in-between.” For a good twenty-five years now, I have attempted fairly quietly to practice a plural and dislocated cultural pedagogy, both critical and (co)creative, that hovers in the sometimes appropriative, sometimes disjunctive interstices of the Eurological, the Afrological and the Indigenous. I lay claim to no particular belonging, although my appearance and heritage tend to do that for me, materially and obviously. My writing such as it is has striven, sometimes against its own tendencies and sometimes by embracing them, to inhabit and to enliven—and to be enlivened by—those unstable and conflicted contingencies, those dissolving and partial places where productive intersections can and do happen. “Join me down here in nowhere,” Claudia Rankine calls out in Citizen: An American Lyric. I feel like I have tried, in my teaching and in my writing, to answer (and to answer to) that fraught, rich, poetic invitation.

            The hover I often find myself attempting to describe occurs—perhaps as a temporary suture, perhaps as an undoing, as a re-opened wound—in the liquid, motile collision of words and music that happens both in and as song, particularly improvised song. It’s the attenuation, the extemporal hysteresis, in one sense, that tugs lyrics toward the lyric. Drawing on Amiri Baraka’s concept of “musicked speech,” Moten begins to map in C. L. R. James’s sentences a “phrasal disruption” that he names lyric, a noisy “poetry” interrupting (“[n]ot by opposition; by augmentation”) James’s prose—inflecting Moten’s own parenthetical and iterative style, as well as my imitation here—and an aurality that “remains to be seen and heard so to speak, and in excess of the sentence because it breaks up meaning’s conditions of production,” serving “to disrupt and trouble meaning toward content” (3).  At the same time, music asserts itself through and against the verbal “not only as a mode of organization but, more fundamentally, as phonic substance, phonic materiality irreducible to any interpretation but antithetical to any assertion of the absence of content” (31). Moten comes to offer his apologies for such theoretically and poetically dense passages as the ones I have just quoted: “I’m sorry if this is all a blur. I’m so used to my own astigmatism that maybe I can’t even talk to anybody anymore. To make matters worse, I’ve never been able to keep my glasses clean” (261). Still, he understands his own verbose blur (as the title of his book suggests) as constitutive and crucial, as inhering in the give-and-take word-music of song itself. This astigmatism, this arrhythmia, is the stuff of the improvisatory; Moten offers, as exemplary, the unsettled musicking of Charles Mingus: “He would protect the pulse, like any good bass player, while freeing himself from it,” and, I want to add, by singing, shouting, moaning, ululating, vocalizing as he plays (103). Protection, however, also articulates itself against the risk of hurt, in Moten’s terms, as both complement and antagonist, as augmentation and opposition. Moten thematizes this correspondent hurt in the transcribed/described “scream” of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester; Michel Leiris evokes the “cri,” which he hears in “les sons râpeux . . . que les jazzmen aiment àtirer de leurs instruments àvents . . .qu’ils savent aussi faire gémir, grognier, se plaindre ou ricaner sur toutes sortes de tons” [the raspy sounds. . . that jazzmen like to shoot from their wind instruments. . that they also know how to moan, grunt, complain or snicker on all kinds of tones] (37). This pained and celebratory tonality—at once, for Leiris, derisive and sanguine—offers a moment of suture, of unruly translation, between what he calls paroleand chant, speech and song: “Peut-être est-ce quand les mots, au lieu d’être en position servile de traducteurs, deviennent générateurs d’idées qu’on passé de la parole au chant? S’ils se font chant, n’est-ce pas lorsque, cessant d’obéir seulement aux injonctions du dictionnaire, ils valent par ce que leur forme et point seulement leur sens official suggèrent (en quelque sorte ‘génèrent’)?” [Perhaps it is when the words, instead of being in a servile position of translators, become generators of ideas that we pass from the word to the song? If they make themselves sing, is it not when, ceasing to obey only the injunctions of the dictionary, they are worth what their form and point only their official sense suggest (somehow 'generate')?] (112). In some sense like me, Leiris comes to this music as an attentive outsider, hoping by staging, as audition, a close proximity to its song also to catch at (that is, to translate otherwise) some of its vitality, its deep cry. Moten, by contrast, necessarily resists such “an absolute nearness [to black vitality], an absolute proximity, which a certain invocation of suture might approach, but with great imprecision. . . . There’s no remembering, no healing. There is, rather, a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the metaphysics upon which the idea of redress is grounded” (ix). “Jazz,” as he puts it, “does not disappear the problem,” or dress its wound, or offer healing sesames: jazz “isthe problem and will not disappear. It is, moreover, the problem’s diffusion, which is to say that what it thereby brings into relief is the very idea of the problem” (xii, emphasis in original). While attempting to describe my own practice of study, which I understand as the interrogation and elaboration of a certain conceptual arrhythmia, I have perhaps relied overmuch on quoting Moten in these few minutes, but I am also mindful that the work of reading, with as much acuity as I can muster, is also to develop a tenuous but palpable resonance, a hapsis, a pushback and a to-and-fro with what I hear presently in Moten’s sentences. I’m going to move on to try to give a more specific example of this practice of reading and listening, of listening as reading, but before that I want to look only once more to the early pages of Moten’s book, where he delineates what he calls “black study” as the stuff of discrepant song, as audible hurt and as a “lyricism of the surplus”:

This is why, as Wadada Leo Smith has said, it hurts to play this music. The music is riotous solemnity, a terrible beauty. It hurts so much that we have to celebrate. That we have to celebrate is what hurts so much. Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study. (xiii)

My own practice of study cannot unproblematically or unchallenged suture itself to that terrible beauty or find even vestigially proximity to Moten’s “we.” Nevertheless, in the fraught translation between word and sound that manifests itself in improvised song, I do find myself, following Brent Hayes Edwards and, of all people, Raymond Williams, “hovering ‘at the very edge of semantic availability’” (16) trying to explain the blur.

Part Deux. Deuxième Partie, I Should Say.

I only have a couple of minutes, so I want to give a brief example of the creative blur, the hover I’ve been trying to describe in my own creative-critical practice by ventriloquizing some of Fred Moten’s recent work. I want to begin to listen carefully to Darius Jones’s and Emilie Lesbros’s Le Bébé de Brigitte, which is both an homage to and an extension of Brigitte Fontaine’s 1969 collaboration with Areski Belkacem and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Comme à la Radio. I want to take up two related tropes to understand how song and the improvisatory intersect in this work: the suture and, borrowing the title of the one wordless track on Darius Jones’s 2015 recording, the “universal translator.” Linking the Jones-Lesbros collaboration directly to the Brigitte Fontaine recording is from the get-go a bit misleading and an instance of mistranslation or of meaning lost in translation. If you dig a little (through the internet, for instance), you’ll discover that the “Brigitte” in Darius Jones’s title is not Fontaine (though named for her) but a maternal figure in his evolving personal cosmology (articulated in his unfolding series of “Man’ish Boy” recordings); unless you find your way to such notes, however, who Brigitte is will remain hermetic and likely miscued for listeners. The promise of universal translatability offers itself through Google or in Star Trekand Hitchhiker’s Guideutopianism (and has something to do with an Afro-Futurism here, though I have no room to engage or unpack it), but rather than transparency, the universality – the Benjaminian Reine Sprache– that Jones describes musically is an effect of contingent opacity, of difference and uncertainty, of the slipped suture: “In the process of creating this music, we often fell into moments of miscommunication because of differences in culture and language. I think this created a sense of mystery, and forced all of us to listen more deeply to each other’s nuances and subtleties, because we didn’t always have words to fall back on.” Words, despite what Jones appears to claim here, are not even a fallback for communicative or diegetic clarity, and even when they’re unsung, their tug and blur remain in play in the performance, the articulation, of these songs. Briefly put, the cosmology – the universality of an imagined universal translator – never closes or coheres, not even for its originator; instead it revises, remakes, re-writes itself, an extemporaneous diegesis. Which means, for me, that in the stitching, the verbal-acoustic suturing that happens when we sing, the lyric “problem” that Fred Moten describes tends to come into play, maybe even necessarily. Here are a few snippets from the (what I take to be) largely improvised lyrics by Brigitte Fontaine for “Comme à la Radio,” the eponymous opening track for her collaborative album: 

Ce n' sera rien

Rien que de la musique

Ce n' sera rien

Rien que des mots

Des mots

Comme à la radio

And,

                        Tout juste un peu de bruit

Pour combler le silence

As she moves through the song, we realize that with her increasing tenacity what we’re hearing both is and is not audible “like” a song “on the radio.” Her words, her noise, fills in silences, but even with what we might mistake for self-deprecation (“nothing but words,” “nothing but music”), it inclines itself, by both suturing and cutting into itself and its musical accompaniment, to the “nowhere” that Claudia Rankine says she inhabits, an excessive and unruly soundspace that both fills semantic gaps and refuses to fill us in. Emilie Lesbros’s singing on, for example, “Chanteuse in Blue,” also darts in and out of any semantic purview (one critic, while asserting that her texts are mostly “suitably poetic,” found that these words “veer into the irritating”: I’d call them edgy, working the audio nerves to the edge, the abutment, of sound and sense, of the Eurological and the Afrological, let’s say, with her Aebi-Birkin-esque accent): 

hah, wah, a-a-a-a-a, uegh

“Baby, let me tell you something.”

“Chanteuse in blue . . .”

“He said, ‘What? What are you talking about, sweetheart?’”

                        “I said, ‘I am suffering from the difference that people 

think we have.’”

What’s both thematized and enacted here, meta-diegetically and subversively, as translated verbal excess, is precisely and necessarily the irritation of the lyric: the refusal to settle in; instead Lesbros (and Darius Jones’s dialogic saxophone lines, both miming and counterpointing, intensifying and cross-cutting Lesbros’s voice) presents an embrace—a fraying and a knitting up – of the discomfiting, the discrepant, the extramusical, the blur. I will have exceeded my time. My time’s more than up.

Texts Quoted or Name-checked (in reverse alphabetical order)

Fred Moten. Black and Blur. First volume of consent not to be

a single being.  Duke UP, 2017.

Michel Leiris. À Cor et à Cri. Gallimard,1988.

Brent Hayes Edwards. Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary 

Imagination. Harvard UP, 2017.

Some Musics, for Ken Pickering (poem)

Here is a brief elegy for Ken Pickering, who passed away yesterday and will be sorely missed.

Some Musics

for Ken Pickering

Some musics draw you in and pull you near.

Some musics sound what words fall short about.

Some musics free you up enough to hear

what offers a brief means of letting go.

Some musics can’t be bought again, even

by special order at Black Swan Records.

Some musics refuse the done, the given.

Some musics have a way of happening

that defies and embraces love at once.

Some musics winnow a few greasy vowels

down to their consequential resonance.

Some musics make life a bit more worthwhile. 

Some musics have little to do with notes.

Some musics improvise what can’t be said.

Some musics stir what grieves and celebrates.

Some musics keep good company in loss.

Breath, Blood, Throat, Voice: Tanya Tagaq and the Politics of Song

This is an audio capture of a collaborative presentation by Bronwyn Malloy and me—both affiliated with the University of British Columbia—on the music of Tanya Tagaq (along with that of Jesse Zubot, Jean Martin and Christine Duncan). The talk, called "Breath, Blood, Throat, Voice: Tanya Tagaq and the Politics of Song," took place on Friday, 24 March 2017 at the University of British Columbia. In keeping with our subject matter—Tagaq’s recent music, especially from the album Retribution, and live performances—we tried to design our own presentation as a co-creative duo, moving back and forth between voices and approaches. Our intention is to revise and expand this material into a collaborative scholarly-critical essay. We're focusing in on the collisions of indigeneity and alterity/plurality/community through the co-creative practice(s) of improvised musicking.