Stated this starkly, this banner headline still seems shocking. The music that defined the ‘Roaring 20s’ is a centenarian, ffs.

I’m delving way back into the early days of the music, and I still find it strange that jazz’s generally accepted birthday, that of the initial recordings of the (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) in February 1917, was so little celebrated, at least as far as I can ascertain. The next significant recordings followed in August 1922, again by white pretenders, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Of course, it is now accepted that the ‘original’ title is manifestly absurd, as daft as the notion that Paul Whiteman (oh the irony of his name!) was the ‘King of Jazz’. But still, the very idea of these recordings being 100+ years old!!

The prompt for this blog is actually my listening to the proper fountainhead of the music, Louis Armstrong’s tracks made with his Hot Five and Hot Seven, from 1925-1928. I was talking to a friend today about the classic anti-wat film, All Quiet on the Western Front, made only twelve years after the end of the First World War, and still probably at the top, or at the least near it, of the best war films ever made. Its sheer longevity is as impressive an achievement as Armstrong’s. Similarly, the late 20s recordings of the pre-Great Depression acoustic Delta Blues musicians, such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson, musicians is a equally miraculous archival triumph. (The recent film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom demonstrates the conditions that these sort of recordings were made under, only softened by the glow of celluloid retrospection.) The re-mastering work of John R. T. Davies for JSP Records, with Armstrong’s groups, to give just one example, is a genuine service to the world community. It is redundant to say so, but Armstrong’s (and Davies’s) genius, makes this music shine through after nearly a century. A cursory listen to much of Charley Patten’s scratched and decayed (and not in an ironic, hauntological way!) records demonstrated how lucky we are to have Satchmo’s music rendered up in such a pristine fashion.

I guess that this is a roundabout way of delineating my aspirations to preserve the work of the early UK free improvisers. (Their work being now a half-century old.) Some early New Orleans players were suspicious of the recording medium, fearing that it might lead to their styles being half-inched (as they surely were by white imitators/bowdlerisers), one result of this nay-saying being that the ODJB had the honour of making the very first recognised jazz recordings. For very different reasons, free improvisers were also suspicious of making permanent their transient interactions (Eric Dolphy’s statement about music’s impermanence loomed large), but the formation of Incus Records in 1970 offered an eventual refutation of this notion, by a couple of the music’s most rigorous thinkers, Derek Bailey and Evan Parker. So, the work of preservation continues, and I aspire to be a part of this ongoing process.

John Russell (1954-2021)

There are already several tributes to John Russell, who died on Wednesday (20th January) out there, from critics and fellow musicians, so this my own small acknowledgement of the passing of this great English free improviser. It coincides with the death of another important figure, the trombonist Malcom Griffiths, so, all in all, not a great week for UK jazz/improvisation. Griffiths was 79 years old, but Russell was only just 66. (He was only 6 months older than this author, so all the bollocks about ‘time’s winged chariot’ seems less and less to be bollocks.)

I’ve always felt some affinity with Russell (a great jazz name, what with George and Pee Wee!), as his early musical influences approximated mine in the early 70s, with the likes of King Crimson and other early 'prog’ bands. He was also eventually bitten by the 'Bailey bug’, and took lessons off the Grand Old Improviser for a year or so - Derek Bailey apparently refused to 'teach’ him free improvisation, and focused mainly on technique. When Russell landed up in London, alongside several of the 'Second Generation’ improvisers, he was soon, along with fellow Teatime’rs (arguably the first album featuring this new group of players), asked, along with Steve Beresford and Dave Soloman, to join the Musicians’ Cooperative (MC). He thus was one of the few who formed an enjambement between the 'generations’. (He was, in a short time, an important participant in the London Musicians’ Collective, the putative sucessor to the MC, as was Beresford). These newcomers marked the arrival of improvisers who came from other backgrounds than the jazz-influenced 'First Generation’ (who were, in fact, not that much older than them).

I think that I first came across the man in a Mopomoso (ultimately his greatest contribution to the scene?) all-day pre-Christmas bash, across a weekend, at Crouch End’s King’s Head, in its basement that also gave space to a residency featuring Veryon Weston’s trio of the time (actually Ollie Blanchflower’s?) with various esteemed guests from the free improv world. A rather forgotten series (called Changes?), across a couple of years, I particularly appreciated it because it was only a few streets away from where we lived and still live. Sadly, Crouch End was not to prove to be as receptive to the music as Dalston would later.

Most of my live Russell experiences were from the long-lasting Evan Parker Trio with John Edwards on bass, a mostly unrecorded combination of almost inevitable high quality. I must have seen this group around 20 times. However, one of the last times must have been at Cafe Oto, when Russell performed with a resurrected String Thing, with Ian Brighton, Phil Wachsmann, Marco Mattos and Trevor Taylor (parts of which were realeased on FMR Records as the recommended Reunion). Parker was also in attendance, our own Zelig of free improvisation. When I saw JR a couple of years later, he was clearly game, but unwell.

I was hoping to interview Russell as part of my Musicians’ Cooperative project, but it was not meant to be. His contribution to the UK improvisation world is incalculable, but he leaves his Mopomoso project, at 30 years of age (started in 1991) now the oldest improv organisation in the UK, and regularly featured at The Vortex Jazz Club since 2008.

Thank you, John.

I took advantage of the first lockdown to complete my long-planned book on the London Musicians’ Collective (LMC), which was reviewed in this month’s Wire magazine. Ironically, one door opens and another shuts: the latest lockdown has meant that the Wire Bookshop is currently closed for business, which rules out one principal source for the book’s availability. It should soon be available through my updated website, improvmusic.co.uk.

And so, as the days stretch out unforgivingly, and the only other person that I currently see is my lovely wife, I’m going to crack on with the next keep-sane project, which will be the story of the LMC’s immediate predecessor, the Musicians’ Cooperative (MC), which was essentially a ‘first generation’ self-help organisation, designed by the early London-based free improvisers to promote the music through regular gigs. It was rather brutally terminated when the Unity Theatre in Mornington Crescent, latterly its main venue, burned down in November 1975. The music kept going through the activities of the LMC, a rather different, mainly ‘second generation’ entity. The MC was a ‘purer’ beast, almost totally committed to then-radical ‘total improvisation’ (Barry Guy’s ‘Ode’ was one obvious exception), to which improvisers had to invited in to join; the LMC welcomed other genres and anyone was free to join.

The MC organised an ‘International Festival of Improvised Music’ (basically first generation English players with a smattering of German and Dutch confreres), at Ronnie Scott’s Club and the Bloomsbury Theatre in January 1974. I was a student in London at the time and attended a couple of evenings, and they left a great impression on me, the first time that I saw such legends as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Peter Brotzmann. The festival was organised by the MC, and was a landmark event. I’ve got in touch with most of the surviving members (Bailey, John Stevens and Paul Rutherford have long passed), but memories can be rather vague (it is, after all, fifty years ago), and, as is often the case with early DIY bodies, written records were seldom kept. (There is much written documentation about the LMC, however, stored in the London College of Communication.) It’s therefore likely to be a rather stitched-together memorial, from a variety of secondary, as well as primary, sources, but I do think that these early attempts to ground improvised music in regular live events needs to be recognised, as they are liable to vanish as the time gets further and further away. From this time of information-overkill, I will be looking back at a ‘scene’ of information-scarcity.

Like Barry Guy’s larger groups (the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, the Barry Guy New Orchestra and The Blue Shroud), Tyshawn Sorey’s (I must stop confusing him with Tyson Fury!!) musicians on Pillars are broken down into smaller configurations across the expanse of the recordings (a methodology that can perhaps be methodologically  backdated to Derek Bailey’s Company, at least in the realm of free music?)  Listeners are encouraged to listen in parts: “small subgroups over relatively short distinguished sections”. The symphonic pretentions are obvious, everything held together under the overarching concept (which makes it somehow not ‘free’?). The London Jazz Composers 1993 ‘small-within-the great’ work Portraits is just one example of this modus.

Derek Bailey’s name will always come up when one is debating categorisation. He is in good ‘company’, as such greats as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, to name only a few, regularly questioned whether ‘jazz’, with its dubious and rather unsavoury backstory in the brothels and stews of early 20th century New Orleans, was an appropriate name for black America’s moist/most creative music of that time period: but no-one has really come up with an alternative name that doesn’t sound lame. Listening to the FJC’s list of the 101 best jazz albums has merely reinforced my doubts as to what one should really call this music, without potentially misleading the listener. Most of us have an idea of what ‘jazz’ sounds like - perhaps a choice of Hard Bop or Swing? Louis Armstrong as the ultimate avatar? I’m aware that there are a lot of question marks in this blog, but John Corbett’s apercu should ultimately stand the test. Much of the 101 list features individuals/bands that seem to originate from other genres - hiphop, electronica, contemporary classical, drone, noise, minimalist, which is fine, as jazz has always been a welcoming home. But today’s maestros are usually from university-level training, and will inevitably have soaked up other speciality genres, jazz being but only one. And it shows.

There have been many attempts to pin down exactly what ‘proper jazz’ is, especially from the 1980′s ‘jazz revival’ onwards, i.e. it being the work of the pre-1970 period, with the Miles Davis Quartet and the John Coltrane Quartet being institutionalised as the music’s non plus ultra. Definitely NOT the work of post-’electric Miles’ and his cursed spawn! The 101 list clearly proves that the definitional battle  is far from complete. There is some great music out there, but is it jazz? 100 years on, the word is still controversial, but resolute.

I’ve been exploring the ‘101 Best Jazz Albums of the 2010s’ list, collated by the guys at the Free Jazz Collective (FJC) website. The word ‘Album’ seems a tad anachronistic, given the multiplicity of of content providers across the said decade, but hey, many of us still love a list! Consisting of names old and (for me at least) new, the whole exercise got me thinking about that other much contested word, ‘Jazz’ itself. I’ve had  a few occasions to quote the comment of the Chicago-based music critic John Corbett, “resistance to naming is a sign of volatility” (from his 1994 classic Extended Play), which seems as good a description as any to query the  name given to much of the music delineated by this list. (The music can be downloaded from the FJC site while reading about the album concerned, which is most appreciated by this particular reader.)

Top of the list is Tyshawn Sorey’s mammoth Pillars, which takes up three (each one considerably lengthy) compact discs, and which retails at around 50 quid. Now, I don’t want to come across here as a penny-pincher, but…The download factor comes into play at this point, and, if I come to like these recordings enough, I might shell out, but this is some way off at present.  200-odd minutes of this stuff is a LOT of material, especially as projects of this scale almost always are somewhat of a curate’s egg. What on earth happened to the concise, 35-odd minute ‘statement’, such as Brilliant Corners or A Love Supreme? Or is this just a case of false equivalences? So many modern day recordings seem a tad grandiose - for example, did Kamasi Washington start the ‘hypertrophy phase’ off with The Epic in 2015, or does it go back even further, with Goldie’s itself epical drum and bass ‘symphony’Timeless, from 20 years earlier, in 1995 ?(These two can definitely be compared, what with their massed strings and choirs, and undoubted sense of self-importance and ‘significance’.) The Epic was unquestionably ‘jazz’  - it ‘swung’, for example (the ‘Braxton test’?), but could the same be said about Pillars? And have we finally moved beyond this sort of determinism? After all, one definition of jazz (Wiki) is music containing “rhythm patterns, harmonic practices related to functional harmony, and the practice of improvisation”. So far, so vague.

The first part of Pillars reminds me a bit of the Bill Dixon/Barry Guy collaboration from the early 90s, Vade Mecum, with the addition of considerable electronics. Jazz, but not as we know it? For me, this is ‘improvised music’, with most of the ‘jazz’ rinsed out. It might point those sufficiently interested ‘towards jazz’, but the latter is not the main ingredient. Of course, this is an argument as old as the hills - syncretic constructs have been put forward in jazz music since its earliest days: by Ellington, Scott Joplin (Treemonisha), James P. Johnson (American Suite-Lament), Charles Mingus (Epitaph), Barry Guy, Anthony Braxton, various Jazz Composers Orchestras, right up to the likes of William Parker (Mayor of Punkville), never mind his namesakes, Charlie and Evan.

TBC

I’ve watched Wholly Communion twice now in order to confirm the sheer car crash awfulness of much of its fascinating content. One of the most awful scenes is that of Harry Fainlight (1935-1982) being crucified on stage by a hostile audience, whilst the mescalin-raddled Dutch writer, Simon Vinkenoog (another ‘who, exactly?) chants ‘love, love’ in very unlovely way, as Fainlight winces and minces on and off the stage. “Oh happy lightbulb” opines Harry, whose biography makes for sad reading.  Hipsters then had absolutely NO idea how to handle those with obvious mental health problems (it was the same in the 70s in my particular crowd). Jokers like Ginsberg came across all “you have to be mad to work here”, but were ultimately impotent in the face of the real thing. Poor old Harry had to be escorted off the stage, before returning for a final, slightly more positively received turn.

Our own Adrian Mitchell makes a good show with an anti-Vietnam poem (whilst obviously being in no risk of being immediately drafted), before making a bit of an ass of himself with his one-line “love is like a cigarette…the bigger the drag, the more you get”. (It’s the way they told ‘em?) Ernst Jandl, on the other hand, goes full Kurt Schwitters, and goes down a storm, presumably because Dada poetry offers an genuinely joyful alternative to all the po-faced main menu offered up.

The coup de grace though if the clearly-pissed Allen Ginsberg, all puffed-up importance and parading paranoid, persecutory nonsense in ‘ob-verse’, a  counterculture Zelig, who managed to be around in so many situations (back cover of Bringing It All Back Home, the famed Beatles/Dylan encounter, being just two). The mot juste of “Shitting the meat out of my ears on my cancer death bed..” being evacuated in front of a woman doing ‘creative dancing’ in the camera’s foreground is just one lowlight in this shit show of bloated self-importance. It’s amazing that this was ever thought ‘important’, but Beat was surely ever about the lifestyle rather than the actual art? (Burroughs is a guarded exception.)

At the end, one lone voice is heard to utter, like a bereft child, “I’ve lost my poetry book!” They weren’t the only one. Watch it and weep. It’s a mesmerising historical document, released on DVD as Peter Whitehead and the Sixties.

Having just read a book on William Burroughs’ influence on rock music, I thought I’d revisit the director Peter Whitehead’s 1967 film of ‘Wholly Communion’, the supposedly epochal  Albert Hall poetry readings held on 11the. June 1965. Featuring several of Burroughs’ Beat poet mates, including the execrable Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alexander Trocchi, the event has gone down in countercultural history as  representing “for a day, (a unification of) various London scenes, cultural, creative and drug taking”. For several commentators, this day was the start of London’s countercultural adventure, furthered in 1966 by the ‘Swinging London’ trope and reaching its apogee (or nadir?) in the ‘Summer of Love’ of 1967 (which was depicted more famously in Whitehead’s Tonight, Let’s All Make Love in London, a more ludicrous title of which would be hard to think of). A (very) rough USA equivalent would be the ‘Gathering of the Tribes’ in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in January 1967. (Ginsberg was equally smug, smirking and attention-seeking at that gig too.)

So, the whole parade kicks of with a Ginsberg ‘mantra’, with the bearded buffoon playing the spoons (or were they actually Tibetan bells?), and trying to come off as some kind of ancient seer from the pages of Doctor Strange? The audience, all-dressed up, preening and smoking artistically, many, laughably, (the first Velvets album was two years away) in sunglasses, look booored (and I don’t mean ‘fashionably’). The ‘look’ is very much high-Mod, pre-hippie, and is one of the most interesting aspects of this cultural petri-dish. There is even a prominent member of the Church of England in attendance (which just about sums it up). I have to remark, at this point, how much Gregory Corso’s delivery and diction reminded me of Trout Mask-era Beefheart. Anyone else agree? There is lots of Vietnam-agonising and USSR crypto-glasnosting here, as one might expect. Also, a lot of posturing and downright mediocrity, which cannot be truly appreciated without actually watching this 50-minute film: it’s all too easy to mock from a safe distance, but for those of us of a certain age, it does blow up (in both senses of the word) some of the pretentiousness and even unpleasantness of the time, which has often been downplayed by those who valorise the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac. And it perhaps further demonstrates why the counterculture was never going to really work in practice.

Next up: the poets themselves in all their g(l)ory.

I’m not really in a position to give a fully informed reflection on the importance of the late hiphop artist MF Doom (or on his producer Madlib), but I’d like to have a stab at acknowledging his importance, mainly because the report of his death (which occurred as far back as October) has somewhat discombobulated (or even just plainly upset?) my 30-year old son, for whom he is an extremely important artist. It’s always salutary, I think, for music fans of my age to properly appreciate, if we can, the achievements of artists from later generations, even as the impulse remains to dig down in to the product of one’s own ’glory days’. This can be more difficult than it sounds.

I’d been aware of Doom since Nathan’s purchase of Madvillain back in the mid-00s. I have to admit to only giving it a cursory listening at the time, not finding anything of sufficient interest to detain me beyond two or three spins. Big mistake. It was really only on hearing of his premature death a couple of days ago (cause uncertain) that I felt a need to reassess the recording, feeble as that sounds. It undoubtedly has something to do with the Covid-related sense of transience and impermanence that we all live with today, and the fact the Doom was only in his late-40s. Was his yet another Covid death? I guess I wanted to pay some respect  and attention to an MC who was clearly so respected by my son’s generation, if that doesn’t sound too condescending. I do sometimes get into arguments with friends who seem enmeshed in the music of the 60s/70s and who seem dismissive of music post - 2000 (this includes, of course, internal arguments with myself and my own biases).

So, impressions of Madvillain include a sample-rich environment, with some references that I can relate to (from Zappa’s Uncle Meat, for example). Samples celebrating weed and getting stoned, and multiple comic book nods and winks reminding me a a far less aggressive and macho Wu Tang Clan and its various splinter artists. Going further back, there are reminders of Public Enemy’s piling up of ‘laminar’ layers, a multi-referential, complex sound field (”silly goose” being just one echo/micro-reference to PE’s Flavor Flav that even I can pick up on). It contains much less directly ‘political’ references than PE, and I was also reminded of John Zorn’s fractured and unreliable ‘surfaces’. The content is constantly agitated, unreliable and on the move, somewhat like Naked City’s stylistic mish mashes.

It’s a far gentler sampladelia than many, though. To my perhaps naive mind, it seems to be, to use a much misused word, a ‘transitional’ album, between more hostile 90s forms and more ‘progressive’ hiphop, that welcomes both Afro-Futurism (there are references to Sun Ra) and the more gentle administrations of the brief Daisy Age of rap, with its playfulness and good (or at least better) humour. Or am I just talking bollocks? I’ve always felt a bit of an imposter in this world, which is as complex and multi-threaded as that of ‘jazz’ (where I feel much more comfortable). But I can see here that Madvillain demands as much creative listening as any Miles Davis album. It’s clear to me (duh!) that this is great music and I’m at that enviable point of still discovering more and more with each listening.

Doom is obviously a great loss to creative music.

Mark Fisher ended his 2016 blog Cybergothic vs Steampunk (two subgenres that he saw as “archaisms, obstructions to a future that is already assembling itself”) by the following reflection on the tide and time of the sort of organisations that I have been recently writing about and researching:

“Neoliberisation was designed to eliminate the various strains of democratic socialism and libertarian communism that bubbled up in so many places during the Sixties and Seventies… the growing clamour of groups seeking to take control of their own lives portends a long overdue  return to a modernity that capital just can’t deliver” (K-Punk, pp. 615-6)

This dovetails with the comments made by influential improvisers of 1970 vintage, regarding the formation of the Musicians’ Co-operative: guitarist Derek Bailey opined that “there were these moves to take control. It was a bit of a thing at the time, ‘do your own thing’”; bassist/composer Barry Guy described “self-help groups trying to find collective ways to plan concerts”. These are micro-examples of the collectivist urge, but it’s interesting to hear echoes, in Bailey’s comment, of the Brexit mantra of Control (maybe they were channeling William Burroughs here?)

It is ironic that both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are almost certainly the ultimate neo-liberals, coming as they both do from a world of ‘unearned’ privilege and wealth, and doubly ironic that they have presented themselves, and been accepted, as ‘candidates of change’ (just as Margaret Thatcher did forty long years ago). I’d love to have read a Mark Fisher analysis of the Jeremy Corbyn ‘project’ and yet another subsequent defeat of the Left, but his previously unpublished 2016 blog ‘Mannequin Challenge’ held the following words:

“The one perennial problem for the revolutionary left is that it doesn’t have the same recourse to reassuring fantasies, the same appeal to a restored past, with which to leaven the leap into the unknown” (page 610). My wife Jackie has long opined that one of the (many) reasons Corbyn was routed one year ago is that he appeared to ‘diss’ England’s achievements and aspirations, as well as casting the ‘working class’ as ‘victims’ - most people resent being portrayed as victims, a notion perceived as being promoted by the media-disant ‘woking class’ of north London and environs. The Tories eventually ‘owned’ the Brexit shit show, but what did Labour promote? Keir Starmer faces the same challenge of self-definition, and it would be so great to have Mark Fisher’s take on all this.

Mark’s writing on mental health and illness were also illuminating, and deserving of another blog at least; the current crisis in these areas demand an explicator who has ‘been there and done it’ (without appearing to be too flippant here). He will continue to be much missed.

The influential critic and blogger Mark Fisher took his own life 4 years ago, in January 2017. Much has changed since then - Mark largely missed the short peak and long slow demise of the Corbyn and Trump epi-phenomena, and the ghastly and costly final victory of Brexit, for example. The reductio ad absurdum of a Boris Johnson premiereship. The truly cost of globalisation = the Coronavirus pandemic. The small lights at the tunnel-end of a Biden victory and the manufacture of vaccines. (It’s a crying shame there isn’t a vaccine for Trumpism). 

Mark would no doubt have recognised that much of this ‘eventmanship’ represented here is a final flowering of the opposition to what he named ‘capitalist realism’ i.e the notion that neo-liberalism is the unavailable  end point  for societal organisation, “the end of history” as Francis Fukuyama famously described it. (I’ve always been amazed at how this idiotic comment has ever been taken seriously, to be frank, but Mark F. would probably have observed that this is just one example of how the neo–libs have gotten control of the narrative.) Although much of K-Punk, the collection of his writings from 2004-2016) seems cautiously optimistic, the sheer fact of his suicide at that particular time does make one wonder whether he ultimately despaired at the idea of any hope either for himself or for us all. Ironically he was correct is his feeling that “the center cannot hold” (as witnessed with the defat of Hilary Clinton in 2016), and the rise of the alt-right and Trumpism/Johnsonism is testament to this. People are well pissed off at neo-liberalism and want change - unfortunately so many see ‘populist’ leaders as the agent to achieve this.

One reason for this particular blog, apart from the coincidence of his month of death is some comments that Mark made about ‘collectivism’, in terms of its potential links to the subject of my recent research into cooperatives and collectives in the 60s and 70s in the UK. From our current position, these “new forms of belongings”, the ‘we’ rather than the ‘I’, seem far away, what with the interpersonal atomisation caused by Covid 19 and the geopolitical isolation following in the wake of ‘Break-sick’, bur Mark’s vision of a more hopeful and less individualistic society, expressed periodically in the book’s pages, is not yet totally extinguished, however grim things may appear presently.

To be continued…