It’s what I reached for by chance: but when I think of Rollins, I think most of the quartet with Don Cherry in the ’60s, the range of those nearly six hours of tapes from the Village Gate, and of the trio of Freedom Suite, the first Rollins record I heard, its diamond-hard sketches, the loose precision of its themes, and the political force embedded within the simple naming of the piece. And I think of how with Rollins, even at his most ‘out’, it’s always something about melody—indeed, that his very treatment of melody constitutes part of his ‘outness’.

There’s a radio recording from the Half Note in 1966 (or perhaps 1963, depending which discography you use): Rollins with McCoy Tyner, Walter Booker, and Mickey Roker, moving in and out of tunes at will; melody stacked free associatively on melody—rhapsody, in the sense of rhapsōidos, “stitcher of songs”, as if Rollins might play every song he knew, that act of association and recall a kind of survival force. Rollins was always walking around the club while he was playing, walking off stage while he was playing, playing within the form: having already begun as he stepped out of the taxi and walked into the venue, or deciding to take a trip up the stairs and out of the club to serenade Alice and John Coltrane in their home, followed by the remnants of the faithful. Sound bouncing off buildings, the walls, sound that would not be contained.

Walking while playing evokes the barwalkers, the entertainers of R&B, movement that refuses fixity; it’s a way of thinking, an exercise of freedom, a desite to get away, an impatience with the limitations of the form or the stage. This movement doesn’t translate to recordings; registers, instead, as a kind of sudden absence. In his unaccompanied cadenza on the Half Note recording, there are huge pauses as he moves around the room, testing the space: interruption, tension, void. All the more so given that these performances were broadcast on the radio, where they become dead air. But, rising again, resurrecting across the silence, Rollins comes back, the melody comes back, the force of remembrance, re-membered: a body put back together, gathering the limbs of Osiris. One tune becomes another, ‘Oleo’ to ‘Poinciana’ to ‘Happy Birthday’ to a newly abstract or abstruse motif: all those moments where what’s quoted and what is the thicket in which quotation occurs constantly blur and stretch, the earworm always within reach.

Once, towards the end of the set at Ronnie Scott’s in London, Rollins reportedly began to play to every song whose title contained the word “Goodnight”; as if to split the difference between language and music, lyric and its instrumentalised sublimation, songs without words—to make the gesture of farewell last forever. Or the time Gary Giddins talks about, when Rollins played the head of Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Take the A Train’ over and over and over again, for thirty to forty minutes; something in the melody that caught and wouldn’t let go. (Describing his own music, Cecil Taylor talked about “motivic possession”.) In all these occasions, the recall and repetition of melody lies between the obsession of a damage or an addiction or a blockage and the capacity for invention that leaps over it again and again. It’s the lifeline; it’s what won’t let go; improvisation as the capacity to create without ceasing, and thus, the capacity for life.

Sometimes Rollins would play nothing but the melody; other times, he would veer so far off the tune he was playing that the song itself seemed to disappear inside the variations spun on it, while remaining with the changes: song form. Fitting that he toured with Betty Carter in 1963, her invention with and away from song matching his own. There is an incadescence to Carter and to Rollins alike. Visible radiation. Thermal excitation. Energy release.

Perhaps it takes poetry to capture that in language: the line break and the chopping of the phrase, the extension or truncation of the word. Paul Blackburn, in ‘Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot’, transcribing Rollins’ extemporisations of ‘There will never be another you’ back into words—or what Nathaniel Mackey calls “stutter-like teasings of a tune”:

some
one
someone
some-one
some
some
some
some
some
some
one […]

anoth
noth
anoth-er
noth-er
noth-er […]

when there

never be
a-noth

“Apprehension and self-conscious duress, by way of dislocated phrasings in which virtuosity mimes its opposite”, writes Mackey, and then over that self-imposed block Rollins’ playing flows again—a constant self-overcoming and self-sabotage in the same or the adjacent breath. Rollins might pause and the void open up or play as though he might never stop, until the audience goes home, until the cleaners come in—and this applies most of all, as so many have written, to his live performances rather than to his generally more concise work in the studio; to their constant stitching, between the braided limbs of Frankenstein’s monster and the braided flowers of a garland cast on the river: deep river, the ocean swell…

But when I think of Rollins, perhaps most of all I think of the famous footage from Robert Mugge’s Saxophone Colossus in which he’s playing outdoors at the Opus 40 Sculpture Park in New York, walking around the stage in one of his a capella cadenzas, then leaping off it and breaking his heel: pausing, as the crowd gasps, nervously applauds, but then continuing to play, lying on his back.

The pause, the quote, the joke: the entertainer, the thinker-in-sound, inscrutably public, playing through and beyond the break, broken foot tapping on the ground, commitment beyond measure.

I mean, really—who else?

Below the paywall, an excerpt from a longer unpublished essay—on the Bridge, the Cry, and the Rollins/Coleman Hawkins version of ‘Lover Man’—lightly edited and posted here in memory of Rollins.

Altissimo (The Cry)

When Amiri Baraka wrote of the emerging ‘Jazz Avant-Garde’ for Metronome in 1961, he named Sony Rollins alongside Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. Reviewing Coleman’s newly-released Free Jazz alongside Taylor’s Into the Hot the following year, he termed Rollins and Coltrane “hired assassins [...] using the various

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Over a fifty-year career, Karen Borca has manifested an uncompromising committment to playing free music—dense, knotty, vibrant, tough unsentimental, and committed to the extended practice of open improvisation. And all this on that toughest of woodwind instruments, the bassoon.

Borca remains best known for her longstanding association with Cecil Taylor—whom she encountered as a student at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s, and for whom she acted as copyist and ensemble coordinator—and Taylor’s faithful saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, who would become both her key musical collaborator (and life partner). Though much of her work with Taylor went unrecorded, her contributions are key to the record made by Taylor’s Orchestra of Two Continents in 1985, Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants). On the albums she made with Lyons between 1978 and 1985—Push Pull, Riffs (1980), Wee Sneezawee, (1983), and Give It Up—and for that matter, with Paul Murphy (Red Snapper, Cloudburst) and Joel Futterman (Moments, Passage) during the same period—she is simply incandescent.

On these records, the songs’ dry, one-or-two-word titles—‘Gossip’, ‘Shackinback’, ‘Methods’ —act as containers for knotty and witty themes and extended improvised performances that sometimes seem like they will never stop, there’s so much energy and invention to go round. Moments of respite are relatively rare—though the Lyons-Borca remake of the first of Chopin’s Ballades, ‘Ballada’, on Give It Up, is a thing of wonder, all grimy elegant sweetness over the chug of brushes and arco, mood indigo. As quartet, with Jay Oliver on bass and Paul Murphy on drums, as quintet, with Enrico Rava or Raphé Malik or Munner Bernard Fennell’s crackling cello added, as embedded duet within all this, Borca and Lyons devote themselves entirely to a music made with no concessions, tapping into the light source, the life source, and refusing to let it go. Riffed wings of the serpent, rife with compressed bursting, snapping, moment to moment. The dragon awakening. Burning flame.

Listen to the solo that begins about four minutes into ‘After You Left’ from Push Pull: to the way Borca pushes, pulls, works her way around the sinuous grit and heft of the melody, silences and feints like shafts of light piercing a curtain; and in the opening and the closing thematic statements, to the way she and Lyons shadow each other, two voices utterly distinct yet like uncanny emanations of each other. And though the title suggests a kind of melancholic reflection, perhaps, a post-mortem or a word unspoken after the door’s closed, the feeling it gives is one of endless possible invention: that this is what it is truly and even without words to sing.

In 1868, composer and bassoonist Désiré Dihau commissioned a painting from Edgar Degas, L’Orchestre de L’Opera, to give the instrument a rare moment in the limelight. Yet though centre stage, the bassoon doesn’t quite fit the frame. The physical awkwardness of the diagonal playing position required translates in compositional terms, the bassoon’s diagonal slash dividing the space asymmetrically. Painted in the pit, the bassoon seems an instrument of labour, of the depths, yet capable of ascent, bassoon and cello both grounding and rising elements in the composition: bulk of instrumental body, bell and joint leading to thinness of the bocal, the crooked tube curving from joint to reed, as the bassoon ascends from its bass register growl upwards and out of the pit to support the flights of the ballet dancers lit up above who, for a moment, it upstages.

What sounds come to mind viewing this painting?

Perhaps…in Paris fifty years later, the calm before the storm: the reedy, high register lyricism of the solo that opens Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring—later adapted by Ornette Coleman for alto; perhaps, the contrabassoon in the opening of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, from depths to heights like an emergent sun, growl emerging into song, shadow into light; or, more likely, the sprightly themes in Dukas’s Sorceror’s Apprentice or Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King; or, again, the deeper-register comic rumblings of the role of the grandfather in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf or, for British listeners, of Vernon Elliott’s music for Oliver Postgate’s children’s TV series Ivor the Engine. In the world of the avant-garde, the great Lindsay Cooper in Henry Cow or her soundtracks to Sally Potter or the Feminist Improvising Group or with the late Mike Westbrook. Or the multiple extended techniques of the Sequenza that Luciano Berio wrote for the instrument.

Almost all of these examples come from classical music. But the quick-speed-dive-and-rise of Borca’s playing is another world; one might even say, another planet. The music that came to be known as jazz consisted of adapting, reconfiguring, redefining instruments invented for other purposes—the marching band, the parlor—and making them sing anew. And in that sense, Borca’s reinvention of the bassoon is in the tradition—a tradition of ceaseless invention, a tradition that is always radical, and that rarely takes the easy way out.

Bassoon was not, in fact, Borca’s first choice of instrument. As she told Ken Weiss in a 2018 interview for Jazz Inside, probably the most in-depth print source available on her work, she began as “a hotshot alto saxophone player in high school”. It was a teacher who recommended the switch to bassoon, as they thought her more likely to attain a scholarship on the rarer wind instrument as “there were too many saxophonists”. At the University of Wisconsin, Borca studied classical bassoon with John Barrows and Arthur Weisberg. This would not, however, be the ultimate direction of her career. In the 1970-71 academic year, Cecil Taylor taught at the university, and Borca enthusiastically took to his music, following him to Antioch College, Ohio upon her graduation, where she served as director for his ensembles, transmitting instructions to players and leading the group when he was absent.

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A relatively spontaneous announcement of a relatively spontaneous gig: this for a new quartet combining poetry and music, with myself (poetry), Andrea Burelli (voice, poetry, perhaps violin), Lucio Capece (bass clarinet), and Stellan Veloce (cello). It will happen at the Casino for Social Medicine at Sonnenallee 100, Berlin, on this coming Saturday, 16th May, at 19h.

As a trio, Stellan, Lucio and I worked together twice last year, and that was beautiful. (Their duo at a performance a few months before the first of those occasions, after which I approached them to work together, was even more beautiful). As a quartet with Andrea, we’ve done one rehearsal so far, and I think it’s entering a whole new dimension, which I’m very excited about.

Also reading will be Tracy Fuad. And I’m excited about that, too.

Do come if you can.

More performances to be confirmed in due course!

The poet J.H. Prynne died last Wednesday morning.

Jeremy was important to a whole host of us down the generations, for a whole host of reasons: politically, personally, and above all, poetically. For his avant-gardism; for his careful, critical, ethical attention to the specifities of poetic language; for his unorthodox Maoism, however that was understood; for his personal kindness and encouragement; for the kinds of permission his work opened up. Of the poems written during the period I knew him, the most important to me remains the life-work summary of Kazoo Dreamboats, written during the era of the financial crisis through the lens of Piers Plowman’s societal vision, via modern scientific textbooks, ancient funeral rites, and Maoist dialectics. A particularly treasured memory is Jeremy’s reading of a substantial portion of this poem to the student occupation of Lady Mitchell Hall, Cambridge in November 2011, alongside the veteran feminist campaigner and author Selma James. Insisting on making this a poem which could speak to the occasion and the political struggle, without compromising the fierce difficulty of the work itself, the reading was forceful and moving. When he read out the line “Rule One: people with top pay are rubbish”, the room was electrically charged, a charge that seemed to come both from the poem and to enter into the poem from outside. What I learned from this moment was that the poem itself does not change its context, nor does the context change the poem: but that their dialectical relation adds something to both.

Other works from these years that I treasure: the “bruised compassionate dismay” of Of ^. the ^. Abyss, a pamphlet I had the honour of publishing, which overlays Victorian child cruelty and the present migrant crisis; and the enquiry into the entanglement of British imperialism with poetic song in Parkland: a complex, insistent and direct enquiry into how the poet can sing when empire starves those other “fair field full of folk” elsewhere; a poem which movingly and deeply wants to believe in the possibility of poetry as lyric joy, but is totally lacking illusion about poetry as salvation; a poem that ask how the poet can go on singing their song when that song gets conscripted as the national anthem; that treats poetry with a near-devotional cast, yet radically questions whether poetry is morally complicit with corrupt orderings, if not actively harmful, then at least insufficiently attentive to or able to frame harm; a poem concerned with a national verse tradition, that ruthlessly interrogates the bases behind that tradition in the interests of a fervent, anti-imperialist internationalism; a poem rigorously dialectical, as dialectic is a practice of dialogue and question in origin, but as it is also the ruthless criticism of all that exists, and the very conditions for that questioning.

Language is no innocent playground, yet the ludic is important to Jeremy’s late work (much of it published by Ian Heames’s Face Press), with its insistence that contemplation, play, and purposive activity be not separated. I love, too, the playful and unsettling rhyming poems of Snooty Tipoffs, the dense compaction of Al Dente, the fables and orchards and tales and streams of language that are the river all those late books swim. But maybe most of all I love the text ‘No Universal Plan for a Good Life’, a didactic summary in clear prose of the ethical position Jeremy believes poetry to hold, written for the context of people’s struggle in Nepal. I treasure both the text itself and the act of imaginative extension and solidarity it performs. And this is what I want to hold onto, about J as a person and about his work, this act of imaginative solidarity, this absolute belief in the power of poetry, this ethical rigour, this thinking through of the question of spirit and matter, this permission and this belief that poetry matters. I think I’ll carry that with me throughout my life. I hope I do so.

At play and at work there in language, into which he has now gone—at play and at work and now and then at rest—a life.

Wednesday 22 April 2026

Words and music (i).

In 1994, pianist Mal Waldron toured Japan to mark the 50th anniversary of the bombings, performing with the singer Jeanne Lee and the flautist Toru Tenda. Among the pieces they recorded was a setting of a poem featured in English transation at the Hiroshima Peace Museum, and written by Syō Ito (Sei Itō), modernist writer and translator of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover into Japanese, called ‘White Road’, followed by its companion piece, with lyrics by Waldron himself, ‘Black Rain’.1 The speaker of ‘White Road’, born just forty days before the bombing, recounts their mother walking the burning white road to Hiroshima after the blast, a condition of perpetual, slow fleeing, a journey without arrival.

A white road,

A white road in Hiroshima

Mother walked that scorching road

Barefooted […]

The road we’ve walked without a pause,

For fourteen years.

Working with Billie Holiday years earlier, Waldron had, he remarked, “became very aware of words as a possible basis for improvisation. You didn’t solo on [chord] changes, you soloed on words too.” Lee likewise described Waldron’s playing: “He really transcends this understanding of accompaniment. He’s not feeding you something, he’s talking.” On ‘White Road’, as Waldron talks and mimics the endless tread, metaphorical and literal, of the mother’s feet on the burning road, Lee turns poem to song, but words are not a full container what gets expressed. As, too, talking too itself is subtext and undertone and written text, too, is paratext, subscript and superscript: all the apparatus surrounding words and their histories and feelings that what we call poetry, what we call music, interrogates, releases, and surrounds, the air it—not always easily—breathes.

The performance of ‘White Road’ lasts thirteen minutes and twelve seconds. There are no breaks between movements per se, but distinctive sections. In the final minute, the music stops and Lee recites the words at the climax to the poem in which the tears of the mother fall onto the child’s face and “le[ave] their patterns in the dust”: the wounds of history, the trace left by that which evaporates without trace. It begins with Lee and Tenda articulating a melody in unison, slow as the procession to the grave

A white road

A white road at Hiroshima.

now they diverge, peel apart on that road, Tenda and Waldron cycling over a gently sad strains of Waldron’s composition while Lee improvises over the top, with and off their melody, gaps between each phrase

like

blank spaces

“Mother walked that scorching road”

Lee sings slowly, to pause—incorporate silence—

“barefooted”

“working clothes…all torn”

“the deep blue sky…stre-tched”

I could take music out of musicality, add space and silence2

elongating words, holding a note, to introduce the dimension of time that seeing words on the page reduces to one dimension—the time taken to read—unfolding it to experiential time—the time of history coming in—the mushroom cloud

“wide”

“like a sea slug..gro…wing…wi…de”

Words are not a full container. In the liner notes to the 1962 album Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet, Archie Shepp, who would work with both Lee and Waldron several tmes over the years, commented of the development of sung blues into instrumental jazz as part of a dialectical process.

As musical instruments replaced the human voice, poetic directness and social commentary began to give way to a “purer” musical form. This musical form developed at a much faster pace than the lyric. It was due in large part to the plasticity and ambiguity of notes over words that a folk art became transformed into a national art and later into a universal art. It was now possible for a listener to hear just the music without the ambivalence that words elicit. He [sic] could identify with whatever he chose and reject whatever he chose. Thus the Negro (through jazz) has lent America a somewhat uneasy reprieve.

Shepp would return to this theme the following decade, a suggestion of loss as much as gain. In gaining its artistic autonomy and reaching something that gets called the “universal”, jazz had lost its racialized and class connection to a community from which it became disconnected, a process of abstraction that was at once a signal of emancipation, of freedom, and of a loss of group energy, group purpose. The revolutionary work that the new jazz was called to do was a response to this dialectic. “It is our belief”, wrote Shepp, “that jazz musical forms must be extended to meet an entirely new set of artistic, social, cultural and economic circumstances.”

Later, Shepp would argue that this instrument-alisation, contra the normal sense of that term, was precisely a loss of clear social function (and, in turn of monetary value, of gig tickets and record sales). Rather, it had meant a loss of social content, a disconnection from the communities from which the music emerged, a tendency for its social content to be glossed over or ignored. In turn, a jazz whose revolutionary movement had in part been its move away from song—or sung—form and from words per se, was at risk of disappearance. “Our instrumental music [...] is in danger of being obsolete, of being phased out,” Shepp argued in 1976. One of his interlocuters asks for clarification: “You mean the more abstract it becomes?”. Shepp dodges the questio, slightly. “The more instrumental it becomes [...] as opposed to vocal.”

It’s not—exactly—as if abstraction, “art music”, the universal, equals the instrumental and the specific, the material, “folk music”, the community equals the vocal. It’s not—exactly—as if the “folk” is loss and “art” is gain or vice versa. And the much-debated separation of the “written” and “oral” traditions of African American poetry—say, Phillis Wheatley versus spirituals, Jupiter Hammon versus the blues—is not so much one of class antagonism, of reform and revolution, integration and separation, house and field, though those terms too, swirl around it, for those are the terms that are given and which poets, musicians, all of us have to negotiate.3 As Stephen Henderson put it in Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972): “An attempt should be made in

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Abstractive

by Candace Hill Montgomery & David Grundy

Buy Now

Candace Hill Montgomery & David Grundy
Abstractive

ISBN: 9780998460703
142 pages
Full Color Paperback
$34.95
April 2026

Praise for Abstractive:

“For Russell Atkins, the ‘psychovisualist’ composes structured relationships that can be viscerally felt by the mind’s eye. In Abstractive, readers learn to lean on the way those structures snare hidden connections: between visual and language arts, music and emotion, and everyone out there searching for the ancient heavenly connection. We are on the cusp.”—Craig Dworkin, author of Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality

“Here is vivacious visual and textual collaboration where melodic lines act as a counterpoint of philosophic riffing so that signification is expansively flung open delivering vantage points galore, tantalizing consciousness. ‘Form sets off everywhere’. We are treated to a cacophony in words accompanied by intense, colorful images. Candace Hill Montgomery and David Grundy conjure the living legacy of Russell Atkins and the results are exquisite!”—Brenda Iijima, author of Presence

“Candace Hill Montgomery and David Grundy set off a collaborative sensory sweep via these polyphonic and polyrhythmic poems, ‘ensorcellating’ an expansive tonality playing within and around image and word. These poems seek a mental music that ‘avoids fitting into the chord,’ ‘innuendoewing’ around the breakage of each eroding word. We are borne through the revelation of a doubled ‘mind in flight’: poetry as ongoing, unceasing dialogic process. Following Candance Hill Montgomery’s incredible long poem, Short Leash Kept On (Materials 2022), this is a thrilling and essential work.”—Geoffrey Olsen, author of Nerves Between Song

About the Authors:

The work of Candace Hill Montgomery spans painting, photography, installation, assemblage, textiles and writing. Making and exhibiting since the 1970s, Hill Montgomery was born in 1945 in Queens, New York, and now lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York. In 2024, she presented a solo exhibition, Pretty Birds Peer Speak Sow Peculiar, at Blank Forms, New York. Recent group exhibitions include From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, 2025); Here Is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge, 2025) and Reluctant Gravities, Hollybush Gardens (London, 2024). Her latest publications include the collection Muss Sill (Distance No Object, 2020) and Short Leash Kept On (Materials, 2022), a long poem inspired by detective fiction and the writing of Lloyd Addison and Russell Atkins. In 2023, a major essay on her work, “Candace Hill-Montgomery, Against Containment” by Amy Tobin, was published in Art History, Volume 46. She is represented by Hollybush Gardens in London and will present her first solo exhibition with the gallery in June 2026.

David Grundy is a poet and scholar. He is the author of the critical books A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1944–Present (Oxford University Press, 2024); A True Account (The 87 Press, 2023), a book of poetry; and Present Continuous (Pamenar Press, 2022), a book of lyric essays; and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He runs the small press Materials.

Twenty-three years later, the US and Israel launch another illegal war off the bat, with no pretence at UN presentations, consultations, weapons inspections, by a president at once pursuing a Nobel peace prize and illegally invading multiple other countries with the only justification being that this is what he wants to do. Just because he can. A “pre-emptive strike” when there is no sign of any impending attack is not a pre-emptive strike at all. The phantom idea of Iranian nuclear weapons which don’t exist, from a nation that seems intent to blow up the entire nation, the entire region, the entire world. But isn’t that what this entity, this holding corporation we call America has always done, Democrat or Republican alike? The Democrats just use a bit more window-dressing, a bit more “due process”: vacillate, qualify their condemnation, tacitly agree.

The term “regime” is used exclusively in western media to describe that of the late Khamenei, killed in a strike, but perhaps people might reflect, it should be used on the world’s richest nation, the world’s most feral, venal, viral empire, one of the most internally unequal countries in the world, a country that illegally invades others, just because it can.

Their justifications shift day by day. Pre-empted by Israel, to pre-empt Israel, to destroy nuclear capability, to enact regime change, to destroy the army and the navy, to liberate the people, to protect American interests: just because they can. Military commanders declare a crusade, the US President “anointed by God” to bring about Armageddon. I’m not making this up. The Secretary of Defense and his Crusader tattoos.

And so what it comes down to is this: At least one hundred children die in a bombing of a girl’s school in Minab. To linger with the horror of it. The numbers rise each day and they are replaced in the newspapers by columns on the deaths of three US soldiers and disruption to the flight paths of western travellers. As if one life were worth a hundred. As if anything could ever justify this.

We’ve seen it all happen before. This has been daily life in Gaza for three years now, and we’ve seen it all happen before. We were there on the streets or in front of our screens during the Iraq War in 2003 and we watched the bombs fall on TV like fireworks, we sat and we watched it all and sometimes we spoke and we shouted and wrote poems or essays and the carnage went on, and we’ve seen it all happen before.

As if this attack will save lives, as if it will not kill many, many more to add to the thousands already killed on the streets in Iran in protest for the last three months, the millions killed by the US and its proxies across the world for the last three centuries. As if one can declare war on an entire country just to boost one’s approval ratings before the mid-terms. As if one has the right to dictate the way the world works, and we’ve seen it all happen before.

As if the trail of carnage, destroyed lands, destroyed lives that is our present reality will prove anything different.

And that is the way the world works, they will say, because they make it.

And we’ve seen it all happen before.

On the video the smoke rising in Tehran and the birds fly in front of the camera away. Where they go to, where they’re flying: some place, perhaps, where people might hide or fly or flee, some dream of that; that flight, that movement, from bombs in the sky to border regimes and death in the ocean, that incessant movement, that structures this world, its blocs of power, its people in the cracks, the possibility for people’s war diminishing as the people are massacred, by whoever, regimes internal or external; to have to believe in the movement of the people nonetheless, whatever that might mean; to believe, at the very least, that people wish to survive and that there are others in the world who wish them to survive too, who don’t wish death on their heads, bombs in the sky, extraction and crusade and a customary sadism experienced in “outraged futility” as we protest or we scream or experienced in customary banality and swiped away from onscreen—the tremulous, held-in banality of this evil that burns the world in its wake.

And now we are politicized, and then we were politicized, and now we know it all, or some of it, and then we could see it coming, and now we are bamboozled, and we are taken by surprise, and in 2003 that movement of hundreds of thousands of the street stopped nothing, whatever our will, and yet to keep trying, to owe the dead at least that, and for the living, too, to owe them that, though here as the first spring flowers poke from the earth and the birds outside begin in profuse strains their song, death from the skies is the only skylark’s flight poetry can see.

“When weapons come from the US, do they strike us more gently than when they come from the regime’s killing machines?”

The air quality has been so bad these past few weeks, someone says, because of the bombings in Kyiv. As the winds from Chernobyl blew over Berlin before: particles, smoke, debris blowing over, invisible by the time it appears but suffusing the air. History enters, not as an image, but just the simple fact of the air you breathe.

I go to a set in the record store late in the afternoon, on the border between day and dusk. A different kind of breathing, a different kind of air. Palestinian multi-instrumentalist Dirar Kalash plays a solo saxophone version of his piece, ‘We Can’t Breathe’, dedicated to George Floyd and Eric Garner and riffing off Fanon’s “combat breathing”. I heard him play this in a duo with bassist Luke Stewart late last year; he’s been playing versions of it for a decade or more, a morphing and ongoing registration of the situation, in Gaza, the West Bank, the US and elsewhere—a piece that doesn’t really have another end as those situations, too, deepen and worsen and lengthen. The names in the dedication stand in for all the other names, known and unknown, all the victims, the martyrs. In the piece, itself unlike the protest chants of “say [their] name[s]”, they have to resound silently, a linguistic core within the abstraction of an experimental music vocabulary that’s by now, at least in this context legible, even expected, but that still resists semantic extrapolation. A year or so ago, a friend talked about how, in the drawings Paul Klee produced during and after the first world war, you see reality—his reality, our reality, whatever split and shared landscape that term implies—“glitch”. Lines wandering off, matter out of place.

Following the November 18th Revolution, in April 1919, Klee become a member of the commissariat for painting in the Bavarian Soviet Republic. When it collapsed, destroyed by the military, he fled to Switzerland. What we see in those drawings at the turn of that decade are forms collapsing: but is what we see the new form of the soviet—prefigurative or existing, a utopian remodelling—or is it more negative—the collapse of the pre-existing world and then the collapse of the utopian experiment that seeks to replace and remould it? Somewhere between those two is the place we’re still in. The palace in passing. Oil and linen and cardboard, watercolour and ink. The briefest of moments before it sinks into the surface and dries. Inside that glitching, shuddering moment, frozen into representation or experienced as incoherence, silence, noise. The arrows point both ways.

Before he plays, Kalash speaks about the idea that politics, revolution, resistance is not ideology, or not just ideology, but something that is forced from one when one can no longer breathe, as Fanon says of anti-colonial revolt. Air through the lungs, rising up. The piece at once literalizes all that and turns it into representation: the deaths of racialized people in custody, in jail or on the street; DK speaks the words “I can’t breathe” into the saxophone before squalls of notes translate it or transcend or move through it, breath becomes sound becomes something else—not, he says, as a process of abstraction, or of abstraction as the removal of context, content, but abstraction as politics; or abstraction as the constant oscillation of the literal and the metaphorical, the capacity for translation in sound and speech of what it’s possible at a given moment to say amidst all the choking air.

Sound becomes something else, and that something else is not easy, it’s not nice, it’s messy or unpleasant, it’s what we’d rather gloss over, its sticky entanglements. Breath and the breathing apparatus, a trail of saliva from the saxophone, a trial, the phlegmy mucus matter of the lungs one coughs up, a habitual gargling or strangling vocabulary of vocalities, a matter of course. “Base materialism” and so on. Is how the spirit chokes to get out, is labour, bodily production, without which any notion of spirit and its entanglement with matter is just an empty mystical shell.

But the kernel is not necessarily rational.

“But a vision had to have been there.”*

The guitar set that follows is much longer, at least an hour, or so it seems. People shifting on their stools, and a phrase comes into my head, something along the lines of “free associating within our own conditions of unfreedom”. When DK starts the set, no one is quite sure it’s started, for at least a minute. Perhaps they think he’s warming up, testing the amp: one of those openings you get in smaller venues where people start without fanfare or announcements, matter-of-fact, that ambiguous transition. Recording her dreams and the thoughts of her brain as it shuts down for sleep, Christa Wolf writes something along the lines that it’s a tragedy that we can’t retain full consciousness of the very final moment before we fall asleep and are thus unable write it down. If we did, we wouldn’t be able to fall asleep: that’s sleep’s precondition. But somehow, perhaps precisely because she knows the impossibility of this transcription, Wolf maintains the desire to register that moment, that border: like the idea of the knowledge one’s meant to gain the very moment one dies, that split second—a wisdom about life one could transmit back to the living. And Wolf thinks

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Mid-December 2004. The Museum of Garden History, Lambeth. AMM—Eddie Prévost on percussion and John Tilbury on piano—perform with Sachiko M on empty sampler, a performance a little over an hour long, unearthed from Tilbury’s archive and released in 2025 as Testing. (The album is available from the Matchless Recordings website here.) We begin with a duet for sine wave and the rumble of muffled traffic familiar around old buildings in London, the stone and the earth vibrating with vehicles unknown when they were built. Collisions of time.

Today as I put the CD on, I have floaters in my eyes, and trying to focus them sideways on a point in the distance as you’re meant to, things start to blur and swim in the middle in the field of vision. The start of the music something like that, too. It’s several minutes before we hear a tone from the piano, the overtonal ping of a note with the string dampened by finger or object. Bending, pressing and holding the piano’s inner strings, varieties of pressure and weight can lead to the subtlest shards of resonance intended and unintended. Tilbury has been working this area for decades and each note is inflected with the history of that practice: a practice of instantaneous carefulness, patience and intense listening. Prévost’s cymbals and tam-tam are invariably bowed: percussion reinvented as bowing rather than striking, a sound sustained by an incessant movement of the arms, but not a traditionally rhythmic one. Percussion becomes a stringed instrument and the piano a kind of muffled, tuned percussion played quietly and slowly. Machines are turned against themselves, identities swap and blur.

A sudden and exquisite arpeggiated chord. Broken and rolled, the piano as harp. The snows started to melt yesterday and the temperature today leapt up by around ten degrees. The world outside the window, muffled for a month in the snow, suddenly comes to life again, and sounds from outside mingle with the performance, so I can’t tell if the birds or church bells I’m hearing are coming from the recording or from the newly-brightened daytime outside. There’s a particular quality of hush to this recording, as if the implacable harshness of Sachiko M’s test tones, buoyed on the feather down of bowed or struck piano string and metal were a kind of austere cocoon, a drained lullaby suffused with a mourning attentiveness. The scrape of percussion is like a rusted gate, a door, the piano’s ping a gentle tap. Gaining admission, quietly exiting. At one point a police siren; at another, the choked utterance of what sounds like a sampled voice; at another, a sound as if someone were quietly whistling to the side.

Seymour Wright’s liner notes link the music to plant growth, to the plant cultivation in the museum’s history, to dissociative fugue states, where one temporarily loses all sense of who one is or where one is. (As Alessandro Giustiano puts it, Sachiko’s sounds (for the most part) involve “no attack, do not offer mediation or guidance.”) And yet both Sachiko M and AMM have never sounded more like themselves, a practice of identity as dissolution.

Prévost plays a “stringed barrel drum”, a wine barrel he took from an old Italian restaurant on the Strand where AMM used to eat and repurposed into an instrument. With its added strings, it sounds somewhere between a guitar, a koto, and a lute; the upper end of a string bass, and the sound one gets from stringing rubber bands over a box to make a child’s guitar; a delicacy chunky and crude, answered by Sachiko M’s electronic rumble, crackle. Music as salvage: the empty sampler, the empty barrel, the piano, its interior treated, as per Annea Lockwood burning or flowering pianos, as a source of endlessly modified growth, of resonators and resonating devices, string and hammer and key, a finger or an object added and taking away.

At once clear and always blurring the edges, the music seeps in like the cold Wright describes on that night, seeping in from the Thames and its tides, sweeping in from the outside, bleeding into skin and stone. Like plants, musicians, too, have to weather the winter: often in freezing venues, wherever can be rented or found, to prepare, to test, to take and transform the place they’re in in the gentlest of ebbs and flows, of incremental growths, of giving and taking.

Stuart Broomer in his review talks of the music’s opening as “a study in the ineffable”. But this is also a study in the palpable. It is about presence, however stretched or suspended. Sounds that die and are succeeded by others. AMM’s second album was, after all, called The Crypt, and in their repurposed industrial sounds they perhaps refract something of the musician’s pasts, already haunted: the echoic clang of the factory, the sounds of metal striking, sparks flying, ships hauling into docks where Prévost’s grandfather worked, the post-war damage in London and other cities. In 2015, AMM performed at the Museu Industrial de Bala do Tejo in Portugal, a performance later released as Indústria. And as AMM’s music continued through the 1980s and out the other side, those characteristic sounds, their boom and swell and crackle, had come to speak all the more of the post-industrial wastelands left in Thatcher’s wake. (On the other side of the ocean, Detroit techno: both creative responses to ongoing conditions of production.) The histories, like those of the Museum of Garden History and other spaces in which AMM have performed, could be traced back even further. You might even go as far back as Prévost’s Huguenot ancestors, fleeing persecution in France. The Huguenot exodus gave the English language its word ‘refugee’, from the French réfugié ‘gone in search of refuge’: the kind of history all too easily forgotten in the current anti-migrant hostility seeded in Britain and across Europe.

The music is not “about” any of these things. Yet they surround it, are the world in which it moves. Presence stretched, suspended; sounds die and are succeeded by others. Yet in that moment of sustain—piano pedal, sampler’s infinite spread, the way a bow stroke maintains a static sound, paradoxically, through movement—and in their recorded after-life, they are never more alive.

Charles Mingus recorded this version of Martin Niemöller’s anti-fascist warning in 1965.

And today, sixty years later in Minneapolis when people intervene to help their neighbours, to come to the aid of those in their community, to attempt to ensure due legal process, they are pushed to the ground by the agents of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and shot ten times, shot four times, shot in the body on the ground, shot in the head, when pulling away in a car. Alex Pretti. Renée Good. A nurse, a poet. The observer is the new target. To be a witness a fatal act.

The Associated Press detailed that Pretti had embraced a person who had just been shoved by an agent. An agent then shoved Pretti, and the two fell back, still embracing.

They shoot down good and they shoot people embracing.

Sharing footage of death has been a necessary way of contending with the lies the administration tells in public. Evidence, reproduction, to show that this happened, even as the state doctors the photos and footage it itself releases. The image, when our eyes can’t be trusted, and the word: the lies told about the image. “I didn’t say that”. “He didn’t say that”. The image and the word. The reproduction of the image becomes a weapon, and, as a weapon, its consequences are fatal: loops of death. The line between witnessing and horrified voyeurism that for the past years of live-streamed genocide has become a part of the texture of observation. What does this do to solidarity and how we conceive of it.

Beyond these ethical questions, questions of representation, questions that matter for our conscience and our consciousness as artists, yet in ways that we find sometimes impossible to track, what matters is what you do. In Minneapolis, protests, marches, a general strike. The resistance of communities to the violence perpetrated on them, in their name.

Mingus’ recitation plays over footage from a demonstration shot for Thomas Reichman’s 1968 film Mingus. His biographer, Gene Santoro, writes:

Mingus figured you had to stand for something. The powers that be would come for you anyway. He was busted a few times with other marchers and spent time in the Tombs, New York’s downtown holding tank.

Mingus also shows Mingus facing eviction from his loft at 5, Great Jones Street, where he’d hoped to set up a music school, in 1966, and from which he was evicted after a crooked landlord set him up for a fall. The film’s last scene shows the press and cops crowding round as his instruments, his scores, his life are taken out of the building, and he’s taken to the police station after they find needles and a rifle in his belongings. He was released: no shots were fired; he planned music for a ballet called ‘My Arrest’.

The following year:

Charles Mingus, a well-known jazz musician, was arrested with two other persons late last night in a demonstration by a group of 200 hippies outside the Charles Street police station in Greenwich Village. Mr. Mingus, who was accused of scuffling with a civilian and two policemen who attempted to intervene, was charged with three counts of felonious assault. The demonstration began with a march by the hippies from Washington Square Park to the Charles Street station. It was touched off by rumors that an itinerant musician had been arrested earlier. These were later said to be unfounded. At the station the hippies sat down and began singing. The police moved the group half a block to the corner of Greenwich Avenue, where, they said, Mr. Mingus engaged in a scuffle with a motorist who had objected to hippies sitting on his car.

Mingus recorded ‘Don’t Let it Happen Here’ in March 1965, introduced by Ralph Ellison for a TV performance, and again in December, in the version released on Music Written For Monterey 1965. Not Heard... Played In Its Entirety At UCLA Vols. 1 & 2. That same year, sixty years ago, the assassinations of James Meredith, Malcolm X. Mingus fires his rifle into the ceiling and notes that it’s the same kind of gun that killed JFK. The right wing and liberal state alike claim a monopoly on violence, at home and abroad, and the vigilante forces that operate outside it, but with its tacit approval. In March 1965, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe murdered the Civil Rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo, shooting at her car as she ferried from the march on Selma. It was rumoured he’d assembled bombs for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Liuzzo grew up in one-room shacks with running water: her activism was the result of experience, of solidarity, the opposite of the KKK’s violence, as today, citizens turn up for their neighbours while others cheer on the forces of hatred. Gary Thomas Rowe received immunity.

The state assassinates people in private, and its agents murder people in public, on the highways and on the streets, whether they are activists or not. Fred Hampton. Sandra Bland. The state becomes and remains fascist because it assassinates and decimates the opposition. But this process of becoming is not some sudden leap of the cliff, though it can feel that way. The state becomes and remains fascist because the potentials for fascism are already there. In his book Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano looks at the analyses of police violence against populations of colour in the writing of Angela Davis and George Jackson to argue that fascism is a differentially-distributed experience. For some, the experience of the state is that it is already fascist. And then it spreads. The tree rotten from the inside will eventually collapse and take down everyone who’s placed their trust in it.

In Reichman’s film, Mingus delivers a sardonic monologue, tinged with furious irony and ironic fury.

I pledge allegiance to your flag—not that I want to, but for the hell of it, I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.

“If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night”, James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis a few years later.

The movement of the people in the streets can be clamped down on, it can be diverted, dispersed, thousands dead, arrested. The empire hovers over the regime, at home and abroad. The empires, plural, their vassals, their dregs. In Venezuela, in Iran. Invasion, kidnapping or ‘deals’ in exchange for extraction, of oil, of wealth: gangster capitalism, the continuation of decades of imperialism by all and any means, already dividing up the land piled up with rubble and with the dead. Fifty per cent of profits from new mineral and oil projects in Ukraine will go to the US; under the aegis of the US-led “board of peace”, the UAE plans a collaborative open-air prison marketed as a ‘safe zone’ in Gaza; the British government denies its complicity in the genocide in Sudan. But the movement doesn’t stop.

Mingus’ delivery in the TV performance is halting, as he fumbles the number of people genocided—death exceeding the weight of statistics—and over the collective noun to use—the politics of solidarity—speaking out against “those who killed…the other people with me.” And in that very awkwardness lies its clarity, its power. “And I say the only way we can avoid this is to look and speak out now. And don’t…let…it happen here”. From an opening lament spread between the brass instruments in the band as he recites Niemöller’s text, Mingus strikes up a propulsive piano figure and the band blares into collective improvisation. On the march, on the move. Fluency in fracture and the stammered statement of fact. The movement doesn’t stop. And though they may breathe in breaths strained, asphyxiated, observed, occupied, a breath that comes in gasps, a breath in combat, the people—continue to breathe.

Back in summer 2024, I met the improviser and sound artist ake, visiting Europe from China. I didn’t see the outdoor performance she did for Yaqin Si’s Daybreak Concert Series, but during one of the Expanded Improvisation Workshops I’ve been co-running with the theorist-artist-improviser Mattin, we were introduced to the piece, or exercise, ake had performed there—of which more below—and which, on this occasion, saw us go into a soundproofed room, individually and then collectively, and scream.

This was by no means the first, nor will it be the last exercise or piece or framework or practice to deal with that kind of intensity. (Take Mattin’s own records with Junko.) But in the context of the workshop, it opened up a whole other dimension of cracks and fissures within the social, within individual experiences of alienation and their collectivisation we’d been thinking through, via Mattin’s concept of social dissonance, and via the collective practice we came across in the “small musical commons” of Eddie Prévost’s weekly, basement-based London Improvisation workshop.

In such moments, something’s released into the air: a sound, a possibility. There’s a risk you fall apart. Falling apart, holding thing stogether, being held or holding them in, these of restraint and constraint as both positive and negative factors in socially-atomised existences, all these are concerns ake’s work raises.

A few days later, in another basement, this one a rehearsal studio, ake joined a few of us and played a sustained violin drone that, once more, changed the whole atmosphere of the music we’d been playing up to that point: unwavering, even more than one might be able to face in its implacable intensity, and yet with a distance, an inner barrier, inside it—constricted, and yet full of variation and possibility. That kind of framework is at once interruption and continuation or expansion of pressures already present, but silenced, both within and outside the space of performance. A bowed drone drawn out on a violin might seem the antithesis of the exploration of the scream: restraint rather than catharsis, reductionism rather than performance art-adjacent excess. But within the world that ake’s practice exists in and creates, they share something fundamental in common.

ake’s biography describes her as “a surrogate weeper, currently working and living in Beijing, conducting site and context specific sound experiments, events, behaviors and installations, also writing poetry, being a musician, organizer and waiter”. Among other activities, ake “accidentally initiated the nomadic space A2 space”, and appears as part of collaborative projects on Zhu Wenbo’s Beijing-based cassette label Zoomin’ Night, as well as Yan Jun’s sub jam cassette box Silence is Shit, but ake (阿科), released in January 2025 as Sub jam 020, is her first solo album.

Working with the material to hand, ake’s work gives a new, subversive meaning to the well-worn term “site-specific”. The eight tracks fit together awkwardly, like a kind of broken jigsaw. They refuse to build up to a unity, but remain fragments, though, as fragments, they are in themselves whole: broken wholes, wholly broken. A majority of the tracks are field recordings, though this is no pastoral. If it has a ‘field’, it is the field of the (urban) social: social action and social inaction as experienced in the corners of everyday life, the boredoms and discontents and acts of quiet rebellion by which one might negotiate one’s way through the world and its systems, what is given to us, what is taken away from us. These are recordings of environments, or recordings that make environments, that intervene in them, that frame and re-frame them, that question or that spark questions. Workers destroying a wall in a Shenzen hotel are heard from a bed, the hammer blows a kind of impromptu drum set, accompanied by scattered fragments of conversation.

‘now first’, which follows, is labelled a ‘field recording’. It’s also ten minutes of the sound of a human being crying. How to listen to this? How do we listen to this album? A field recording is supposed to put emphasis on the environment, but these recordings often feel ‘inwards’ as much ‘outward’. It sometimes feels as if the listening is being done as much by the performer as the listener, eavesdropping, confused. Yet the performer themselves is hardly some sort of hidden mastermind, the composer at their desk, the sound artist shaping with expert directorial flourish. Is the person performing here performing? An actor, forcing themselves to weep? A kind of reversal of the singer who turns tears musical in Dowland or ‘Dido’s Lament’, turning music back into tears?

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!

Exiled for ever, let me mourn;

Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,

There let me live forlorn.

I’ve quoted before somewhere Adorno’s comment in the Philosophy of New Music that the original of all music is in itself weeping.

As at its end, so the origin of music reaches beyond the sphere of intentions, that of meaning and subjectivity. It is a gestural art, closely akin to crying. It is the gesture of dissolving. […] The sentimentality of inferior music caricatures what superior music is truly capable of shaping at the boundary of frenzy: reconciliation. The man [sic] who surrenders to tears in music that no longer resembles him at the same time allows the stream of what he himself is not—what was dammed up back of the world of things—to flow back into him. In tears and in singing, the alienated world is entered. “Tears pour, the earth has taken me back”—this is the gesture of music. Thus, the earth reclaims Eurydice. The gesture of returning, not the feeling of waiting, describes the expression of all music, even in a world worthy of death.

But what kicks in ake’s ‘now first’—anxiety, empathy, the urge to stop the tears, the impossiblity, given the distance of recording, of doing so—goes beyond any

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—Jessie Cox’s Sounds of Black Switzerland

—Jack Spicer’s Collected Letters and some new Spicerian titles from Wry Press

—Records by the Urs Graf Concert / Gabriel Bristow and Steve Noble

—ake’s debut on Sub Jam

—Bassoonist Karen Borca’s Good News Blues

—Poetry by Ariel Yelen

—N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus

—Archival releases from Horace Tapscott

In the meantime, as the sub-zero temperatures descend and the new year begins with the latest bout of criminal invasion, the latest oil-grab and imperialist intervention, the latest blatant violation of international law, some astonishing footage of the Blue Notes at Ronnie Scott’s Old Place on the Ogun Records youtube channel. Ian Hutchinson’s original film The Real McGregor, shot in 1967 and restored by Paul D.J. Moody in 2025, is prefaced with some brief excerpts of newly-shot contemporary interviews—including Hazel Miller, Evan Parker and the late Louis Moholo-Moholo—filmed as a part of an in-progress documentary on the Blue Notes. The (colour) footage itself follows. Chris McGregor on piano, Dudu Pukwana, alto, Mongezi Feza, pocket trumpet, Ronnie Beer, tenor, Johnny Dyanu, bass, and Moholo on drums, playing in the small original venue of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, maintained by John Jack after Ronnie Scott’s itself moved on to a bigger premises, music every night of the week.

The only previously-available footage of the group I’d seen catches them in an earlier iteration, shortly after initially moving to Europe. Though the footage only offers truncated glimpses of a full performance, they’re still more recognisably within the bop-oriented mode with which they’d began than the free music to which they soon gravitated within the experimental laboratory of the London music scene. In terms of records, the music featured here is most reminiscent of the 1968 album Very Urgent, released under McGregor’s name, perhaps the group’s closest engagement with free jazz, and in itself marking a transitional stage to the emergence of the Brotherhood of Breath big band, documented in a chapter of Bill Shoemaker’s excellent Jazz in the Seventies.

For these exiles, uprooted from their homeland by apartheid, The Old Place became a kind of home, a lab, as well as a stage. Shoemaker notes that “without a piano in his flat, McGregor spent all-nighter after all-nighter composing in the damp, cold basement venue, often falling asleep at the piano”. Informed by material difficulty, in which the group often struggled for gigs and to make ends meet, the music has as its backround too loss, sorrow, and turmoil: The Blue Notes’ original tenor player Nik Moyake, returned to South Africa soon after the group’s original departure, dying of a brain tumour in 1965, while Moholo and Dyani would be stranded for months in Argentina, where they’d gone on tour with Steve Lacy, after the 1966 anti-commnist military coup (watched with approval by the USA). But this is not music of existential negativity, formalist exploration, or anarchic destruction, tendencies perhaps more pronounced in the European versions of free music in which it participated, so much as the persistent and insistent declaration of liberation, as a process always in motion. Key to the Blue Notes was the influence of kwela, a Zulu word meaning “get up”. In 1967, Pukwana, Beer and McGregor appeared on Gwigwi Mwrebi’s album Kwela. McGregor hung out with Albert Ayler for several days, talking and playing. Dancing, and other forms of ascension, rising. Free music was not a movement away from dance but into other ways of moving and using the body.

In this footage, we see the Blue Notes a few years into their exile from apartheid, playing as if their lives depended on it, or with a new lease of life, the formal opening up of the music to create that unique and beautiful synthesis of free playing and endless melodic capacity, song as collective repository. Within the basement club’s cramped conditions, it’s all the camera can do to keep the musicians in the frame: an intimacy and an expansion, as if the collective and individual force this group represented couldn’t be contained by the media in which it was captured. Recordings after all, as we know from Baraka’s comment on Albert Ayler, are but rumours of the original, in-person blaze of sound. Rumours, ruins. But here they are through the restored lo-fi haze, dispelling time’s mists and basement cold in blazing heat: Mongezi Feza’s foot lurching out as if kicking a football or stabilizing himself during his solos, as if otherwise his playing might cause him to levitate: Moholo stopping playing for a moment, looking exhausted but not spent, preparing himself to re-enter a music which it sometimes seems can never stop; a Dyani bass solo which cuts away to images of painting, a laughing baby, the life that surrounds the music that compresses it into the space of a bandstand and the time of a gig; the furious, raucuous, joyous collective soloing by Feza, Pukwana, Ronnie Beer. (Perhaps the least-remembered of The Blue Notes today, Beer later left music to build boats in Ibiza but was a key part of the South African jazz scenes from which they emerged: this film offers a fine opportunity to see him at work). McGregor’s piano, meanwhile, launches speedy runs that blur into the sustain pedal then come out again into staccatoed clarity, moving in surges or waves, and the music as a whole is constant movement, towards the end of apartheid, yes, but also that constant search that moves beyond any end point. Restored from another era, the music sounds out of a past but also with the promise of a future not yet arrived. The music’s quality, Evan Parker notes in his interview, is “certainty”. As the year turns, reading the news, going out on the street, facing the upending of orders or their continuance in more brazen form, the spread once more of something that moves towards a fascist consensus, all gives rise to of doubt, despair, a series of shocks. That certainty is something vital. It’s how The Blue Notes survived—and—maybe—it’s how we might get out of this.

Below the paywall, an essay on the varied career of the neglected saxophonist Robin Kenyatta. This might be the first substantial piece on him in decades—at least, according to my initial attempts at researching Kenyatta: a player who’s been on the edge of my listening consciousness for a while now, since hearing his solos on records by Bill Dixon and Andrew Hill, but whose full career had so far eluded me. There’s still much that’s unclear, but for now, consider this something like a listening guide.

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What is the relation of free jazz (bearing in mind all caveats on the term) to song? For all its reputation for noise, melody is everywhere. Ornette Coleman is the exemplar here, his approach primarily motivic, melodic. Glorious surges of melody flowed out of Cecil Taylor, which, like Charles Mingus, he would call or sing out to musicians in rehearsals. John Tchicai, a singer of songs on his solos through the alto aslant. The extended, angular unison melodies of Sunny Murray, ‘Giblets’ or ‘Hilariously’, imbued with a kind of unparseable, a bright and bitter hope. Ornette Coleman and ‘What Reason Could I Give’ with Asha Puthli, or the version of ‘Lonely Woman’ sung by Patty Waters on Marzette Watts’s The Marzette Watts Ensemble (a record produced by Dixon); the tapestry of melodies in Don Cherry’s work; Clifford Thornton’s The Gardens of Harlem, the extraordinary cracked melodies of Arthur Doyle’s prison-composed Songbook: musicians continued to write songs, with words or without, with vocals or not, songs that in mood or form went beyond the usual designation of the up-tempo number, the ballad, the ‘tune’.

This is the tradition, too, explored in Elaine Mitchener’s ‘Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde’ project: Christine Spencer singing Archie Shepp’s ‘On this Night (If that Great Day Would Come)’, Ella Jackson singing Muhal Richard Abrams’s ‘How are You?’ on Things to Come from Those Now Gone, Abbey Lincoln on ‘Triptych’ from We Insist!, Andrew Hill’s work with choir on Lift every Voice, the songs and processionals and chants throughout Sun Ra: a tradition of song neither that of Broadway nor the jazz standard nor the pop song as it came to be understood with the advent of rock; not folk song nor classical lieder, nor musicals, nor art song per se, but another kind of work, another kind of structured intimacy.

This expanded sense of song form had been a part of jazz since well before its codification into the Great American Songbook. (It goes back at least, for example, to Adelaide Hall on ‘Creole Love Call’ in 1927). And it’s not just there in the more overtly composed, art song-styled vocal pieces like those of Shepp or Abrams. Monk and Herbie Nichols didn’t—or didn’t always—write ‘heads’ to be soloed over: they played their compositions. ‘Monk’s Mood’ or ‘Crepuscle with Nellie’ are through-composed pieces. Many Ellington and Strayhorn pieces, both in miniature and more expanded form, contain little ‘soloing’ per se. ‘Melancholia’, ‘Reflection in D’, ‘Absinthe (Lament for an Orchid)’, ‘Star-Crossed Lovers (Pretty Girl)’, ‘New World-A-Coming’. This is not to undervalue the extended improvisation which is one of this music’s greatest contributions, nor to separate ‘mere’ song from capital C composition, but to emphasize that these are all imbricated in ways not often acknowledged. And there is no name for this imbrication, still, because of the delimitations, the expectations and assumptions historically placed on Black composers. Perhaps that’s what “the American songbook” really means, its true form.

When Bill Dixon improvises on trumpet or flugelhorn, is that ‘jazz’, and when he writes a through-composed piece of music for a soprano, is that ‘classical’, even though the latter may contain more ‘jazz’ chords than the former? Ben Young notes: “For any number of reasons—which may never fully be known—Dixon’s musical activities in the late Seventies focused more heavily on the composition and refinement of his own songs—short pieces with and without words.”

Hired in 1968 at Bennington College, Vermont, initially to work with his then-partner Judith Dunn in the dance department, Dixon began playing piano for Dunn’s dance classes, not, he insisted, “[as] an accompanist, but [as] a musician-composer”.[i] Dixon began studying piano, his second instrument, in 1958, renting an instrument and teaching himself by studying for twelve hours day. The piano, he remarked, gave him a renewed spatial sense of the music. “You can look at it and see the juxtaposition and distance of notes, unlike the trumpet and saxophone, where you snatch the notes out of the air without being able to see the relationship”. Ten years later, working increasingly with the instrument at Bennington, “I wrote a lot of songs”.

Not pop, but Ellington- or Strayhorn-styled songs that grew out of playing the piano in that context of dance classes. When I became very attached to Hugo Wolf, I wrote some songs like I imagined he would have written. I really liked the form of the song—some of Berg’s songs, for instance—but there was no place for me to go doing that. So I just wrote them and used them where I could [...] None of them were abstract […] it was good for me because it was utilitarian.

Writing a waltz at the request of dancer Jack Moore, or songs to be sung by students in recital, Dixon worked within established forms that were “rhythmically intact” but “melodically, harmonically and spatially interesting for me”. Composed on his studio electric piano for students, recitals, theatre or dance pieces, rehearsals, the resulting pieces were acts of community, extending the commercial freelancing work he used to do transcribing Miles Davis solos and gospel songs. Dixon’s earliest recorded music on Archie Shepp—Bill Dixon Quartet (1963) found him writing for small, piano-less groups reminiscent of those of Ornette Coleman. Beginning with the septet pieces on his side of the split record with Shepp the following year, and maturing in the long work ‘Pomegranate’, performed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966, the record Intents and Purposes (1967) and his work with the University of the Streets orchestra (a single, lo-fi bootleg of a 1968 performance of which is available), he moved towards long-form, suite-like structures. This preference for longer modes would characterise—though not exclusively—much of his ensemble music from that point on. In the earlier ’60s, however, Dixon also freelanced for Savoy Records by transcribing lead sheets for gospel songs for the purposes of copyright registration, and in 1965, he composed two song for a staging of Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule as part of a

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Angelika Niescier—Marta Sánchez—Tim Berne—David Murray—Elder Ones—London Jazz Composers Orchestra—Amalie Dahl—Fire! Orchestra—Mary Halvorson—Marc Ribot—Mopcut and MC Dälek—Sakinda Abdou—The Handover—Moabit Imaginarium—James Brandon Lewis—Cadences—Where we’re going.

All photos in this post © Berliner Festspiele and Camille Blake.

So back to the beginning. On the first night of the festival, I saw two contrasting trios. Angelika Niescier (alto saxophone) with Tomeka Reid (cello) and Eliza Salem (drums) at the Festspiele Haus played Niescier’s compositions—bruising, relentless, pulse-oriented. At the nearby jazz club A-Trane, Marta Sánchez’s piano trio, also playing the leader’s original compositions, offered a set of truncated lyricism, with an especially effective re-versioning of Monk’s ‘We See’. Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer were magnificent. Tim Berne’s Capatosta at the Charlottenburg institution Quasimodo ploughed the furrow he’s ploughed so effectively for decades: in his words, “asymmetrical, weird, ‘almost groove’ stuff [with] just enough information [...] to make the players avoid cliches and licks.” Of particular note: Tom Rainey is a phenomenal drummer and ideally suited to the music, cracking and snapping in a perpetual jittering dance.

David Murray’s favourite saxophonist is Paul Gonsalves, not necessarily an obvious choice, and somewhat undersung within the pantheon. Just as Gonsalves managed to sound “modern” in the bop era, despite not being a bop player per se, so, perhaps, Murray was never really the Aylerseque New Thing player he was a first made out to be, but somewhere in between bop, post-bop, free music, and the influences of earlier forms, along with Mingus’ deep and complex romanticism (and nods to the Third Stream). On the second night, Murray’s quartet, with Sánchez once more heard on piano, and a guest appearance from Murray’s wife, poet Francesca Cillini, offers no real surprises, but it’s a music nonetheless of huge spirit and an unshakeable optimism which feels infectious and real rather than forced. Following them, Makaya McCraven’s fusion-oriented band play material in part derived from transcriptions of recorded improvisations, their set, amongst the most popular of the festival, rapturously received.

Over in the Festspiele Haus’s entrance hall, Elder Ones, led by singer-composer-harmonium player Amirtha Kidambi offer something more intense. “We are a protest band, and protest is in the tradition of this music”, Kidambi announces, prefacing the band’s lengthy songs with political speeches on the rise of Fascism, Gaza, Trump, UAE funding of genocide in Sudan, the environmental costs of AI—but it’s the music, from a forthcoming album, that really does the talking. They’re long, composed units, out of which particular solos or textures emerge: Lester St Louis, on bass rather than his accustomed cello, dragging on low arco notes, bright-sharp solos for saxophonists Alfredo Colon and Matt Nelson. But they’re also, importantly, songs. Charlie Haden and Carla Bley’s Liberation Music Orchestra might be one comparison, combining arrangements of socialist song with the intensity and energy of new music; so too, the politically-inclined art rock of Henry Cow, Komintern, Art Bears. Perhaps most of all, however, the music shares a sensibility Kidambi herself terms “spiritual punk” with her friend, the late jaimie branch, with whom she briefly co-led a quartet, and who booked Elder Ones’ first gig.

In her eulogy for branch, Kidambi notes that Elder Ones and branch’s Fly Or Die, which included St Louis and drummer Jason Nazary, both formed during the first Trump presidency, and both create a take on protest music which draws on multiple genres—among them Bhajan singing for Kidambi, Mariachi music for branch—within the general sphere of jazz, their approach to song-writing likewise characterised by “the same method of handwriting charts and literally cutting and taping them together in a kind of motley arts and craft style of editing”. It would be tempting to link the music’s combination of spontaneity and organisational complexity to the demands of contemporary anti-fascist struggles. What comes through, most, though, is spirit: defiance, resistance, continuance.

All these were smaller groups, but the festival also booked a number of large ensembles (to call them “big bands” would only be half-accurate). On the third day, the London Jazz Composers Orchestra under Barry Guy presents the third iteration of Guy’s double piano concerto ‘Double Trouble’, first written for the Globe Unity Orchestra with Howard Riley and Alex von Schlippenbach back in 1989, and subsequently revised for Marilyn Crispell and the late Irène Schweizer, and now revised again for Crispell and Angelica Sanchez. An expansive work, it’s constructed around what seem to be two main themes, one romantic, and one hymn-like, around which are woven a panoply of different solos and instrumental combinations: wailing saxophones, blaring tuba and trombones, some very hyperactive drumming. Besides the pianists, there’s a gorgeous opening from Charlotte Keefe on trumpet, followed a bit later by an ever more gorgeous variant on the same material by undersung veteran Henry Lowther; an impressive alto solo from Mette Rasmussen that rises from romantic yearning to ferocious squalling over a rising orchestral backdrop. Like Kidambi’s long song form, as an approach to the interweaving of composition and improvisation, it never feels overly formal or formalist: there is so much music packed in here, one hardly knows when to stop.

The big band of Danish, but Oslo-based saxophonist Amalie Dahl, Dafnie EXTENDED reminded me at times of John Tchicai’s great large ensemble Cadentia Nova Danica (a release of whose 1968 Wigmore Hall concert is forthcoming in January from the Italian label formalibera). Her own solos have a Tchicaian economy and clarity of melodic thinking, and rather un-Tchicain propensity for paint-peeling altissimo frequencies—treated, not so much as outbursts of emotion as structural elements. At one point, Dahl’s conduction of the orchestra in a rising-pitch crescendo and volume under Sofia Salvo’s squalling baritone solo provoked my neighbors in the audience into an audible yell of alarm. (I think we can safely say they are not partisans of the avant-garde.) Later that evening, the Fire! Orchestra played a single, long suite, free-form improvised sections alternating with loud, riff-based song material. Celebratory, rhythmically-driven, exuberant, their set at times reminded me of Centipede, the giant jazz/rock big band led by Keith Tippett in the ’70s, and Julie Tippetts’ rousing closing number to Septober Energy, ‘Unite for every nation’. Here, the vocals were from Sofia Jernberg, who leans towards extended techniques, and from the duet of drummer Mariá Portugal and guitarist Julien Desprez; Mariam Rezaei’s turntables

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(This is the second of three posts on this year’s Jazz Fest Berlin. The first two are longer essays on particular sets by Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer and by Pat Thomas, the third a more general overview of the festival.)

I’ve seen Pat Thomas play numerous times over the years: first as a member of Oxford Improvisers, which Thomas co-founded, and then as part of the scene around Café Oto in London where, whether with Black Top, his evolving set of collaborations co-led with Orphy Robinson, with [ahmed], the phenomenally successful cooperative quartet devoted to reinterpreting the compositions of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, or in numerous other more ad-hoc combinations, on electronics or piano, he imports a distinct combination of instant authority and live-wire unpredictability to any context he appears in.1 His music widens and deepens all the time.

At the Festspiele Haus, audience members who’d protested at the loud points in the previous set by Amalie Dahl’s big band then walked out half way through Pat Thomas’s solo set. Their loss. It’s been excellent to see Thomas getting recognition of late outside the UK, of whose improv scene he has been so fundamental a part for so many years. Typical of Thomas that this high-profile festival appearance saw him dilute the music not one iota.

Thomas manifests absolute presence on stage: gregarious off it, on stage he is all business, sitting down and playing without the need of announcements or framing beyond the music itself. In an improvised solo set in the vein of the recent records The Solar Model of Ibn-Shatir and The Bliss of Bliss back to Nur in 1994, Thomas played what were essentially a series of short pieces: not quite miniatures, but relatively brief, each a study in a particular technique or texture. (One might call them études, perhaps.) Two were studies in rhythm and the harmonics that ring off a scraped or plucked piano strong, particular down the lower end of the instrument; the others focused on thick, splashy clusters and hand-over-hand runs dispensing with tonality as old news.

Thomas (‘Blind Tom’) Wiggins, to whom Thomas has previously paid tribute, was one of the first to use the tone cluster as device in a piano piece, in his programme-music depiction of the first large-scale battle of the American Civil War—a substantial Union defeat—The Battle of Manassas (1861). A cluster is a chord which exceeds the condition of a chord, a thick mass of adjacent notes. If a chord is like a familiar shape, a triangle say, a square or a circle, the cluster is like a shape, but one for which we do not have a name: a cloud, a thing whose form appears to be without form. In its history, the cluster is both representational and something which exceeds representation. Sometimes the cluster was the product of multiple intersecting lines, the excess of polyphony, as in some instances from Bach—a fleeting effect, where the layering of lines which must be heard as separate and individual for their effect briefly blurs. For Jean-Féry Rebel it stood for the primal chaos from wich God created the world; for Heinrich Biber, the chaos of the Thirty Years War which killed half the German population and decimated much of western Europe. Wiggins takes this up in his Battle of Manassas, where alternations of the anthems of respective parties—Dixie, the Union anthem, and La Marseillase played by rescuing forces on a train, are punctuated by sound effects including whistling and puffing to represent the train, left-hand grace notes that imitate drum rolls, and clusters representing cannon fire. Different kinds of freedom are heard in contestation. For Wiggins, the cluster pushes at the border of representation—the sound of cannon- or rifle-fire, the piano itself as mechanism, technology, machine. And first in Monk’s use of dissonantly-adjacent keyboard notes—not quite clusters, but moving in that direction—and then in Cecil Taylor’s of a variety of forms of clusters—explicated in Mark Micchelli’s excellent paper on Taylor’s piano technique—the cluster moves yet further in the direction of abstraction, as intricacy rather than simplicity, the thickness of texture overburdening the confines of the traditional chord, seeing how much information, how many notes can be pushed into the music to make it resonate and ring.2

In those forms of Black abstraction and, too, the anti-programmatic, anti-idiomatic form of abstraction of the UK and European free improvisation in which Thomas made his name, the cluster represents nothing so much as itself. It refuses to speak for or about anything, but its force, its pulverizing power, articulates presence, destabilisation, sound as mass rather than line, color-field rather than etching. And in its tendency to erase the traditional forms of harmonic or melodic linear or vertical movement, the use of cluster as method turns the piano into the orchestra of drums Taylor always said it was, tuned and pounding.

And abstraction too, might have to do with Islam, with Thomas’s Sufi faith—those qualities of attention, aesthetic or theological, that move beyond limits of representational form. (“Nur is an Arabic word meaning light, a very intense light that illuminates everything.”) Along with clusters, another way the music moves toward abstraction occurs in the way Thomas runs up and down more traditionally-formed chords: a way of thinking through different ways of organising sound than those of melody supported by harmony.

There’s an obscure track from Thelonious Monk’s final recording sessions in London

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To hear Wadada Leo Smith’s sound in person is to have your ears gently collapse, rebuild themselves. Its particular kind of intensity is matched by little else I’ve heard in person. Marshall Allen’s alto saxophone blasting into the front row and almost directly into my left ear, one night when the Arkestra and audience were somehow crammed into the back room of a pub in Bristol, or Abdullah Ibrahim’s absolute slow intensity and intent of touch at the piano, heard across a much more cavernous auditorium last year, are not things I’m ever likely to forget. But Smith’s tone on trumpet burns through the air, it sings and speaks. Luminous axis; prism of light: split into constituent colours, bending in speed as it changes from air to prismatic glass at angles bending and separating into visible spectrum or rainbow; to analyze the light from stars or other sources, to determine their composition.

I’ve seen Smith in several different contexts: on a balcony in Potsdam in a heatwave, two summers ago; at the Jacqueline du Pré Recital Hall in Oxford in 2011; on the boards of London’s Conway Hall in 2012; and now, this November, on the stage of the Berlin Festspiele Haus in what was announced as his final European tour. Each time, in whatever context—acoustic, electric, reverbed or clean—Smith’s signal achievement is to play as if each note is of weight—yet without ponderousness, with rhythmic alacrity, elasticity. This doesn’t meant that each note is articulated or elongated in the same way, plays the same role in melodic architecture—for Smith is predominantly a melodic player, however abstracted his melodies become—but it is to indicate a quality of equality, a non-hierarchical approach to phrasing and to the overall architecture of a piece—a quality closer, perhaps, to meditation, a concept Smith says he first discovered through reading about Marcus Aurelius at the age of twelve, the year before he started playing trumpet, and which guides his piece more than do more familiar notions of development, climax, tension-and-release.

Smith’s ‘Rhythm Unit’ concept, developed in the 1970s, but with its origin in ‘The Bell’ from the late ’60s, involves giving notes and silences equally priority, so that every period of sound had to be filled with an equal period of silence. Each phrase can be a complete piece in itself, is sufficient in itself. As he explains in his self-produced 1976 pamphlet Rhythm: a study in rhythms-units in creative music: “A single sound or rhythm, a series of rhythm/sound, or a grouping of more than one series of sound rhythm as a complete piece of music and thus need not be so- called developed further to be appreciated as a whole fresh realized work or piece [...] The correct understanding of each unit is: the value given to an audible unit is followed by the relative equivalence of silence.” So that when Smith plays, each note could be the first note, each note could be the last, because each note matters, is a statement, a pebble dropped into water as into silence and so rippling out in circles concentric or otherwise, the spot where time stops.

But how to describe Smith’s sound? You could say: “Smith plays a Yamaha custom Xeno II 1993 silver trumpet with a Monette mouthpiece. He also has a Flugelhorn and mouthpiece, built by Erhurt Todt in 1981, in what was then East Germany.” You could use words like “regal” (Jonathan Finlayson) or “majestic” (Roy Hargrove). And, since at least Notes (8 Pieces) Source a New World Music: Creative Music (1973), Smith has been a longstanding and capacious theorist of his own music and the notational and philosophical system which expresses it, Ankhrasmation. But neither technical breakdown nor metaphorics, still, will get at this thing, Smith’s sound, which is so palpably material, cuts so keenly through air and ear, and yet so evades the mechanics of language, of description scientific or poetic.

You could ask instead: where does this sound from come from? “ ‘My sound is authentically me, and it comes from here.’ Smith touched his diaphragm and his heart. ‘It doesn’t come from a mouthpiece. It doesn’t even come from an instrument.’” From inside Smith, but Smith himself, his sound, comes from many places. Smith talks of “the sound that is already congregated inside the trumpet”, the sound the player actualises. So, too, that sound translates what they hear, what they know, what they absorb, as if through osmosis, the semi-permeable layer between self, sound and socius.

Smith’s sound is, first, the Blues (the root). Smith’s stepfather Alex “Little Bill” Wallace was a blues musician, and this is the music he was immersed in from when he began playing at the age of twelve. The blues, not as genre, but as experience of life. “It’s not a harmonic progression and it never was,” says Smith of the blues, “and that’s the freest phenomenon you could find. It’s just tone, that’s the only thing about it—and I think that’s a beautiful thing that it’s tone, because that is generating, or connecting its unified point”.

And then Smith’s sound is Jazz, the tributary flowing

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In the past few weeks, I’ve been working quite intensively on a long essay on Cecil Taylor’s poetry for what looks to be an expansive collection on Taylor’s work edited by Peter Valente. Having long thought a book like this should happen, I’m delighted it finally is! Taylor’s work has meant a lot to me for what seems like forever—certainly, since writing, or trying to write an MA thesis on his poetry back in 2011: a somewhat wobbly first step, or what Taylor himself would call an ‘Excursion on a Wobbly Rail.’

This latest iteration is part of what I think of as a suite of writing on Taylor’s work, particularly his poetry: a memorial post in 2018, a piece for Chicago Review in 2019, and an essay on Taylor and vodou for Point of Departure in 2020. It updates all that with some new reseearch—the conference on Taylor’s work at CUNY in 2019, Phil Freeman’s recent biography of Taylor, In the Brewing Luminous, a valuable chronological synthesis of existing materials and new interviews, and—not least—seeing a copy of Taylor’s unpublished poetry manuscript, Mysteries, of which the first page is above.

Besides that essay, I’m planning for other writing on Taylor, its final form yet to be determined, to find its place in two current manuscripts on music, Survival Music and Ensembles. Taylor’s work continues to mean a huge amount to me. An all-consuming music, an all-consuming vision. Here’s a bit of the work in progress:

In the film Imagine the Sound, Taylor speaks of making “the commitment to poetry”. But what did poetry mean for Cecil Taylor? Poetry was, I argue in this essay, where he theorized his artistic conception. It was poetry he credited with saving his life, and in turn, it became part of the way he understood the nature of life, his own life, and that of life in general; of how to live one’s life, of how to approach art with charm, with ferocious grace, and with the unstinting courage of conviction.

Lots to catch up on in the meanwhile....In the not too distant future, I’m hoping to post here some writing on Wadada Leo Smith and a report on the Berlin Jazz Festival. Some other things are in the works as well. For now, news and some capsule reviews, notices of new work...

—‘Dream in a Hailstorm of Riots’, a long piece on the new collected poems of Jayne Cortez, is up at the Poetry Foundation.

From the mid 1960s through the early aughts, Cortez wrote about the political crises of her times: Attica, Allende, Palestine, Rwanda. But like fellow African-American Surrealists Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman, she was as interested in transforming reality as in documenting it. She bursts generalities and stereotypes in startling catalogues of surreal images that build around repeated phrases like the riffs of an improvising soloist. In her work, observations of everyday life and political events turn into dream visions, apocalyptic landscapes, meditations, and exhortations that crackle with energy, rage, and love. Above all, she is perhaps the poet of what her generation referred to as “The Music,” the various traditions of jazz, the blues, and R&B that soundtracked the freedom dreams of the Black liberation struggle. Cortez wrote poems in tribute to musicians and led her own band, the Firespitters, for decades. Hers is a voice—both on and off the page—that speaks with authority, curiosity, and an unshakeable faith in the power of poetry to change consciousness and change lives.

—Honoured to receive this attentive review by Eric Keenaghan of Never By Itself Alone at Resources for American Literary Study. Eric’s own work on queer coalitions, and with the writing of Muriel Rukeyser is, are necessary projects of historical reclamation and reminders of traditions of principle, resistance, and the complex negotiations of struggle for committed writers in times of crisis—needless to say, perhaps more relevant than ever.

—An essay on John Wieners from almost ten years(!) ago, now in print in Utter Vulnerability: Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners, edited by Michael Kindellan and Alex/Rose Cocker, published by Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. This was the first thing I wrote after handing in my Ph.D thesis and it feels like a signficant part of the work I did since then flowed out of this way of thinking. It’s about love and poetry and fire and Wieners’s relationship to his first love, Dana Durkee.

This chapter addresses what John Wieners claimed was the most important romantic attachment of his life—that with his partner of six years, Dana Durkee—and the eventual ending of that relationship. As I’ll show, this loss can be said, in part, to have prompted Wieners’ fully-fledged entry into the world of poetry, prompting the composition of his breakthrough volume The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), and it seeps into the minute fabric of his language itself, whether through conscious acts of address, revision and removal, or sublimated elements of textual echo which at once memorialise and disavow the object of loss. By introducing this element of biographical resonance, I do not wish to reduce Wieners’ poetry to a pained lyric exceptionalism, the poet as an exemplary figure of suffering removed from the social conditions that produce that suffering. Rather, such information serves as a means of heightening the way loss and despair intersect with socially produced domination, and the problems of community and desire in the face of persecution and its constant threat. As Denise Levertov astutely noted in 1965, in Wieners’ work, “Confessional” subjects such as mental breakdowns and the pain and loneliness of queer love are “not autobiographically written about, they are conditions out of which it happens that songs arise”.

—And last but not least, I’m very pleased that CJ Martin and Julia Drescher’s Further Other Book Works have taken on Abstractive, the book of poems and visual art works I wrote with the great Candace Hill Montgomery last year (with some final tweaks this past month). More details will be forthcoming. For now, as a sneak preview, here’s a page of the manuscript….

The poets I love, the musicians I love, the artists I love, are not those in the centre but on the edges; not the ones who survive easily or the ones who survive at all, but the ones whose art and life gives us some insight into this business of survival, whether or not they always had the means or reserves—material or physical or mental or spiritual or otherwise—to make it. For the last few years, I’ve been working on a book on free jazz called Survival Music, and that framing question of survival is something I’ve been thinking of more and more in these times of genocide, of people we know or know of dying and struggling; of the ever-crueller global shift towards an order that in its cruelty at once takes us backwards towards the explicit displays of power and might and segregation and discrimination we might in some quarters have relegated to history—or wished we could so relegate—and forward into a future whose fusion of techno-capitalism, extreme wealth disparity, environmental destruction, the world as a vast lab for financial experimentation, of whose horror we can perhaps only begin to dream.

And on the question of survival, I think of musicians like Charles Gayle or Henry Grimes or Giuseppi Logan or Sonny Simmons or Kalaparusha who lost their homes, living in supported accommodation or phoneboxes or abandoned buildings and playing on the streets, but still playing; and of poets like Stephen Jonas or John Wieners or Bob Kaufman or Bernadette Mayer or Alice Notley, whether they survived or not, what their music and what their poetry has to teach us about survival. Poets who lived in or occupied the outer edge, the outside, the underground, outside the outside. Kaufman’s vow of silence during a time of imperial war; Mayer’s and Notley’s reckoning with the exigencies of renting and parenthood and gendered labour and the commitment to art all costs, money or no money; Jonas’s and Wieners’s hanging out and hanging on in Boston equipped, it sometimes seemed, with little more than a belief in poetry at all costs, poetry as salvation. People who were so often living, by choice or not, whatever we take “choice” to be, on the edge, house or unhoused, with dwindling or non-existent incomes, and who took poetry from there—not because, as in the poète maudit myth, that’s the place where poetry has to live, or the only place it can come from, but because it’s so often a place where poetry is one of the few things left, the art that can happen anywhere, can happen inside, winter fuel, a little fire burning in the buildings everyone left behind to clear and build their palaces and condos and arms factories. And today, it seems instructive that so much of the writing that has come out of Gaza during the genocide that began or accelerated in 2023 has been poetry: a few lines here and there, a whole poem, a whole book, a poetry whose poets have often not survived their poems—poets like Refaat Alareer—a poetry whose poets, despite the odds, continue to survive. Poets like Refaat Alareer’s student Nour Abdel Latif, in whose ‘If We Must Starve’ from June this year to Refaat Alareer’s ‘If I Must Die’ in 2011 to Claude McKay’s ‘If We Must Die’ in 1919. Poems in which the imagination of death and its aftermath becomes, quite literally, the way to imagine a future beyond death and its regimes, its dominion.

Musicians Adegoke (Ade) Steve Colson and Iqua Colson have been writing and recording music for over fifty years. Their new album GLOW came out this summer, with liner notes by Robin D.G. Kelley. It features pieces written as far back as 1968, lovesongs, sambas, the new piece ‘Atrocities’. “Thoughts and prayers don’t change the game / Can you list each murdered name?” sings Iqua Colson, her voice burnished and lower with age. “When will be truly free?” “When the world turns as it has, the music bears witness”, she says in the liner notes.

The world turning has a sense of inevitability, but also of a motivated turning, the political order that has turned. Turning: counter-revolution, revolution. As the revolutionary poet Amiri Baraka remembers in his liner notes to the Colson’s 2010 record The Untarnished Dream, he and Adegoke Steve Colson attended the same church, the Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, albeit a decade apart. Years later, Ade would be the pianist in the house-band for Amiri and Amina Baraka’s space The Blue Ark, touring with the group worldwide. (While I can’t find any official recordings of these collaborations, an excerpt from the Colsons and the Baraka’s collaboration on a tribute to Martin Luther King can be seen here.) The church as a place for musicians to grow and emerge, to view their music in a communal context connected to social awareness, a million miles away from the politics fostered by the megachurches of today and their ties to an encroaching fascism, with its would-be martyrs, as of 10^th September 2025, turned, Horst-Wessel-like, into the basis for new crackdowns on civil liberties and new surges of fanaticism. And the music I love and the poetry I love has to do, I think with faith, in whatever system it names itself, whether it is named or not: a faith that has to do with the resources or reserves of community, of comradeship and friendship, and too with the resources or reserves when the artist is alone and has to go on what’s stored or built up within; a faith that is precisely not in the unchanging but in change, in the ability to resist and to survive and to overturn the overturning. “We worship the strength in our selves”, wrote Baraka. “We worship revolution”.

The Colsons met at Northwestern University in the 1970s. As he recalls in a profile for the university’s magazine (Northwestern has recently acquired the Colson’s archives), 1968 was Steve Colson’s first year at the institution. Martin Luther King was murdered that April, and Colson participated in the student takeover of the Bursar’s Office that May,

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In Amsterdam this August, it was a real privilege to have been hosted by Phil Baber and Elisabeth Rafstedt for the Don’t Pay Your Rent series at Elisabeth’s and Johanna Ehde’s Rietlanden Women’s Office, named for Bernadette Mayer’s ‘Walking Like a Robin’ in a nod to the city’s squatting history and an imagining of other possibilities, utopian but unsentimental. Published a decade ago, its relevance remains undimmed.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

                                                […] each piece
is anti-war and don't pay your rent, in fact
remember: property is robbery, give everybody
everything, other birds walk this way too

Birds walk and poems get, somehow made—through labour, even if unpaid: poems like Alix Chauvet’s, after Baudelaire, the contortions of their affect and syntax a fit for the jagged unfitting contours of this moment; Cleo Tsw’s, warmly biting, about surveillance, typography, Marx’s grave; and reconvening our panel from the Jazz Futures conference, Siyabonja Njica giving his first reading for a decade, reading poems by Vernon August and Gwendolyn Brooks and a short story from Dambudzo Marechera; and then, resonating in the space, not poems per se but poems in sound, Gabriel Bristow playing a ten-minute solo trumpet set which invoked Erroll Garner’s ‘Misty’ and, fitting the day of the week, Ellington’s ‘Come Sunday’. Gabriel’s duet recording with Steve Noble, out as a download release on Cafe Oto’s Otoroku, is great: I think this might have been the first time I’ve heard him play in person.

Gabriel has a propensity for half-valving that renders the authoritative, declamatory tone of his playing always sliding away—we’d talked about Nathaniel Mackey and the idea of ‘telling inarticulacy’ earlier at the conference: the false stumble, the performance of failure that tricks or dodges, fins another way to go on (around, to the side, disguised). There’s a dose of humour, too; some plunger-noted blarts or blasts somewhere between Bill Dixon and Bubber Miley. (How low does the note have to be before it can no longer be ‘blasted’ per se, the attack of the note swallowed inside itself?). There’s maybe something of Don Cherry’s thinness in the half-valving, and that juxtapository quality of atonal flurries as textural contrast to what is a primarily melodic, linear approach. But I should stop with the litany of names and influences. Gabriel knows the history of jazz, but it never feels like a forced parade of references. Afterwards, for example, when I asked about the half-valving, he mentioned, as a child, hearing the half-valved notes at the opening to the classic Lee Morgan solo on Art Blakey’s ‘Moanin’: those single moments from which a whole style emerges, microcosm and macrocosm. Style is first externally heard and learned, then absorbed and deployed as part of one’s own vocabulary—like the process of learning language, of imitation and internalization. At the same time, in jazz, perhaps more so than any other music, style is also a case of homage, display, reference, reverence. What matters, though, is that the music is its own thing, its own synthesis, what history sounds like in the present. Standing on the edge of the door to the packed room in the light-filled old school-house, the canal outside, the giant Free Palestine banner on the wall, one ear to Gabriel’s trumpet warming up, the other to the first readings, held in that moment, those two different kinds of music and language swarming together, other birds walking this way.

On my desk at the moment, the remainders of that trip, a pile of publications from Phil’s The Last Books, all as ever exquisitely made, designed, typeset, produced: the book not just as a medium for what’s inside—or the opposite, what’s inside an excuse to make a beautiful object—but the interrelation of all the elements—editing, typesetting, design—as an act of care. At the top of the pile, the two most recent books, by Dom Hale and Jennifer Soong, and in the pile too, a beautiful print from a student of Phil’s who’d scrawled the words from one of the poems from John Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol—soon to be republished!—direct onto the plate, hacking at the edge of the margin with dashes that smear into lines exceeding even the para-linguistic. Hale and Soong have both learned from Wieners in different ways—a few years back, Dom reviewed the most recent Wieners selected, Supplication, and, more recently, Jenn has written an excellent article on Wieners and the notion of the “minor poet”. Their two recent books—Hale’s First Nettles and Soong’s My Earliest Person—both collect poems from a period of several years.

Dom’s gathers much of the work written since his first book, Scammer, from the 87 Press in 2020: a book which inhabited the quick, satirical world of Kevin Davies’ The Golden Age of Paraphernalia or Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures—recently reissued in the NYRB series—meeting the internet-mediated discourse which is today reaching its full flowering head on, the world of Musk and Thiel furiously scanned and reacted to. As that discourse expands all the more, Dom’s work has moved away from that collision with the paraphernalia of what we’re maybe no longer calling “late capital”, more “late fascism”. Instead, he’s moved definitively into a lyric world he’s made his own—one which, as I mentioned birefly in a piece a few months ago on Dom’s and Tom Crompton’s pamphlet-poem-manifesto Mud Ramps—draws from Maggie O’Sullivan and Barry MacSweeney, their English from the North, its rich repertory of poetic or poeticizable words, their disjunctive take on the pastoral; their politics, too—amongst other things, the absolute opposition to that Thatcherism to whose early days they reacted and in whose long shadows we now live.

The book is in three parts, gathering together pieces published across the pages of magazines, some of the anonymous poems that open each issue of the Poets’ Hardship Fund magazine Ludd Gang. Besides Seizures, a sequence previously published as a pamphlet by Gong Farm in 2022, the poems are mostly discrete lyrics, ranging from one to several pages in length, and elaborately spread over the page. An eye which could find no surface where its power might sleep. Each poem feels like a gesture: a meditation, a gathering together, like going for a walk in language, in the light that precedes the clouds or the oncoming night. As the notes at

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Pleased to have poems alongside good company in Michael Klausman’s and Patrick Tillery’s magazine Luigi Ten Co: a sequence called ‘Axis and Orbit’ and a prose poem from something in-progress...

Thanks to Florence Uniacke for producing this beautiful pamphlet, Two for Notley, for the Cafe Oto summer fair, with proceeds going to the new trans health centre at House of Annetta.

One of the two texts in the pamphlet is an extended version of a text that first appeared on this substack. And a different version of that text is also up at Little Mirror—thanks to Hunter, Jen and Allie.

Also out, a piece on Steven Belletto’s extremely well-researched new biography of the great Ted Joans, Black Surrealist, over at The Poetry Foundation: “Nothing to Fear From the Poet but the Truth”.

Finally, a reminder that this Substack now has a paid subscription option. A paid subscription gets you access to any posts over 1,000 words, which go behind a paywall. The Substack-ification of writing (and the way it negotiates the sphere of paid writing, traditional media, precaritisation of readers and writers alike) is perhaps something to be ambivalent about, but it is, at least, a platform...Coming up in the next few days will be a long-form piece on new books by Dom Hale and Jennifer Soong.