Here is an audio capture of “Possibility Abstracts: Taylor Ho Bynum, Nathaniel Mackey
and Discrepancy,” a paper I delivered in Prague, in the Czech Republic, on 18
July 2014 as part of the vs.
Interpretation symposium,
sponsored by the Agosto Foundation. The text riffs on the epistolary form of
Nathaniel Mackey's serial novel, From a
Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, particularly the fourth
volume, Bass Cathedral, on which
Taylor Ho Bynum draws for his modular composition Navigation, versions of which he recorded with his sextet for release
on Firehouse 12 records late last year. (See firehouse12records.com/album/navigat…12-recordings.)
For me, this music is a contemporary masterpiece, negotiating the liminal zone –
the discrepancies – between the improvised and the composed, and doing so in
such as way as to creatively undo that rather careless binary. There is an excellent
review of Navigation by Stuart
Broomer in Point of Departure.
This is the abstract/proposal
for a paper I am set to give at the Vs.
Interpretation colloquium and festival on the improvisational arts, which
is taking place in Prague in the Czech Republic on July 17-20, 2014. The
colloquium is supported by the Agosto
Foundation, and keynote speakers include George Lewis and Pauline Oliveros. The original theme
for the colloquium had to do with “improvising across borders.” I am aiming to
extend my own thinking about the intersections of improvisational practices and
the poetics of listening by addressing the work of Taylor Ho Bynum and Nathaniel Mackey. So here it is:
Released in November 2013, the multi-format set of recordings of Taylor Ho Bynum’s innovative composition for improvising
sextet, Navigation, both culminates
and continues his fascination with the interfaces between the extemporaneous
and the written, the scripted and the performative. Separate LP and compact
disc versions of the work are paired with different fragments of text from poet
Nathaniel Mackey’s experimental epistolary novel Bass Cathedral, a book that Ho Bynum has recently said, for him, is
probably the best writing about music he has encountered. Earlier compositions
by Bynum, such as his suite Madeleine
Dreams, have not only used prose fiction as
libretto, but more tellingly have striven to address sonically and structurally
the complex and often fraught relationships between the musical and the
diegetic, between sound and sense. Navigation
takes up Mackey’s own address to this interface, sounding what Mackey
understands as creative discrepancy, an expressive troubling of formal and
cultural boundaries. Name-checking both Sun
Ra and Louis Armstrong, Mackey has noted what he calls a “play of parallel
estrangements” in improvised music and in poetry, arguing that music “is prod
and precedent for a recognition that the linguistic realm is also the realm of
the orphan,” that is, of the limits of sense, a liminal zone of both orchestration
and letting go. Ho Bynum’s recordings pick up not only on Mackey’s thorough
enmeshment in jazz history, but also on his intention to pursue the expressive
potential of language and of music at their textural boundaries, at moments of
troubling contact between divergent worldviews, or between dissimilar social
and cultural genetics. Composing using what Mackey calls m’apping – a
portmanteau splice of mapping and mishap, pursuing what Mackey calls the
“demiurgic rumble” of discrepancy, improvising across the gaps between careful
craft and unruly noise – Ho Bynum conjures a hybrid and collaborative music
that blends the complex Afrological heritages of jazz performance style
(audible in Navigation’s network of
gestures to Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, to name only two key forebears)
with graphic scoring techniques derived from Sylvano Bussotti or Wadada Leo Smith, among others. If
improvised music, for Mackey, represents – and represents precisely – what
defies descriptive capture in language, what eludes ekphrasis, then the music
of Taylor Ho Bynum’s sextet aspires to invert that representational effort, to
take up the discrepant aesthetic tactics of Mackey’s writing and to assess how
the written (as graphē, as graphic
score) can approach and test the expressive limits of making music happen.
Taylor Ho Bynum’s compositions for improvisers offer exemplary instances of how
to negotiate creatively the boundaries between text and sounding, and suggest a
means of addressing, too, the graphic work of other composer-improvisers,
including the work of Nicole Mitchell, Anthony Braxton and Barry Guy
