Sonoran Christmas

The view across the Sea of Cortez from Bahia Kino, looking toward Tiburon, and somewhere out there, Bahia de Los Angeles.

I've been struggling for the past few weeks with whether or not to include two trips with The Poetess, this one to Bahía Kino and back up through Moctezuma and our spring break trip a few months later to southern Arizona. The reality seems clear: these two trips are also an essential part of my own personal tale. I haven't been reluctant to include them out of any desire to expunge the partnership or the Poetess from the record, a la post-revolution cleansing. On the contrary. Posting about these shared experiences has just seemed in bad taste, or an example of bloody and bad boundaries, or some sort of other bad thing. Bad, bad, bad.

The decision here is to just write about some of the aspects of the trips, as well as the cactus angles, and some of my own experience. Keep it simple. I mentioned in a previous post how well she and I traveled together, even when the partnership was under incredibly severe strain. This was true for both of these sometimes-bizarre adventures.

It's powerful, how shared experience lodges in the memory like a knife in the heart. In particular, whenever I go to Mexico now, the Poetess will be there, everywhere. I had thought I just wouldn't go back, but that isn't an option. That leaves slowly accepting the experience on its own terms. Equal parts gratitude and grief. Sometimes, one breath at a time.

In general, I love the experience of Mexico, so much that I would brave anything to be able to go there. One of the remarkable moments is as soon as one crosses the international border. There is really very little if any transition zone in some places, in particular the Lukeville/Sonoyta crossing and the Tecate crossing into Baja. As soon as one travels a car length beyond the US customs areas, one is instantly inundated with the completely different culture, style, economy, energy and color of Mexico. It is a moment for me like passing into a dream. Even the dogs are different. I always exhale a huge sigh of relief. Finally, out of the United States for a while. I have also felt huge relief being back in the United States, and I think these two moments are a great reason for international travel in general: the sheer release of leaving one's own country, the welcome comfort of returning to it. More often, however, especially the past few times, I have just been sad to be re-entering the US. It's not that I am sad to be back, it's just that I am not done with Mexico. As infuriating, wacky, raw, inscrutable, sometimes edgy and strange as Mexico can be, the past several trips have not at all made me long for the US.

This trip to Sonora was initially triggered by a former student of mine, studying in Bahía Kino with Prescott College. She posted photos on Facebook and I was smitten. For the previous three years, the Poetess and I had traveled to Baja, and that in itself could be an entire book, but this year it seemed like we should do something different, for a lot of unspoken reasons I won't go into here.

The first stop was the small but lively border town of Sonoyta, just south of Lukeville, Arizona, in turn about 90 miles south of Gila Bend, through Ajo, past Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

The Black Range, north of Ajo:



Grupo Doctor Bob, Sonoyta's AA club. Went to a great meeting there last Thanksgiving; more on that later.




The main cactus quarry for Sonoyta, Echinomastus erectocentrus var. acunensis. The type locality for this form is in Organ Pipe, but the area is closed due to human and drug smuggling activities. Ironic that the plants in Mexico are accessible.






Crazy leaf gathering ants:


Stenocereus alamosensis on the road south of Caborca:



Hotel VB, not really highly recommended. But it did in a pinch. It was a bit challenging the first night in Kino, as many places were closed and we didn't know the layout of the town very well.


One way to cover an electrical outlet. Perhaps fitting, for Noche Buena.


One of many amazing sunsets in Bahia Kino:


Comparatively swanky accommodations with full kitchen and hot water at Caluma Bungalows:


Feliz Navidad at Bungalows Caluma:


Crystal clear and calm waters and tide pools, north of Kino Nuevo:


Various impressions of the Bahia Kino area, including "Playa del Burro Muerto," so-called because we camped there and did not notice until after we set up that there was the carcass of a burro on the beach. It was, thankfully, downwind.






I spent many hours searching around the Kino area for a particular cactus, Grusonia marenae, originally named as Marenopuntia marenae. I had no luck finding any of the plants anywhere around Kino. I asked an American ex-pat staying at Caluma Bungalows if he knew anything about it, and he directed me to another ex-pat who makes it a point to catalog all of the cacti in the Kino area. He hadn't found any either (at that time, I have since heard from him about a small patch of marenae near Kino), but he directed me to a rare plant called Grusonia reflexispina, which is perhaps just a form of marenae anyway, near Tastiota. Beautiful and strange "dog cholla."




Ferocactus near Tastiota:


Sunset the last night in Kino.


Some of the AA clubs seen in Kino and up through Sonora on the way home:







Beautiful finds outside Moctezuma, New Year's Day. Coryphantha recurvata, Agave parviflora, a couple Mammillaria mainiae and C. recurvata again.






Mexico loves arches. This one makes Moctezuma seem grand indeed.


Some Moctezuma scenes, and the road back to the States, north of Nacozari.






Looking back, I notice I was especially "non-human" focused on this and many other trips. As the trip photos go forward, there's more documentary photos of the towns; it's not all wildness and cacti.

Roughly 500 days ago

I decided to dial back to October 2009 and track myself all over the southwest and Mexico for the intervening 18 months or so. The log shows almost 30 excursions, either day trips or long weekends or much more elaborate forays.

Unbeknownst to me (do people still say "unbeknownst" nowadays?), I was hitting a personal bottom throughout these months, slowly falling from a great height of trying to manage a lot of unmanageable aspects of myself, slowly watching it all unravel. Like watching a tornado in slow motion. I was only dimly aware of a lot of it, which is probably for the best in the long run. The journeys here were one way to boil it all down.

In October of 2009, I hit the road for Joshua Tree. I see this as a first experiment with travel as meditation. This particular trip was riddled with self pity and a chorus of evil voices in my head, for a lot of circumstantial reasons. But the sights were grand. A theme for this series of travel postcards. "I'm miserable, having a miraculous time."



sunset along California 62 from Vidal Junction to Twentynine Palms.




Scruffy old Escobaria alversonii at Joshua Tree.


Incredible spine color on Ferocactus cylindraceus, Joshua Tree.


Fearful symmetry of Escobaria alversonii.


Typical form of Echinocactus polycephalus in Joshua Tree, many small stems.


Fierce Grusonia kunzei, along 95 near Parker.


Echinocactus polycephalus toughing it out in a vertical rock crack.


Incredibly spiny form of Echinocereus engelmannii, perhaps 'armatus'.


A heat-addled bunny, not at all spiny.


Dehydrated purple Cylindropuntia ramosissima.


I decided to head back through Searchlight, Nevada. First time I ever stayed at a motel where the checkout time was 9 am. The glorious El Rey Motel. A theme throughout these travels is cheap and strange motels, for sure. I didn't start taking motel pictures until later into the trips, so I don't have a photo of the El Rey. It's like roulette: you never know what you're going to get. In this case, the woman who runs the place was unfriendly, unwelcoming, seemed irritated to have me as a guest and pounded on my door at the 9 a.m. checkout time. Maybe she hated the quasi-hippie stickers on the back of my car ("Expect Miracles," "No War," and perhaps the most damning one, "Have You Threatened Your Children With Eternal Damnation Today?"), judging from this review on Yahoo!: "2 weeks ago I made a reservation & spoke with Marie. I just called her to ask about details for Tea Party 3/27. She has not heard about specifics or location, but has received many calls. She is a very nice lady, very accommodating, & sweet. I can't wait to meet her on 3/26, day before Sarah Palin gets there for kick off. 5 Star customer service so far." 5 Star service for Tea Party members; scruffy, cactus loving environmentalist commies, not so much? I wonder if Marie is even crankier, since Harry Reid got re-elected?

Echinomastus johnsonii:


A few spine close ups of the burly Searchlight Echinocactus polycephalus:




Sunset on the drive home, along Carefree Highway toward I-17.


Miracles and wonder. Filtered through a completely addled and murky psyche.

Trips and trips

One trip, about a year ago, was from alternately wonderful, comfortable and miserable cohabitation with the Poetess in a 900 sq. ft. suburban house with yard and neighbors' barking dog and street sweepers and block parties and that whole thing to living alone in a 500 sq. ft. house across town, pictured above. It's odd how sometimes the biggest trips we take are the fewest miles, as utterly trite as that sounds. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single fuck up. Not that there's ever just one. But a self-centered, dishonest, fearful and inconsiderate alcoholic like myself has to start somewhere.

The new place has been a cloister-like hermitage, mostly. It is noisy, off a main street. During the school year, ASU students wander past all night, especially Thursday through Saturday, howling drunkenly. But it has still been a sanctuary. And I like the tiny Wilcolator stove.


It's been a blessing to live here. A hide out. My emotional life has been so thoroughly unpredictable all year, and the step work in recovery so periodically all-consuming, as well as the one-on-ones working with others, that I would not have fared all that well with roommates. I know I spent hours wandering around this neighborhood last summer, in the 80 degree nights. Watching the trains.

Just before I moved, I took a trip out to an area near Wickenburg to look for some Echinomastus. If you follow these posts, you'll see that all of my trips revolve around searching for cacti, to one degree or another. This population of Echinomastus seems to fit the old description of arizonicus, created by Hester back in the 1930s. I think Marc Baker places this bunch under that varietal name.



Similar to plain old E. johnsonii and also reminiscent of acunensis, but with some morphological differences in spines and so on. Not sure if there are floral differences or not. Haven't been able to see many flowers of these in habitat. Much more recently, I went back, and visited the population in the Harcuvars as well, and sometime after I post about all the intervening trips, there will be more photos.






Some very cool little Mammillaria tetrancistra in this area as well, just on the edge of the transition to the Mojave Desert.



And a very densely branched cholla on the way down toward Tonopah AZ that looks almost like multigeniculata.



As usual, the feeling of peace and repose in the middle of nowhere was simultaneous with roiling nostalgia and tons of questions. When you go out alone, even if there isn't a huge, painful change in the wind, the mind can really kick in. Deep breaths, prayer and meditation, just being aware of what is right there and how beautiful it is can help. But I know I usually was going out to meet myself anyway.

I just remembered a few earlier trips that were solo before this one. One to Joshua Tree and one to Meadview, AZ. Maybe I'll back up. It figures I would get ahead of myself, even here. The entire year runs, runs together.

This too. And Eliza Rickman is at Trunk Space, May 13.

Memory, CocoRosie style

Another preface to the travelogue. Just heard about these strange hop surrealists. This song has been haunting me.

Preface to Travels

I can't get going until I clear the air on a few things.

Not entirely sure where to start the travelogue for the past year, working toward some sense of organization and structure around all these trips. Closure, too, although I think that is bound to happen on some other schedule far outside my ability to control or manage. The Poetess and I went on a couple of miraculous trips in the months leading up to the separation and eventual end of the partnership. Miraculous, because even though clear indications were everywhere that some kind of upheaval or at least fundamental change was coming, it was as if (largely) we were able to take a vacation even from that and travel very well together, as we had always been able to. One concession to the change itself was that we went to Sonora over the Christmas holidays, rather than to Baja, as we had done the three previous years.

At first, I was going to start with the beginnings of my single wanderings last spring, but it seems that to make sense of the impulse over the past 18 months, I need to honestly account for the simple fact that the Poetess has been present on all of the trips. It would be false to present them as if I were the lone adventurer. In fact, although I was physically alone, huge swaths of every one of these sojourns have been thickly laden with memories, conversations in my head, overmastering grief, gut-punching longing and loneliness and wistful nostalgia in many forms: aching, generously loving, grateful, confused, resigned. So I would like it understood from the start that this is the emotional and spiritual background of these excursions. No matter what else has been present, whether it has been awe, joy, freedom, contentment, frustration, boredom, whatever, the Poetess has been present in spirit, in my own astonishing imagination, in my company with myself, in surprising ways and in ways perhaps unhealthy or absurd, but unmanageable and unaccountable.

The irony there is that one of my goals for some of these trips was to get free and reclaim some of these places for myself. Of course, it hasn't worked out in that simple way at all. In retrospect, it is a self-centered and self-seeking goal and altogether too controlling, an attempt to manipulate the universe and the heart. Place and memory, sense triggers, wayward blinding ambushes of recollection and sometimes searing and sudden reappearances of the past in the heart of the present are the very stuff of grief and not at all subject to our preferences, not in the least concerned with or contingent on the passage of linear time.

Not to get too personal and confessional (too late?), it is also imperative that I preface all references to the partnership with the Poetess with an acknowledgement of my failures. Were this an anonymous blog, my failures could be mapped in detail. Suffice it to say that one narrative that gets to the exact nature of my wrongs but in a very general way is that this was my first partnership in some semblance of sobriety and I unconsciously tried to work it the exact way that I always had in the past, when I was an active addict. My character defects operated just as fully in this partnership as they would have if I had been drinking. I think I was even better at them, actually, since, even in long white knuckle dry periods, I was trying to be virtuous, generous, kind and caring, all to get what I wanted, all to arrange the show to suit myself. Had I been drinking or openly displaying other compulsive or addictive behavior, although it is highly doubtful the partnership would have formed at all, if it had, my selfish, dishonest, fearful and inconsiderate actualities would have manifested more egregiously and much sooner. There is a saying in recovery: "Take away the addictive behavior from a horse thief and all you have is a dry horse thief," and that rings true in this case. If I had been practicing the principles in all of my affairs, I imagine significant differences in substance and eventual outcome.

Since I have had to own my wrongs in as clear-eyed and honest a way to the best of my current ability, I have also consequentially realized that I cause a lot less harm if I just keep myself company and stop trying to manipulate other people. The last thing I ever considered in sexual partnerships was honesty. The price has been everything. Lately, I am asking "how free do you want to be?" That too is the consequence of essential dishonesty and waking to a principle of honesty.

The force of these realizations (as fumbling as they are...Bill W was not kidding when he called AA "spiritual kindergarten") has hit hardest when I have been on these travels. So I'm sure they will resurface at odd times. Lucky you.

Disentitled

I haven't posted anything new here in months. The idea popped into my head recently to revisit this thing and write more and post again. I got completely sucked into the shiny microblogging Facebook thing and have spent an awful lot of time over there. The FB account is actually a major photo storage site, miniblog, social thang, sometimes shared celebration or outrage, lots of music vids from YT and so on. Great fun, but I have been longing to accomplish a few other things lately that require much longer form.

For example, I have traveled like Jehu since roughly last year at this time, with an estimated 14 or so road trips in the past 12 months. On FB, I can post photos and basically say "Okay, I'm leaving" and "Okay, I'm back" and that's that. I don't use the FB "Notes" feature because the few that I've posted, it seems no one reads. Not that a ton of people were reading this. Maybe some of the reflections on all of these trips I've taken will be a good way for me to try to make sense out of things.

The real reason I left this blog behind was the death of my dog of almost 14 years old and the subsequent break up with the Poetess and the complete change in living situation, followed by months of ashes and busted bullshit and untranslatable spiritual meanderings, heartbreak, confusion, depression, step work, defiance, and general catastrophe and surrender and repeated submersion in grief. This blog was never particularly personal and every single thing everywhere suddenly became inseparable from the personal and I just didn't feel like writing about it or really anything else. I'm not sure if this is true anymore or not. I have my days. But maybe I can write about the trips I took and post some photos and ease my way back into something, maybe even change this thing around a little bit to be somewhat more personal. That's a strange proposition since it is not an anonymous blog. And a few current students of mine, for example, have said to me a few times "hey, you should write on that blog of yours again!" and I think they are just waiting for me to spill some sort of soap opera or heartache or other dirt.

No such luck.

The other series of items that might be worth cataloging for some reason might be musical discoveries and pleasures over the past year. Many of these have been in the alt pop rock more commercial arena. Baths, Cafe Tacuba, Yo La Tengo, Akwid, Eliza Rickman, Calle 13, Krishna Das, strange stuff for me, some of it. Also a lot of revisiting of past music. And really very little new music. A fallow year in that regard. And 10 months since a performance. Just underground, as in buried.

Hanged Man.

I think I'll start with a series of travelogue posts. Maybe that will get me back in practice and get me some perspective on what I've been looking for, driving all over the crazy beautiful world.

I will tell you that I learned this much: no matter where I went, she wasn't there.

Prayers for Zimbabwe

My good friend and long time collaborator, bassist, mbira player and composer Zimbabwe Nkenya, suffered a stroke Wednesday, November 4, and is in the hospital in St. Louis. No word yet on his condition. My prayers and positive healing energies go out to him and his wife and family.

For the past nearly 20 years in Northern New Mexico, on and off, I've had the privilege of playing drums and piano in various ensembles under his direction and he has graciously agreed to play bass in some of my projects as well. He moved to Tucson, Arizona a few years ago and then to St. Louis, his hometown, where he was central in resurrecting the Black Artist Group there, calling it BAGII.

In New Mexico, his projects included Black Jazz Culture, The African Space Program and a variety of ensembles dedicated to honoring the compositions of Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Duke, Miles, Wayne Shorter and more. He has always been a generous supporter of my musical endeavors. He's especially been supportive of my piano playing, for which I'm deeply appreciative.

Zimbabwe Nkenya and the New Jazz, is available through High Mayhem in Santa Fe. It's an interesting tour through some of Zimbabwe's more jazz-influenced compositions.

The huge, warm tone of his bass playing has always been healing for me, whether I have had the honor of being in the band or the audience. Again, Zim, prayers for your peace and healing.

Rrake, In Time for Autumn

I've had the great fortune to work with Chris Jonas on a few different vibrant and challenging projects. I first met him shortly after he and his wife, the composer, vocalist, musician, community arts director and conduction expert Molly Sturges, moved to Santa Fe from New York, about 7 years ago.

The first couple of opportunities involved Jonas and Sturges' collaborative band, Bing. Learning their book and then working on music for silent films (the epic The Man Who Laughs and pratfall-laden Buster Keaton classic, Steamboat Bill, Jr.) and accompaniment for Wise Fool New Mexico's Circus Luminous all happened in about 6 months and was like going to graduate school for percussion for a couple semesters.

Then came Jonas' project, Rrake. This called on completely different musical resources for me, pulling together some echoes of Captain Beefheart, Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, some of James Blood Ulmer's and Ronald Shannon Jackson's stuff from the '80s and '90s, etc.

The charts involved sections where Paul Brown and I worked out asymmetrical figures while Milton Villarrubia III and Jeremy Bleich, the other drummer and bassist, played cycles of different, but eventually overlapping, asymmetrical figures. Some of the cue phrases are deceptively simple and oddly catchy, despite also being alternately eerie and arcane. In spite of very limited rehearsal time, with Josh Smith coming in from San Francisco the day before the gig, I think, the ensemble turned in some solid versions of Jonas' demanding charts at the 2006 High Mayhem Emerging Arts Festival. Since then, Rrake has performed a couple other times, including a highly enjoyable show with Joe Fiedler on trombone.

Here's one piece that came out well, in my opinion, in 2006, a piece called Vig.



The other four pieces from the 2006 High Mayhem Festival performance are also on YouTube, thanks to High Mayhem's meticulous documentation and my new YouTube account.

Poltergeist Percussion

The Frank Rosaly performance at Modified Arts with openers Static Announcements kicked off a bizarre weekend which found me piling into my car Sunday and driving in a big loop through Quartzsite, Parker, Twentynine Palms, Searchlight and back home. I was looking for Echinocactus polycephalus (pictured above)...a decidedly fierce beast found in the driest, rockiest, hottest deserts of the southwest. The plant has a certain ragged and fierce charm, symmetrical yet shaggy looking, tough as nails yet very challenging to keep going in cultivation, oddly fragile and given to either languishing for years or up and rotting.

A great metaphor for creative improvised music, in some ways. Rosaly was hosted by The Phoenix Creative Music Movement,, which, as Executive Director and Co-Founder Jen Rogers said at the show, has turned into more of "an occasional series of concerts." Perhaps the new direction at Modified Arts toward being a home for more cutting edge music will resuscitate Rogers' idea, which seems to have had a lot of energy behind it back when PCMM hit the scene, in 2005. It is no mean feat to host and produce performances of creative improvised or composed music in any area of these United States these days. In Phoenix? Home of the utterly derivative "wine bar" "jazz" experience? Very challenging indeed. The Phoenix area sometimes seems like a replica of a simulacrum of a city, and this even extends to the "arts scene," which as far as I can tell, centers around about 6 square blocks near Roosevelt and Central, mighty slim pickings for a metro area boasting more than 4 million people. In a few years of living here with my ear fairly close to the ground, this Frank Rosaly/Static Announcements show has been the only one of its kind that I have known of. The low attendance, despite a great write up in Phoenix's miserable rag of an "alternative weekly," spoke volumes about just how retarded Pheonicians can be.

Side note: I realize it has become a great American pastime, bitching about the cities in which we live. But Phoenix really does utterly suck. Everything is smash and grab fake, quick buck ugly. The people are not friendly or welcoming in the least. The air of "wannabe" Los Angeles is pervasive. Phoenix is as thoroughly tawdry as Las Vegas and as materialistic and shallow as LA, only minus both the history and charm. The arts scene around Roosevelt features some lovely stuff but is basically only truly alive a couple of Fridays a month. The music scene is almost entirely focused on really bad jazz (the worst of all music) and equally bad "indie rock" (oh man) or "death metal." The idiots who have watered the desert and stacked condo on top of hideous condo on top of puke colored strip mall after strip mall after completely disposable rectilinear street corner after street corner graced by everything that is hideous about Amerika have, at the same time, predictably ignored the cultural landscape of the city. In Tempe, the great "hip" strip is supposed to be Mill Avenue. "It's so funky and unique!" people said to us when we first moved here. Tell that to the minimum wage slaves working at Fatburger, American Apparel, PF Chang's, etc. along this outdoor shopping mall of a cultural shithole. So bereft of anything even resembling cultural curiosity that even the frikkin' BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC mega outlet right next to the UNIVERSITY couldn't manage to stay in business. But I digress.

I had been tipped off to Rosaly by my Santa Fe friends at High Mayhem, (ha, nice Wiki page folks!). The show there had involved a multi-percussionist piece featuring some of my favorite Santa Fe musicians. Rosaly came highly recommended. I have attended a very few solo percussionist performances. In fact, I think the only other one might be the absolutely transformational and gorgeous performance at High Mayhem a couple years ago by Tatsuya Nakatani.

Rosaly's performance was equally gorgeous. He uses a sort of hybrid, electro-acoustic drumset, featuring old Rogers drums and some pickups/transducer mics placed around the kit. I didn't get to talk with Rosaly either before or after the show, so I don't really know the technical details. I do know that Rosaly opened by creating some echoing, clanking and clattering textures using electrified mbiras on his floor tom. These forays into industrial machine percussion alternated with shitstomping, furiously fractured avant metal beats. Rosaly also did an extended meditation on some polyrhythms loosely associated around a 6/8 figure. His wonderfully honed technique and four way (actually, more like 6 or 7 way) independence and counterpoint were never flashy but always served some overarching musical idea. During the course of his energy-charged excursions, Rosaly made use of a wide variety of beaters, including hitting the drums with cymbals, a vibrator, a kitchen utensil that looked like a pasta server, etc. A wonderful boinging, chattering effect was created by a flexible glockenspiel mallet held across the head and rim of the snare drum and pulled up and released. Shproing wobblewobbleblblblblblb.

The timbral feast was rich and spicy, like a Thai hot curry. Overall, I was reminded of some of my all time favorite re-conceptualists of the drums, including Milford Graves, Han Bennink, Ronald Shannon Jackson, etc. Rosaly's gestural shenanigans were fun to watch as well, as if he felt a force field around the drums and was cagily and at times warily entering into a temenos, or sacred, magical space. Rosaly also sang a strange little tune at the end of his second piece, with inscrutable lyrics. This is risky stuff. But it totally worked. One of the delightful ironies of his performance was a final, direct and explicit reference to "jazz drumming" at the very end, where he settled into some Jack DeJohnette style time keeping and fills. It was as if it took him the entire hour of conjuring poltergeists, ghosts, demons, manic angels and fiery, alien landscapes to purge himself of the burdensome history of drumming and stereotyped vocabulary of the drumset in order to be comfortable enough to play some jazzy figures.

If you get a chance to see Rosaly in action, jump. I enjoyed Static Announcements too and hope to see them again here in Phoenix. I hope, too, that the Phoenix Creative Music Movement can continue in any form, even on life support. It is a sorely needed possible source for sonic adventures in this otherwise barren desert.

Hystericity

Music critic Chris May takes a bizarre tack in reviewing the latest CD from Vijay Iyer's trio, Historicity.

Writes May: "There is much that is immensely exciting about pianist Vijay Iyer and something else that is intensely irritating. The excitement lies in the music and the irritation in the miasma of cerebralization that surrounds it."

Can anyone guess to whom Iyer is inevitably, ineluctably compared a mere 1 paragraph later? Anyone? Starts with B. And it ain't Buxtehude. Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

I am as leery of miasmas of cerebralization as the next guy. My enjoyment of art is often utterly destroyed by gasbags who insist on articulating their insights, methods, musings and reflections, especially in big fancy words of more than say, 3 syllables. Think of how the accessible folk songs of Harry Partch were completely destroyed by his ridiculous "theory." Imagine how much more enjoyable Schoenberg or Webern would be without all that annoying "Serialist" pretense.

I prefer immediacy. I like my artists utterly aphasic, in fact. Too much thinking and self-reflection, especially when it reaches MIASMIC levels of CEREBRALIZATION, and I'm outta there. I don't know much about music, but I know what I like, and it isn't musicians who are more intelligent and articulate than I. Young, dumb and full of JASS, good time music, no philosophy.

Lo and behold, in a startling new trend that I wrote about last year sometime, Mr. Iyer himself weighs in on the comment thread to May's review. I suppose this isn't strictly new. I vaguely remember musicians writing letters to the editor at Downbeat, responding to 2 star record reviews or whatever. Generally, however, for centuries, critics have written about artists at a certain insulated distance.

Anyway, in the comment thread, Iyer posts the actual miasmically cerebralized liner notes to Historicity, to wit:

Historicity

"The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory."

- Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks


There are two main meanings for "historicity":

1) the quality of being historically accurate, as opposed to ficticious or legendary
2) a condition of being placed in the stream of history; also: a result of such placement

The second sense matters here: without a doubt, it's the past that's setting us in motion. With eons of recorded music ringing in our ears, and several years of intensive collaboration behind us, we take on pre-existing works by Andrew Hill, Julius Hemphill, Ronnie Foster, Stevie Wonder, Bernstein & Sondheim, and M.I.A..

Most of these works have a disruptive quality that we aim to reproduce with the trio. (The exception is "Somewhere," which simply gets retold on our terms.) You could see our covers as tributes, but we've also tried to augment each song with a fragment of ourselves. Each cover becomes a conversation between the original work and something else entirely; the best word for it is versioning.

I also borrow from my own past: earlier prototypes of "Trident" and "Sentiment" appeared on my first few albums, over a decade ago. And all of our music draws influence from the musical traditions of South Asia, Africa, and their diasporas (the Brown and Black Atlantic); perceptual illusions, mathematical equalities, and physical resonances; and everyday life in transcultural New York City.

The coda sections of "Historicity" and "Helix" both consider our experience of time as a continuous dimension instead of a series of events. For psychologist J.J. Gibson, events are perceivable, but time is not; he contends that time's continuum is something we imagine, as our way of connecting the dots.

Music, it seems, also connects -- carrying us smoothly across the tumult of experience, like water over rocks. That would make historicity the swirl of undercurrents, the reason we brace ourselves as we step into the river.

Thanks for listening.

vijay iyer"

OMFG!!!! IDK WTF Iyer is on about!!!! These liner notes? EPICALLY IRRITATING CEREBRALLY MIASMIC FAIL.

Not really, of course. Iyer's notes are interesting. I've been thinking a lot about the history of the music, how it relates to the repertory approach of Jazz at Lincoln Center, what the value of a retrospective "versioning" is, why people still get together all over the world and try to play Real Book tunes, how all of this history can be an inspiring force rather than a stultifying and intimidating Mt. Everest of genius, etc. One of my favorite blogs, It Is Not Mean If It Is True, was for a long time doing an "improvised music" reading of Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. (also some fascinating reflections on Adorno's Verse une musique informelle, but I digress....)

A closer examination of May's objection suggests he may have missed some of what Iyer is communicating. According to May, Iyer's musings boil down to nine words: "we are all part of the tide of history." I think not. Perhaps if one exposed a sullen yet mysteriously literate fencepost to Iyer's liner notes, said summary would result. Those of us with the patience for MIASMIC CEREBRALIZATION garner somewhat more. Each creative act is a gesture of incorporation of all the influences, in the mysterious aggregate, that come before. Each "new" statement is an homage as well as a rejection. Each moment of an artist's life is a "version" of the past yet entirely present. Influence can be literal, entombing the past in amber, fossilizing what was once vital, or it can be metaphorical, liberating and transcendent. I have long admired artists who baldly and reverently embrace influence (The Art Ensemble of Chicago, for example) but eschew imitation.

May continues: "As Iyer and his publicists frequently remind us, before becoming a full-time musician Iyer studied mathematics and physics at Yale and UC Berkeley. The guy has smarts; can we please move on now? For if he isn't careful, Iyer is going to match reed player Anthony Braxton's bone-dry academic posturing and in doing so set himself apart from the sizable audience his music could reach."

IRRITATING. Really a sort of trifecta of gasbaggery. 1). implying that Iyer and publicists (I imagine a vast team of marketing MBA's sitting around a shiny stainless steel conference table generated high-falutin' smartypants copy, a team of buzz-building former math majors, unheard of in JASS music until now....) somehow try to sell Iyer's music by making him look "smart," 2). implying that Iyer will somehow lose listeners as a result, 3). completely mischaracterizing the philosophical background and entire career of Anthony Braxton. ding ding ding! Insufferable gasbaggery for the win!

The irritating parts of May's review read like a Daily Mail article. May's appreciation for the music doesn't actually offer much insight into the methodolgy or aesthetics of the trio and there's a kind of inarticulate critical vocabulary at work. It's more plot summary than critical assessment. The sort of "review" that's fairly easy to pound out in 20 minutes, hungover, after giving the CD one listen. Maybe this is why a greater word count is actually dedicated to lamenting Iyer's intellectualism than to the music?

Anyway, file under "anti-intellectualism in jazz criticism," along with decades of other dismissive and condescending perspectives.

Ironic that the CD is available where smart people live (Europe) but won't be released here until October 13. In the meantime, in case you were wondering, here's a photo of the irritating and dangerously inscrutable CEREBRALLY MIASMIC Iyer. Be on the lookout.

If Q then not necessarily P

Americans have long had a technique fetish in their Calvinist, superficial attempts at appreciation for the arts.

Recently, Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success caused quite a stir. As soon as I heard Gladwell's glib "10,000 hours" formulation, I knew a couple things. I knew it would become a meme, a viral apothegm. I also knew it was a formulation of no ultimate consequence. This past summer, I was snooping around a friend's bookshelf, found a copy of Outliers and read it in about 45 minutes. How utterly disappointing, to see that the "best minds of my generation" are well-fed, superficial and have decided to reduce their intelligence to Reader's Digest levels of pablum-spewing lack of significance.

I'm sure there is a correlation between time spent engaged in a task/field of endeavor/area of expression and the quality of the results. I'm also sure that switching the "if...then" of the basic proposition reveals, in what should be an obvious way, the glib superficiality of the basic idea. "People who show extraordinary success at X have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice" simply doesn't translate to "People who put in 10,000 hours of practice at something will be extraordinarily successful at it." That this simple logical converse does not seem to shed light on the transparent uselessness of the original correlation for a lot of people speaks to how bereft the arts are (for example) in America.

The American sensibility seems to me often to reduce appreciation for an artist to the admiration one shows for a circus freak. Speed of execution, articulation, ability to manipulate the physical world and one's body, excellence at representing reality, extraordinary agility, flexibility, etc. These are the hallmarks of a "true artist" for the essentially materialistic American "consumer" of the arts. Even in the case of highly technically accomplished artists who also have a great depth and individuality of expression, what many Americans seem to value is merely the technical accomplishment.

Take, for example, the majority opinion on John Coltrane. Check out this bracing video of a transcription of Coltrane's solo on Giant Steps, the version originally released on Atlantic:



This metronome 240 (roughly) foray into linear and arpeggiated statements over functional harmony, an exaltation of both freedom and form, is a landmark performance. But the pathetic Jazz University that would soak such a form in formaldehyde entirely misses the point.

Coltrane's trajectory soon followed entirely new shapes, much to the dismay of many long time fans. The triumph of "be bop" was also its downfall. The form allowed for too much formalization, and very soon the genius practitioners of the form chafed against the "hamster wheel" experience of simply running the changes in 12 or 16 or 32-bar cycles again from the top. What could be said in such a fashion was exhaustively said, by artists of such expressive ability and insightful genius that there was no artistic urgency to revisit the endless chord wheel yet again.

Yet the phase of Coltrane's career most beloved by Americans, and especially most revered in "The Jazz University," is absolutely the phase of greatest traditional display of traditional technique. This is as it always has been here in the great US of A. Even 'Trane's later work with Miles Davis on the so-called "modal" Kind of Blue
pieces begins to attract resistance. "Too many notes," say some. (Possibly even Mr. Davis, who in his famous, possibly apocryphal, rejoinder to Coltrane offered a very simple suggestion for how to end a solo, namely, "Take the @%#$!* horn out of your *#@*&% mouth").

I have had many be-bop lovin' hepcat jazzbo white guys who are still running tired, fleet and technically accomplished solos over even more tired Real Book (tm) tunes say to me "I can't stand that later Coltrane stuff! He must have gone back on smack or something! Or that cat went crazy man! Ya Dig!!" (not really that last part, so much, but you get the idea).

So I'd offer Coltrane as one example (of a very, very many) of an American artist embraced as a master up until that regrettable leap off into madness, marked especially by what is perceived as an abandonment of technical facility. For contrast, and for a renewed sense of just how astonishing 5 years can be in the lifetime of an American innovator, check this transcendent 1965 performance of Naima :



And this is especially telling, as Naima is itself now considered a "jazz classic," and sometimes is subjected to the usual superficial, glib, utterly semantically depleted exsanguination as any other "tune" suffering the general misfortune of being adopted by the jazzbots. (At the same time, also tellingly, Coltrane's Sufi-like ecstacy in his solo is often dismissed as "just too much, " even now, 45 years after the fact).

So where does this version of Naima fit in the Gladwellian formulation? Clearly, Coltrane's utter mastery of the tenor saxophone, of the fundamentals of melody, harmony and rhythm, of the great sweeping arcs and jagged jumps of compositional drama in his solo, these aspects of Coltrane's art could (perhaps) be taught. Certainly, if not taught, at least analyzed, more deeply admired through analysis and perhaps employed in part or attempted whole by other artists, other students of the music. One could imagine easily spending 10,000 happy hours learning to play every nook and cranny of a handful of Coltrane recordings from roughly 1962-1967. Indeed, an entire school could be and in fact has been built on Coltrane's work, or Davis's, or Parker's, or what have you. Entire 10,000-hour schools could be built on single solos by these masters, or even some of the methodologies summarized in a few bars. This may sound hyperbolic, but listen to any so-called "JAZZ" recording claiming to be "mainstream" from the past 40 years or so and tune in to how each solo is an homage to an homage to an homage to some masterful statement, several decades old, a palimpsest featuring Sunday cartoon comics sketched over layers of what used to be culturally significant, the bottom-most layer an intricate, fundamentally unreproducible and urgent statement of vital truth.

What Coltrane (and so many others) plumbed (and continue to plumb) at the peak of their self-expression cannot be taught. Cannot be practiced. Only a mistranslation (at best) or a sorry-ass recapitulation is possible. Check the Naima clip from 2:49 to about 3:17, or the amazing interlude of telepathy with Elvin Jones from 4:26 to about 5:05 for but two examples (totaling just over a minute) from Coltrane's improvisation of what 10,000 hours, or 10,000 lifetimes of 10,000 hours each, could never teach.