Joelle Léandre / George Lewis / Pauline Oliveros “Play As You Go” (Trost, 2021)

In my to-be-rebuilt-from-zero collection of albums (it’s a long story, I won’t narrate it here) there are live records released years after their public executions. The beautiful double ECM “Bells For The South Side” by the various Roscoe Mitchell Trios (Mario Gamba wrote on the italian newspaper Il Manifesto that these compositions stand in Mitchell’s carnet at the same point of Beethoven’s Ninth) was recorded in 2015 but released two years after. And the dream album by pianist Cecil Taylor, one of my favorite composers&performers of all times, “At Angelica 2000 Bologna” was issued on 2020.

Something similar happened with Peter Brotzmann’s sessions for the saxophone solo CD “I Surrender Dear”, sessions that belong to the year 2018 and published only two years later. So I asked myself if there is one reason that, after a long period of time where alternative music – whatever this label means – was about to instantaneously monetize creativity, now after all these years artits are going slower with the publishing of their own music, sometimes bringing to light hidden gems that were at risk of becoming only a small portion of a vast archive.

Things have changed in the business. If ten years ago a good decision was to give birth to a limited edition of 1000 copies for one album – since it would have been difficult to sell more than that at the beginning of the European economical recession and in the middle of the cultural crisis of the new century – now artists and labels, if we’re talking of passed away musicians, are more aware of the link and the responsibilities they have with their public, and the few of us that didn’t leave completely in order to become adults with no strange sonorous objects in their houses want more than the next great album to add to our collections anyway.

In order to respect the up above tracked rules, here it comes an album that will leave you with the will to listen to it repeatedly, or so I hope at list becaue it’s what it deserves. The musicians involved in this live recordings are three of the most important masters of instant composition and improvisation of the last decades. We’re in effect talking about bassist and vocalist Joelle Léandre, trombonist and electronic manipulator George Lewis, one of the founding members of the AACM, and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. This is the first time they play together.

The 44 minutes long instantaneous compositions begin with Léandre raucous vocals interspersed with accordion and electronic effects. The interaction is obviously different from that of a ‘jazz’ trio since the way the musicians listen and react to each other is based on reprocity more than on idiomatic techniques. Bass is both pizzicato and arcoed, and even if it is difficult to tell who’s conducting the dances, I would say that Léandre gestures are kind of the skeleton for Lewis’ and Oliveros’ flash, at list in this first part.

It can seem obvious since the nature of an instrument that is designed to be pivotal but not that obvious from the nature of the sound structure of the improvisation-composition. And if a colleague from his blog wrote aptly that the way every musician is open to the other is fundamental for the creation of the music, I would also suggest the listener to be careful with the group indentity of it, an identity that can seem overwhelming the single musician but pertaining to the ensemble.

Around minute 8 the electronic elements mastered by Lewis give space to various accordion statements, intertwining with them, dialoguing with them, leaving them the space to become an abstract, far away melody mixed with bass’s percussed and arcoed strings. We’re about minute 12 and the trombone takes its place in the usual manner: statements of existence instead of melodies or trasfigured melodies or scarred melodies. It’s time for the voice to dialogue with these statements, while the trombone become less dense and more careful to the dynamics of sound and silence.

It’s time again, at around minute 15, for the accordion to gather trombone’s heritage and give life to a way of being, more than a way of improvising: the electronic sounds, in fact, articulate a range of different paths to music, leaving the listener the right space to live inside the music instead of being overwhelmed by it. We’re around minute 17 now, and this complex texture is held by trombone and bass: they build a climax that leave the listener with the famous Braxton idea of waking up spiritually the people who are attending to the event.

At around minute 19 electronics add themselves to the music, before a quasi-silent space where sparse sounds can accompany the positioning of the listener’s mind in the middle of the music itself. Accordion and electronics are now underlining the short and dense, but warm and gentle, statements from the bowed bass who takes the lead of the trio again, conducing it to a construction made of different textures sometimes echoing an exaltating full and sometimes leading to some full/void dynamics.

We’re around minute 25 and Lewis elaborates in real time Léandre vocals, before a short amount of silence interspersed with electronic sounds. Strings and short electronic statements dominates this second part of the performance, with vocoderized vocals and short accordion bids. A new climax by all the instruments can be taken as an invitation to leave yoursef go to the following mix of acoustic and electronic trombone’s sounds.

A new crescendo makes the music more dramatic, but it’s the non idiomatic quality of it that makes the listener live an experience of openness, of feelings, more than that of different identities contaminating each other. In a way, it is as this idea, that circulated throughout intellectual environments during the last decades, is now leaving its place to that of sensations mixing together in order to create a new, composite feeling, whose spirit is here represented by a sound that can seem that of a dramatic keyboard followed by small sound gestures levitating in the mind of the listener.

Small bowed strings lead the listener to a new electronic heartbeat, while far away small voices counterpoint Oliveros’ small accordion morceaux, until the apparition of what can seem a little percussion. Bass and accordion dialogue is following the pause with a mix of melancholy and expectancy, while the electronics try to remind us that this is non-descriptive music, and that this idea of sound is not for everyone to be played: you have to dismiss a previously frequented idea of ethics and aesthetics in order to do so.

Then, it’s time to the trombone to conduct the listener into a journey to be played as you go, and if the cover of the album is not far from that of other avant garde records where the sea is compared to the texture of sounds, this is the best version of it from Christian Fennesz “Venice”. Recorded in Prague at the Festival “VS Interpretation” for Czech radio, “Play As You Go” is an important album not only becase we miss Pauline Oliveros since 5 years, but also because this music is far from becoming surclassed in a period where we often can listen to musicians that are perched on melody or on a non completely textured experimentation.

 

Is the Avant-Garde sexist?

Matana Roberts

My reflection about this problem started quite some years ago. I was going to a concert with a friend, a trumpet player, who told me that 'women cannot play saxophone because their rib cage is smaller than that of a man'. Curiously enough, in that period a woman saxophone player was emerging, Matana Roberts, and the media dedicated to improvised music were praising her for the freshness of her sound and vision.

The result was that I started asking myself: 'is the avant-garde sexist?'. After all, what we needed was Peter Brotzmann heavy blowing, Cecil Taylor strumming, Han Bennink hammering. What about hues and shades? Obviously there was Marylin Crispell playng piano in many records by the Anthony Braxton quartet, there was Susie Ibarra playing drums with William Parker band 'In Order To Survive', and the concert me and my friend trumpet player were attending to was that of Joelle Leandre.

But that assertion about women's rib cage was so impressed in my mind that I started aking myself if the seed of mysoginy was in some way present in my environment. After all, when I was in London for six months, I attended many gigs and festivals and I noticed only few women. To be honest, I remember four of them – and only one from outside the Eu/US. And only few titles in my CD collection were attributed to women.

At a certain point, I started searching the web for articles about the subject. I read that women were mostly hired by the music business in jazz as pianists or singers, while all the other instruments were taken as instruments for male performers, as an example. This is mostly true also for improvised music. Then, I found a dissertation by Dana Reason Myers titled “The Myth of Absence: Representation, Reception and the Music of Experimental Women Improvisors” (2002).

Pauline Oliveros

I will talk about this thesis for all the lenght of this article, since it's really interesting if you want to deepen the problem of women musicians in a male-dominated world as the one of jazz and particularly the avant-garde scene of improvised music. The thesis of D.R. Myers starts with drawing the life and art of seven women improvisors: Pauline Oliveros, Marylin Crispell, Maggie Nichols, Joelle Leandre, Miya Masaoka and Susie Ibarra.

Since all these women are very well acknowledged nowadays and are well known to my readers, I will omit their achievements and I'll pass to the rest of the discussion. D.R. Myers starts analyzing how Down Beat magazine covers women in jazz from 1960 to 2000. Down Beat doesn't cover free jazz or avant garde music in general, and his columns are seen more as an opportunity to sell records of the concerned styles of music (bebop, fusion, classical jazz, etc.) more than discussing about issues of interest from the musicians themselves.

Nonetheless, Down Beat sometimes pays hommage to the masters of free jazz and avant garde music, favoring male participants: Cecil Taylor, Julius Hemphill, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis, and Ornette Coleman among others. Occasionally a review of a CD by Marylin Crispell appears. In addition, some journalists, such as John Corbett, have written about male and female improvisors. Despite his contributions, prominent American women improvisors has been very limited.

While the magazine tends to profile American musicians, on occasion European improvisors appear, including Barry Guy, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and Alex Von Schlippenbach. European women from the same generation and field are not featured: only three have been featured in articles and only five have received reviews in Down Beat. We obtain similar results consulting the database of the magazine Cadence, where, from 1976 to 2000, there are 686 articles about male musicians and only 30 featuring women musicians.

Myra Melford

As far as the magazine Jazziz, a special number was issued in 2000 dedicated to women artists. Only two women, Myra Melford and Carla Bley, are involved in both creative music and jazz music. Women instrumentalists remain marginalized, and experimental women remain even more marginalized. Things don't get better if we consider books. D.R. Myers analyzes the following titles: Robert Walser's Keeping Time (1999), Ingrid Monson's Saying Something (1996), Krin Gabbard's Jazz Among The Discourses (1995), Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz (1994), John Corbett's Extended Play (1994) and the famous book by Derek Bailey Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (revised 1992).

All these books provide little mention of the contributions of women improvisors, and even less on cross-cultural aspects of the role of women in music. In contrast, Val Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life (1977) dedicates an entire chapter titled “You sound Good – For a Woman” in which Wilmer discusses attitudes towards women musicians and how creative women improvisors have helped support the male musicians they maintained personal relationship with (Alice and John Coltrane, Fontella Bass and Lester Bowie, Linda and Sonny Sharrock).

At this point D.R. Myers ask to herself if the statement “sound good for a woman” necessarily imply the notion of a woman who plays like a man, or if the comparison of creative women's abilities to creative men's abilities engender notions of the women being understudies of 'big brother' either directly of indirectly.

Amina Claudine Myers answers in an interview: “I don't recall actually hearing that statement [“sound good for a woman”] in reference to me, but I have heard it … years back when I was playing organ with Gene Ammons, I heard someone saying 'she plays like a man'. One time I was referred to as a female Mc Coy Tyner, or Cecil Taylor”. Amina Claudine Myers believes that statements like “'she plays like a man' means being strong and aggressive on the piano, but it's been proven that women have done heavy work and stood up under it.”

Susie Ibarra

It is perhaps safe to assume that the most valued physical standard would be gendered masculine. In an article issued on Times, a newspaper from New York, of May 30, 1999, David Yaffe describes the music of drummer Susie Ibarra depicting her as an 'exceptional' woman. Susie Ibarra can surely physically handle the drums differently from what many critics of the past were thinking about women – as my friend trumpet player – but the discussion of physicality leads readers to assume that there is a standard by which physical qualities are to be measured and compared in order to play the drums.

Yaffe discussion of Susie Ibarra creates distance between her and other women drummers or women improvisors. Allan G. Johnson makes an additional claim suggesting that what makes some women exceptional “is their ability to embody values culturally defined as masculine” (1997). In addition, many reviews of women musicians call attention to personal traits, physical attributes, or compare their music to other male musicians obscuring why these women's voices are important to be heard.

Coverage by media is not the only problem women approach through their journey in music. Joelle Leandre recalls that “as a woman, it is certainly more difficult to enter the musical 'machine'. We are the minority and it is therefore difficult to find one's language as an artist while remaining faithful to ourselves”. Other women have experienced a mixed reaction to their work, as it happened to Miya Masaoka and her piece Ritual.

Ikue Mori talks about the feeling of being displaced in both the improvised music field and technology: “They see the technology and they don't really consider me a musician playing an instrument. So I feel that they don't understand. But then I go to electronic music people's concerts. It's all male dominated. My music made by machine is not electronic enough, like I am too female for them”.

Maggie Nichols

Public criticism made by other musicians or participating colleagues can also alienate women improvisors. Maggie Nichols and Irene Schweizer, from the Feminist Improvising Group, recount how they were ostracized at one of the early important performances at the Total Music Meeting in Berlin in the late 1970s. Perhaps the discontent expressed by other musicians towards the ability of the musicians in the Feminist Improvising Group indicates not only gender bias, but also latent gendered conceptions of how music ought to sound or be created.

“We could be very iconoclastic and very surreal, or very silly – recalls cellist Georgina Born – I am sure there were good moments of music and moments of real hilarity. Only video would do justice to the character of what we did”. Born elaborates on how this use of humor could have led other musicians to perceive the Feminist Improvising Group to be not a serious band. “I am sure that humor is always a weapon from the margins. We were also using parody and probably the grotesque”.

It's time to have a look at various festivals of improvised music and its policies. Total Music Meeting (Berlin) has hired only a small number of women since 1968. Peter Brotzmann has appeared fifteen times, Evan Parker thirteen times, and Alex Von Schlippenback twelve. Twenty-eight different women performed at TMM. No African-American women were presented, and only three Asians have performed (Aki Takase, Jin Hi Kim and Sainkho Namchylak). The most women ever presented during a single festival was in 1979 with the Feminist Improvising Group (seven members).

At the Vancouver Jazz Festival, the number of creative improvisors, both male and female, totaled 45 on 1600 artists represented from 1986, equaling 2.8%. Creative women improvisors made up only 0.37% (six on 1600). Compared with other festivals, Taklos (Zurich) includes a large number of women who are not pianists and singers. This is important, since the festival more accurately represents the diversity of creative women improvisors. The number of women presented at this festival ranges from a minimum of three out of thirty-tree (9%) in 2000, to a maximum of ten out of thirty-four (29%) in 1996.

Jin Hi Kim

The festival has featured six Asian performers and two African American women. The programming demonstrates that there are more women who are not just pianists and singers which should be hired. The Guelph Jazz Festival (Guelph, Ontario) began in 1994 run by Dr. Ajay Heble, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Guelph specializing in post-colonial studies, and he has been the festival's founder and artistic director.

Up until 2000, the festival has concentrated on bringing women improvisors from Canada or the United States and has presented a handful of women improvisers that were not presented at the Vancouver festival, including Maggie Nichols, Amina Claudine Myers, Pauline Olveros and percussionist Gayle Young. The Festival de Musique Actuelle Victoriaville has programmed a variety of Asian women improvisors and European women improvisors. The percentage of creative women improvisors varies from 15.7% in 1985 to 7.8% in 1990, to 5.5% in 2000.

A close examination of the number of women hired to perform at all those festivals reveals that women are hired substantially less than their male colleagues. The attention placed on singers and pianists in festivals and the media over other istruments may be examined in terms of historical notions of women in music. In her study of girls' musical education in British schools, Lucy Green points that teachers tended to identify particular istruments with girls.

Recent musicological studies address the history of women pianists and singers in Western classical music, a tradition that still has enormous influence on music industry and social practices. During the 19^th century the piano was associated with the bourgeoisie and was almost exclusively an instrument for females of amateur rank. Many artists used women pianists as subjects for their paintings and drawings, capturing many of the dominant culture attitudes towards women.

Mary Lou Williams

“The piano served as an object to be looked at besides being heard or played … the looking was insistently gendered, driven by the instrument's extra-musical function within the home as the visual-sonoric simulacrum of family, wife and mother” (Leppert, 1993). The notion of women as pianists and singers is widespread even in contemporary jazz music. The most famous women in jazz before the 1960s were pianists (Lil Harding, Mary Lou Williams, Dorothy Donegan, Marian McPartland, Hazel Scott).

The prominence of women pianists still dominates women's contribution in jazz today. But if a girl is conditioned and trained on one instrument from elementary school, it may be difficult to switch instruments once a certain proficiency is achieved on one instrument. And certainly a visit to any Western music conservatory will clearly reveal that the majority of women tend to major in piano and voice. Many traditional music programs foster the continuation of this kind of gendered construction in their students and curricula.

One way for women artists to counter some of the dominant hiring practices at festivals is to produce their own festivals. Festivals such the Canaille Festival (Frankfurt) co founded by trombonist Annemarie Roeflos and Irene Schweizer has created a space for many women improviors. Joelle Leandre, Elvira Plenar, Maggie Nichols, violinist Maartje Ten Hoorn and Marylin Mazur have played there.

City of Women, a festival held in Ljubljana, was started in 1995 with the specific goal of providing space for women artists, musicians and theorists. The 2001 call for artists posted by the organizers is especially telling: “City of Women's main theme for the first edition of the new millennium is inspired by an in 1989 written, unpublished poem by Audre Lord: 'Most people in the world are Yellow, Black, Brown, Poor, Female, Non-Christian and do not speak English.

Joelle Leandre

By the year 2000 the 20 largest cities in the world will have one thing in common: none of them will be in Europe none in the United States'. In addition to this we also want to stress that a large percentage of the European and North-American population is not 'white'. 'Western society' is multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. In this new global contest it is not surprising that the main creative centers, the contemporary art talent is less and less to be found in 'white' cultural fortresses.

With this in mind we have decided to call the 7^th edition: YEAR ONE, and select only artists and theoreticians 'of colors'”. However, the women programmed by the festival still legitimizes the most famous women (Marylin Crispell, Lindsay Cooper, Ikue Mori, Tenko, Meredith Monk and Zeena Parkins) and is not committed to the younger generation of improvisors.

Another festival, Kosmos Frauenraum, is held in Vienna. There, in 1997 a group of women formed LINK. Part of its mission was to raise awereness for the need of women-centered performance space in Austria. They obtained from the governement a space, a cinema called 'Rondell' as their homebase. After a while, the governement retracted their promise and so LINK squatted the 'Rondell' for the next months.

Performances, readings, concerts as well as actions of protest took place not only at the 'Rondell' but all over Vienna. Finally LINK found the cinema 'Kosmos' suitable to substitute the 'Rondell' and the space was named 'frauen.raum' and opened in 2000. In 2002 Kosmos presented an international festival of music entitled 'Here I am': artists invited included trombone player and violinist Annemarie Roelofs, The United Women's Orchestra, Joelle Leandre, sound artist Gabriele Proy, Susie Ibarra, trombonist Abbie Conant and Sylvie Courvoisier.

Another example of a festival open to women is the Vision Festival, based in New York and founded by bassist William Parker and her wife Patricia Nicholson. The 2002 Vision Festival reveals a much stronger commitment to African-American improvisors and featured women include Joelle Leandre, bassoonist Karen Borca, and the vocalists Ellen Christi and Jayne Cortez.

Ellen Christi

In March 2002 the San Francisco Jazz Festival presented “Women and Jazz: A Panel Discussion” featuring writer and activist Angela Davis, musicologist Sherri Tucker, composer Maria Schneider, pianist Mary Watkins and Susie Ibarra. One would argue that in the near future things will go better for women improvisors, but the path is still long and full of obstacles.

The lesson we can learn is that the world of art is not ripped apart from society, and that it reflects the same dynamics. This means that the music we all listen to reflects the dynamics of power we all live through our society and that a music that reflects change and committment is still far from us. This is also an explanation to the problem I raised up with my last reviews.

The records I reviewed, all by male musicians, are records of 'post avant garde' music. A music that takes improvisation mixing it with other styles of music from the 20^th century. A music that has its reference in the past, that doesn't look at the future. A music that reflects a period of stagnation. Maybe if in the future men and women will collaborate together, there will be a new music, reflecting new values and new musical ideas – think about the Feminist Improvising Group as an example.

Until that moment, I expect to encounter music that reflects the past and the status quo, as the records I reviewed in the past months. It is necessary to include different genders and races in our culture if we want it to be renewed. If we fail this target, we will listen to music created following old schemes and old dreams, a music that is far from being near to us, a music that will be conservative.

If you want to read Dana Reason Myers dissertation in its entirety, follow this link.  

Understanding music as a matter of intelligence and love

Interview with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

Bologna, 7/5/2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Panic Jazz Café, Chiostri S. Corona, Vicenza, May 13, 2011

I followed directly Wadada Leo Smith in various live performances since Vitry-Sur-Seine in February. Since then, the trumpet player toured massively through North of Italy: in March he was in Milano with his Organic band (I put a review on Mescalina webzine in my native language), than he played in May (6 to 9) at Angelica Festival, solo, and in a duo with pianist John Tilbury, and finally both of them were in a quartet featuring Pauline Oliveros and Roscoe Mitchell (my photos). Astounding was his quartet performance, with all the musicians taking their parts as main soloist in turn, and the other ones following their stream in answer: very essential, and very fluid at the same time. Then again, one of his most beautiful performances: a duo with Gunther ‘Baby’ Sommer on May, 12 in Padova, in which Wadada played completely acoustic but with a mastery on his sound that would get him out of the boundaries of a trumpet player, even if no effects nor pedals were used, whereas Gunther made his drumset sound sometimes properly as a piano or a melodic instrument, working notably also on layering fore and background with his fellow. The day after, in Vicenza the couple played with Italian pianist Antonello Salis. Though the Italian musician is a master on his own (he played also with Cecil Taylor along with Tony Oxley), that was a harshly nervous performance, with serious interaction problems between the musicians; only in the end they finally played together all at the same time, giving shape to a melancholic, pointillistic and oblique blues … This is part of our conversation at the hotel he stayed in Bologna, followed by an open explanation of his Ankhrasmation musical system, that I deepened a little, as he suggested to me when we had the talk. Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith is a great teller, and his ideas could seem simple, but they are amongst those that need an entire life to be developed. It’s a pleasure to listen to him talking as it is hearing him play. I thanks both the musician and his Italian manager Alberto LoFoco for their kindness and support.

I’d like to start our conversation talking about your first compositions, like The Bells and Light of the Dalta, that were on Anthony Braxton’s records [The Bells appears on Delmark’s Three Compositions of New Jazz, whereas Light of the Dalta was issued on Byg’s B-Xo/N-0-1-47a or Composition 6g] … Light of the Dalta is an open reference to the blues, and I was thinking about the fact that the first free jazz players, like Ornette Coleman, developed melodically the references to the blues … you were more kind of giving to sound itself, silence and timbre a major relevance … you know, if I have to think about a blues composition that can remind me of your music, that piece would be Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground [a Blind Willie Johnson piece, that inspired also musicians as diverse as Ry Cooder, Marc Ribot, Loren Connors and moviemakers like Wim Wenders], where you can hear this guitar chord very prolonged and repeated; so I think that there is also a spiritual aspect, if you will, in developing music that way from the blues … so I wanted to ask you about your references in music, blues, and spirituality, in developing your style with the trumpet …

Teatro San Leonardo, Bologna, May 7, 2011

Ok, the song that you’ve mentioned I don’t really know it, but the blues is a very complex music, that has alternation between a 1/4 and a 5/4, and most people take that to be kind of a progression, but it’s not. A progression has to be at least three of four relationships to a chord, and blues has this alternation between those two relevances that is time to get a dam. Now, what makes that so important is that the blues itself has already built inside of it a notion about freedom, most sentence look tells like that: ‘no refuse, make some happen, or call some to change, all you need is to part to what to change’, I mean, until that part happens. So the blues masters figured out that the most natural relationship between events and objects and humans is true; that for example, if you have a child, he needs a woman; man and woman make appear that from the form; so there’s another phenomenon, of sunrise and sunset; both of them do the same things: sunrise it brings for light, sunset it brings for dawn; so out of both of them it quills like new conditions. So the blues is based off of that, a natural relationship between events, abrupt and hint. Now, my music doesn’t come out quickly as the blues, that little piece, Light of the Dalta, does have motion between the one in the bar, you see … [sings] … dabadabadabadabada–bang-da … [shifts singing of a major] dabadabadabadabada–bang-da … but, that’s an illusion, is not really blues … I made music like that because of the notion about the Delta, you see, the South, Mississippi has the most famous Delta in America. So Light of the Delta has to do with the way the sun rise in Mississippi where in the Delta, it comes about and it warm, when it rise. And at certain points you as a human being as you’re stand and watch sunrise you tell of being that. And at another point, it comes up midway left by, it comes up to your head; you even look so, and at some point, it passes by your head and move forward, and you know how it moves, you see, and, he goes on like that; it can shatters, an the sunset never it reduce the light; so, that’s what The Light of the Dalta means, it has to do with sunrise, and it’s not really a blues, it has relationship that’s … spiritually, is attempt to the blues, ok?

Ok, so, it has to do with the sun rising on the Dalta, and not with a progression of chords …

No, has nothing to do with chords … y’know, lot of people look at how music should be organised, they reduce to notions about chords and their function…

Yeah, this is a big problem, if we talk about so-called avant-garde jazz, even for people like Charles Mingus, they took many years to understand how his music was working, because musicologists were thinking more about the developing of music in notational terms, more than studying directly his compositions, as we European think about music from 18^th century on … I read a good essay on Mingus written in Italy kind of six years ago, by Stefano Zenni [Charles Mingus: Polifonie dell’Universo Afroamericano, Nuovi Equilibri/Stampa Alternativa, 2002], because he was trying to use a different approach, starting from what he wrote on the lines of his records … but maybe, if you want to understand really music, you have to be an artist, like a poet, or a painter …

No!

No?

No, no … I would say that to understand music, it’s a head and a heart, intelligence and love, that’s all it takes …

The most simply things…

Padova, Cinema Teatro Torresino, May 12, 2011

But the most simple is the most complex, and everytime we do comes through those two things: a head, that is intelligence, and a heart, which is really the one’s request to be loved … so really when Mingus remembers whatever they were doing they would come from the same point, basically a head and a heart, and to understand that is all it takes, now artists, and journalists, and poets, and painters, in any kind of profession, they did kind of a special relationship with, but what works not so fair is that relationship that one understands from the head and the heart… Like for example, if I put another photo wide on it it’s still wide but maybe a little bit lighter and a little bit dumb in his right, but it’s still … still wide, you know, so … when people look at music and they took it and put it a way it shows some other view of value, like for example some other who wants to show a relationship between American music and European music, and they take out people like Charles Mingus or anybody, like Roscoe Mitchell, or Anthony Braxton, or Anthony Davis, they take them as if they use the same light, and they use the same kind of head and heart to analyze them, but that has only information from the eighteen, nineteen century, or even twentieth century, now they gonna miss, you totally miss it, you completely miss it, and if you look a fantastic book that is nice to read, but when you get to the conclusion of what it has wrong you made a value mistake, that most of people … that jazz created music, blues … anything that’s in America, the same bop, it came out of the euro century, with some stuff amassed; and that’s a lost, that’s completely lost, because, look at it like this: this is Africa, this is Europe, right? And those people that came from Africa when they came to America they already had knowledge of art, culture, music and count … how do have they had that? As slaves: because those people loved, when they were slaves, they composed music when they were slaves, and they thought about the situation which made them culturally conscious of what they were doing; so when they came that they had this homost that was actually equal to the European homes; and then this blend that happened that was the first melting pot, that’s when you can talk about the euro-century and the afro-century thing, but the moment that a scratch happened, the more you wrote that picture on ragtime, it was all over … and that moment, it had changed completely from this European and this African merge it became stuff on that, it would be no Europe nor Africa to realise, it became creating what the music is, all jazz, all ragtime music, all American music, all this tons of main zones, but the best man for the American music, you know, it’s people like Stockhausen, or Pierre Boulez, it’s all you can mean, not baroque or classical music, or this stuff ...

So the thing is, putting down too much boundaries between styles of music can’t be useful to understand music truly…

I think that … you see, writers write for the same audience, stylists write of the people that are stylists, they don’t write on normal people, you see? Artists that write about music they write for artists. Sometime the individualist economic stand it comes to a pure standpoint and so an artistic standpoint and so much a stylistic standpoint, but they’re not allowed to do it, it’s just those people count on brilliance, so to speak; but in all near places they have better to view wide music than anybody does, because brilliance doesn’t bring another reflection of what they could find among things; but they have in some way to have a way to peep inside of it; they look directly from their heart to your hart, from their head to your head, and they did it. I mean, I can’t burglarize you, because it’s not mean. Don’t mean to burglarize you, and they didn’t. And the most important dime about it is that when they do connect, it transform their life. What it does is to make that point to make it more aware, make it more conscious, and give them more feeling about a human being; that’s the profound change. And how it goes notice this is beautiful? That’s why the spiritual maze is like this, make it so that … spirit don’t have to know when you connect, like, when you came onstage and you’re making that music come out and make happen that feeling in contest connecting with people and the people in the audience they feel it and get connecting with it and sound out feelings and don’t get connecting with it, and sound do feels part of it, like just connecting some of them just with the head, some of them just with the heart, some just connect with even one of them, but the pushing to connect with both the head and the heart and this put intelligence to feel love … they made it, and they don’t even know it. That’s beautiful. I don’t know it; Roscoe doesn’t know it, you know, Miles Davis didn’t know it, nobody knew it, but … you can feel something happened. That’s beautiful. That’s what we call beauty.

An Ankhrasmation score example

Ankhrasmation

Spanning through his career, Wadada Leo Smith not only produced an important amount of recorded works; he also gave shape to a notation system called Ankhrasmation, which merges the idea of composition, improvisation and performance into a single construction. As the trumpet player would say, working on an Ankhrasmation score, every musician has to do a personal research, far from the ensemble playing. As an example, a red half triangle in the score could be taken as a velocity unit. So, every player will determine how fast or slow this unit would be, and nobody will determine it the same way: onstage there will be nine different realisations of that notion. Same with color: red could be a reference for blood, or for cherry, and this reference has to be developed in music; if nine musicians are playing that red, all musicians will have different references about that. And also, the cherry has a skin that’s red, a pin inside of it, and stems coming out of its center. Every player has to develop every part of the cherry. When finally the musicians play together, they have to rehearsal in order to find the right balance, the level of creativity coming out.

Wadada Leo Smith started developing his Ankhrasmation (from "Ankh", the Egyptian word meaning vital life force, "Ras", the Amharic or Northern Ethiopian word for Father, and "Ma", the conventional word for Mother: its sense, is that when Father and Mother procreate, they embody a vital and seminal life force) since his very first composition, “The Bells”, with his work on Rhythm-Units, a concept he started explaining after his residence in Europe since 1967, when he issued the booklet Rhythm: a study in rhythm units in creative music, and then formalized through his following activity as a musician and through his first self-published book notes (8 pieces)/sources of a new/workd/music/music: creative music in 1969. Improvisation #4, from Creative Music No. 1, first issue on Kabell in 1073, paved the way for Ankhrasmation. For full information about Wadada Leo Smith philosophy of music, scores and concepts, check his official website.

AngelicA - Festival Internazionale di Musica - May 5-28, 2011

Art shows us what is still invisible: it opens us up to new realms, it awakens us. 

“Contemporary” is anything we are drawn to by our inspiration, free from interference: it can be something ancient, or that is seen as ancient and old-fashioned, but that is absolutely new and necessary. 

“Contemporary” is anything that poses questions and makes us think, that corresponds to a time (which one?). 

“Contemporary” is also the reflection, the result of the culture of the time, of a state of
things. In this case its function may appear to be limited, inadequate, perhaps because it is too close to the world we are living in and almost closed upon itself, with no chances to grow and take off. A great amount of energy can be spent on a project, especially when its organizers want to bring something useful, stimulating and innovative to a stagnant scene.

In these times of crisis of the Institutions and of a great need for renovation, such choices can bring solutions, new life and a sense of hope that used to be let down in the past. 

Bologna welcomed us. 

Bologna is permeated by a contemporary reason, sedimented through time, and made up of the most diverse experiences: it is a hidden treasure that stirs silently.
 

An apparition, an event beyond our measures, causes a change with no return.
Giving shape to an idea requires an exchange beyond mutual limits.
In the midst of a thousand manifestations of protest, immersed in chaos, the opportunity to listen to an imaginative, creative voice that can reestablish a balance on several levels, open up once again the doors of imagination and give hope to our doings…this is a key.
Neptune among us, for a sensitive city.
 

Massimo Simonini

 

Complete program here: featuring Jim O' Rourke, Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury, Wadada Leo Smith, Stefano Scodanibbio, Cristina Zavalloni, Maja S.K. Ratkje, Paal Nilssen-Love, Lasse Marhaug, Heiner Goebbels, and many others.