L I S T E N E R By Howard Slater, 14 October 2009

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The 'compositional improvising' of jazz, from big band to free to AACM, is, in its shared precarity, 'tellingly inarticulate' ! writes Howard Slater in this month's Mute Music Column

Throwing handfuls of pebbles on the hollow tree sprinkling of tones thuds of sunder coastal cymbals Pre!history In the beginning there was rhythm. Thank fuck there was drumming before language. Hope there in the heartbeat, the well untempered random learning to talk. Banging on tree trunks' says drummer Andrew Cyrille. And not just to communicate a message, a warning against the advent of vowels, but a belonging too, an intuitive belonging to the sustaining of the other's flow. Keep it up. Keep it backed up but non! repressed. Keep it pre!articulate, tellingly inarticulate'. Make mistake room inside the random rhythms. An inclusiveness. Bird song. Pipe drip. Roger Blank, a Sun Ra drummer, says, You've got coordinated independence which demonstrates how important it is to get into a collective individuality. And that's what the four limbs are about.' There's unity in ego abeyance, unity in listening to be touched. A collective individuality ! an Arkestra, an Art Ensemble ! not mass individuals, but constructive sidemen presiding over the solo's demise; invisible no names' like in the time before proper nouns to come. Or, as another Ra!ist, Ronnie Boykins, titled an album ten years in the pipeline, the will come, is now'. The will come' is to mutate: the collision of four limbs and three drums on an open urban plain, four limbs, all bone and muscle, becoming sensitised feelers banging out insistent resistance until walls fall... and yet still able, simultaneously, to brush a sprinkle of stones and fondle the forlorn into a quiet, reviving paroxysm.

Music and Agony !1" How many times has it been said, I can't live without music'? Or it was music kept me going when she died'. There's something in emotional precarity, the end of our world, the withdrawal of hope, which music can match. I think of a story I heard. A man gripped by the tension of an anticipatory loss. A man, like many men, suffering from a blockage in the chest that gripped upwards toward the dry throat, a blockage so tight and welling that reservoir of tears' can pass as an actually lived clich "it's then you know you're in trouble' he said... when clichs and sentimentality ring through to undam our intellectual defences'#. This clogged blockage was eased, he said, by a sudden pitch shift, a minor vortex in Mahler... by

a little crystal!forming diminuendo on a keyboard... the song at the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But more: there was this accompanying need to hear myself moan, to make the agony resound through my chest, to suppress a howl into a bass croak and hear this elemental kind of music, the sounds of a not yet syllabic cavity. This, too, broke the blockage, the thoraxed mucus of solidified tears.

With callous distance I think of the sound poetry of Henri Chopin, its attesting to a communicative level akin to bare life'. At an even greater distance I recall a book and look up a Klossowski phrase, for even though language is the usurper, it never allows us to speak of our unintelligible depth.' The sad thing is, though, that this depth', in such agonising moments, is hardly that far away. The depth' is rising to the moebius surface and it "the unintelligible emotional polyphony# doesn't speak an abecedarian language. It sounds like birthing pangs, like an untrained tongue roving to clack the palate, like unmetered croaking babble, like the psychic suffocation of human capitals. So, the musicians tip us off like theorists never can: every human being has a non!tempered psyche' "Ornette Coleman#, an alterity, an unmeasurable polyphony that's made to denounce its squwaking ambivalence by the last bar in a linear easing. And this is what it sounds like.

2009 O.C. The first time I heard Ornette Coleman's voice was not so long ago and I repeated it, kept pushing the button. He was in Stockholm at the Golden Circle and it was 1965. With boyish enthusiasm I immediately likened it to the voice of Eric Dolphy as he celebrates and yet mourns, in light tones, the passing of the music he has just played: when you hear music, after it's over it's gone into the air. You can never capture it again'. Like Dolphy, Coleman had this same diminishing!to!inaudibility type of voice; gentle and deflective of attention. With a further defensive connectivity I linked both of these voices to a phrase by Caribbean Surrealist, Ren Mnil, transgression of your own limits through embracing the groundswell of blind sincerity'. So, then, the last time I heard Ornette Coleman's voice was more recently at the Royal Festival Hall. It had become inaudible. He bowed over the microphone and spoke in a millisecond whisper. And yet Mnil's impossible sincerity was audible all night long, it was unmistakable. The voice and the saxophone reached a symbiosis; the breath, that most precious of facilitators, seemed, in the harmolodic' language that followed in flows, to give an added flesh to his recently reported words: I play things that heal people. You know what healing is? Something that brings tears and clarity to the heart.' Healing may well be to hear a player who is ahead of the melodic line or behind it, who strays into a territory that can sound off' and out' whilst still firmly stooled in an auditorium especially designed for gridwork renditions. It's here we are gathered before a 79!year old man who plays to repudiate his legendary status, who is defended by audience members "turn Ornette up!'# because, who knows, do we all sense his vulnerability before high expectations and low lung power? Is it this sense of a shared vulnerability that heals? Is it the keyed approaching of an impossible blind sincerity' that heals? His risk taking is still intact and there is a supportive sociality created from a generalised recognition of precariousness' that Judith Butler suggests makes the senses more receptive. Our own vulnerabilities travel towards these sounds so as not to repress our emotional precarity, have it elided by a too tight identification, but to have it as a key part of our receptivity to the music. We are being held by sound. Compositional Improvising

Ornette Coleman was not alone in overcoming oxymorons. Whether this aim of his to play improvised compositions' is a matter of an unwieldy language that doesn't quite articulate his experiential practice or an expressive practice that dismantles language by means of a telling inarticulacy' could be a continuing point of debate. But, for me, this compositional improvising is representative of a defiance of the logic of language on the part of musical practitioners. How can these words fit together and make sense?! Is it, then, an indicator of freedom' in music to be able to escape the confines of a language!enforced logic and address affect instead? Did the use of notation in jazz represent a compromise between the two extremes of free!form and staved? Was notation a mediator that gave these internally exiled jazz musicians a sense of respectability? Did it assuage the sorrow in Eric Dolphy's voice? Or is it something much more simple? Richard Muhal Abrams, a founder member of the still extant Chicago!based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians "AACM# and active proponent of this liminal zone of compositional improvising, has said basically musicians are performers, composers and all, at the same time. You write music when you stand up and practice your instrument.' For Abrams, composition seems to be something that musicians are instinct with, a form!making immanence, but it is also a co!operative and collective practice, a relational proximity of singularities. Following on from this what we have, then, is a further defiance of a language that can neither fully articulate collectivities "the personal pronoun# nor the all at the same time' of simultaneities "too tense restricted#. That the AACM, like Sun Ra, resuscitated the ensemble sound of the big band is, with hindsight, a step forward into a remaking of the work of the past. Here, after be!bop's softening up of the song, there was room for simultaneous collectivities that were a little out of time. Abrams, in an interview with Ted Panken in 2007, cites Ellington and Fletcher Henderson as his early guiding lights in composition "a black compositional tradition that would go back to a pre!jazz New Orleans and one that is overlooked as soon as the word notation' is mentioned#. The jazz approach to composition is tellingly different. As Graham Lock informs us, Ellington composed solos that sound not only like improvisations but like improvisations characteristic of specific players.' A kind of composed singularity effect!ing a non! classical form of jazz composition. So, if we take Ellington's bands we not only hear a well!oiled collective as insistent as history will be, but we also hear ensemble tones backing soloists and soloists soloing in unison. The sound of a future mode of organisation. We hear dance numbers, but also the onset of mood pieces like The Mooche' "1928# that struggle free of the form of the blues into something multicoloured and drenched in whatever!polyphony. Abrams and the AACM took their cue from this autodidact jazz route of the big bands and in the mid '60s, as free jazz took hold, they worked on a more measured and spacious sound that allowed, in the manner of The Mooche', for a tonal palette to be created by, at times, unusual instrumental combinations. As Abrams told Panken, sound precedes music itself' and it is the freeing of sound from a metered tempo and the need to interpret standards that marks not just the AACM but the Arkestra too. Abram's piece, Levels and Degrees of Light', pits a choral singer with vibes, brushed cymbals and clarinet to make an, at times, indistinct wave!like piece reminiscent of something much more akin to an avant!garde chamber orchestra. But, in not eschewing the dirty timbres of free jazz, theirs is a punk classical that establishes a tension point between the more classically derived avant!garde musics of the '60s and this organic experimentation that took its off!centre approach into the jazz clubs of Chicago's South Side. Indeed, lacking the university backing of the former, the AACM "a musician!led self!institution that sought the creative and representational control of their music as well as an alternative pedagogy# was entirely financed by its membership to the degree that Val Wilmer says, perhaps over!effusively, that the AACM engendered the idea of musical socialism'. One of the most widely appraised of the AACM's records is Roscoe Mitchell's Sound "1966#. This record prompted jazz writer John Litweiler to declare: Music is the tension of sounds in the free space of silence'. His is an apt description of a title track that is as unexpected as it is form!forming "here we can hear an antecedent of such contemporary players as Taku Unami, Mattin and Radu Malfatti who have made

pieces that are almost entirely filled with the free space of silence'#. On Sound the musicians play their instruments in unconventional ways, puncturing the half!silence with slides and slips of merging tones that range from a historically informed articulacy to a telling inarticulacy': the ghost of blues and be!bop slide up to breath!flatulence, spit, keys and blats, rasping flies, hi!hat shakes, arco cackle, etc. There is, then, a dramatic element that doesn't so much unfold towards crescendo as hover immanently over the piece which makes the listener expectant and highly receptive to the range of expression on offer. The vulnerability of the unconventional playing as well as the fragility of incorporating silence and inarticulate' proto!expression, receives its support in the players' mutual risk taking: whines, moans, whimpers, rumblings. There are no virtuoso solos to speak of but a kind of gut bucket turn taking. This backs up George E. Lewis' statement about AACM music that individual style is radically devalued in favour of a collective conception that foregrounds form, space and sonic multiplicity'. Such a multiplicity is furthered by Mitchell's introduction of little instruments' "chains, whistles, bells etc.# that would otherwise be inaudible but whose use also adds a kind of humility to the piece: the little sounds get to be heard as an inclusion of the voiceless as well as being an indication that music is beginning again from an enticing degree zero. So, was Sound' scored? Was it notated? Was it mapped? I don't think so, for as Mitchell's later group, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, seem to demonstrate, such compositional improvising comes about by means of affinity dynamics' "Anthony Braxton#. All the players were members of the AACM, each was composing themselves and the resultant collective practice overcomes the oxymorons! The rift between theory "notation# and practice "improvising# is not only overcome, but both notation and improvising are practised and heard in a light that casts doubt on either term's coherence. With music we need not be the slaves of language....

Tellingly Inarticulate "1# When Mark E. Smith semi!sang Let's get this thing together, let's get this thing together... and make it...bad' and when Sun Ra spoke of there being no mistakes, that if someone's playing off key...the rest of us will do the same', we're not only in the terrain of an affinity dynamic that permits the impermissible and defies expectation whilst creating collective bonds, we are in the presence of what poet Nathaniel Mackey called telling inarticulacy'. There have been many terms for this: dirty timbre, dirt music, freak playing, skiffle, punk, messthetics, noise, etc. So when Mackay speaks of the way that some jazz!playing conveys a sense of apprehension and self!conscious duress by way of dislocated phrasings in which virtuosity mimes its opposite' we are in an area where music assumes an acutely political mantle. Militating against expected industry standards of production "the Fall's Dragnet as well as the Slits' Y album spring to mind# as well as against an alleged musical coherence that befits those automated by a common sense consciousness, this approach to non!virtuosity and making it bad' is a direct affront to notions of specialisation and commodification that not only restrict our confidence to participate but dull our senses. The self!same creates a lull and a dulling of the senses that can be awoken by the sudden shocks of an off!note or a staggered, stuttering rhythm. There's something enchanting about Sun Ra's percussive tracks on Atlantis that sound, to too trained ears, like a bunch of kids randomly banging stuff in a room. Or, the way King Oliver, a lot less smooth than Louis Armstrong, suddenly seems to have stuffed some broken glass down his trumpet. Such a reference to the beginnings of jazz is not without relevance as telling inarticulacy' is there at the root of it all: sandpaper used on a snare drum before brushes were invented, the intrusion of the saxophone into the New Orleans combos as if it were an alien instrument. This inarticulacy not only seems to respond both to the non!tempered psyche' and to an emotional polyphony by means of its putting strict meaning into abeyance and addressing the affective, but it also seems to place us in the presence of a coming!to!articulation; something that could be prior to commodification. This latter, because it is a result of an affinity dynamics' that legitimates it, carries a sense of meaning as being made in the collective moment. So, telling inarticulacy' is a constant reminder that our creative powers need not be alienated by some debilitating version of virtuosity and, in that there is always a guaranteed audience

for telling inarticulacy in the fellow musicians, that these creative powers have a constitutive force that's based in shared precarity...

Howard Slater <howard.slater@googlemail.com> is a volunteer play therapist, bookkeeper and sometime writer living in East London Ensemble Players Ronnie Boykins, The Will Come, Is Now, New York: ESP, 1975/2009. Judith Butler, Frames Of War: When is Life Grievable?, London: Verso, 2009. Ornette Coleman, Dancing In My Head, Verve, 1973/2000. Eric Dolphy, Last Date, EmArCy records, 1964/1991. The Fall, Dragnet, London: Rough Trade, 1981. Phil Freeman, Faith Healer', The Wire, June 2009. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, London: Athlone, 1997. George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself ! the AACM and American Experimental Music, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Graham Lock, Blutopia, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958, New York: De Capo, 1984. Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, Sound, Chicago: Delmark, 1966/1996. Sun Ra, Atlantis, Chicago: Evidence, 1969/1999. Valerie Wilmer, As Serious As Your Life, London: Serpent's Tail, 1992.

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By Howard Slater, 1 July 2010

What happens when musicians smash the metronome of developmental time and the prison!house of language?, asks Howard Slater in this month's Mute Music Column On the way to a full silence the mark of language brands the body with a reminder of the time ! Delphine

Tellingly Inarticulate !2" At a recent performance at Freedom of the City 2010', trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith reversed virtuosity for a moment. Virtuosity being no virtue, time stood still a little, time that normally in these moments races ahead with a neurotic fidgetiness, here almost descended into a silence that could have prompted vague paranoias. Is it finished? Has it kiltered? Can I hold this abeyance, this break to the flow that is my desire to be led? What could this respite be a prelude to? From the silence came a sputtering tubular saliva phisp. This sound was no perfectly sounded slaver of a too!smooth dirty timbre befitting the studiousness of a chamber quartet. The latter are tellingly articulate and they tell of a time that must be filled with meaning, a time in which silence would be a disastrous trapdoor that devolves the institution of the performance. Silence here would be like a strike, a go!slow, a cheating of the audience, a plateau phase. For Wadada Smith, and maybe his lineage assists us to relax in this, there seemed to be an aimed!for silence from which the muttering of his trumpet began again to speak articulately. Here, in this brief moment of brass smears, the struggle for the means of expression, an ever rejuvenating staple of jazz, was staged again. A building up from the wavering foundation; a hiatus in time to alter the density of the space. Writing, in 1973, of his approach to improvisation, Wadada spoke of there being no intent towards time as a period of development. Rather time is deployed as an element of space...' Where does development end? In a kind of untouchableness? A kind of constantly arrived!at elevation that suppresses the struggle of beginnings? In some ways such telling inarticulacy as Wadada's "this time# can extend the affinity dynamic' out to the listener and away from the stage in a kind of lateral depth'. The element of space' that is deployed in the breakdown' is, as ever, a kind of interior' space that raises the question of our being!with' not only the performers, but our fellow audience members. Beyond a virtuosity of development there could be, with a telling inarticulacy that wills its own vulnerability, the offer of a social relationship: a development of our relationality not only in the moment, but as that which begins again in a musically induced reposing of an affecting exposure to bare life; a laying bare prior to a constitutive moment. Out Of Time Maybe Wadada's statement rings out like a blat for other improvisers. You can, when hearing the constantly undulating solos of Eric Dolphy on such tracks as Iron Man', be in the presence of an arrow that's flying directly to somewhere we know not but which we do know doesn't arrive at a target. It sets off from some place that could be notated but notes in potentia seem to split up into atoms that forms a

cloud around the line' as it moves. The choice in the milliseconds is which of the note!atoms to hop to whilst seemingly playing as the crow flies'. So, again, direction' or directionless' seem hardly the right ways to speak of such solos as these and say those of John Coltrane on Stellar Regions'. Instrumental proficiency in these and many other cases seems to be about sounding instinct, bringing impulse to bear against time in an intoxicating suspension that, in outflanking language, somehow seems to suspend time. For someone such as Dolphy, who jammed with the birds and fluted with the waves, it was hardly timeliness he was after. As the authors of his musical biography have attested, moments on his still much acclaimed Out to Lunch LP have a double time feel' and Dolphy himself spoke about incorporating free time' in his, well, compositions; a desire that extended, he informs us, to replacing the piano "that seems to control you'# with the more open and spacious sound of Bobby Hutcherson's vaporous vibes. Is it possible then that the continuing appeal and who knows, resurgence, of interest in free jazz' may well be informed by a desire to escape or seek respite from the heavily demarcated chronos of the abstract time of capital; the sucking up of time that seeks to forever defer disposable time'? For, as opposed to the three minute pop song that seems to be the perfect cultural form for the music industry, "i.e. constantly consecutive and conducive to the production of quantity#, our sense of time when we listen to, say, a free jazz ensemble piece is one that is not over before it's begun. Such abstract time, a time of instant gratification, doesn't give us a now' that is long enough to open and establish a relationship to time in. Not only this but there is, as part of the time!slip of free jazz, a sense of simultaneity "duet unison'# whereby the present moment of listening becomes a condensed deceleration of duration that doesn't run towards developmental meaning but makes time thick. Dolphy: The bass follows no bar line at all. Notice Tony. He doesn't play time, he plays'.

Image: Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. Intempestive Atopians' Temporal dynamism, then, somehow needs the presence of more than one and when, either bereft of a being!with' or in an attempted effort to devote living attention', it is the ensemble sound that most easily allows us access to our component selves, to the society of our intra!psychic groupishness. An interior population, then, could be an indication that we are present to ourselves at the same time that we are present to the multiple pasts of ourselves. It is an indication that our emplacement is always intertwining with a displacement. Coming up for air after listening to such a tempestuous track as the Utter Nots' by Sun Ra and his Solar!Myth Arkestra, it is as if we need a time of readjustment to avoid the psychical benz that has made us intempestive atopians' "not only do some of Ra's piano lines sound out of place, other! roomly, there is, after a steady unison pulse at the beginning, a kind of percussive flailing that doesn't so much mark time as attempt to break its partitioning effects#. All the component parts of our self, parts that contain the precipitates of relationships, seem to have been provoked into parallel lives' by the component parts of the ensemble and the concentrated fury of the soloists as they each take it to the brink of inarticulacy. The bundle of affect we brought to the listening was not assuaged by a naming ceremony', there wasn't feeling as such, neither was there specific emotion. Most definitely there was not some self!centric unity, some boundaried possession of our social experience made possible by a single track, but an utter not' of dispersion, a diffusion of an abated self in non!controlled time'"the date of the session can't be pinpointed and the track feels much briefer than its stated eleven minutes#. The intempestive', then, should maybe not be taken as a transcendence, nor be mistaken for nostalgia. Sun Ra, with his ease of musical access to different times and his sustaining investment in different places, has perhaps made it more clear to me that this supposed cacophony is meant as a complete refusal of both time and place as they are now structured "an utter not to it#. It is as if some form of communism has been audibly experienced; a communism that gives us a glimpse of some kind of ontological thickness' that

encourages both an amended reissue of the past' and a lack of debilitating fear before the trauma of the narcissistic wound'. Proust: ... my actual life... appeared to be comprised in a larger reality which had not been created for my benefit.' Music and Agony !2" Feelings of disassociation from time and place accompany the wound of the bereaved who can no longer rely upon the presence of a loved one, no longer rely on that narcissism, that reflected love, that, in other circumstances may well have been the submerged sop of dependency, may well have provided the modicum of temporary unity for a centripetal self!image. The ego, its ideal, may well have need of a gradual disassembly, the prop of which, the being!with as the prop, has now been removed. The affective stakes are raised in a such way that ideological sublimation and rational appraisal prove insufficient to meet the demands of amorous mourning. A certain conserved idyll meets the absence of its ongoing propellant. Are those who bear this affective state drawn to music so as to be nearer to their fellow intempestive atopians'? Can their music ease the ache of a hole rather than fill it? As they said of Dolphy, there is a direct emotionalism' at play. There seems to be less between us because there is less language there to take the place of the affect, less language to draw us towards misunderstanding. It's almost as if sincerity and language could be in inverse ratio. This space of listening, as a potential space that is neither too close in its offer of sympathy, nor distanced enough to be a cold unaccompanying, is, as Winnicott has put it, a space of relaxed undirected mental inconsequence'. So, in their active passivity, are the bereaved drawn to music for its qualities of a lightly guided daydreaming, for its offer of a free floating attention' that could just as well drift into a temporary forgetting? Again the indirection' of many of Dolphy's solos, which nonetheless sound out with a velocity, a passage, are such that there can be a passing!through, a momentary overcoming of acute discomfort that at least provides a cessation to an, albeit natural, intense self!focus, replacing it with the revivifying call of another. There is a drawing out. There is a being taken to the horizon to get a better view. There is more and more of an offer of less and less mediation. We Dare to Sing' There are times during Offering' by John Coltrane where the mediation of the instrument, its being a prop, is replaced by a sense of directly hearing a kind of semiotic of the impulses'. Here, an embracing of spontaneity, with its limiting of an over!preparation, allows for an access to affect and a propulsive, non! abstract time that allows for these affects to unfurl at their own speed'. As Coltrane enters a solo phase he repeats a motif in a tight and circular form, the solo seems stuck, but as it swiftly returns and returns it grows in breadth, it adds tangents of off!time', of inarticulate sax!cracks. It becomes like a catherine wheel that spins back to the start but gives off random and fortuitous sparks that speak of a temptation to break the tightness of the repetition by harnessing the friction of competing affects. On the track We Dare to Sing', another tenor saxophonist, John Tchicai, in duet with drummer Tony Marsh, creates a similar effect of suspension. He begins this piece with a kind of wordless wailing that falls somewhere between singing and mourning, celebration and self!effacement. The track confidently stages inarticulacy by beginning from this kind of zero craftless' position of vocalising. Before Tchicai blows a note on the saxophone we hear the bare life' of breath that summons up the temporal dynamism of the intempestive: singing as ritual, as catharsis, as joy, as a distribution of vulnerability. Tchicai dares to sing, dares to offer something less than polished, but he also stages a kind of founding contrast between the unmediated breath of wailing and chanting and a channelled breath that figures his tenor as a recent machine. The suspense of this track, then, is announced from the outset: what follows the voice? Is it words and language or something prior to these? Is there something in a language made impermanent that can be rejuvenated by the unmooring sounds of affect?

Diabolical Vocason The power of those that use the human voice as their instrument may lie in the risks entailed in doing an uncivilized violence to the founding rigidities of language. There is something agonising and off!putting in hearing what sounds like the most unmediated of musical practices through which music, its hopes for coherence and meaningfulness, are sorely profiled. Such vocalising may not so much be tending towards language as withdrawing from it, retracting from a social contract. At times, listening to Demetrio Stratos or Phil Minton can have the simultaneous effect of being close to someone in pain, close to a primeval event and close to the communicative sounds of a rejuvenated species. We're in a forest, a tunnel, an ancient plain... the dictionary is burning. Stutterers know this splintered harmony and interrupted flow and they are aware too of the alienating facial contortions that become necessary for speech to come out' as a cough, as a deep inhalation of bubbled breath. There are sonorities here, there are what sounds like fragments of words, vowels and consonants ringing out from an unfamiliar place in the vocal tract, there are technical tricks "annotated ad infinitum in Trevor Wishart's book On Sonic Art#. But there is also the wonder of a telling inarticulacy' that sounds!out with a visceral presence unmediated by the desire for a speech!led individual continuity "the hall of mirrors set up by the approximations of language#. Are such performances as these discomforting in that they are akin to a regression, to a staging of the dialectical interrelation between infancy and adulthood? Is it that they challenge us to a non!conditional living attention' in which in!bred judgment is suspended? Are they refusals to bring the dispositifs of language to bear once again and have ourselves be the object of the already communicated? Do these geckering screeches' disturb us in their bringing into a public space the warded!off sounds of the pre! articulate; the sound of suffering "phn" that is well and truly exiled from political representation? Stratos, inspired by his daughter's babbling, offered as his motivation that the richness of the vocal sound gets lost in the acquisition of language'. Could this mean that such vocalising can awaken us to a bodily capacity that has been lost, the repressed sounds that we carry within us which remain unexpressed since there are very few situations permissive enough? Are wordless affects summoned in this way? Can this, in turn, mean that there is always something that outstrips us: a potential in redirecting breath, an immanence of infancy? Is lip flabber' more liberating than discourse? Luce Irigaray: saying ourselves can't happen without transgressing the already learned forms.'

Image: Kicking Robin Page's Guitar Around the Block, Yam Festival, New York City, May 1965 Non' & Un' A new wave of post!reductionist improvisers seem to be experimenting with this combination of telling inarticulacy' and minimum mediation. At times it appears to have an autotraumatic import. It wants to run the risk of ridicule', it wants to leap from a great height' to subject ourselves and the audience to an obscurely unsettling test'. This move from taking the audience as an object to affront becomes a self! affronting abjectness of unworthy performers' before the total' subject and multiple criticalities of the audience. The offer of participation, or immersive engagement of the audience, is, somehow sidled away by the creation of a dense atmosphere' or lateral depth' that makes any perfectly formed discourse object of critique seem weighty with its own self!mediating bid for power. If an immanence is created in the stead of the known knowledge of expectation, it is a kind of unthought known' that can fill the reductionist silence, not with the delayed intention of the musicians, but with a distributed vulnerability and palpable tension. What does such music sound like? In Paris on 1/12/2009 it was the sound of two people sobbing. In a studio in Berlin it was a sound of blastering noise followed by a whimpering that reduced a Wire journalist to hateful invective. On 29/2/2010 in Dundee it was described as creepy' or, later, as being like a group therapy session. On 2/8/2008 in Niort it contained the disintegration products'

of several psyches and a passage of crawled, close!up mutterings pierced by phylogenetic screams of refusal. In a booklet accompanying the latter it is possible to read telling inarticulacy' in a description of an intentional process of uncrafting': The practice of uncrafting does not just imply the negation of technique, but the unleashing of a generic potency proper to incapacity'. With no plan "we did not know what we might do'# and often with no props "four microphones/an unfamiliar instrument, etc.# the self exposure of these performers is akin to a deterritorialising turbulence' in which the child screaming quietly the emperor has no clothes on' is not in the audience but in the performative space. In this moment if no sound is communicated then what could well be communicated is the shared incapacity "how we've been spectacularly incapacitated#: I can only be what these inarticulate words make of me: a broken subject, un!unique and spurning the edited time to pretend; a spoken subject: exposed, banal, bereft and plummeting before acculturated expectation'. Music poetency? Howard Slater <howard.slater AT googlemail.com> is a volunteer play therapist and sometime writer living in East London Ensemble Players Ray Brassier, Jean Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama & Mattin, Idioms & Idiots, w.m.o/r, 2010. John Coltrane, Stellar Regions, Impulse, 1994. Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra, Humiliated, Tochnit Aleph, 2009. Eric Dolphy, Iron Man, Giants of Jazz, 1969/2002. Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch, Blue Note, 1964/1987. Luce Irigaray, The Way Of Love, Continuum, 2004. Mattin & Taku Unami, Distributing Vulnerability to the Affective Classes, Rumpsti Pumpsti, 2010. Phil Minton & Roger Turner, Drainage, Emanem 2008. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way ! Part One, Chatto & Windus, 1981. Jacques Rancire: Communism: From Actuality to Inactuality' in Dissensus, Continuum, 2010. Vladimir Simosko & Barry Temperman, Eric Dolphy ! a Musical Biography and Discography, Da Capo Press, 1971/1996. Wadada Leo Smith, Notes #8 pieces", excerpted at http://music.calarts.edu/~wls/pages/philos.html Demetrio Stratos: Metrodora, Cramps, 1976/1989. Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra, The Solar Myth Approach, Vol.1 & 2, BYG/Actuel, 1971. John Tchicai/Tony Marsh: We Dare to Sing' on Duets, Treader, 2005. D.W.Winnicott, Playing & Reality, Routledge 1989.

L I S T E N E R

A S

O P E R A T O R

" 3 #

By Howard Slater, 20 November 2012 In its encouragement of a group expression that supports musicians to play beyond themselves and to evolve singularities within a shared reservoir of artistic richness, Howard Slater finds in jazz a response to the experience of slavery; one that evolved outside channels of sanctioned expression, and which preserves and propels a collective being. This is his third column for Mute Music

We are still black And we have come back

Nous sommes revenus

We have come back Brought back to our land Africa the music of Africa

Jazz is A black power Jazz is A black power Jazz is An African power Jazz is An African music Jazz is An African music

We Have Come Back

Tellingly Inarticulate !3"

Rough and beautiful in the nobility of coarseness $ Frank London Brown

The above dedication is a verbatim transcript of words spoken as the Archie Shepp set kicks into action at the 1969 Pan African Festival in Algiers. The music that follows contains a mlange of Shepps jazz outfit accompanied by Tuareg percussionists and Algerian musicians and singers. At first the speaker of the above dedication continues on with his words listing figures from jazz history, but this verbal honouring of the general intellect of jazz is soon drowned out by a practical rendition of a cultures social wealth. Not an ostentatious display, not a string of solos, but a confluence of intensities backed by an incantatory drumming and the sharp sound of reed flutes. As the rock and pop scenes go global, there is here, at the Pan!African festival, an almost subterranean internationalism. The excitement of being back whilst being welcomed by Algerian musicians is palpable; a meeting point for something more or less inarticulate from the perspective of the prevailing rock scenes of the time. For instance the 12 tone system is rendered inexistent; non!standard pitching thrives and the outlines of the instrumentation, the perspective of background and foreground "especially in the massed percussion#, are blurred to the point of amorphous joy.

Collective culture, then, sounds a little like this. It dispenses with the sad articulation of the negative in favour of its being harnessed as a drive. It doesnt seek the con of the quest for perfection. It seeks its motivating succour in a group!process that cannot but re!articulate the negative as the pleasure of disalienation. From Bennie Moten to Duke Ellington to Sun Ra to Shepps ensemble in 1969, an unquestioned togetherness informs the sound as it merges together singularities in a tone!palate that, as Cedric Robinson has said in reference to the radical black tradition, preserves the collective being.1 Preserves? Yes, because that tradition has had, in the main, to maintain itself outside those very organisations "such as the Labour Movement# that one would have thought were pre!disposed to it; and, being outlandish, its wavering non!admittance could be misrepresented as an impulse towards transcendence rather than a material effect of racism. So, Shepp and Co. sound inarticulate because such a collective culture "here celebrated as a jam session of black consciousnesses across continents# cannot delineate itself as a single bounded institutional entity. They form an assemblage of enunciation that could be said to resist reification by being out, by not having to speak articulately. They ignore the discipline enforced by the tenets of music, by musically claiming, as Aim Csaire said in his resignation from the French Communist Party "PCF#, the right to initiative, the right to personality.2

The right to free jazz. The right to singularity. Claiming these rights and claiming them via the wordless illicity of colliding continents and the partial egocide of a heavy hearing of the other, is to claim that the alienating line between the individual and the collective, is here and in countless other ensemble jazz moments, not so much surpassed but corroborated as non!existent in the first place and preserved in the music of jazz from a moment prior to bourgeois enlightenment. This prior moment "disqualified from history# that goes back further than a memory of the land, has been celebrated in the form of musical praxis by such as Duke Ellington who called!out the collective black tradition in such tracks as Rhythm

Pum Te Dum, and albums like Liberian Suite and Black, Brown and Beige. Such a musical praxis, from the crafting of the very instruments "the banza or strum strum which eventually becomes the banjo# through derisive singing and the prohibition of slave dances to Ellingtons symphonic history!writing, makes jazz an ongoing moment of politicised disalienation. It is an implied politics, a praxis that, making its own form as it moves, is often unintelligible. It is tellingly inarticulate because, caught up as many of us are in the unavoidable pathology of individuality "its inferiority!fears and interior walls#, we cannot hear the liberation!from!self as a politicising practice that singularises itself by means of an assemblage "be that, in this case, the jazz ensemble or the black radical tradition#, because this would be to similarly face the trauma of psychical placelessness across time; a kind of dispersal to points of inarticulacy where the boundary between self and other dissolves but, and aptly, the 'new' begins.

Music and Agony !3"

I am sick of these weeping half!days $ Henry Dumas

In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon offered before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation.3 It is an agony to kind of know that freedom, like love can take on mythic proportions. These very proportions garner an idealistic hue that further trap us within the painful limits of a bourgeois self. A heavily signposted way!out gets blocked. So, the interpellation of aims and ambitions take the form of ego!ideals and the concomitant activation of a de!communalising narcissism not only build internal walls against a recognition of our interior world as a social!psyche, they ward!off the dangerous outbreak of singularities. Is Fanons advice to make an effort at disalienation partly connected to arriving at an awareness of our social psyche? To become, as strange as it may sound, disalienated from an individualism that, deep rooted, disbars the notion of a self as already a collective? Free Jazz, without having to articulate a politics, seems to effortlessly concur with such propositions.

%Image: Earliest known image of a jazz band. The cover of New Orleans newspaper The Mascot, 15 November, 1890. 'Robinson's Band Plays Anything'.

Such a disalienation is agony enough. One is placeless, no longer the centre of anything. One is interchangeable. One can only labour abstractly. But isnt there in the sound of jazz some supreme overcoming of the temptation to an alienating negativity? Listening to many jazz players it is possible to be enlivened by the very lack of shame of the singularities that are set free by means of the music. Singularities are maybe embraced in the assemblage of jazz not simply as a harnessing of a mythic Dionysian creativity, but as a result of the urge!inducing agony of genocide that Black Codes and then Jim Crow Laws set going in the American South: Anyway, when we got there in the woods, everyone started crying and turning their heads away in horror. I looked up at the man. I knew him, yet he was so messed up I could not tell who he was. He was naked and theyd put tar on him and burnt him.4 As hard as it is to write that out its maybe necessary to have this as backing to our appreciation not just of the spleenage!at!

the!reed of players like Ayler and Sanders, but also to honour the supreme effort of jazz musicians to maintain their propellant positivity. More than that, is it not the experience of Jim Crow barbarism that binds these jazz musicians to a collective notion of their self as black from which basis singularising becomes an easier next step to take? A step unfraught by the guilt of standing out and standing up and one that is no longer afraid to express. A hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation trumpeter and ensemblist Philip Cohran could say: Were all denied the privilege of expressing what is in us.

The knotted agony of not being able to speak up or protest "an inculcated terror of the self as Calvin Hernton refers to it# comes undone and the dam is burst by the mid 60s. The liquid lyric moans, as poet and communist activist Claude McKay describes 20s jazz, are transformed into the guided rage of having so much to say that words are bypassed by the dense emotional simultaneity of free jazz propulsion. That Calvin Hernton, writing of his childhood in the American South, speaks of taking a beating from his grandmother for regularly chatting with a white girl "a danger he could not perceive at the time#, and that he talks also of a social life that has to be closely self!monitored down to a control of glances, is just one element of racisms psychic damage that surely must inform free jazz as a disalienating force. Calvin Hernton: I am not absolutely certain at what age I became conscious of my colour as a limitation on where I could go, sit, or with whom I could associate.5 Such constant vigilance may train the mind in an acuity of perception and contextual sensitivity that, as agonising as it is, could well inform the later ease of a non!fanfared collective awareness and free space for singularities that marks those early 60s assemblages such as Charlie Mingus Jazz Workshop, Sun Ras Arkestra, Horace Tapscotts Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians "AACM# and Philip Cohran's Artistic Heritage Enemble.

Jazz and Organisation !1"

Where no one is more alone than any other $ Joseph Jarman

There can be no agonising terror of the self "a block to singularising# when the shared trauma of racist genocide comes to bind you tightly to a collective notion. The same could well be said of exploited classes in general upon whom is meted out an ongoing psychic damage that ends up in self!loathing, affective insecurity and the internalisation of inferiority "its epidermalisation in the words of Frantz Fanon#. These latter can amount to a terror of the self, a terror of subterranean force that can be a serious hindrance to the consistency in any coming together. Whether this supra!personal fragility be dealt with as an isolating retreat or as an appeasement of the terror of the self by recourse to the ideological mediations of a joining up of ego!ideals, the terror can be both repressed through the ongoing act of an abstract belonging as well as projected "as repressed# into forming the wayward unconscious forces of the group. The organisational form that results can come, after Didier Anzieu, to be one that could be described as bearing a group illusion: There was a desire in the group for a superficial unity to plaster over the contradiction between declared principles and actual behaviour.6

The problem for groups may well lie, then, in these declared principles that become a disconnective abstraction, that determine the meaning of group membership and that give rise, not to singular expressions, but to a guilty vigilance that comes from conformity. Throughout the history of jazz, save for the sizeable Pan!African and Black Nationalist political hue of the 60s, there has been scant recognition of its ensemble practice as providing methods and means of organisation for political movements. Larry Neal, viewed as a co!founder of the Black Arts Movement, still had cause, in the 1980s, to bemoan this and urged his readers to consider &...' a system of politics and art that is fluent, as functional, and as expansive as black music.7 Perhaps a factor in this lack of fluency is the blockage created by the subterranean persistence of, as Fanon said, self!evaluatory comparison and the quest to fulfil the ego!ideal. In other words the persistence within organisations of forms of bourgeois individualism "personal merit and self! fulfillment# mediated by organisational forms that militate against what Aim Csaire called for as he resigned from the PCF: the deepening and co!existence of all particulars.

From swing to the be!bop era, the space to solo, to singularise within the assemblage, was given to all musicians in the combo. Extemporisation around a theme "or in other parlance, playing with particles of the general intellect of the standard# enables these particulars to be co!extensive with other particulars. In the world of free jazz one could say that the mlange of particulars "simultaneous soloing# forms the universal itself! So, what to many ears, say in the Archie Shepp track mentioned above, is a mess, is not only an un!recouperable mess "deliberately inarticulate#, it is the sound of the overcoming of a terror of the self by means of creating together the incomparable through which the question of merit does not arise. Neither does it seem that the contradiction between declared principles and actual behaviour arises: the principles arent declared but outline a problem of action. So, in the 1969 track we are not listening to a group illusion that stems from the fear of wrongness and ambivalence, but to an almost definite disalienation that, being a group!effort, does not have to watch itself. Here improvisation adds!to rather than detracts!from the ad!hoc organisational form as the indefiniteness of not knowing how the music is going to sound is a non!declaration of principles, but yet is a declaration of co!existent singularities attempting disalienation by means of the jazz ensemble and its historical preservance.8

By the late 60s it could be perhaps remarked upon that the era of combo, the steady line!up group "i.e. Coltranes classic quartet, Colemans too# were being replaced by looser, ad!hoc, almost nomadic, groupings of musicians and a temporary assembling when studio time was being paid for. The form of organisation of the swing era, the big band with its large personnel and long!term performance engagements, was maybe, after the 1944 Cabaret Tax, becoming less viable. The be!bop combo could be said, as Will Menter mentions, to replace the band leader/arranger with a lead soloist and an equal opportunity to solo "rather than maintain the backing riff so elegantly scored as tone!parallels by Duke Ellington#. This form of the combo was adopted by the likes of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, but they began to break up this form of organisation by adding to their combos and as with their large ensemble pieces "Free Jazz and Ascension respectively# there was a step, as with Mingus, Max Roach and Sun Ra, into re!articulating the backing!riff of the big band, but this time atonally: an inarticulate and confident move that, at the threshold of the civil rights movement, tells of an organising rise in black political consciousness. So, it is not like there is some supercession of organisational forms as we are want to believe by a system that would rather have us forget, but an infusement of a collective tradition in which the general intellect figures as, after Cedric Robinson, an ontological totality.

However, if we focus on the late 60s and this sense of the ad!hoc session we are maybe in the realm of the meeting of singularities that bring with them an instilled and moveable collective awareness: an ontological totality of belonging to a history that is shareable and shared!in. At his first audition for the AACM in Chicago, Wadada Leo Smith reports that he was playing together in an ensemble with other musicians and then one by one his fellow players stepped down and began talking in a huddle, leaving Wadada to play alone. One could say that in this moment Wadada was left with the terror of the self as well as being made aware that, as far as the AACM was concerned, there was no group illusion in the AACM; that declared principles and actual behaviour would be resolved by a singular praxis within a collective assemblage "that Together Alone is the title of an LP by AACM members Joseph Jarman and Anthony Braxton is perhaps testament that they had a similar experience to Wadada Leo Smith#. Such an experience seems to suggest that as an individual player you are nothing special, but as an individual player you have to have the confidence in your instrument and its place in the tradition: you have to be able to singularise without becoming an individualist "be prepared to improvise!amidst# and to be a member of the AACM without losing your particularity "play to enhance anothers score#. Such an incomplete musing may be an example of the functional fluency that Larry Neal was calling to be more widely applied as a politics.

Jazz and Organisation !2"

How do individuals enter into composition with one another? $ Gilles Deleuze

The ongoing debates about spontaneity and organisation, about structure and structurelessness can maybe be tempered by the example of such organisations as the AACM. The AACM has been noted for the special place it allots to both composition and improvisation. One seems not to be valued over the other and its maybe that there is a synthesis in AACM practice that leads us in the direction that Larry Neal urged. That said any synthesis is not visible as a declared principle, but as a singular praxis that differs from Roscoe Mitchell to Muhal Richard Abrams to Anthony Braxton to Wadada Leo Smith; each of whom, Will Menter informs us, have all developed their own notation systems and ways of using notation within improvisation "composing themselves#. This goes against the grain of hearing in free jazz a pure visceral spontaneity as some level of organised sound is sought!after by those who learned through the AACM. However, it seems to be that the improvisatory element is that which brings through the emotional counterpoint, that in a sense, brings in the non!accordant sounds of the tellingly inarticulate that is at the roots of the black jazz tradition. When Wadada Leo Smith spoke recently of his work with an orchestra on his Ten Freedom Summers, he reported that in order to bring flexibility to the orchestral players he wrote music that was impossible to play: My instruction to them was while youre playing this and you cannot completely play it correctly, keep going forward. At some point its going to breakdown completely $ at that point youre improvising.9

In terms of organisation it is the emotional counterpoint, an attention given to the terror of the self, that gets lost amidst the declared principles of the group; the struggle to express articulately enough that, without recourse to the tellingly inarticulate "the breakdown of the playing# makes us give up trying to speak "or more aptly, give up trying to play# beyond ourselves. In his discussion of Roscoe Mitchells Little Suite, Will Menter offers that what marks out this piece "and it applies to other pieces by AACM members# is that it sounds spontaneous overall, even though one is aware that it must have been substantially pre!structured.10 He goes on to suggest that this is achieved through ensuring musicians oriented their playing towards the growing music as opposed to individual expression "my emphasis#. Perhaps one cannot discount that both are in operation as individual expression is not placed in the service of a bravura performance "the sections of this piece are too small and collage!like#, but in service of the partially structured score that is in!formation as the piece progresses through time. However, the organisational advantage that can be gleaned, and which Menter mentions in relation to Mitchell, is that a method of distancing has been developed which meant that no longer must every sound that was made be taken at face value as a serious personal or collective expression. These latter two, the face value of individualism and its competition for recognition and the pathology of its illusory supercession through group membership alone, are the bane of organisations as they can still be experienced.

We Dare to Sing !2"

What we could not say openly we expressed in music $ Duke Ellington

This modulation of improvisation and composition, of what was formally instinctual and impulsive being acted upon and informing a grounding structure, does not so much mean that either one is replaced by the other, but that when both are taken together there is an expansion of the ontological totality. There is, as Cedric Robinson puts it, a breaking of the evolutionist chain.11 Instead of succession and development that pampers to the bourgeois logic of hierarchies and linearity, instead of a carpetbagging there is a contributing!to, in this case, the black radical tradition that is jazz. Muhal Richard Abrams urged his collaborants in the AACM to add copiously to an already vast reservoir of artistic richness handed down through the ages.12 Such adding!to resonates with the distancing necessary to elude bourgeois individualism whilst at the same time liberating expressive and impersonal singularities. A fine example of this can be heard on Arthur Doyles solo sax and vocal rendition of the 40s tune Nature Boy. Whilst much of whats being said here is far better expressed by Arthur Doyle is it not by such means, a preserving the collective being, that the guilt of self!expression is appeased? Is it the ontological totality, the belonging to something multi!personal and meta!categorical, that can dare us to sing?

Richard Wright wrote of jazz as the rhythmic flaunting of guilt feelings and Calvin Hernton wrote that each in our idiom hold the nightmare of our singularity.13 Both Wright and Hernton "as members of a radical intelligentsia# seem to me to be expressing something that a replenishing jazz tradition helped them to overcome. For Wright in the 40s and 50s it may well be that the voiceless and inferiorised have no right to express themselves and those that dare to sing do so, but yet feel guilty to transgress both the taboo on their expression from a racist society and from being misconstrued as trying to escape from their

own communities "c.f. Charlie Parker and heroin#. For Calvin Hernton, on the other hand, the 60s seem to throw up the sense that the terror of the self "its traumatic disalienation# is what both inspires and holds back self!expression as a process of singularisation. There is a massive risk, Hernton seems to be saying, in expressing yourself within a bourgeois context that tempts one to lose oneself through what Aim Csaire refers to as walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the universal.14

Image: Engraving by Granger, after a sketch by James H. Moser, The Negro Exodus, 1879. The wharf at Vicksburg, Mississippi, from which many black migrants departed following the end of Reconstruction for points North and West.

But this singularity is no nightmare when it takes as its ground the multiplicities that have formed it and with which it communicates. That the jazz ensemble figures as a collective assemblage of enunciation from which some dare guiltlessly to sing is a testament to the preservation of a collective being that contains within it the attempt to disalienate. This attempt is made almost unavoidable because of the abreactive proviso to much jazz playing. Nat Hentoff says of Charlie Mingus that he expected his men to learn their parts through what their own feelings tell them about the music. This isnt a technique of playing the right notes but, as an abreaction of feeling, its maybe more a matter of playing between notes and, as a player, bringing to the part the unwritten states of feeling that cannot yet be named. This shared abreactive premise to the music, audible as plaintive anger and rough sonority on Mingus Faubus Fables, may make it possible to say that individual expression as such is annulled in favour of processes of singularisation that can be expressed as simply as in these words of AACM member Fred Anderson: All music is basically the same, but what makes it different is different cats have different ways of speaking and communicating15 These different ways could be the source of guilt, the nightmare of our singularity, in that without the abreaction of feeling they can become aids to separation, but they are also the challenge of performing and enacting a complex communication "a modulation of feeling# whereby neither is dominated nor subsumed by the other, but complemented and encouraged to make a composition of the assemblage, to be disappearing in the elasticity of a form. If we dare to sing we may find that the structure no longer expresses us, but that we, instead, come to form an assemblage, a re!iterative structure that is expressive of us: the anonymous singularising solo of the general intellect.

Howard Slater <howard.slater AT gmail.com> is a volunteer play therapist and writer. His book, Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings, was published by Mute Books in January 2012.

Appendix One

Tellingly Inarticulate

In his sleeve notes to Max Roachs We Insist! Freedom Now!, Nat Hentoff records that there was an impromptu squawk from Coleman Hawkins tenor sax on the track Driva Man. Hawkins is reported as saying: No dont splice it... when its all perfect, especially in a piece like this, theres something very wrong. This track sung by Abbey Lincoln with lyrics from Oscar Brown Jr is still seen as one of the more forthright political jazz records of any day:

Git to work and root that stump, driva man will make you jump. Better make your hammer ring Driva manll start to swing Aint but two things on my mind Driva man and quittin time.

When his cat!o!nine tails flies Youll be happy just to die

This record was out around the time of the Greensboro student sit!in in 1960 and was released on Candid, an independent record label. Another strong statement was made by Charles Mingus on his Faubus Fables track. This latter features an ongoing call and response between Mingus and drummer Danny Richmond:

CM: Name me a handful thats ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.%DR: Faubus, Rockefeller, Motherfucking Eisenhower.%CM: Why are they so sick and ridiculous? DR: Two, four, six, eight: they brainwash and teach you hate.

Yet again Hentoff writes up in his sleeve notes for this album a comment made by Eric Dolphy: I play the notes that would not ordinarily be said to be in a given key, but I hear them as proper. The squawk, the non!key, the emotional counterpoint, proper.

Appendix 2

We Dare to Sing

A great song arose, the liveliest thing born this side of the seas. It was a new song. It did not come from Africa, though the dark throb and beat of that Ancient of Days was in it and through it. It did not come from white America $ never from so pale and hard and thin a thing, however deep those vulgar and surrounding tones had driven. Not the Indies nor the hot South, the cold East or the heavy West made that music. It was a new song and its deep and plaintive beauty, its great cadences and wild appeal wailed, throbbed and thundered on the worlds ears with a message seldom voiced by man. It swelled and blossomed like incense, improvised and born anew out of an age old past, and weaving into its texture the old and new melodies in word and in thought.

$ W.E.B. Du Bois

Appendix 3

Jazz and Organisation

each man!string doing his own thing vibrating at the each!to!each volume sounding at the each!to!each pitch all being heard at the same time no one pushing no one behind each knowing eachs

rhythm and sign

Henry Dumas "from Greatness#

Appendix 4

Music and Agony

Hair $ braided chestnut, coiled like a lynchers rope, Eyes $ faggots, Lips $ old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath $ the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh after flame

$ Jean Toomer "Portrait in Georgia#

Discography% Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1984. Anthony Braxton & Joseph Jarman, Together Alone, Delmark 1974/2008. Aim Csaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez in Salah M. Hassan, Documenta "13#, 2012. John Coxon in conversation with the Author. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, City Lights, 2001 Arthur Doyle, Nature Boy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6l6rAyZeN8

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860!1880, Free Press 1998 Henry Dumas, Knees of a Natural Man, Thunders Mouth Press, 1989 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Paladin 1973. Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969. Calvin C. Hernton, Medicine Man, Reed Canon and Johnston, 1976. Claude McKay, Selected Poems, Dover 1999. Will Menter: The Making of Jazz and Improvised Music: Four Musicians Collectives in England and the USA, Phd Thesis, University of Bristol, 1981. Charles Mingus, Mingus Presents Mingus, Candid, 1960/1989. Ken Rattenbury, Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer, Yale University Press 1990. Max Roach, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, Candid 1960/1989. Cedric J.Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley, Black, Brown and Beige $ Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, University of Texas, 2009. Jean Toomer, Collected Poems, University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Archie Shepp, Live at the Pan!African Festival, Get Back, 1969/2002.

Footnotes 1 Cedric J.Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, p.171. 2 Aim Csaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez in Salah M. Hassan, Documenta "13#, 2012, p.36. 3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Paladin 1973, p.165. 4 Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969, p.99. 5 Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969, p.55. 6 Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1984, p.149. 7 Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley, Black, Brown and Beige $ Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, University of Texas, 2009, p.240.

8Ornette Coleman in ibid., p.28. 9Ben Beaumont!Thomas, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith: The black experience is American experience, The Guardian, 23 September 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/23/ishmael!wadada!leo!smith! int... 10 Will Menter: The Making of Jazz and Improvised Music: Four Musicians Collectives in England and the USA, Phd Thesis, University of Bristol, 1981, p.138. 11Cedric J. Robinson, op. cit., p.276. 12 Will Menter, op. cit., p.100. 13 Cedric J. Robinson, op. cit., p.302; and Calvin Hernton, Medicine Man, Reed Canon and Johnston 1976 p.51. 14 Aim Csaire, op. cit., p.38. 15Will Menter, op. cit., p. 21.