Microgroove by John Corbett

MI O

forays into other music

john corbett

CR GR O O VE

MICROGROOVE

MICROGROOVE

forays into other music

john corbett

duke university press Durham & London

2015

© 2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Quadraat, Orator, and Officina Sans by Graphic Composition, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corbett, John, [date] Microgroove : forays into other music / John Corbett. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5900-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5870-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-7553-1 (e-book) 1. Avant-garde (Music) 2. Music—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Music—21st century—History and criticism. 4. Improvisation (Music) i. Corbett, John, [date] Extended play. Continuation of: ii. Title. ml197.c769 2015 780.9’04—dc23 2015003795 Frontispiece: Two panels from Uncle Gaspard Joins the Bograt Navy © Michael Hurley, reprinted with permission, all rights reserved. Cover art: Joe McPhee, 1970. Photograph by Ken Brunton. Courtesy of Joe McPhee.

in memory of fred anderson, ornette coleman, von freeman, steve lacy, bernie mcgann, and koko taylor

I hate music, what is it worth? Can’t bring anyone back to this earth. Filling the space between all of the notes, But I’ve got nothing else, so I guess here we go.

• SUPERCHUNK, “Me and You and Jackie Mittoo”

contents

Preface: Tympanum of the Other Frog • xv Acknowledgments • xix Introduction • 1 One. On the Road, Into the Cul-de-Sac Joe Harriott and Bernie McGann: Flying without Ornette • 15 Michael Hurley: Jocko’s Lament • 21 Mayo Thompson: Genre of One • 33 John Stevens: Unpopular Populists • 36 Peter Brötzmann Tentet: Freeways • 40 Steve Lacy: Sojourner Saxophone • 49 David Grubbs: Postcards from the Edge • 57 Voice Crack: From Nothing to Everything • 67 Two. Exigeneses of Creative Music Milford Graves: Pulseology • 71 Out of Nowhere: Deleuze, Gräwe, Cadence • 79 Carla Bley and Steve Swallow: Feeding Quarters to the Nonstop Mental Jukebox • 85 Misha Mengelberg: No Simple Calculations for Life • 93 Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink: Natural Inbuilt Contrapuncto • 109 Form Follows Faction? Ethnicity and Creative Music • 116 Anthony Braxton: Ism vs. Is • 123 Anthony Braxton: Bildungsmusik—Thoughts on “Composition 171” • 129

Paul Lovens: Lo Our Lo • 132 Clark Coolidge: The Improvised Line • 136 Nathaniel Mackey: Steep Incumbencies • 142 Sun Ra: From the Windy City to the Omniverse—Chicago Life as a Street Priest of diy Jazz • 153 Fred Anderson: The House That Fred Built • 162 Three. Ululations and Other Vocal Stimulants Sun Ra: Queer Voice • 169 Jaap Blonk: Uncommon Tongue • 170 PJ Harvey: Mother’s Tongue • 179 Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound (coauthored with Terri Kapsalis) • 182 Liz Phair and Lou Barlow: On Music, Sex, tv, and Beyond • 194 Liz Phair and Kim Gordon: Exile in Galville? • 205 Koko Taylor: The Blue Queen Cooks • 212 Brion Gysin and Steve Lacy: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permuted • 217 Four. The Horn Section Ornette Coleman: Doing Is Believing • 233 Roscoe Mitchell: Citizen of Sound • 244 Fred Anderson and Von Freeman: Tenacity • 250 George Lewis: Interactive Imagination • 258 Mats Gustafsson: MG at Half-C • 264 Ken Vandermark: Six Dispatches from the Memory Bank • 270 Ken Vandermark and Joe McPhee: Mutual Admiration Society • 278 Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker: Bring Something to the Table • 285 Five. Track Marks Oncology of the Record Album • 297 Discaholic or Vinyl Freak? Mats Gustafsson Interrogates John Corbett • 301 Twenty-Seven Enthusiasms: A Spontaneous Listening Session • 308 xii contents

A Very Visual Kind of Music: The Cartoon Soundtrack beyond the Screen • 313 R. L. Burnside and Jon Spencer: Fattening Frogs for Snake Drive • 322 Before and After Punk: The Comp as Teaching Tool • 331 Raymond Scott: Cradle of Electronica • 336 Six. Melodic Line and Tone Color Peter Brötzmann: Graphic Equalizer • 343 Albert Oehlen: Bionic Painting • 347 Albert Oehlen: Mangy—A Conversation and a Playlist • 352 Christopher Wool: Impropositions—Improvisation, Dub Painting • 359 Christopher Wool: Into the Woods—Six Meditations on the Interdisciplinary • 366 Sun Ra: An Afro-Space-Jazz Imaginary—The Printed Record of El Saturn • 371 Seven. The Texture of Refusal Helmut Lachenmann: Hellhörig, or the Intricacies of Perceptiveness • 379 Guillermo Gregorio: Madi Music • 387 Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others • 391 Afterword: A Concise History of Music • 417 Grooving On: Selected Listening • 423 Credits • 443 Index • 447

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preface Tympanum of the Other Frog

The moon was a drip on a dark hood. Dad hit the brakes as we drove up to the water’s edge, grinding gravel, dust rising in the dusk air. The sound of the car silenced the nightlife, but only temporarily. Arms folded on the windowpane of the Ford ltd station wagon, we waited for the frogs to crank back up. I was eight years old. My family lived up the street, in a suburb of Virginia Beach. Inlynnview Road bisected the larger waterway into two parts: a pond that opened out onto an even larger body of water, and a smaller pond lopped off on the other side, fed by a viaduct, surrounded by overhanging trees, a bit swampy with algae and lily pads, but with a clean and flowing water supply that kept it fertile, green, and full of critters. For a few years, this was my preferred playground. Engine off, night on the horizon, my father and I awaited the first frog, a scout who would croak bravely into the abyss. A regular pulse, sometimes like the pluck of a tenor banjo. Very soon others would join, first a few, tentatively, then louder, then more, until the pond was transformed into an amphibian amphitheater. A cacophony of belches, a vortex of peeps, several species of itsy animals bellowing longingly into the night in hopes of finding a hookup, depositing eggs or sperm, then paddling or hopping off into the dark having accomplished the one-night stand, froggy style. When the full chorus was singing, my father whispered to me that I should pick out one particular frog and try to listen only to it. It was more difficult than I expected, but I found that with some effort I could differentiate the sound of a specific animal—I suppose I recognized its voice—and isolate it from the others. Now, he said, keeping that one in mind, try to hear another one at the same time. Struggling, I did. But the rhythm of the first one was a bit faster than the other, so they kept coming together and then moving apart, cyclically, drawing me away from the first one. Croak, croak, croak, croak-croak, croak-croak,

croak-croak, croak, croak, croak. Listen to the new voice in relation to the first one, he said. I did, and the first frog became the base from which the second frog veered, like when the blinker in the car doesn’t match the blinking of a street sign. OK, now if you can, switch them. This was even trickier, but when I managed, it was like a door opened up in my head. Suddenly, the second frog was the baseline, the original one was the variable. And right away, I could do this with any of the hundreds of frogs bleating in the dark. My dad was teaching me about polyrhythms. Setting me up for Steve Reich and jazz. That’s already pretty mind-blowing for an eight-year-old, but there was more. I couldn’t put a name on it, but I also understood that he was showing me something deeper, a principle. If I was able, by shifting my focus, to change the rhythm I was hearing, then listening must be a relative activity. A listener has to make decisions about how to listen. It’s not just a passive thing. And in order to do that, to put yourself into the right space to be able to make informed listening decisions, you have to pay attention. During many nature trips, frogging or birding or fishing, my dad instilled a sense of this fundamental respect for paying attention, using eyes as well as ears. It probably saved my life a couple of times when I nearly stepped on poisonous snakes, noticing them just in time. If you don’t pay attention, you don’t notice the snakes. But attentiveness is a luxury in our lives; the focus is so often made for us, to optimize and economize our experience. I guess it’s one of the pleasures of watching Orson Welles, his love of the long shot and deep focus, his avoidance of the close-up and the cutaway. There’s plenty to notice in one of those shots, but you have to pay attention; nobody will point at it and say, “Hey, nimrod, look over here, this is the important thing.” Try this: go to a pond and look at the water. Stay there. Keep looking. Wait longer. Bored? Stay there. At some point, you’ll start to notice things. Maybe a turtle’s head will pop up, a dark area will turn out to be a lurking fish, you’ll see the googly eyes and bulbous nose of a frog. They were there already. You hadn’t noticed them. I did this once when I was in junior high, outside Philadelphia. There was a stream I’d been walking past regularly for a couple of years. I stared at a clump of leaves submerged against a rock in the bed of the stream. Zoned out in adolescent daze, but armed with my beastie attentiveness training, I was amazed to realize that the leaves were alive and were in truth a hellbender salamander. No doubt, that will be the only time I see one in the wild. Glad I noticed. The trick to being attentive is one thing: still thyself. This is the ultimate message of the frog pond. Before you can become an active listener, before you can explore the tapestry of croaks, you have shut down all the stuff in your xvi

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head. Get over yourself. Forget all your fancy ideas, your elaborate plans. This recognition has an ironic component—you have to be receptive, all ears, in order to get to a place where you can choose how to hear. That’s one of the most profound aspects of John Cage—in order to become a critical listener, his music often suggests, you have to dispense with your ego. If you are in the woods and all you have in your brain are thoughts and conversations and preconceptions, over that din you’ll never notice anything new. Nothing will surprise you; you will only continuously confirm your suspicions. Consider the time-honored cliché of the classic western—the observant Native American notices the broken twig, sniffs the dirt, says he’s been here, the ground is still warm, locates the outlaw to the awe of the flat-footed honky posse. There’s something to it. The world—natural or cultural, no matter—is there already, waiting to be observed. In order to do so, you have to be patient and humble and get yourself out of the way. It’s a different frog pond these days. The prevalence of electronic gadgets in our daily lives makes deep observation even more difficult; our attention is ruthlessly interrupted by other messages claiming greater importance. Those gadgets should become part of the landscape, something that we have to pay attention to, to place among the other sounds, so that we can hear them for what they are, and, in the long run, so that rather than reacting to them automatically, we can make decisions about how we hear them. Imagine we’re there in the dark, back on Inlynnview Road, froggies singing, and the cell phone rings. OK, no judgment, I’ll let it ring, try to hear it in relation to the other sounds, see what it adds to the chorus. Perhaps I won’t choose to defer all the others to the phone’s tones, making it the baseline frog. I’ll strip it of its singular urgency, neutralize it, just for a minute. It’s a sound, no more or less, mingling with other sounds, not only frogs but toads too, trilling and chirping in the warm evening air.

preface xvii

acknowledgments

This book has had four different introductions. In 1999, I began to assemble material for a new collection as a follow-up to my book Extended Play (1994). This period found me writing extensively for music magazines, contributing liner notes, and essaying periodically for academic publications. There seemed to be ample work to choose from, and the emergent document seemed to have a shape and substance complementary to the previous book. It began to feel like Extended Play Volume 2. I put the manuscript together, wrote an initial introduction, sent it off to the press, got positive feedback and a contract. Then I put it aside. At the time I wasn’t sure why; now I know. It wasn’t ready. It needed a scrupulous chopping. Moreover, something had started to shift and deepen for me. I had to give it more time, work more, build it up and take things out. Think of ceramicist Ken Price: layer upon layer, then the sanding down, accumulating in order to reveal what is underneath. About five years down the line, I revisited and reworked it, and out in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I wrote a new introduction. Then I put it aside, again. This time, it was on the shelf for a shorter period; I went back to it again about two years later, but at that point, in the mid-oughts, I had embarked on a new, very timeintensive adventure opening an art gallery, and I once again put the collection, as well as its third intro, on ice. Late in 2013, I opened up the manuscript again and found it newly exciting. This time, I was brutally honest, extracted many earlier parts that didn’t make the cut, and added a batch of newer chapters including a series of writings linking music and visual art. On a writing retreat in southwest Wisconsin, I composed the final version of the introduction and put the pieces in a definitive order. A book that takes fifteen years to assemble is inevitably indebted to many colleagues and associates. I would be hard-pressed to name (or remember)

all of them, but a number require acknowledgment. I’ve learned immensely from the guidance and insight of editors at several periodicals, especially Kiki Yablon, Philip Montoro, Jason Koransky, Ed Enright, and Aaron Cohen. Kevin Whitehead, who lived in Chicago for some time, was and continues to be a bright light from whom I have drawn as much illumination as possible. With the brilliant Lloyd Sachs, Whitehead and I hosted a radio program, Writer’s Bloc, on wnur, also very inspiring and informative for me; later the show added two more great journalists, Art Lange and Peter Kostakis. That rich environment contributed immensely to this endeavor. I miss the Lightning Round. Fundamental appreciation goes to all the interview subjects represented in this volume. Several of the musicians and artists are now close friends, and for their comradeship, constancy, and trust, as well as the way they challenge me, I thank Peter Brötzmann, David Grubbs, Joe McPhee, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool. Mats Gustafsson is the best buddy a vinyl freak could want (shhh, be very quiet!), an open ear whenever needed. Several artist-friends not in the book were deeply inspiring to its completion: Josiah McElheny, Phil Hanson, and Charline von Heyl. For twenty years of return visits to his basement, where I have learned so much, I bow to my friend Milford Graves. Over the course of a decade starting in the ’90s, I was fortunate to work closely with Ken Vandermark, and I thank him for many insights into the stressful world of a working musician. In the same period, I benefited greatly from time spent with Bruno Johnson of Okka Disk records. I wish we saw more of one another these days; in spite of family and entrepreneurship, he too has felt the irresistible gravitational pull of the music. My alte freund Kurt Kellison, cofounder of the Unheard Music Series, is another key inspiration for Microgroove. Many colleagues and pals have aided me directly or indirectly, including Bruce Finkleman, Pete Toalson, Scott Black, Malachi Ritscher, Lou Mallozzi, Anthony Elms, Susanne Ghez, Hamza Walker, Susannah Ribstein, Brian Ashby, Ben Chaffee, Julia Hendrickson, Emily Letourneau, Nicole Sachs, Judith Kirshner, Ihno van Hassalt, Mitch Cocanig, Mike Reed, Dave Rempis, Josh Berman, Michael Orlove, Frank Alkyer, Rachel Weiss, Sheryl Ridenour, Adam Abraham, Kate Dumbleton, Bob Snyder, Pam Wojcik, Rick Wojcik, Scott Nielsen, and Leslie Buchbinder. Props to my wonderful and supportive extended family: James, Joyce, Jack, and Jennifer Corbett; Jayne Hyland; and Tim-Bob Fitzgerald. Most recently, I have been engaged most pleasurably working alongside Jim Dempsey, the master of analogy, whose style and humor are undergirded by his sensitivity and intelligence. For waiting it out with such supportive good spirit, I thank my editor at Duke, Ken Wissoker. My dear amigos Katie Kahn and John Sparagana have xx

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given me invaluable feedback on the manuscript. They are as responsive and spontaneous as creative souls could be, and they helped nudge me to excavate the book. Dinners with them and Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish are a staple measure of sanity in an unclear time. Likewise, trips to Grafton, Wisconsin, to visit Gina Litherland and Hal Rammel, trusted sources of counsel and inspiration. Most of all, my better half and editorial conscience, Terri Kapsalis, who patiently endured abandoned titles, discarded chapters, and all four introductions—the world is falling down, hold my hand.

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introduction

Everything starts as an encounter. As abstract as thinking and writing and talking about music can be, it all begins with something concrete, material. The bump of Pusha T’s My Name Is My Name as its soundwaves enter my aural canal and meet my eardrum. The surprise of a fateful afternoon jaunt to a neighborhood record store on which I happen upon Michael Hurley’s Blue Navigator, marveling at the Hurley-penned comics on its jacket. The rush of picking up Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink from the airport in my vw bug—long, tall Han, feet on the dashboard, pummeling them with a stray drumstick. Encounters with sounds, objects, people. The sense of encounter, a basic exchange that music engenders as a social activity, is reflected in conversation, dialogue, argument. Think of the notion of a “band,” “ensemble,” or “group”—social convergence is encoded into the very words we use for fundamental musical units. I’m sure this is why I remain committed to the question-and-answer format in much of my music writing. Sometimes in an encounter you hit a vein, other times it yields only a nugget, a shard, a precious memory perhaps too small to build around. In a Parisian flea market, casual discussion with the vendor, and suddenly a box of white label test-pressing 1970s African singles appears. A ride across Boston interviewing Ornette Coleman from the backseat of someone else’s car in which he shares a magical experience with Thelonious Monk. Thai food one-on-one with Cecil Taylor talking about his favorite divas. Now and then, an encounter backfires. In 1986, I arranged an interview with On-U Sound guru Adrian Sherwood. His work seemed to me to be the most advanced production around; I loved how he manipulated voices, layered sounds, truncated melodies, toyed with dynamics, and brought an aggressive dada-esque sensibility into post-dub mixology. We met at a café during a lunch break from my day job. He invited two guests: singer Mark Stewart and drummer Keith LeBlanc. I was starstruck and delighted. LeBlanc was the

legendary force behind the Sugar Hill Gang, and then later was Sherwood’s go-to for all things nonreggae. Stewart’s were the most explosive and exciting of Sherwood-produced efforts, his William Burroughs–like vocal paranoia infused into dance music defaced by an ied. More important, Stewart had been the singer in the Pop Group, the British post-punk band that, truth be told, had introduced me to freely improvised music; improvisor Tristan Honsinger ornamented their 1979 single “We Are All Prostitutes” with trademark cello and mumbling. Gateway drug for this lifelong user. We all sat down for a coffee. I broke out the tape recorder and kicked off with a question about the politics of production. Sherwood knitted his brow and explained that he didn’t prescribe politics to the artists he produced, they could say anything they wanted. Stewart and LeBlanc stared at me. I made another pass at the idea, but Sherwood was already put off. “Man, you gotta come see these sneakers I found down the street,” exclaimed LeBlanc to anyone who would listen. “They’re totally silver and white!” Stewart chimed in that he wanted to make sure to hit all the thrift stores, that American secondhand overcoats were not to be believed. “C’mon!” they both said, and leapt up, ending the interview before it had started. I went to see the sneakers, just out of curiosity. Stewart sought his coats alone. That night, Mark Stewart + Maffia played an incantatory set, the singer’s snarled rant dropping in and out intermittently while LeBlanc and Doug Wimbush laid down an irresistible g-force beat.

••• Out of hundreds of interviews, a few others have gone south. Aborted diner lunch with Mayo Thompson where the conversation looped unnaturally—I think he was just messing with me. A phone interview with organist Jimmy Smith that turned from belligerent into buddy-buddy as soon as I mentioned being a fan of barbeque—I swear to the god of soul-jazz. As in its precursor, Extended Play, the bulk of Microgroove is predicated on the encounter. In Microgroove, there are a greater number of interviews, fewer academic essays. That, in part, reflects shifts in my own orientation, a move away from an investment in the language of poststructuralism coupled with a long engagement with the production of cds and the presentation of live music. Having explored the theory/practice divide, I guess I’ve come up on the practice side. Or maybe the service side. The twenty years since Extended Play are evenly split between music and visual art. I had started organizing concerts in 1985, but in the period between 1996 and 2005, it was my primary occupation (never my main source of income). For a decade I presented live music, nearly a thousand concerts 2

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altogether: a weekly series and annual festival (co-organized with saxophonist Ken Vandermark) at the Empty Bottle, Chicago; a yearlong stint as artistic director of the Berlin Jazzfest; lots of independent production. At the same time, with Kurt Kellison of Atavistic Records, I inaugurated the Unheard Music Series, releasing around seventy cds of creative music, as we put it in an early press sheet, “scouring the dustbin of history.” Then, in 2004, Jim Dempsey and I opened an art gallery together, a move that confounded some of my musical colleagues but one that grew directly and organically out of the work I’d been doing in music. In 2000, with Terri Kapsalis, I became involved in saving a large cache of Sun Ra artifacts from oblivion, eventually donated to the University of Chicago Library and Experimental Sound Studio’s Creative Audio Archive. I’m still deeply engaged with those materials, and, along with a concurrent stint as chair of Exhibition Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I think this provided the natural transition from live music to visual art. At Corbett vs. Dempsey we still periodically present live music in the gallery, and now we have a record label; I’ve organized musical programs at the Guggenheim in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, curated exhibitions of Brötzmann’s artwork and Sun Ra’s archive. These worlds turn out to be more connected than you’d think. And fronting the music you love is a hard habit to shake. For many years, I subscribed to Laura Mulvey’s statement of intent, “the destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon,” all along feeling that there was an underlying ellipsis in this profound dictum. To disrupt the pleasurable consumption of mainstream narrative cinema, to interrogate its secret methods, to break the comfort zone of continuity—these activities felt right, they seemed so good. But there’s the rub: the destruction of one kind of pleasure often creates another kind of pleasure. The joy of creative critique. The glee of deconstruction. Much of the music I was interested in was already engaged with something like that kind of interrogative practice. I recall my first conversation with guitarist Derek Bailey, in which he told me that he couldn’t imagine any reason that a person would come hear him play unless they were attracted to the sound of what he did. Wow, I thought, you’ve got to be pretty deep down the rabbit hole to find that sound attractive. To say it’s an acquired taste is perhaps wrong. I think it’s music that demands a different mode of listening, and when heard attentively, seriously, and critically, it reveals a whole system of pleasures, some predicated on the destruction of conventional musical norms, some operating in their own autonomous zone of attractions. There are still several essays rooted in poststructuralism and deconstruction in Microgroove. More than providing specific references or terminology, introduction 3

at a formative stage in development an immersion in poststructuralist and critical theory and cultural studies helped shape my thinking. I feel that it actually changed neural pathways. One does not need to write the word “text” to approach an object of study with circumspection. In Deleuze’s widely cited phrase, theory has given me a tool kit. Then again, so has dub reggae and freely improvised music. So has hip-hop, which I rarely write about, and Greek rembetika. And jazz. And vinyl. And Christopher Wool’s paintings. These are all lenses, kits, to me equally valuable. If theory is a source, bury the source. Let it grow anew.

••• In the introduction to Extended Play, I waxed lyrical about the radical potential of shuffle play. It was a new thing then. I had no idea how central it would become to my way of listening. At the time, I could shuffle between five discs; now I have an iPod with forty thousand tracks, and I can randomly access music for months without repeating. I’ve been thinking about jukeboxes lately. Strictly in terms of musical selection, my iPod now does the job of a jukebox. A sort of hyper-juke. I can let my little selector do all the work, keeping me entertained for hours at a stretch, consistently teasing my brain by introducing impromptu blindfold tests into my day. But shuffle only really works for me, I now realize, if I pay attention to it. If it’s just background, it takes all the interest away and can homogenize even the greatest music. If I need background, I prefer to listen to something more concentratedly programmed, like an album or an artist or even just a genre. On the other hand, by shifting my attention, the activity of shuffling can take on a different significance. In recent months, I’ve taken to pretending that my iPod is a deejay. That way I can judge its performance. Sometimes it’s in the zone, and sometimes it loses the thread. But when I attend to the iPod as a sort of miniature disc jockey, there’s something at stake in its juxtapositions, transitions, good choices, and fumbles. My colleagues think I’m a bit weird, I suspect, when I blurt out: “iPod is on fire today!” But that’s how I feel when it abuts two things that really somehow work, but would never have seemed like a conscious match. I’m old fashioned by now, with my grandpa iPod. Most youngsters are streaming, or they use algorithm-based programs like Pandora that choose songs based on some initial personal preference data, like Amazon does—if you like this, then you’ll probably like this. I’d rather have a means of access that doesn’t assume what I’d want, that’s not trying to please me. Those per4

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sonal preferences require a static subject, but I’m on the move, always curious; I want to learn new things, make unexpected associations. I might be interested in something that the little algorithm would never know, might think I’d hate. That’s why I’m a sucker for the chance aspect of shuffle. I love the notion, attributed in philosophy to David Hume and in biology to Lamarck, that chance is but our ignorance of causes. It suggests that there’s some reason beyond our grasp. Maybe that’s as close as I get to metaphysics. But I like it because it’s not the product of a corporate investigation; my interest is not predicted exclusively according to music I’ve liked in the past and superficial affinities it might have with music I don’t know. I want curveballs thrown into the mix. That’s why chance is my deejay. Looking through my singles recently, I thought about how much jukeboxes were like that, how they were harbingers of the possibility of random play, the idea that a machine could make cool decisions. Here you have a format, the seven-inch single, which is a standard unit. Anything could be put on it; wildly divergent music could be programmed using the same automaton. Two record covers in my singles collection caught my attention, and I immediately imagined them played back-to-back on a jukebox. Here’s Red Garland Quintet, with the beautiful graphic of a record in cross section, nifty arrow pointing down into the groove like a stylus. Superbad hard-bop, with a topflight lineup, Blue Mitchell’s trumpet, Pepper Adams’s baritone sax, and the Joneses (bassist Sam and drummer Elvin) on rhythm along with their leader. It was, quite literally, music made for jukeboxes, a black-and-white picture juke sleeve released alongside the color lp version. Now switch radically to a beautiful, extremely rare single by the British improvising group amm. This gem, which, like the Garland, has been reissued on cd, features short excerpts from a forty-five-minute performance by the duo version of the group, with Lou Gare on tenor sax and Eddie Prévost on drums. I love the idea of a groovy jazz jukebox session interrupted by a spacious, noisy spate of improvised music. It’s the kind of thing that my iPod might kick up, but there’s the added thought of the actual vinyl whirling around in the juke, the heavy tonearm slapping down on the disc, the vinyl living its ephemeral existence, serving its life’s purpose, to make us listen, to entertain us, maybe to make us think and feel something we haven’t thought or felt before.

••• Why micro? Microgroove. Smaller grooves. Grooving in small places by small assemblages with small audiences. (Makes me think of an early Pink Floyd title: “Several introduction 5

Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.”) A celebration of things content to stay small or resigned to the fact that without changing their underlying principles or aesthetics they will not grow all that much larger. No barrage of pr will make improvised music a pop commodity. It is a subset of a fraction of a portion of a minoritarian activity we call music listening, buried within the entertainment industry; the very fact that it’s of almost no value unless you actually pay attention to it automatically means it will never be especially popular. For that matter, an avalanche of radio coverage could not possibly make Helmut Lachenmann’s delicate “Dal Niente” into a hit, even in the already rarefied world of classical music, itself a rather unpopular micro-environ. Cat Power may have covered Michael Hurley’s songs, but that didn’t fling Hurley’s surreal lyrics and lemon drop intonation to the top of the charts. The music in Microgroove is not all small. PJ Harvey and Donna Summer and Liz Phair couldn’t be classed that way. But I think, in their variances of enormity, they can still be shoehorned into this title in a sense of finding little meanings in big music—reading against the grain is an activity that loosens classificatory borders, making transit from small to big and back more tenable, enjoyable even. Some of them actively engage in what Martin Scorsese has referred to as “smuggling”—the illicit bringing of unwarranted ideas or images into a mainstream work. This writer certainly has his straight-up, dead center mainstream passions, even if they’re not the ones he writes about most often. The twenty years represented in this collection reflect but hardly exhaust my interests and preoccupations in that period. I listen to pop and rock, entertainment music plain and simple. Lately, I’ve gone back to Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, and Cheap Trick, discovering things in them I’d missed when I first loved them. Albert Oehlen turned me on to neo-soul artists like Van Hunt, Bilal, and Omar, suggesting that if the world made any sense these artists would be on the radio, which reminds us that in the ’70s, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were on the radio. They were huge. And incredible. When I have found myself writing about majoritarian musics, it is often in search of aspects at their periphery. As a reviewer rightly observed in reference to Extended Play, I’m never particularly interested in getting to the “essence” of a music; that would be hypocritical coming from someone who takes pleasure, as a listener, in the details, the surfaces, the contradictions, the texture, the edges, the forgotten or repressed or ignored or discounted or discarded components in excess of any music’s essence. The inexhaustible margins of audio activity. 6

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••• The specific term “microgroove” refers to a new technology introduced in 1948 and patented by cbs Laboratories that advanced the development of lp albums by cramming more music into each square inch of disc surface, allowing the standard twenty-minute side to take shape. In my private semiology, this is a reminder of how much my own experience of music is filtered through recordings. I am, as is virtually every contemporary person, a child of the microgroove revolution. This micro was the vehicle for the initial explosion of the popular music industry, an irony that is never far from my mind. The title Microgroove is also a link to Extended Play. Only a few months after the microgroove technology was introduced, rca debuted the “extended play,” or ep, the direct result of which was the emergence of the seven-inch single. These two books are closely related, carrying some of the same themes and some identical interview subjects. Anyone familiar with the former book will perhaps notice that where there were individual entries on Fred Anderson and Von Freeman (both dearly departed in the meantime) and Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker (now very active septuagenarians), in this book the same musicians are found conversing with each other—an interview strategy I have enjoyed deploying for DownBeat and other publications. Thus, I hope these discussions can profitably be read in relation to the ones in Extended Play. Han Bennink and Sun Ra reappear, and Mats Gustafsson, who is just a glimmer in the introduction of the earlier volume, is now one of my closest friends and a verified free music superstar. I have tried to approach certain artists from different angles. Brötzmann, for instance, appears three times here: in conversation with Parker, in a tour diary, and also in a reflection on his work as a graphic artist. A profile of Sun Ra’s Chicago period is augmented by a specific look at the graphic design approach of his El Saturn label. I was a third wheel in two conversations, separated by four years, that involved singer Liz Phair; it’s fascinating to see the differences in tone that arise over that span, and the ones that might be attributed to the gender of Phair’s other interlocutor, in one case Lou Barlow, in the other Kim Gordon. Several figures are considered solo and with another musician. Ken Vandermark appears in successive chapters—a personal reflection on nearly thirty years of knowing him, and in conversation with Joe McPhee. Steve Lacy’s ambulatory lifestyle is the topic of a profile written a few years before his tragic death, based on a weekend spent with him and Irene Aebi at their apartment in Berlin; another chapter written in a less personal manner considers Lacy’s highly collaborative nature as it manifested in his introduction 7

work with writer Brion Gysin. My interview with Misha Mengelberg proved too rich for the article I originally published, and I have opted to reproduce the full conversation, contrasting it with a three-way dialogue adding his career-long compadre Han Bennink. Two of the most important and influential contemporary painters, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, each make a pair of appearances in Microgroove: Oehlen in question-and-answer interviews, one free ranging, one based on a specific body of work; Wool in two essays, one considering the musical currents in his paintings, one based on a specific set he designed for a dance troupe and composed at the request of choreographer Benjamin Millepied. In all these cases, I was interested in presenting multiple points of view, to suggest how a different vantage in time, place, modality of writing, or circumstance of interview can yield new ideas. My experience tells me that such a notion is arguably most fruitful when dealing with rich works and complex artists. It’s a shakier proposition to approach superficial culture from different viewpoints. Some new and expanded areas of orientation appear. I dedicate a full chapter to contemporary classical music, and elsewhere I explore contrasts and continuities between music and painting, graphic arts, poetry, and fiction. If there is a deep difference between the two compilations, it is mostly felt in the way they are organized; while I chose to segregate the chapters according to writing mode in Extended Play (academic, journalistic, interrogatory), here I’ve let the literary as well as musical genres freely mingle, grouping the chapters into rough thematic zones. This time out, I’m the deejay. The “other” of the subtitle has two tributaries. First, from the academic side, it’s a holdover from the 1980s, when the notion of “the other” had achieved something of a pandemic reach into the critical community. (It became the discursive fetish that Jean Baudrillard had so pointedly observed in the word “fetish” as it was deployed by Marxists a generation earlier.) A student of semiotics, I wrote on otherness as it related to psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxian critique, and subaltern studies. “Other” was a dialectical term pitted against the dominant center of the social map—white, middle-class, male, heterosexual, and any combination of the above. It was a useful, if much too versatile, concept, but after a period of overapplication it has gone the way of terms like “apparatus” and “suture”—supple, seductive terms that eventually lose their frisson. (At one point in grad school, my friend Jalal Toufic and I joked about writing something titled “Why (B)other?” to poke a bit of fun at this and another insufferable theory tic: witless parentheses.) In “other music,” the “other” comes from a less tony place as well. On undergrad afternoons when I should have been reading Wittgenstein or 8

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Barthes or Mulvey, I often went awol to Boston, where the record stores were numerous and well stocked. One feature not exclusive to Beantown that I especially liked was the existence of a catchall for uncategorizable music. A white plastic separator card proclaimed: other. Not this, not that, but the other. Something that doesn’t fit. I found myself burrowing into that inexact section, truffling for the odd Fred Frith item or Borbetomagus rarity. A longlived store in New York City now bears the name Other Music. A fine store with a fine handle. The intervening two decades between these two books have given me added confidence in one aspect of my endeavor. I believe that we will one day understand improvisation to have been a paramount contribution to culture in the twentieth century. Maybe the central contribution. It is a feature of many contemporary artistic practices, and its philosophical implications are yet to be fully grasped, but there’s no doubt that improvisation has been explored most richly in music. This, of course, is the topic for a more focused argument, one that I’m beginning to formulate. When I look at the choices I’ve made of who to interview and write about, I am convinced that it’s because Ornette Coleman, Milford Graves, Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, Peter Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, Carla Bley, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, and George Lewis are among the greatest artists of our time, their work roughly equivalent in significance to the radical innovations of cubism or abstraction in painting. In the company of equals, they are more equal than the rest, their obscurity in the mass ear notwithstanding.

••• There are record collectors whose entire focus is on the esoteric. Scarcity and unknownness are taken to be signs of quality, perhaps confirmation of a conspiracy in mainstream culture to hide the really great stuff. These guys dig up some of the most astonishing things, genuine lost treasures. There’s a whole pecking order of them, a rare record royalty. I feel an affinity for this way of thinking, I recognize, because I distrust the popular filters through which most cultural productions must pass in order to be registered in the mass imagination. If history is written by the victors, sometimes the victors have dull taste, hence the singular importance of the cratedigger. But there has to be more than raw rarity at play. The records must reward the observer, somehow, some way. For me, this normally means the music has to be compelling. Sounds obvious, but some collectors are not interested in the sound of the music—if it has a weird cover, was issued privately, and fits into some oddball category, like new age free jazz or Native American cowboy music, introduction 9

that’s more than enough. From the standpoint of music as affirmation of the spectacular diversity of human endeavor, no doubt it is. I recall finding an early ’70s seven-inch with a picture sleeve in a going-out-of-business Lisbon record store by a Portuguese band called the Korean Black Eyes—five ultrahip Korean women leaning over their guitars and saxophone, playing a version of Sly & the Family Stone’s “Higher” that is a testament to the creative possibilities of cross-cultural misunderstanding. I dig this kind of wild-world wacko-ness. It can be a brilliant demonstration of the poetics of failure or the positive potential of geographic isolation. A night listening to records with ne plus ultra cratedigger David Hollander is like a trip to another planet. With a gleeful smile he’ll drop the needle on a delightfully inept soul track, rock back on his heels, take a beat, and finally, with a maniac’s intensity, blurt: “Do you realize we’re in the freaking twilight zone?!!” On the other side of the fence, I know well-informed and critical people who have absolute faith in the mass cultural filtration system. And lest we be blinded by our enthusiasm for the little known, the fact is that the system has shaped some sensationally fantastic music. In the soul realm alone, the productions of Stax, Atlantic, and Motown are among the great achievements of Homo sapiens. Many of the hen’s teeth singles that diggers have excavated are in truth made by people trying to replicate the best-known artists. James Brown in particular has been mauled by several generations of near-miss imitators, sometimes to wonderful or hilarious effect. Anyone who offhand dismisses JB, Ray Charles, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding on the basis of their stature is little more than a sanctimonious ideologue. Sometimes things left by the side of the road deserve to stay there, and sometimes things that stand the test of time are the Darwinian champs. Now and then, nothing scratches the itch like Sam Cooke or the Drifters. But if you believe that the whole soul diva story is covered in Aretha Franklin’s greatest hits, go get yourself some music by Betty Harris or Jean Wells and prepare to have your mind changed.

••• Micro. Other. It’s too crude a formulation to pit Big Bad Big-ness against Scrappy Li’l Micro-Otherness in some imaginary timeless epic battle. There are subtler forces at work, a mottled topography of independent and institutionalized artistic interests, intricate and submerged lines of distribution, unevenly cast webs of information. But sometimes a well-placed reductive dichotomy can help clarify things, and in this case it holds true enough: the large/small divide in cultural production and consumption is a gap that must be reckoned with. 10

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Obviously, technology has altered everything about how we access and utilize music, for better, for worse. Downloading dominates. People wear headphones all day, every day, making listening into an asocial activity. Amateurism flourishes on YouTube, as does a vast repository of historical clips. Head over to Ubu Web for a holy shit moment of free vanguard fun. (Gotta hand it to a once preposterous-sounding Friedrich Kittler, who prophesied a central bank of cultural productions linked to users by some sort of fiber network. Introducing . . . the Interweb.) Observe the demise of magnetic tape, the waning years of compact disc. We hear regularly about the death of the music industry, how the online marketplace has destroyed independent record production, how centralized the music world has become. That’s not my experience of it. A restructuring of the major label model does not signal the end of recorded music or the last gasp of music itself. There are certain places where losses can be detected: I find fewer venues, even online, where really incisive writing on music happens in the journalistic realm. But thanks to musician-theorists like George Lewis, David Grubbs, and Vijay Iyer, creative music is taken seriously in academic circles, enhanced by the experience of practitioners. There are more small labels than ever, attending to all sorts of wee little musics. And the microgrooves of the past are being incessantly mined; Dempsey and I recently spent hours in a London store obsessively specializing in obscure rockabilly and the wildest, weirdest r&b. In Chicago, multiple venues present improvised music on a weekly basis. Worldwide, the audience for creative music has grown exponentially, with folks taking regular trips down some of its culs-de-sac. Via podcast, anyone can hear almost any kind of music they’re curious about. A whole generation of hipster rock bands has grown up plumbing the mysteries of microgroove via previously unimaginable research tools—listen to the way that Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors integrate their innumerable influences. These are salad years for music fanatics and omnivorous musicians. Maybe the divide between micro and macro is falling apart. That would be a positive development. Or maybe everything is just scaling down. Expectations are changing. In terms of cd sales, no question, what constitutes an acceptable number has been reduced. And why not? Ten thousand people is a lot of people. We sold about that many copies of Peter Brötzmann’s Nipples when the Unheard Music Series reissued it. That’s plenty. I fondly recall March 10, 1996, 10:00 pm, at the Empty Bottle, when two hundred people crowded the club to hear Joe McPhee play in Chicago for the first time. Vandermark and I both looked around in disbelief. There will certainly never be a mass audience for McPhee’s music, it won’t top the charts, which is OK. McPhee’s introduction 11

finely etched, unvoiced wind sculptures on pocket trumpet wouldn’t work in a stadium setting. His music requires the sort of concentrated, close listening that giant crowds can’t tolerate, even on some physical, squirmological level. No matter that it’s not a household music. There are still people who would want to listen to McPhee and other “others”—we can infer that from just this single event and from the nine more years of concerts Ken and I presented at the Bottle. Curious people, people who would give the work the attention it deserves without concern for the fact that not a soul who’s friends with anybody they know had ever heard of Joe McPhee. Open people who want to know about the music. Ones who merely haven’t found it. Yet. It is to the encounter with that patiently unaware listenership, as well as to the fortunate folks who have already discovered other music in all its manifestations, that Microgroove is dedicated.

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