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******New Year 2006******
Obituary
Derek Bailey
Restlessly creative guitarist forever pushing at the boundaries of music
John Fordham
Thursday December 29, 2005
The Guardian
On and off over the past decade, I would meet Derek Bailey in the same Chinese restaurant in Dalston, north
London. As well as being a wonderful raconteur, the Yorkshire-born guitarist regularly blew holes in convenient wisdoms sitting smugly on some shelf in my head. His provocativeness was not oneupmanship, or a parade of erudition; it was the way his brain was wired. He had done the same for musicians and listeners all over the world for 40 years or more as a free-player and a freethinker, a Frank Zappa for the world of spontaneous performance.
Article continues
Bailey, who has died aged 75 of complications from motor neurone disease, was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture without ever believing he knew all the answers - or maybe any at all. With his passing, the world has lost an inimitable musician and an implacable enemy of commercialised art.
Bailey once described his friend John Zorn, the American avant-garde composer and improviser, as "a Diaghilev of contemporary music" for his catalytic influence. But he could as easily have been describing himself. He worked with performers as different as free-jazz piano legend Cecil Taylor, cool school saxist Lee Konitz, Harlem bop-and-swing hoofer Will Gaines, naked Japanese improvising dancer Min Tanaka, fusion guitar star Pat Metheny and the drum virtuoso Tony Williams. In later years, he collaborated with Japanese art-of-noise rock band the Ruins, and - when he had already passed 70 - with young drum and bass DJs.
Singlemindedly devoted to unpremeditated improvisation, Bailey published a book on the subject in 1980 called Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. Twelve years later, it led to Jeremy Marre's revealing Channel 4 four-parter On the Edge: Improvisation in Music, an ambitious venture that Bailey both scripted and presented. The project tracked the improvising impulse through the most radical interpreters of Mozart, the methods of the organist at the Sacré Coeur, Paris, in baroque music or the blues, and in locations from the
Hebrides to the
Ganges.
Bailey was born to George and Lily Bailey, in the Abbeydale district of Sheffield. His father was a barber, his uncle a professional guitarist who gave the boy his first instrument and some haphazard lessons. By a process of osmosis from musicians he met, sustenance from odd jobs, record-listening (bebop guitar pioneer Charlie Christian was his early model) and some later self-education in theory and arranging, Bailey became a pro on the
UK dance-band and studio circuit in the early 1950s. By 1965, he was playing
Blackpool seasons for Morecambe and Wise.
By that time, he had begun rehearsing regularly with two adventurous younger players in
Sheffield - classical percussionist turned jazz drummer Tony Oxley and bassist (later to become classical composer) Gavin Bryars. The three formed the group Joseph Holbrooke (named after an obscure British composer whose work they never played), and, from 1963 to 1966, its jazz beginnings in John Coltrane and the Bill Evans Trio were crossbred with ideas from John Cage, Stockhausen, serialism, Oxley's labyrinthine rhythm variations, and much more. Gradually, the group moved from jazz into a non-idiomatic approach - free-improvisation.
From 1966, Bailey began visiting the Little Theatre Club, a
West End bolthole where the drummer John Stevens ran all-comers' sessions and young improvisers (including Evan Parker, Trevor Watts and Paul Rutherford), jazz virtuosi (Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler) and contemporary classical players like Barry Guy gathered. With various versions of Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Oxley's sextet, the Music Improvisation Company (electronics, percussion and Parker's sax) and the trio Iskra 1903 (with trombonist Rutherford and bassist Guy), Bailey began to build a completely new vocabulary for the guitar.
Though he never abandoned the conventional instrument, he was mixing warped chordal ideas, serialism's lateral melodies, Cage's elevation of silence, pedal-operated electronics and a brittle attack borrowed from percussionists. From 1970, he also ran the Incus Records label, first with Oxley and Parker, then with his partner (and later third wife) Karen Brookman - their Hackney flat is still the Incus HQ.
Bailey's Diaghilev qualities came to the fore in 1976, when he began his Company project, an improvisers' festival that involved 400 players each year up to 1994 in Britain, the US and Japan, with Zorn, Lee Konitz, saxist Steve Lacy, classical violinist Alexander Balanescu, bassoonist Lindsey Cooper and composer/saxist Anthony Braxton among those taking part. He also invited dancers, performance-artists, electronica-specialists and avant-rockers to join in, with the artists deciding who would improvise with who.
He likened improvisation to spontaneous relationships and conversation - full of accidental harmonies, misunderstandings, passion and indifference. Though a sophisticated instrumentalist himself, he did not mind playing with people who had comparatively few skills; something interesting might always happen. He worked with bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Tony Williams in the trio Arcana in 1995, and collaborated with Pat Metheny and two percussionists on The Sign Of Four in 1996.
He described that encounter to me thus: "The equipment I use I bought in Canal Street 15 years ago. Pat's sitting in the middle of what looks like the console of a 747, with four guitars and a distortion unit that could be used for dispersing mobs. There were two guys with huge percussion kits, and I'm making a lot of noise, and then he switches this thing on, and it's like there's three dogs playing around a little, and suddenly an elephant lands on top of them."
Yet for all that raw-noise energy, Bailey continued to be a delicate acoustic improviser, often unaccompanied or in duets. Just in time, he was caught by the ideal biographer, Ben Watson, in the book Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation. And, though his combativeness never left him, he seemed to take heart from the musical eclecticism and dissolution of idiomatic differences he had done so much to encourage.
"The kids don't mind whatever it is these days," he told me once. "Maybe there's a lot of stuff out there now that is by its nature odd. But they seem to be able to take anything. Which is great to somebody like me. I find it very comfortable. In an uncomfortable sort of way." Karen survives him, as does Simon, the son of his second marriage.
Richard Williams writes: The least typical recording Derek Bailey ever made also turned out (not that he would have appreciated the compliment) to be one of the great jazz recordings of the last 40 years. Titled simply Ballads, and recorded in 2002 for John Zorn's Tzadik label, it consisted of solo guitar meditations on 14 songs from the standard repertoire, including Laura, Body and Soul, What's New, Stella by Starlight and You Go to My Head.
Although this was the last project one might have expected from a professed enemy of composed music, it was no surprise to discover that in these songs - their musical and emotional contours long since flattened by overuse - Bailey found brand new angles and meanings, thanks to the application of his highly personal imagination and unique instrumental language. Extraordinary renditions, indeed, and utterly spellbinding.
By the time he recorded another solo CD for Tzadik, entitled Carpal Tunnel, three years later, his refined technique had all but disappeared. No longer able to grasp a plectrum with his right hand, he adapted by striking the strings with his thumb. The album's title came from the condition, carpal tunnel syndrome, that was said by doctors to explain his reduced dexterity. In fact, it marked the onset of the motor neurone disease from which he died.
In these pieces, the spiky elegance of Ballads is replaced by a halting delicacy reminiscent both of Japanese koto music and of the last paintings of Willem de Kooning, when illness had robbed the great abstract expressionist of the power to do anything other than trace a haunting shadow of the shapes and colours that had once burst from the canvas.
· Derek Bailey, improvising guitarist, born
January 29 1930; died
December 25 2005
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We regret that this information was lost in its entirety. "News and info" will be updated as reguarly as possible
by the Black Phone Records staff.
Below is the listings from 2004. Above will be the listings for 2006 onward. If you have any questions
please contact:
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Black Phone Records Staff
Desert News Publishing Co. July 11, 2004
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Church's peyote use OK'd
High court ruling may clear founder of charges
By Angie Welling
Deseret Morning News
Members of a Utah County American Indian church, whatever their race,
can continue to use peyote as part of their religious ceremonies without
fear of state prosecution, the Utah Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.
James Mooney, right, and Linda Mooney appear in court in 2000. The Mooneys
were accused of distributing peyote during ceremonies at their church.
Dan Lund, Associated Press The unanimous decision applies to all 200
members of the Oklevueha Earth Walks Native American Church and may result
in the complete dismissal of criminal charges against the church's founder,
James "Flaming Eagle" Mooney.
"The bona fide religious use of peyote cannot serve as the basis for
prosecuting members of the Native American Church under state law," Justice
Jill Parrish wrote in Tuesday's opinion.
Mooney's attorney, Kathryn Collard, praised the ruling as a victory
for religious freedom that affects all Utahns, not just members of Mooney's
congregation.
"For the rest of us, what it confirms is that individuals can still
rely on the courts and their state and federal constitutional rights to
protect them from this incredible power of the state. And that is a
wonderful thing," Collard said. "I think it should make all of us who take
these rights for granted think about how in every age people have to
struggle to preserve these fundamental rights."
Mooney was unavailable for comment Tuesday, but Collard said he is
grateful for the Supreme Court's decision.
"He just expressed to me what a great thing it is that the court
protected the religious diversity that is the foundation of our country and
our state," Collard said. "He just could not be happier. It's been a very
long struggle for them."
Mooney and his wife, Linda, were arrested in November 2000 and charged
with 10 first-degree felony counts of operating a controlled substance
criminal enterprise and one count of second-degree felony racketeering for
allegedly distributing peyote to non-Indians.
Collard said she will revive a motion to dismiss all charges against
the Mooneys, which 4th District Court Judge Gary Stott rejected in October
2001 when he ruled that the exception does not apply to any race other than
American Indians.
Though Tuesday's opinion overturns Stott's ruling, Assistant Attorney
General Kris Leonard said it may still be possible for the case to go
forward.
"There are still issues that haven't been decided below that may yet
allow prosecution of the case," she said.
The court's ruling holds true only for members of a valid Native
American Church, Leonard said, and there has been no investigation into the
validity of Mooney's church.
For the purposes of its decision, the Supreme Court assumed Mooney's
representations, she said.
At issue in the case was an exemption in the Federal Controlled
Substance Act that allows the use of peyote in religious ceremonies. The
exception was enacted by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, now
known as the Drug Enforcement Administration, after peyote was classified as
a controlled substance in 1970.
The state Attorney General's Office argued on appeal that the
exemption has never been incorporated into state laws controlling drug use.
Additionally, the state argued, the exemption does not apply to non-Indian
members of the Native American Church.
The Supreme Court rejected each argument Tuesday, saying the state
statute must be interpreted to include the exemption to avoid a conflict
between state and federal law and to protect the Mooneys' constitutional
rights. Additionally, the court noted, the exemption makes no mention of
tribal status as a requirement for immunity from prosecution.
"The term 'members' in the exemption clearly refers to members of the
'Native American Church' ‹ not to members of federally recognized tribes,"
the opinion states. "Therefore, so long as their church is part of the
'Native American Church,' the Mooneys may not be prosecuted for using peyote
in bona fide religious ceremonies."
Mooney founded the Oklevueha Earth Walks Native American Church in
1997 in Benjamin, a rural community west of Spanish Fork. The Native
American Church, which was established in 1918 in Oklahoma, operates
throughout the United States and Canada. Each chapter operates autonomously
and sets its own rules.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2004 Deseret News Publishing Company
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ray charles dies (june 10, 2004)
Ray Charles, Who Reshaped American Music, Dies at 73
June 10, 2004
By JON PARELES
Ray Charles, one of
America's greatest singers and a
musician who brought the essence of soul to country, jazz,
rock, standards and every other style of music he touched,
died today. He was 73.
A spokesman for Mr. Charles, Jerry Digney, told Reuters
that Mr. Charles had died at his home in
Beverly Hills,
Calif., of complications from liver disease.
Mr. Charles reshaped American music for half a century as a
singer, pianist, songwriter, bandleader and producer. He
was a remarkable pianist, at home with splashy barrelhouse
playing and precisely understated swing. But his playing
was inevitably overshadowed by his voice, a forthright
baritone steeped in the blues, strong and impure and
gloriously unpredictable.
Mr. Charles could belt like a blues shouter and croon like
a pop singer, and he used the flaws and breaks in his voice
to illuminate emotional paradoxes. Even in his early years,
he sounded like a voice of experience, someone who had seen
all the hopes and follies of humanity.
Leaping into falsetto, stretching a word and then breaking
it off with a laugh or a sob, slipping into an intimate
whisper and then letting loose a whoop, Mr. Charles could
sound suave or raw, brash or hesitant, joyful or desolate,
insouciant or tearful, earthy or devout. He projected the
primal exuberance of a field holler and the sophistication
of a be-bopper; he could conjure exaltation, sorrow and
determination within a single phrase.
In the 1950's, Mr. Charles became an architect of soul
music by bringing the fervor and dynamics of gospel to
secular subjects. But he soon broke through any categories.
By singing any song he prized - from "Hallelujah I Love Her
So" to "I Can't Stop Lovin' You" to "
Georgia on My Mind" to
"
America the Beautiful" - Mr. Charles claimed all of
American music as his birthright. He made more than 60
albums, and his influence echoes through generations of
rock and soul singers.
Ray Charles Robinson was born on
Sept. 23, 1930, in the
small town of
Albany,
Ga., and grew up in
Greenville,
Fla.
When he was 5 years old, he began losing his sight from an
unknown ailment that may have been glaucoma. He became
completely blind at the age of 6. But he began to learn
piano, at first from a local boogie-woogie pianist, Wylie
Pitman; he also soaked up gospel music at the
Shiloh
Baptist
Church and rural blues from musicians who included
Tampa Red.
He was sent to the
St. Augustine
School for the Deaf and
the Blind from 1937 to 1945. There, he learned to repair
radios and automobiles, and he started formal piano
lessons. He learned to write music in Braille and played
Chopin and Art Tatum; he also learned to play clarinet,
alto saxophone, trumpet and organ. On the radio, he
listened to swing bands, country-and-western singers and
gospel quartets. "My ears were sponges, soaked it all up,"
he told David Ritz, who collaborated on his 1978
autobiography, "Brother Ray."
He left school at 15, after the death of his mother, and
went to
Jacksonville to earn a living as a musician. He
played where he could as a sideman or a solo act, taking
jobs all over the state and calling himself Ray Charles to
distinguish himself from the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. He
modeled himself on two urbane pianists and singers, Charles
Brown and Nat (King) Cole, carefully copying their hits and
imitating their inflections. After three years, he decided
to put
Florida far behind him and moved to
Seattle. There,
he formed the McSon Trio, named after its guitarist, Gosady
McGee, and the "son" from Robinson. He also started an
addiction to heroin that lasted for 17 years.
Mr. Charles made his first single, "Confession Blues," in
Seattle in 1949, credited to the Maxin (a different
spelling of McSon) Trio. His second single, "Baby Let Me
Hold Your Hand" by the Ray Charles Trio, was recorded in
Los Angeles in 1950 with musicians who had played with Nat
Cole. The singles were hits on the "race records" (later
rhythm-and-blues) charts, and Mr. Charles moved to Los
Angeles.
He joined the band led by the blues guitarist Lowell
Fulson, and became its musical director. After two years of
touring the
United States, he left to resume his own
career.
In 1953, he signed with Atlantic Records; he also moved to
New Orleans to work with Guitar Slim as pianist and
arranger. Guitar Slim's "Things That I Used to Do,"
featuring Mr. Charles on piano, became a million-selling
single in 1954, and it convinced Mr. Charles to leave his
imitative style behind and free his own voice.
He moved to
Dallas and formed a band featuring the
Texas
saxophonist David (Fathead) Newman. And after working with
studio bands on his first Atlantic singles, he convinced
the label to let him record with his touring band, playing
arrangements that had been road-tested on the
rhythm-and-blues circuit.
"I've Got a Woman," recorded in a radio-station studio in
Atlanta with his seven-piece band, became Mr. Charles's
first national hit in 1955, starting a string of bluesy,
gospel-charged hits, among them "A Fool for You," "Drown in
My Own Tears" and "Hallelujah I Love Her So."
In the mid-1950's, he expanded his band to include the
Raelettes, female backup singers who provided responses
like a gospel choir, and they became a permanent part of
his music. It was the beginning of the rock and roll era,
but Mr. Charles didn't gear his songs to teen-agers; they
had the adult concerns of the blues. Yet his songs began
showing up on the pop charts as well as the
rhythm-and-blues charts.
At the same time, Mr. Charles made clear his allegiance to
jazz, recording an album with Milt Jackson of the Modern
Jazz Quartet in 1958 and appearing at the Newport Jazz
Festival.
In 1959, a late-night jam session turned into "What'd I
Say." It was a blues with an electric-piano riff, a
quasi-Latin beat and cheerful come-ons that gave way to
wordless, call-and-response moans. Although some radio
stations banned it, it became a Top 10 pop hit and sold a
million copies. But his next album, "The Genius of Ray
Charles," took a different tack: half of it was recorded
with a lush string orchestra, half with a big band. He also
recorded his first country song, a version of Hank Snow's
"I'm Movin' On."
Mr. Charles left
Atlantic for ABC-Paramount Records in 1959
when it offered him higher royalties and ownership of his
master recordings. He began to reach a larger pop public
with songs that included two No. 1 hits, his version of
"
Georgia on My Mind" in 1960 (which brought him his first
of a dozen Grammy awards) and "Hit the Road Jack" in 1961.
With increasing royalties and touring fees, Mr. Charles
expanded his group to become a big band.
By the early 1960's, Mr. Charles had virtually given up
writing his own material to follow his eclectic impulses as
an interpreter. He made an instrumental jazz album, "Genius
+ Soul = Jazz," playing
Hammond organ with a big band
featuring Count Basie sidemen. On the duet album he made in
1961 with the jazz singer Betty Carter, two highly
idiosyncratic voices sounded utterly compatible. And in
1962, he released the album "Modern Sounds in Country and
Western," remaking country songs as big-band ballads. His
version of "I Can't Stop Lovin' You" reached No. 1 and sold
a million copies.
After recording "Modern Sounds in Country and Western, Vol.
2," Mr. Charles settled into an office building and studio
in
Los Angeles that remained his headquarters. He returned
to rhythm-and-blues for his other major 1960's hits:
"Busted" in 1963 and "Let's Go Get Stoned" in 1966. But he
was also recording standards, country songs and show tunes.
In 1965, Mr. Charles was arrested for possession of heroin.
He spent time in a
California sanitarium to break his
addiction and stopped performing for a year, the only break
during his long career. When he emerged, he resumed his old
schedule: touring for up to 10 months with the big band and
releasing an album or two every year. He started his own
label, Tangerine, which released albums through ABC and on
its own. In the mid-1970's, he started another label,
Crossover, which released albums through Atlantic Records.
His presence on the pop charts had dwindled, but he was
still widely respected. In 1971, he joined Aretha Franklin
for the concert she recorded as "Live at Fillmore West."
His version of Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" won a
Grammy award in 1975. He wrote an autobiography, "Brother
Ray," that became a best-seller in 1978. In 1979, his
version of "
Georgia on My Mind" was named as
Georgia's
official state song, and in 1980, he was featured in the
movie "The Blues Brothers."
During the 1980's, Mr. Charles returned to the charts, this
time in the country category. The boundary-crossing
Southern music he had envisioned with "Modern Sounds in
Country and Western" had been not just accepted, but
treated as natural. Mr. Charles signed to CBS Records's
Nashville division and made "Friendship," an album of duets
with 10 country stars, including songs with George Jones
and Willie Nelson that reached the country Top 10 in 1983.
He sang "
America the Beautiful" at the Republican
Convention in 1984.
In 1986, Mr. Charles was one of the first musicians
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He received a
Grammy award for Lifetime Achievement in 1987, and in 1989
he appeared on Quincy Jones's album "Back on the Block,"
winning another Grammy for a vocal duet with Chaka Khan on
"I'll Be Good to You." In 1990, he turned up in television
ads for Diet Pepsi, singing, "You got the right one, baby,
uh-huh!"
Mr. Charles's private life was complicated; he was married
twice, and had nine children with seven women. But he had
become an American pop icon. And year in and year out, Mr.
Charles continued to move audiences with his concerts. He
would take a set of familiar songs and find within them
moments of tenderness and bitterness, humor and
resignation.
In songs he had written and songs that he had indelibly
claimed, Mr. Charles summed up American music from big-band
swing to country, Tin Pan Alley to gospel. With his
profound knowledge of musical styles and matters of the
heart, Mr. Charles composed, arranged and improvised his
way toward an American culture that embraced soul and
acknowledged no barriers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/arts/music/10CND-RAY.html?ex=1087910282&ei=1&en=4895d3103cdadd99
eminem in the "lyrically judicial" press
Lyrical Judge Praises Eminem in Lyrics Fight
June 10, 2004
By MICHAEL BRICK
Comparing Eminem to Benny Goodman, Elvis Presley and Paul
Simon, a federal judge ruled yesterday that the company
that publishes a leading hip-hop magazine was in contempt
of court for failing to comply with orders in a copyright
battle with the rapper.
In two separate orders released yesterday, Judge Gerard E.
Lynch of
United States District Court for the Southern
District of New York awarded some monetary damages to
Eminem's record company, Shady Records, and dismissed
counterclaims against Eminem himself, whose real name is
Marshall B. Mathers III.
Judge Lynch ruled that the publisher of The Source, Source
Enterprises, had violated his injunction by publishing on
its Web site (www.the source.com) lyrics ascribed to
Eminem. The lyrics, which disparage black women, are
several years old, written before Eminem acquired his fame.
The judge said their publication by The Source carried the
potential to impair the credibility of Eminem, who is
white. Eminem has acknowledged writing them but described
them as a product of adolescent heartbreak.
"Mathers is the most prominent of the handful of white
hip-hop artists who have been artistically or commercially
successful," Judge Lynch wrote. "Like other white musicians
who have been successful in musical genres or forms
pioneered by Africans or African-Americans, from Benny
Goodman to Elvis Presley to Paul Simon, Mathers has been
accused of exploiting black culture; he in turn has
asserted his respect for his black role models and peers,
and has maintained that he comes by his hip-hop success
honestly, as a young man from a poor urban background who
has long been associated with African-American friends,
neighbors and mentors."
The magazine cast its publication of the lyrics as a
journalistic exposé; Eminem and his record company cast it
as copyright infringement, and the parties took their
dispute to court. The main copyright infringement claim is
still being litigated.
One order issued yesterday released Eminem from
responsibility for counterclaims of copyright infringement,
finding that only his record company, as the assignee of
his rights, was directly involved in that dispute.
A second order found that The Source was in civil contempt
for publishing the lyrics on its Web site, where a lawyer
for Shady Records found them. The judge stopped short of
ruling the magazine company's contempt willful, and he
denied requests for sanctions against it, awarding little
more than the costs of enforcing the injunction, which have
not been determined.
"At the same time," Judge Lynch wrote, "the degree of
acrimony and lawyerly zeal in this litigation makes it
inconceivable that Source was unaware that Shady would be
vigorously monitoring its compliance with the order."
Dennis Dennehy, a spokesman for Interscope Records, the
parent of Shady Records, declined to comment on the orders.
Michael S. Elkin, a partner at Thelen, Reid & Priest who is
the trial lawyer for The Source, said in a telephone
interview that his client's focus remained on the copyright
infringement claims.
"The Source had every right to publish the material it did
release to inform the public about who Eminem is," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/arts/music/10RAPP.html?ex=1087902039&ei=1&en=5ec70f7f0ea212b7
artists as criminals (june 2, 2004)
http://www.caedefensefund.org/
SEVEN ARTISTS SUBPOENAED IN
USA PATRIOT ACT CASE
On May 30, members of the performance art collective Critical Art Ensemble were subpoenaed by the FBI. The FBI is planning to indict Steve Kurtz, a member of CAE before a grand jury on June 15, on unknown charges. CAE is under investigation for their use of scientific equipment to produce art projects that question the relationship between commerce, politics and biotechnology. Critical Art Ensemble have been producing performances and theory that merge political realities with technology and theater since 1987. Thus far seven subpoenas have been issued to: Adele Henderson, Chair of the
Art
Department at UB; Andrew Johnson, Professor of Art at UB; Paul Vanouse, Professor of Art at UB; Beatriz da Costa, Professor of Art at UCI; Steven Barnes, FSU; Dorian Burr and Beverly Schlee.
****
The Washington Post
June 2, 2004 Wednesday
Final Edition
HEADLINE: The FBI's Art Attack;
Offbeat Materials at Professor's Home Set Off Bioterror Alarm
BYLINE: Lynne Duke, Washington Post Staff Writer
"A forensic investigation of FBI trash." On the telephone, Beatriz da Costa says it wryly. Her humor sounds bitter. She's talking about the detritus of a terror probe at the
Buffalo home of her good friends, the Kurtzes.
She's talking about the pizza boxes, Gatorade jugs, the gloves, the gas mask filters, the biohazard suits: the stuff left by police, FBI, hazmat and health investigators after they descended on the Kurtz home and quarantined the place.
The garbage tells a story of personal tragedy, a death in the Kurtz household, that sparked suspicions (later proved unfounded) of a biohazard in the neighborhood. And it tells a story of the times in which we live, with almost daily warnings about terror, and with law enforcement primed to pounce.
Steve Kurtz, a
Buffalo art professor, discovered on the morning of May 11 that his wife of 20 years, Hope Kurtz, had stopped breathing. He called 911. Police and emergency personnel responded, and what they saw in the Kurtz home has triggered a full-blown probe -- into the vials and bacterial cultures and strange contraptions and laboratory equipment.
The FBI is investigating. A federal grand jury has been impaneled. Witnesses have been subpoenaed, including da Costa.
Kurtz and his late wife were founders of the Critical Art Ensemble, an internationally renowned collective of "tactical media" protest and performance artists. Steve Kurtz, 48, has focused on the problems of the emergence of biotechnology, such as genetically modified food. He and the art ensemble, which also includes da Costa, have authored several books including "Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media" and "Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas," both published by Autonomedia/Semiotext(e).
The day of his wife's death, Kurtz told the authorities who he is and what he does.
"He explained to them that he uses [the equipment] in connection with his art, and the next thing you know they call the FBI and a full hazmat team is deposited there from
Quantico -- that's what they told me," says Paul Cambria, the lawyer who is representing Kurtz. "And they all showed up in their suits and they're hosing each other down and closing the street off, and all the news cameras were there and the head of the [Buffalo] FBI is granting interviews. It was a complete circus."
Cambria, the bicoastal
Buffalo and
Los Angeles lawyer best known for representing pornographer Larry Flynt, calls the Kurtz episode a "colossal overreaction."
FBI agents put Kurtz in a hotel, where they continued to question him.
Cambria says Kurtz felt like a detainee over the two days he was at the hotel. Paul Moskal, spokesman for the
Buffalo office of the FBI, says the bureau put Kurtz in a hotel because his home had been declared off limits. The probe, Moskal says, was a by-the-books affair from the very beginning.
"Post-9/11 protocol is such that first-responders have all been given training about unusual things and unusual situations," Moskal says.
And obviously, says Lt. Jake Ulewski, spokesman for the
Buffalo police, what the cops eyeballed raised some alarms. "He's making cultures? That's a little off the wall."
Erie
County health officials declared the Kurtz home a potential health risk and sealed it for two days while a state lab examined the bacterial cultures found inside. Officials won't divulge what precisely was examined, but it turned out not to be a danger to public health. And the house was reopened for use.
Still, federal authorities think something in that house might have been illegal,
Cambria surmises. But
Cambria denies there was anything illegal in the house. William Hochul Jr., chief of the anti-terrorism unit for the
U.S. attorney's office in the Western District of New York, would not comment on the investigation.
Kurtz, on
Cambria's advice, isn't speaking to the press either.
Da Costa, a professor at the
University of
California at
Irvine who has flown to
Buffalo to help out, says Kurtz is "depressed" and dealing with the loss of his wife, who died of a heart attack. Today the
Buffalo arts community will memorialize her.
Adele Henderson, chair of the art department of the State University of New York at
Buffalo, where Kurtz has tenure, is among the people who've been questioned by the FBI.
On May 21, she says, the FBI asked her about Kurtz's art, his writings, his books; why his organization (the art ensemble) is listed as a collective rather than by its individual members; how it is funded.
"They asked me if I'd be surprised if I found out he was found to be involved in bioterrorism," she says.
Her response? "I am absolutely certain that Steve would not be involved."
They also asked about "his personal life,"
Henderson says, but she would not describe the questions or her responses.
The investigation, she says, will have no bearing on Kurtz's standing at the university, where he is an associate professor. (Prior to
Buffalo, he taught at
Carnegie
Mellon
University.)
"This is a free speech issue, and some people at the university remember a time during the McCarthy period when some university professors were harassed quite badly," she says.
Nonetheless, considering the kind of art Kurtz practices and the kind of supplies he uses, "I could see how they would think it was really strange."
For instance: the mobile DNA extracting machine used for testing food products for genetic contamination. Such a machine was in Kurtz's home. His focus, in recent years, has been on projects that highlight the trouble with genetically modified seeds.
In November 2002, in an installation called "Molecular Invasion," Kurtz grew genetically modified seeds in small pots beneath growth lamps at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, then engineered them in reverse with herbicide, meaning he killed them.
"We thought it was very important to have Critical Art Ensemble here because we try to have our visiting artist's program present work that takes our curriculum to the next step," says Denise Mullen, vice dean of the Corcoran College of Art and Design, whose Hemicycle Gallery hosted Kurtz's molecular exhibit.
Beyond the cutting edge of art, she says, "we want work that is really bleeding edge."
In
Buffalo, in the aftermath of the bioterror probe that has found no terror, activist artists have scooped up the refuse from the Kurtz front yard and taken it away, perhaps, says da Costa, to create an art installation.
*****
The New York Times
June 7, 2004 Monday
Late Edition - Final
HEADLINE: Use of Bacteria in Art Leads to Investigation
BYLINE: By DAVID STABA
The F.B.I. agents in hazardous-material suits are gone from Steven Kurtz's house here.
He has buried his wife, Hope, whom Mr. Kurtz, an art professor at the
University of
Buffalo, found dead in their home last month. But the attention of federal investigators, drawn after his wife's death to Mr. Kurtz and the tools of his unusual means of artistic expression, has not ended.
Civil liberties advocates and supporters of Mr. Kurtz say the case is a matter of the authorities' misdirecting post-Sept. 11 investigative zeal and in the process, trampling First Amendment rights to artistic expression. Fellow members of his art ensemble, which describes itself as ''dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory,'' call it frightening.
On May 11, Mr. Kurtz phoned 911 after waking to find Hope Kurtz, 45, his wife of 20 years, unresponsive. One of the paramedics who arrived at the Kurtz home noticed laboratory equipment used in Mr. Kurtz's artwork. That observation triggered a series of events that led to F.B.I. agents shuffling through the home in hazardous-material suits and confiscating the equipment and biological material. They also seized his books, personal papers and computer.
The authorities searched the house for two days before announcing that there was no public health risk and that no toxic material had been found. Mr. Kurtz was allowed to return home on May 17, and his wife's death was attributed by the authorities to heart failure.
An F.B.I. spokesman, Paul Moskal, referred all questions to the
United States attorney's office in
Buffalo. William J. Hochul Jr., the lead terrorism prosecutor for the office, declined to comment on the case, citing Justice Department policy regarding current investigations.
Mr. Kurtz, 46, is not talking to reporters, either. His fellow artists and his lawyer are speaking on his behalf.
''No one likes the whole force of the whole federal government to come down around their shoulders,'' said Mr. Kurtz's lawyer, Paul J. Cambria, who represented Larry Flynt, the Hustler magazine publisher, in his Supreme Court case over censorship. ''He feels he's being unfairly treated and would like it all to be over.''
But members of the art collective Mr. Kurtz founded, the Critical Art Ensemble, say it is far from over.
A member of the collective, Beatriz da Costa, an art professor at the
University of
California,
Irvine, said she was leaving her hotel to attend an art show in
North Adams,
Mass., last Sunday when a stranger called out to her.
''I heard someone say my name,'' she said. ''I turned around and an F.B.I. agent was there and served me with the subpoena.'' She was summoned to appear before a federal grand jury in
Buffalo on June 15.
Ensemble members heard reports that F.B.I. agents had questioned museum curators and administrators at university art departments with connections to the group. The group produces Web sites, books and touring shows and orchestrates 1960's-style ''happenings,'' aimed at showing the impact of technology and its representation on modern life.
''We knew there was an investigation going on -- they were talking to people and they weren't giving him his stuff back,'' said Steven B. Barnes of
Tallahassee,
Fla., another founding member of the group, who was subpoenaed to testify before the federal grand jury along with Ms. da Costa. ''Those things had nothing to do with public health.''
Ms. da Costa said her subpoena indicated the grand jury is looking into ''possession of biological agents.''
She said the bacteria E. coli, which can be fatal in some forms and harmless in others, was used in a Critical Art Ensemble production called ''GenTerra,'' which looked at genetic engineering of organisms from the perspective of a fictional corporation.
''I know everything we did was legal,'' Ms. da Costa said. ''We didn't buy it illegally or make it ourselves. We worked in cooperation with a microbiology lab in
Pittsburgh to create a transgenic E. coli that was completely harmless.'' Transgenic cells include genes or DNA transferred by genetic engineering from a different type of living thing.
The bacteria's benign nature was one of the central themes of the work, which allowed audience members to expose themselves to the material.
''We were kind of demystifying the whole procedure and trying to alleviate inappropriate fear of transgenic science and redirect concern toward the political implications of the research,'' Mr. Barnes said.
Mr. Kurtz's fellow artists believe federal prosecutors will try to show that his possession of E. coli and other forms of bacteria -- harmless or not -- violated a federal law. The statute they refer to was expanded and strengthened by the Patriot Act passed after
Sept. 11, 2001, and subsequent anthrax scares in
Washington and elsewhere. It prohibits the possession of ''any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system of a type or in a quantity that, under the circumstances, is not reasonably justified by a prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose.''
Supporters maintained that the ''peaceful purpose'' exception should have snuffed out the investigation well before it got to the grand jury.
''Once they established that nothing in that house was toxic and that he had no connections to anyone but legitimate artistic and educational institutions, this should have been dropped,'' Mr. Barnes said. ''Everything he's ever done has been in the public sphere. There's no secret or private work. The transgenic bacteria was part of a show that's been traveling across the country for two years.''
A spokesman for the New York Civil Liberties Union said the initial phases of the Kurtz investigation were handled properly.
John Curr III, assistant director of the
Buffalo chapter of the civil liberties union, said of the Kurtz investigation, ''Given the set of circumstances when it happened, I don't think there was an overreaction. Unless there's some golden nugget of information that they're not sharing, we feel they're overreacting now.''
''The code even makes a stipulation about a 'peaceful purpose,''' Mr. Curr went on. ''I don't think anybody could make the argument he was doing anything that wasn't peaceful.''
Mr. Barnes said: ''We're not an activist group. We're what we refer to as tactical media. We're mainly interested in issues of cultural representation, how things are represented to the public, and what's the ideology and the subtext to how something is being represented.''
The group's works, many of which can be seen online at www.critical-art.net, include Web sites and mock newspaper ads touting fictional biotech companies, and shows in which the audience has the chance to drink beer containing human DNA.
''That's the essence of the First Amendment,'' said Mr. Cambria, Mr. Kurtz's lawyer. ''It allows people to be different and express themselves in unique and creative ways.'' Up until the moment he and Ms. da Costa were served with their subpoenas, Mr. Barnes said he was confident no reason would be found to prosecute Mr. Kurtz.
''I was optimistic that when they saw what was going on and talked to enough people, they were going to realize there was no threat and no crime,'' Mr. Barnes said. When he was subpoenaed, he said his reaction was: '''They're really going to do this. They're going to push this.' I was also a little disturbed to realize I was being followed.''
copyright laws and hip hop (june 1, 2004)
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18830
How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop
By Kembrew McLeod, <http://www.stayfreemagazine.org>Stay Free! Magazine
June 1, 2004
When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in
1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing
sounded like it at the time. It Takes a Nation came frontloaded with
sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing
tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically
radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music
industry, black nationalism, and in the case of "Caught, Can I Get a
Witness?" digital sampling: "CAUGHT, NOW IN COURT ' CAUSE I STOLE A BEAT /
THIS IS A SAMPLING SPORT / MAIL FROM THE COURTS AND JAIL / CLAIMS I STOLE
THE BEATS THAT I RAIL ... I FOUND THIS MINERAL THAT I CALL A BEAT / I PAID
ZERO."
In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of
opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies
before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took
advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put
hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them
up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But
by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting
sued. They had to pay a lot. The following is a combination of two
interviews conducted separately with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.
Stay Free!: What are the origins of sampling in hip-hop?
Chuck D: Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not
music. It's rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very
beginning stages of hip-hop. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over
live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records.
Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that
would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over
it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.
Stay Free!: Those synthesizers and samplers were expensive back then,
especially in 1984. How did hip-hop artists get them if they didn't have a
lot of money?
Chuck D: Not only were they expensive, but they were limited in what they
could do they could only sample two seconds at a time. But people were able
to get a hold of equipment by renting time out in studios.
Stay Free!: How did the Bomb Squad [Public Enemy's production team, led by
Shocklee] use samplers and other recording technologies to put together the
tracks on It Takes a Nation of Millions.
Hank Shocklee:The first thing we would do is the beat, the skeleton of the
track. The beat would actually have bits and pieces of samples already in
it, but it would only be rhythm sections. Chuck would start writing and
trying different ideas to see what worked. Once he got an idea, we would
look at it and see where the track was going. Then we would just start
adding on whatever it needed, depending on the lyrics. I kind of
architected the whole idea. The sound has a look to me, and Public Enemy
was all about having a sound that had its own distinct vision. We didn't
want to use anything we considered traditional R&B stuff bass lines and
melodies and chord structures and things of that nature.?
Stay Free!: How did you use samplers as instruments?
Chuck D: We thought sampling was just another way of arranging sounds. Just
like a musician would take the sounds off of an instrument and arrange them
their own particular way. So we thought we was quite crafty with it.
Shocklee: "Don't Believe the Hype," for example that was basically played
with the turntable and transformed and then sampled. Some of the
manipulation we was doing was more on the turntable, live end of it.
Stay Free!: When you were sampling from many different sources during the
making of It Takes a Nation, were you at all worried about copyright
clearance?
Shocklee: No. Nobody did. At the time, it wasn't even an issue. The only
time copyright was an issue was if you actually took the entire rhythm of a
song, as in looping, which a lot of people are doing today. You're going to
take a track, loop the entire thing, and then that becomes the basic track
for the song. They just paperclip a backbeat to it. But we were taking a
horn hit here, a guitar riff there, we might take a little speech, a
kicking snare from somewhere else. It was all bits and pieces.
Stay Free!: Did you have to license the samples in It Takes a Nation of
Millions before it was released?
Shocklee: No, it was cleared afterwards. A lot of stuff was cleared
afterwards. Back in the day, things was different. The copyright laws
didn't really extend into sampling until the hip-hop artists started
getting sued. As a matter of fact, copyright didn't start catching up with
us until Fear of a Black Planet. That's when the copyrights and everything
started becoming stricter because you had a lot of groups doing it and
people were taking whole songs. It got so widespread that the record
companies started policing the releases before they got out.
Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record
like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear
every sample?
Shocklee: It wouldn't be impossible. It would just be very, very costly.
The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the
people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout meaning you could
purchase the rights to sample a sound for around $1,500. Then it started
creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this
thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units,
then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional
$7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up
twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of
what you would make on your album.
Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums,
which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations
owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who
illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big
six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at
some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, "Your artist is
doing this," so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the
lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original
artist or the publishing company.
Shocklee: By 1990, all the publishers and their lawyers started making
moves. One big one was
Bridgeport, the publishing house that owns all the
George Clinton stuff. Once all the little guys started realizing you can
get paid from rappers if they use your sample, it prompted the record
companies to start investigating because now the people that they publish
are getting paid.
Stay Free!: There's a noticeable difference in Public Enemy's sound between
1988 and 1991. Did this have to do with the lawsuits and enforcement of
copyright laws at the turn of the decade?
Chuck D: Public Enemy's music was affected more than anybody's because we
were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't
have been anything they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged
together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too
expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style,
the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.
Shocklee: We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but
you can't really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar
sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in
the studio. The guitar that's sampled off a record is going to have all the
compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It's going to
hit the tape harder. It's going to slap at you. Something that's organic is
almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a
piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get
off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has
gotten a lot softer.
Chuck D: Copyright laws pretty much led people like Dr. Dre to replay the
sounds that were on records, then sample musicians imitating those records.
That way you could get by the master clearance, but you still had to pay a
publishing note.
Shocklee: See, there's two different copyrights: publishing and master
recording. The publishing copyright is of the written music, the song
structure. And the master recording is the song as it is played on a
particular recording. Sampling violates both of these copyrights. Whereas
if I record my own version of someone else's song, I only have to pay the
publishing copyright. When you violate the master recording, the money just
goes to the record company.
Chuck D: Putting a hundred small fragments into a song meant that you had a
hundred different people to answer to. Whereas someone like EPMD might have
taken an entire loop and stuck with it, which meant that they only had to
pay one artist.
Stay Free!: So is that one reason why a lot of popular hip-hop songs today
just use one hook, one primary sample, instead of a collage of different
sounds?
Chuck D: Exactly. There's only one person to answer to. Dr. Dre changed
things when he did The Chronic and took something like Leon Haywood's "I
Want'a Do Something Freaky to You" and revamped it in his own way but
basically kept the rhythm and instrumental hook intact. It's easier to
sample a groove than it is to create a whole new collage. That entire
collage element is out the window.
Shocklee: We're not really privy to all the laws and everything that the
record company creates within the company. From our standpoint, it was
looking like the record company was spying on us, so to speak.
Chuck D: The lawyers didn't seem to differentiate between the craftiness of
it and what was blatantly taken.
Stay Free!: Switching from the past to the present, on the new Public Enemy
album, Revolverlution, you had fans remix a few old Public Enemy tracks.
How did you get this idea?
Chuck D: We have a powerful online community through Rapstation.com,
PublicEnemy.com, Slamjams.com, and Bringthenoise.com. My thing was just
looking at the community and being able to say, "Can we actually make them
involved in the creative process?" Why not see if we can connect all these
bedroom and basement studios, and the ocean of producers, and expand the
Bomb Squad to a worldwide concept?
Stay Free!: As you probably know, some music fans are now sampling and
mashing together two or more songs and trading the results online. There's
one track by Evolution Control Committee that uses a Herb Alpert
instrumental as the backing track for your "By the Time I Get to
Arizona."
It sounds like you're rapping over a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
song. How do you feel about other people remixing your tracks without
permission?
Chuck D: I think my feelings are obvious. I think it's great.
noted comments from the article:
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18830
Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums,
which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations
owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who
illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big
six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at
some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, "Your artist is
doing this," so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the
lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original
artist or the publishing company.
(first published; May 24, 2004)
"Also, their brains have about 10 times the amount of matter devoted to processing acoustic information as do humans..."
"Perhaps, in their brains, "they have maps of the ocean, very much like you and I have maps in our heads from our visual experiences. They have maps in their heads from their acoustic experiences."
http://65.54.187.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=376d24eca906ce36a1199c2b805d7de3&lat=1087112319&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2escience%2eutah%2eedu%2fclark%2ehtml
Songs of Whales take spotlight at U.
By Joe Bauman
The Deseret News
In the 1986 film "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," the crew picks up a strange transmission, which when decoded by Mr. Spock turns out to be the communications of an alien life-form of great intelligence. It is the song of whales.
While the notion of whales as interlopers from another solar system is science fiction, the movie is right in that these great mammals really do sing. And whales aren't just humming to themselves. Apparently they're doing something valuable with their songs -- attracting mates or possibly even using the sounds to build up a map of the underwater topography.
The eerie songs of baleen whales will squeak, click and moan through a lecture hall in landlocked Utah on April 12, during a free public lecture. The Frontiers of Science talk, sponsored by the University of Utah's College of Science, will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the new Aline Wilmot Skaggs Building auditorium.
Humpbacks are among the most famous of the baleen whales (the variety with flexible keratin plates in their mouths to filter food), according to the speaker, Christopher W. Clark, biology professor and director of the bioacoustics research program at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca, N.Y.
The humpback is a star among whale aficionados "because of its songs and its great attitude about life," he said. They are social animals that jump from the water to look around and sing remarkable songs.
"Ancient whalers used to talk of the sirens of the sea, and probably lots of times they were listening to the songs of the humpbacks coming through the hulls of the boats," Clark said.
The immense and endangered blue whales also sing, he said. "They are making incredibly deep, loud sounds."
Once during his research he listened to the sounds of a blue whale picked up by hydrophone off Puerto Rico. Using other hydrophones, he was able to triangulate to figure the whale's location: off Nova Scotia, 1,600 miles away.
"They were detecting the same whale throughout the entire North Atlantic," Clark said.
The blue whale's song is extremely low-voiced and loud, an advantage for communicating over great distances in deep water.
Communicating over hundreds of miles may be part of the reason for whale songs. The large whales, like blue whales and humpbacks, have exquisite ears, he said. Recent anatomical studies show that they also have "just as much hardware" in their ears, nerve cells and fibers as dolphins and humans, although half of it is dedicated to picking up extremely low-frequency sounds.
Also, their brains have about 10 times the amount of matter devoted to processing acoustic information as do humans.
So are they sending information to one another when they sing?
"Well, I think that's a good conclusion" that one could draw, Clark said. But he hastened to add, "We don't know that."
In the recordings he has made of blue whales in the Atlantic Ocean over the past eight years, the songs are "always the same," he said.
They are sung slowly, each note taking 20 seconds. Other blue whales hundreds of miles away may hear the song. But if it carries a message, it may be saying simply, here I am.
Also, the song may provide another kind of information. The depth, temperature and the contours of the ocean bottom distort the sounds. If whales know what it should sound like, and then use their immense brain-power to compare the ideal with the real, they may be able to figure out something about the topography.
On the other hand, the humpbacks' songs change. Apparently only the male sings, and he may be using his song as a "reproductive display" like a canary sings.
"They're essentially jazz musicians. They're constantly improvising," he said of the humpbacks.
Within the same song, a whale can hit high soprano, alto and bass notes. "The bass voice part of their song is conserved and tends to be very stable and not change," he said. "It's the high frequency part that's changing."
High notes don't carry as far, and the humpback may be directing them "to animals nearby, like the honey that's coming down the street," he added.
Some scientists theorize that with the distortions that occur in songs based on differences in their environment, whales aren't only sending out pick-up lines but are also providing information about the structure of the ocean, he said. An oceanographer was able to reconstruct the topography of the bottom, based on changes that could be detected in whale songs.
Clark suggests that whales may be able to learn a great deal about their surroundings in the century or two that they may live. For example, for five or six days they will swim unerringly toward a destination, covering vast ocean stretches.
Somehow, whales must be able to navigate, and possibly their songs are a key element, he said.
The songs may be "a very simple form of echo-ranging and acoustic navigation," Clark said.
Perhaps, in their brains, "they have maps of the ocean, very much like you and I have maps in our heads from our visual experiences. They have maps in their heads from their acoustic experiences."
Over the past eight years of his studies, Clark added, he has learned that the time and spacial scales of whales are drastically different from ours. Traveling thousands of miles a week, living for 100 or 200 years, whales may learn about huge areas of our planet.
Possibly, Clark mused, "they're like elephants. They contain a lot of wisdom."
|
|
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(from New York Times; May 27, 2004)
The Curse of Beauty for Serious Musicians
May 27, 2004
By ANNE MIDGETTE
When the violinist Lara St. John gave a recital in Toronto
in February, she gave a lot of thought to what she was
going to wear.
Ms. St. John, 32, is well aware of the power of image. For
one thing she is a striking six-foot blonde. And while this
week saw the release of "Re: Bach," her first album for
Sony Classical, the CD she will probably always be best
known for is "Bach Works for Violin Solo" from 1996. That
is the one on which she appeared naked on the cover,
holding her violin across her breasts.
The picture was more artistic than shocking. Showing Ms.
St. John from the waist up with the violin completely
hiding her chest, it revealed nothing inappropriate for a
family paper. But from the reaction, you would have thought
she had posed for Penthouse. There were accusations of
sexploitation and child pornography. (Ms. St. John was 24
and looked younger.) There were also phenomenal album
sales: more than 30,000 copies, big stuff for a classical
music recording.
The cover has remained a mixed blessing. Because of it many
in the field have pigeonholed Ms. St. John in the booming
genre of classical crossover, lumping her with other
musicians of far less artistic substance, like Linda Brava
(a Finnish violinist who has indeed posed for Playboy) or
Vanessa-Mae (a violinist remembered for her wet T-shirt
poses and electric violin arrangements).
But this is patently foolish. Ms. St. John is a substantial
musician, and she has never strayed from the classical
repertory. "Re: Bach" is her first crossover album. In
person she is also less a bimbo than a bird of paradise,
striking and unconventional. And while she clearly enjoys
vamping for photos, she's very serious about the music.
"I'm actually pretty conservative when it comes to
performance," she said.
For that recital in February, Ms. St. John chose her best
gown, a simple navy blue silk. "I did it on purpose,
because the recital was so serious I didn't want trouble
with the visuals," she said. But as it happened, John
Terauds of The Toronto Star wrote: "The visuals may have
faded, but the music burns more brilliantly than ever. An
almost matronly St. John shambled out onto the Jane Mallett
Theatre stage in a wrinkled pigeon-colored number that had
to be one of the ugliest frocks to see stage lights this
season. . . . Yet the intensity and beauty of the music St.
John made were almost too much for one sitting."
Ms. St. John, never one to hide her light, fired back a
response, which the paper published, including the
observation that her "pigeon-colored" frock was navy blue.
But she was still steamed in a telephone interview a month
later. "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't," she
said. "The guy was really nice about the concert, but did
that have to be the first paragraph?"
In sports, film and pop music, many leading women have
turned their strength into an asset. But Ms. St. John is
not the only evidence that classical music still seems to
have trouble dealing with strong women. If you're
attractive, it seems, you must also be cheesy and
commercial.
In a telephone interview from his London office, James
Jolly, editor of the classical-music magazine Gramophone,
said: "I get reactionary readers. I can never unpick their
argument. If you've got an attractive woman who is
talented, how are you supposed to show her? They seem to
think she should be portrayed as frumpy."
Diane Walsh, a pianist, observed, "The image of a beautiful
young woman inspires deeply ambivalent feelings in
everyone." Successful female pianists of the past, she
noted, have not been generally noted for beauty: Clara
Haskil, Myra Hess. "Some musicians seem to have a second
wind when they no longer have their young figures," she
added, citing Alicia de Larrocha, whose career didn't take
off until she was nearly 40.
One reason being attractive gets bad press is that
classical crossover albums so often flaunt image to play
the virgin-whore dichotomy to the hilt. Take Bond, a string
quartet of four model-beautiful young women who play
electric instruments in skin-tight catsuits. Take the Opera
Babes, two classically trained singers who scaled the
charts with mixes like "One Fine Day" (from Puccini's
"Madama Butterfly"). Sex really does sell: Bond's first
album sold two million copies. (A third album,
"Classified," is due in June.) Proponents of this kind of
thing say that it is just part of an effort to find a niche
for classically trained artists in a world in which they
seem to be increasingly irrelevant.
But classical purists, of course, abhor it. And the
crossover approach strengthens a tacit corollary belief
that to open up classical music to contemporary influences
is to dilute it. Certainly images of strong women bring a
very different flavor to a field still characterized to a
large extent by its tight hold on the familiar (starting
with its repertory). In a sense the resistance to strong,
attractive women is comparable to resistance to so-called
Eurotrash opera productions or to "La Bohème" on Broadway:
resistance against any change to a status quo that already
feels very, very fragile.
But the idea that women who are attractive are somehow
being exploited is amusing given that some of the most
visible "babes" in classical music are entirely responsible
for their own images, thank you very much. Ms. St. John,
for instance, has never even had a publicist. She has
called the shots on all her previous album covers and was a
little surprised at Sony's choice for the image on "Re:
Bach." "It's just so friendly," she said. "I thought they
would want to go for something more out there."
Also self-determining is the Eroica Trio, a group that has
made a trademark out of good looks and fine couture. "For
record covers we insisted on having approval of our own
image," said Erika Nickrenz, the group's pianist. "We were
worried about unwittingly being exploited."
But the trio is often dismissed as some kind of women's
shtick. And it is often taken for granted that anything
they do is projecting sexuality. "For the Brahms CD that
came out in January 2002, we ended up using head shots
without any of our bodies showing," Ms. Nickrenz said. "We
thought, there's no way anybody can pick on us for being
too risqué; it's just our heads. But people still said we
had a sensual, come-hither look."
It's notable that women in classical music come under fire
for their image, since each must create her own identity
from the start. "The template is male," Ms. Walsh noted.
And not only in terms of career - there are still fewer
female instrumental soloists than male ones, still fewer
women than men in top-flight American orchestras - but also
in terms of what you wear. There is no female equivalent of
a man's standard concert uniform, the tuxedo.
Of course men are also evaluated in terms of their sex
appeal, but the violinists Joshua Bell and James Ehnes do
not seem to be relegated to bimbo status because of their
pinup images.
Not that Ms. St. John is complaining. She seems rather to
enjoy playing with her image and dealing with the attention
it gets her.
"It's always the first thing people hear about me," she
said wryly of the nude cover. "I did an interview for U.S.
News & World Report after it came out. The guy said, `Why
did you do this?' I said, `Well, listen, hon, if I didn't,
you wouldn't be talking to me.' "
http://65.54.187.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=ae3116213d893486fa5729b2c3ef903c&lat=1087111178&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2enytimes%2ecom%2f2004%2f05%2f27%2farts%2fmusic%2f27BABE%2ehtml%3fex%3d1086668793%26ei%3d1%26en%3dd7e20efe0e3faec5
Critical Noir: Hip Hop's Gender Problem (first published may 26, 2004)
Recently there's been a lot of talk about the
problems with how women are represented in hip hop,
but very little about where the influences for
these images and ideas come from. Perhaps we should
be looking at the influences instead of the
performers themselves.
By Mark Anthony Neal
<http://65.54.187.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=11d2757b4aaa6af630fe2290bd503c3f&lat=1087052927&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2eafricana%2ecom%2farticles%2fdaily%2fmu20040526hipgender%2easp>
The recent controversy over Nelly's music video "Tip-
Drill" has highlighted what we've all known for some
time: hip hop has a gender problem. And for most of hip
hop's 30-something years, folk have been compelled to
point out the sexism, misogyny and homophobia that finds
a forum in the lyrics of the young black and brown men
who have primarily influenced the genre, and the lack of
a womanist perspective that could directly counter those
lyrics.
In this regard, the recent decision of the Spelman
College Student Government Association and others at the
Atlanta University Center to try to hold Nelly
accountable, was part of a larger tradition, one honed
by journalists like Joan Morgan, Raquel Cepeda, Karen
Good and Elizabeth Mendez-Berry and scholars such as
Tricia Rose, Cheryl Keyes and Gwendolyn Pough, whose new
book Check It While I Wreck: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop
Culture and the Public Sphere drops in June. But in
recognizing this larger tradition, we should also
acknowledge that we may be asking hip hop to do
something that it's fundamentally incapable of.
By asking hip hop to reform, we are essentially
demanding hip hop's primary consumer base to consume
music that is anti-sexist, anti-misogynistic and
possibly feminist.
Let me be clear - I'm on the front lines of any effort
to get the men in hip hop to rethink their pornographic
uses of women's bodies and performance of lyrics that
more often than not express, at best, a deep ambivalence
about and fear of women (perfectly captured 14 years ago
with the Bell Biv Devoe quip "never trust a big butt and
a smile") and, at worst, outright hatred. But as we make
demands of these artists, it's important that we
understand the demands of the peculiar space they occupy
within pop culture. Without doubt, the performance of
black masculinity continues to be hip hop's dominant
creative force. Yet over the last decade or so sales
figures have consistently shown that young white men are
the primary consumers of the various performances of
black masculinity and the pornographic images of black
and brown women found in mainstream hip hop.
By asking hip hop to reform, we are essentially
demanding hip hop's primary consumer base to consume
music that is anti-sexist, anti-misogynistic and
possibly feminist. And in what context have young white
men (or black men for that matter) ever been interested
in consuming large amounts of black feminist thought?
Clearly these young whites are consuming hip hop for
other reasons. In the case of young white males, hip hop
represents a space where they work through the idea of
how their masculinity can be lived - what they literally
take from the hypermasculine "black buck" (think about
50 Cent's influence in the killing fields of Iraq) and
indeed it is an integral part of the cash and carry
exchange.
In a society that remains largely ignorant of the
scholarly, political and cultural contributions of women
like Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis ("oh
yeah, the chick with the afro, right?"), June Jordan,
bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Patricia Hill-Collins,
Jewell Gomez, Joy James, Beverley Guy-Sheftall and
Masani Alexis De Veaux, how can we expect hip hop to do
the heavy-lifting that hasn't been done in the larger
culture? Despite popular belief, hip hop is not the most
prominent site of sexism and misogyny in American
society but a reflection of the misogyny and sexism that
more powerfully circulates within American culture. In
many ways the images and lyrics used to objectify women
of color in hip hop videos serve as metaphors for the
ways that American society actually treats those women.
As Pough notes, "rappers become grunt workers for the
patriarchy: they sow the field of misogyny for the
patriarchy and provide the labor necessary to keep it in
operation, much as Black men and women provided the free
and exploited labor that built the United States."
Remember, the black men on the screen are "performing"-
performing their notions of how American masculinity
embodies power through force, violence and exploitation.
(50 ain't the only thug or pimp in the room - there are
more than a few in the White House and at the Pentagon.)
In many ways, our discussions about hip hop culture are
the product of a very myopic view of contemporary black
expressive culture. Yes, hip hop needs to be reformed,
but it's not as if hip hop is the only place where young
black men and women are discussing the very reasons why
hip hop remains so problematic to some of us. For
example, Princeton University scholar Daphne Brooks
asserts that few critics have paid attention to the
significance of narratives by black female R&B artists.
She argues that "Black Women's popular desire is thus
depoliticized and disregarded for its reflections on
domestic and socioeconomic politics and sexual
fulfillment." But she adds that what "critics have
failed to fully interrogate are the ways in which this
subgenre also operates as an extension of hip hop
culture itself." A good example of this is an artist
like Syleena Johnson, who has circulated within hip hop
via remixes with the Flip-Mode Squad and most recently
singing the hook on Kanye West's "All Falls Down" (no,
that's not Lauryn Hill you're hearing). On her disc
Chapter One: Love, Pain and Forgiveness (2001), Johnson,
recorded the track "Hit on Me," which explicitly
addressed the issue of domestic abuse.
If we think about contemporary black popular culture
more broadly than what urban radio and BET tells us,
then we are likely to find the work of artists like
Ursula Rucker and Sarah Jones. Rucker first came to
prominence, performing spoken word poetry on The Roots'
recordings Do You Want More?!!!??! (1995), Illadelph
Halflife (1996) and Things Fall Apart (1999). In 2001
she released her own disc Supa Sista, which included the
track "What???", which challenged mainstream rappers to
a battle. But Rucker sets up the rules for the battle
stating "no krissy, no thongs, no baby-boos or baby-
daddies/no tricks no whips no weight pushing/and
absolutely no platinum or ice/no guns no lies about your
ghetto repÂ…" essentially challenging her male colleagues
to rely simply on their wit and creativity, instead of
the standard tropes of ghetto authenticity. In a more
celebrated example, performance artist Sarah Jones
stepped to the mic to hold mainstream hip hop
accountable with her track "Your Revolution" (on DJ
Vadim's USSR: Life from the Other Side). "Your
Revolution" is a riff off of Gil Scot-Heron's "The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised," and on the track
Jones takes shots at the sexist lyrics of artists like
Biggie ("Big Poppa"), LL ("Doin' It"), and Shaggy
("Boombastic"). But in an ironic twist, that perfectly
captures the struggles of those who try to hold hip hop
accountable, Jones' lyrics were cited as "vulgar" by the
FCC and a complaint was filed after the song was played
on Portland, Oregon's WBOO in 1999.
For all those, who like me, are interested in holding
hip hop up to serious scrutiny, maybe we should also get
serious about challenging the pervasiveness of sexism,
misogyny and homophobia in the larger society. Perhaps
only then will the images that circulate within hip hop
be exposed for the absurdities that they are.
First published: May 26, 2004
About the Author
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of three books including
the recent Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and
Blues Nation (Routledge, 2003) and co-editor (with
Murray Forman) of the forthcoming That's the Joint!: The
Hip-Hop Studies Reader (June 2004). Neal's next book
NewBlackman will be published in the Spring of 2005. He
teaches in the Department of American Studies and the
Center for African and African-American Studies (CAAAS)
at the University of Texas at Austin.
steve lacy dies; june 5, 2004
June 5, 2004
Steve Lacy, 69, Who Popularized the Soprano Saxophone, Dies
By BEN RATLIFF
Steve Lacy, an American soprano saxophonist who spent more than half
of his 50-year career living in Europe and helped legitimize his
instrument in postwar jazz, died yesterday in Boston. He was 69.
The cause was cancer, according to an announcement from the New
England Conservatory of Music, where Mr. Lacy had been teaching since
2002.
After performing in
New York, his hometown, Mr. Lacy moved to
Italy
and
France, and became the most Europeanized of all expatriate
American jazz musicians. He married one of his musical
collaborators, the Swiss-born singer Irene Aebi, who survives him. He
insisted on a literary dimension to his work, incorporating texts by
novelists, poets and philosophers - as well as visual-art and dance
components, when time and money allowed.
For someone long considered an avant-garde artist, Mr. Lacy always
insisted that nobody could get more avant-garde than Louis Armstrong;
his best work was anti-highfalutin and doggedly practical. His most
representative melodies, like "The Bath" and "The Gleam," use gentle
repetition and gentle wit; he developed his saxophone tone to be as
attenuated as a Hemingway sentence, and his improvised lines as
succinct. At the end of his life, hounded by tax problems in
France,
he returned to the
United States, moving in 2002 to teach at the New
England Conservatory and live in
Brookline,
Mass.
Mr. Lacy formed musical partnerships and made records at an
astonishing rate. He led working bands of up to eight musicians for
nearly 30 years; he also performed and recorded often as a solo
saxophonist and in duos with partners as different as the American
pianist Mal Waldron and the Japanese percussionist Masahiko Togashi.
One of his discographies lists 236 items up to the year 1997,
including more than 20 solo saxophone albums.
Mr. Lacy was born Steven Lackritz and grew up on the
Upper West Side
of
New York City. Clarinet was his first instrument; then, inspired
by hearing Sidney Bechet's version, recorded in 1941, of a Duke
Ellington song, "The Mooche," he decided to pursue Bechet's
instrument, the soprano saxophone. At the time - it would still be a
few years before John Coltrane would make it popular with his
recording of "My Favorite Things" - he had little competition.
At the age of 21, he was performing the standard Dixieland repertory
on both instruments at Stuyvesant Casino and the Central Plaza in New
York; he shared stages with musicians like Henry Red Allen, Pee Wee
Russell, Buck Clayton and Hot Lips Page, and his teacher, Cecil
Scott. And he was also playing at the Newport Jazz Festival with the
pianist Cecil Taylor, who was terrifying audiences by doing away with
traditional structure and tonality. Mr. Lacy worked with Mr. Taylor
for six years and with other bandleaders as well, including Gil
Evans; he always described this mix as the best possible training for
a jazz musician.
One of them was Thelonious Monk, who became a guiding aesthetic
master to Mr. Lacy for the rest of his life. Through playing with
Monk in a quintet and big band, and studying his music assiduously,
Mr. Lacy was able to absorb the elder musician's wit, economy,
insistence on simple rhythmic patterns and range of melody. He once
described Monk's music as perfect for the soprano saxophone: "Not too
high, not too low, not easy, not at all overplayed and most of all,
full of interesting technical problems."
In 1966, with no work at home, Mr. Lacy began his long trip away from
America. He took a group to
Argentina and ended up stranded there
for nine months because of political unrest. Later he headed to
Rome with Ms. Aebi, where they worked with Musica Elettronica Viva,
a quartet that blended modern-classical tendencies with
improvisation and included two other American expatriates, Frederic
Rzewski and Alvin Curran. After a brief stay in
Rome, Mr. Lacy
and Ms. Aebi moved to
Paris in 1970, in the beginning of the era that
he often called "post-free": all experimentation came grounded in
scale and melody. And with his long-lasting sextet, which he started
shortly after he arrived in
Paris, he found an original
compositional style: lilting and singsongy with a bitter twist, often
compared to nursery rhymes, though Thelonious Monk's sense of melody
was probably a greater influence.
Mr. Lacy preferred to collaborate with artists from other fields.
Most of the time that meant setting words to music, and in his group
Ms. Aebi sang poetic texts by Herman Melville, Robert Creeley,
Gregory Corso and Lao Tzu, among many others; in other works he
collaborated with dancers, painters and stage designers. "To me,"
he said in a 1990 interview, "music is always about something or
somebody, or from somebody or something. It's never in the blue,
never abstract."
Mr. Lacy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992; he published a
book of writings and saxophone exercises, "Findings," in 1994. The
French government's ministry of culture appointed him Chevalier of
the Order of Arts and Letters in 1989 and Commander in 2002. In
addition to his wife, his survivors include a sister, Blossom Cramer,
and a brother, Martin J. Lackritz.
For Immediate Release:
June 4, 2004
New England Conservatory Mourns Death of Jazz Great Steve Lacy
Soprano Saxophone Master Succumbs to Cancer at Age 69
Steve Lacy, one of the greatest soprano saxophonists of all time
and a New England Conservatory faculty member since fall 2002, died
Friday at New England Baptist Hospital. The jazz master who once defined
his profession as "combination orator, singer, dancer, diplomat, poet,
dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, educator, student,
comedian, artist, seducer and general all around good fellow" was 69.
He leaves his wife and collaborator, the Swiss singer Irene Aebi.
Born Steven Morman Lackritz in
New York City, Lacy was the first avant
garde jazz musician to make a specialty of the soprano saxophone-an
instrument that had become almost completely neglected during the Bop
era. Indeed, he is credited with single-handedly bringing the instrument
back from obscurity into modern music of all types. He regularly
received awards from DownBeat Magazine as the premier soprano
saxophonist and in 1992 received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.
In 2002, he was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by
the French government. A prolific recording artist, Lacy is represented
on many labels including Universal, Senators, RCA, Verve, Label Bleu,
Greats of Jazz, EMI, CBS/Columbia, and Denon.
Throughout his career, Lacy was widely admired for the beauty and purity
of his tone, for his incisive melodic sense, for keeping his music
uncompromising and fresh, and for his eagerness to play with a wide
variety of musicians while retaining long-term musical relationships.
For example, since 1998, he performed often with Panamanian pianist and
NEC faculty member Danilo Perez, but he also played regularly with Mal
Waldron, a pianist he had worked with since the fifties. He was esteemed
for his productivity, and for the consistently high quality of his art.
As a teacher, a role he took on in the last two years of his life, he
was revered for his intense focus and generosity.
During the latter part of his career, Lacy made his home in
Paris for 33
years, but returned to the
United States in 2002 to begin his first
teaching job at NEC. He was prominently featured in the concerts
celebrating the centennial of NEC's Jordan Hall in October 2003, kicking
off the festivities in a Best of Jazz performance that featured other
Conservatory jazz greats like Ran Blake, George Russell, Bob Brookmeyer,
and alumnus Cecil Taylor.
Lacy got his start as a sideman in the early fifties playing in
Manhattan's Dixieland revival scene. He also worked with some Duke
Ellington players including cornetist Rex Stewart who christened him
"Lacy." Although he initially doubled on clarinet and soprano sax, he
soon dropped the former instrument and found his distinctive voice with
the saxophone. It was the NEC-trained Cecil Taylor who set Lacy on a
new course and introduced him to Thelonious Monk-who, along with Duke
Ellington, would remain the most important influence in his life.
"Playing with Cecil Taylor immediately put me into the offensive mode"
(of music-making), Lacy recalled in his book Findings: My Experience
with the Soprano Saxophone. "This was the avant-tout garde; we were an
attack quartet (sometimes quintet or trio), playing original,
dangerously threatening music that most people were offended by...."
Lacy recorded with Gil Evans in 1957 and continued to work with him
intermittently up through the 1980s. In 1958, he and pianist Waldron
recorded Reflections: Steve Lacy Plays the Music of Thelonious Monk,
which led to an invitation to join Monk's quintet for four months in
1960. After that immersion experience, he created a quartet with
trombonist Roswell Rudd that dedicated itself exclusively to Monk's
music. He was still playing Monk as recently as last winter when he
introduced a new quintet at
Manhattan's Iridium. Monksieland, comprised
of trumpeter Dave Douglas, Rudd, and Lacy's longtime
Paris rhythm
section, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and drummer John Betsch, played
Monk with the freedom and contrapuntal interplay of Dixieland jazz.
In 1965, Lacy began performing in
Europe where he found particularly
appreciative audiences in
Italy and
France. He met his wife in
Rome in
1966 and by the late sixties, they had settled down in
Paris. During
the enormously fertile decades that followed, he created a quintet that
could expand or contract from a duo or trio on up to a big band. He
began collaborations with dancers (Merce Cunningham in particular),
artists and actors. He also started working with poets like Brion Gysin,
composing musical settings of their poems.
Irene Aebi exerted a profound influence on Lacy's artistry. For the
woman he called "his muse," he wrote his first composition, The Way
(1967), based on the words of Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu. He continued
to be inspired by his wife's voice and wrote works for her based on
poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Mary Frazee, Anne Waldman, and Judith Malina.
He wrote an opera, The Cry, with Bengali poet Taslima Nasreen. And,
over a period of many years, he composed The Beat Suite, a jazz song
cycle based on poetry by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and other beat poets. That work had its
official world premiere in 2003 and has been recorded on a Universal CD.
As recently as this spring, Lacy and his wife were performing his
settings of Robert Creeley poems and excerpts from the Beat Suite at MIT
and
Boston's
Institute of
Contemporary Art.
At NEC, 36 students, both graduate and undergraduate, worked
directly with Lacy and he affected many others through his active
participation in the musical community. In his teaching, he was
concerned with helping students become complete artists. For example,
he might say of a young player: "He's got imagination, but he needs to
develop his taste a lot more-opera and poetry and literature and dance.
He really needs to broaden his base." At NEC, he felt students could
get that broadening. "That's what I like about this school," he said in
an interview last year. "...One can cross the hall and it's not such
rigid departments really. Anybody could study improvisation or Indian
music or symphonic construction or whatever..."
About Lacy, NEC President Daniel Steiner said: "He was an
extraordinary artist, the kind of person who appears only a few times in
each generation of musicians. His presence at the Conservatory affected
not simply the jazz program but the overall musical life of NEC."
Remarks by Ran Blake, head of NEC's Contemporary Improvisation
department.
"With the exception of Sidney Bechet and John Coltrane, no other
musician has brought such a personal sound to the soprano saxophone and
few other musicians have tapped into the unexplored repertoire of
Thelonious Monk."
Remarks by Danilo Perez, NEC Faculty, Jazz Pianist, and Lacy
collaborator:
Steve Lacy showed us that being a jazz musician is the work of a
lifetime.
His compositions and improvisations are full of wisdom and life. He
taught us the power of words through his music. Hearing his soprano
playing was a life changing experience, because he approached his sound,
improvisation and technique as if he believed it was a test of man's
sincerity.
As a friend he was a very encouraging, caring and generous man with a
great sense of humor. As a teacher he was a great educator who inspired
all of us inside and outside the classroom, with the genius of his
musical phrasing and his brilliant remarks.
Last year while playing a duo concert in
New York, he took me to
an exhibition of a great Chinese painter. His detailed comments about
the paintings offered a great lesson in color subtlety and form. I found
myself contemplating his words of wisdom all afternoon. That night after
the very inspired concert we played he said;" Danilo we were painting
tonight. "
He was very kind to me and to many people who knew him. As he
would say the music and the artist become one as we get older.
Steve, thanks for inspiring and sharing your gifts with the world. Your
great musical legacy will live in our hearts and minds forever .
God bless Steve and his dear Irene.
Remarks by Ken Schaphorst,
Chair, Jazz Studies and Improvisation
The NEC community is devastated by this great loss. I can't think of
another musician who has been involved in so many different chapters in
the history of jazz, from Dixieland to Free Jazz, and everything in
between. Steve has brought his unique combination of open-mindedness,
humor, intelligence, rigor and artistry to his teaching at NEC over the
last two years. And everyone who has come into contact with him has been
transformed by his wisdom and musicianship. We will miss him.
For more information, visit NEC on the web at
www.newenglandconservatory.edu
(from the NY Times; May 20, 2004)
At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets
May 20, 2004
By ADAM BAER
MIKE GARSON can finally travel light.
A pianist and composer who has played in David Bowie's band
since 1972, he fretted for decades over his ever expanding
collection of sheet music, stored in dozens of heavy manila
folders overflowing with heavily annotated sheets, many of
them torn. But on one recent weekday morning, while
fighting Los Angeles traffic on his way to an early
"Tonight'' show rehearsal, he actually had clean copies of
nearly all of his hundreds of works in his car with him -
in a thin, lightweight box about the size of a conductor's
score.
Mr. Garson was carrying his music in digital form, scanned
into his MusicPad Pro Plus, a five-pound tablet computer
made by a company called Freehand Systems. The $1,200
device, with a 12-inch liquid-crystal-display touchscreen,
is the first of a class of computers that enable musicians
to store music and edit it onscreen. Soon it will also
allow them to communicate with one another over wireless
networks.
In much the way that portable digital audio players have
changed the way people consume tunes, tablets like the
MusicPad are changing the way musicians use sheet music,
which is so compact that it can be digitally stockpiled far
more cost-effectively than MP3 audio files.
"It's something I always wanted, and was trying to work out
with a computer,'' said Mr. Garson, 58, who has volunteered
suggestions to Freehand Systems on how to improve the
MusicPad. "But it became so unwieldy.''
Kurt Bester, 48, a pianist and composer who also tested the
device, said it had freed him from fumbling with paper when
he plays since he can turn the page by tapping the screen
or pressing a foot pedal. The bright screen helps him read
music in dark rooms, take notes and even archive music he
writes before it has been printed.
"This is my sheet-music iPod," he said.
Beyond its
usefulness for professional musicians, the MusicPad could
help restore sheet music's luster as a tool for amateur
entertainment as Freehand Systems seeks to expand the
amount of sheet music available online. Through the
company's newly purchased Web music store, sunhawk.com,
MusicPad users can download and edit 35,000 newly digitized
scores.
An average-size music store today carries sheet music for
about 2,000 individual works, according to Fred Anton,
chief executive of Warner Brothers Publications, and
customers generally must order others through the mail
unless they live in a metropolitan area with a
professional-level sheet-music store. Freehand Systems
hopes to use Sunhawk to change that.
It already offers about 20,000 works from the complete
40,000-work Warner Brothers Publications catalog at the Web
site (the rest will make it online in a couple of months).
And it is working on similar arrangements with other top
publishers that could double the amount of music available
through Sunhawk. (Of the two other leading online
sheet-music stores, musicnotes.com provides nearly 20,000
individual works and Hal Leonard's sheetmusicdirect.com,
over 10,000.)
Sunhawk customers can preview songs, transpose them into
different keys and hear them in MIDI format. The
sheet-music files are encrypted to limit the transfer of a
work to the number of MusicPads for which it was purchased;
encryption also allows Sunhawk to rent instrumental parts
of a composition for limited periods.
Mr. Anton said that the MusicPad and Sunhawk could help
resolve two problems that have crippled sales of sheet
music online: the limited portability of paper and the fact
that the official versions of many pieces are sold only by
the publishers.
Mr. Anton dismissed worries about the potential for trading
illegal copies of music sold online.
"The Xerox machine has always been the arch enemy of the
printed music world, and copying is impossible to police,"
he said.
Not unexpectedly, Freehand Systems faces competition in the
race to take the slow-growing sheet-music industry digital.
David Sitrick, a patent attorney and engineer in Chicago,
has developed a system called the eStand, which involves
proprietary software installed on pairs of Wi-Fi-enabled
touchscreen tablet computers. Mr. Sitrick received patents
for the concepts behind the eStand in 1998 and 2000, two
years before Freehand Systems patented the "music
annotation system for performance and composition of
musical scores" that led to the MusicPad.
In fact, Mr. Sitrick, 53, has sued Freehand Systems for
patent infringement. He has also filed an "interference
proceeding" against the musician Harry Connick Jr. over a
patent he received two years ago for "a system and method
for coordinating music display among players in an
orchestra." Mr. Connick, whose system is said to provide
for digital conversion of handwriting into musical notation
and to distribute electronic scores over a network,
declined to comment.
Kim Lorz, the chief executive of Freehand Systems, said his
company had not infringed on Mr. Sitrick's patents,
although Freehand Systems does plan to release a
double-screen model for conductors.
This fall Mr. Sitrick expects to begin selling the eStand,
which he says will have more memory and more computing
power than the MusicPad - which has 64 megabytes of RAM and
96 megabytes of flash memory, enough for roughly 5,000
pages of sheet music - and will cost considerably more. He
also plans to introduce a digital-sheet-music Web site, he
said, and is considering selling his music-reading and
editing software separately.
Mr. Sitrick has shown the eStand, which mimics the look and
feel of an open score, mainly to professional musicians,
and he has already won over some prominent artists,
including the violinist Itzhak Perlman.
Two years ago Mr. Perlman tested a version of the eStand
while conducting the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia
Festival. He liked it so much, he said, that he plans to
purchase one.
Page turning "is a pain," he said. "Just the fact that you
could touch a screen and get to the next page is weird and
wonderful."
One of the few people who have assessed both products is
Mike Albaugh, director of music at the Interlochen Arts
Academy in Michigan. Mr. Albaugh, who recently bought 25
MusicPads for school use, said he found them more durable
than the eStand and that he liked the pledge from Freehand
Systems to fix anything that goes wrong.
He said the availability of music to load onto the machines
was crucial.
"Freehand has purchased the rights to a lot of works within
the general archives of music, and with us, it's about the
standard works," Mr. Albaugh said. He said the digital
tablets would save paper and serve as a time-efficient
teaching tool. What's more, he said, the backlighted
screens, which can be used in landscape or portrait
orientation, can help ensure that a pit ensemble's sound
does not thin out because half the violinists need to turn
a page.
Whether the machines will be warmly received by Interlochen
students remains to be seen. Liz Koch, 18, an oboist, said
she found the MusicPad easy to use but that she didn't
appreciate its high price. "It would also be inconvenient
to carry," she said.
Travis Dierolf, 17, who plays trombone, said the idea was
good but that he would not trust the MusicPad in a
performance. "While the marking functions seemed promising,
I think that whenever you have you more technology you have
more things that can go wrong," he said.
As for David Bowie, Mr. Garson said that all his boss cared
about is "making sure you play the right stuff when it
matters," and that like most rock stars he never uses sheet
music.
"Still, I think I'm going to get him a MusicPad for his
birthday with all his thousands of lyrics entered onto it,"
he said. "I think it would be a really nice thing for
someone so prolific to have."
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(from LA Times; May 20, 2004)
Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES
Elvin Jones, 76; Jazz Drummer Worked With John Coltrane
By Jon Thurber, Times Staff Writer
Elvin Jones, the jazz drummer whose dynamic sound was a vital component to
John Coltrane's seminal quartet in the 1960s, has died. He was 76.
Jones died Tuesday of heart failure at a hospital in Englewood, N.J.,
according to his wife, Keiko. She said he had been in failing health for
some time.
From the 1960s on, Jones was a key force in the evolution of jazz drumming
with a style that critics viewed as sometimes ferocious, often subtle and
always original. Many critics believed Jones was to his generation what Gene
Krupa was to the swing era.
"He founded an entire new school of drumming marked by unprecedented
freedom, polyrhythmic ingenuity and ferocity," critic Leonard Feather wrote
in 1976.
Jones created what Feather called "a circle of sound."
"This approach," Feather noted, "freed the drummer from the role of the
accompanist and allowed him to participate more fully in collective
improvisation and the overall sound of the ensemble while still supporting
individual soloists."
Jones' style had the overall impact of transforming the drums from a
traditional time-keeping instrument and allowed a dynamic interplay with
soloists unprecedented by earlier drum stylists.
The youngest of 10 children, Jones was born in Pontiac, Mich. Two of his
brothers ‹ Thad, a cornetist, composer and arranger, and Hank, a pianist ‹
became influential jazz performers in their own right.
As a child, Jones liked to carry the bass drum in the school marching band
and quickly learned to read music while becoming interested in jazz.
Jones enlisted in the Army just after World War II and traveled the country
as part of a special services unit. After his discharge, he joined his
musical brothers in Detroit where they played in saxophonist Billy
Mitchell's band, among others.
Detroit was filled with gifted jazz musicians in those days, including
guitarist Kenny Burrell, singer Carmen McRae and pianist Tommy Flanagan, and
Jones often played with them as the house drummer at the Bluebird Inn. He
built a name for himself as one of the leading drummers in Detroit and would
attract the attention of visiting giants such as trumpeter Miles Davis and
saxophonist Charlie Parker.
Jones moved to New York City in the mid-1950s for an audition with the
Benny Goodman orchestra, which included his brother Hank Jones on piano. He
didn't get that job but he found a steady gig with bassist Charles Mingus.
After touring with Mingus, Jones performed with pianist Bud Powell and
trombonist J.J. Johnson, as well as saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Stan
Getz.
But he came into his own and into the broader jazz consciousness in the
1960s when he joined Coltrane's quartet, which included pianist McCoy Tyner
and bassist Jimmy Garrison.
Critic Nat Hentoff noted that Jones had considerable influence on Coltrane's
work and vice versa.
"Jones had such stamina," Hentoff told The Times on Wednesday. "Coltrane's
improvisations could go on for most of an hour, and Elvin would be right
there with him. They spurred each other and never stopped searching."
Together, critics said, they redefined the possibilities of the small jazz
ensemble.
"The level of saxophone/percussion engagement that Coltrane and Jones
realized in
extended performances such as 'My Favorite Things,' 'Chasin' the Trane,'
'Impressions' and 'AfroBlue' intimated chaos yet retained clear connection
to
structure and tempo," critic Bob Blumenthal wrote in DownBeat magazine some
years ago.
"At the same time," Blumenthal wrote, "more introspective performances such
as the album 'John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman' revealed Jones' ability to
sustain his complex polyrhythms at more restrained dynamic levels."
For Jones' part, working with Coltrane was a revelation.
"When I was playing with Coltrane, I heard purity in his tone, in his
discipline for study. That's what he was projecting. I think it affected me
Š ," Jones once told an interviewer for DownBeat.
"The most impressive thing about working with 'Trane was a feeling of
steady, collective learning," he later said.
But in 1966, Jones left Coltrane's group after Coltrane decided to add a
second drummer, a decision Jones felt was inconsistent with his own musical
direction. Coltrane died the next year.
Jones went to Europe, played with Duke Ellington's band for a couple of
weeks and returned to the United States. Over the next four decades, he
formed and led several outstanding groups under his own name. His band
eventually became known as the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine.
Jones was known in the jazz world for his generosity of spirit and as a
nurturer of new talent. By the early 1990s, his group had included such
up-and-coming stars as saxophonist Joshua Redman, trumpeter Nicholas Payton
and trombonist and arranger Delfeayo Marsalis. It also included Coltrane's
son, Ravi.
Over the years, Jones dismissed the pyrotechnics of some drummers, once
telling Whitney Balliett of the New Yorker magazine: "I never learned any
tricks, anything flashy like juggling sticks or throwing them in the air.
That kind of thing stops me inside. After all, Artur Rubenstein doesn't play
piano runs with his chin."
"His functional equipment," Feather once noted, "was far less elaborate than
many drummers who may believe that the more cymbals, bass drums and other
equipment one has, the easier it is to create ideas."
"His complexity stems from a lightning mind, with hands and feet to match."
In addition to his wife, Jones' survivors include his brother, Hank. Thad
Jones died in 1986.
about george lewis:
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Columbia post lures esteemed professor to New York
By George Varga
UNION-TRIBUNE POP MUSIC CRITIC
April 25, 2004
Musical visionary George Lewis, the UCSD professor who in 2002 was
awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellowship,
is resigning in order to accept a teaching position at New York's
Columbia U niversity.
Lewis, 51, will join the Columbia faculty as the Edwin H. Case Professor
of Music this fall, barely three months after his June wedding to
maverick musician, composer and sound artist Miya Masaoka.
His new endowed chair position in the Big Apple notwithstanding,
Lewis plans to continue to live and work in San Diego as often as his
schedule allows. The trombonist and electronic-music composer also
hopes to foster a new spirit of cooperation between Columbia and
UCSD. He began teaching in 1991 at the La Jolla campus, where  with
fellow music professor Jann Pasler  he helped create the school's
innovative Critical Studies/Experimental Practices program in the
mid-1990s.
"Columbia approached me in March of 2002, six months before I got
the MacArthur fellowship, and it took a long time for me to decide I
wanted to do it," said Lewis, who will be at New York's Carnegie Hall
Wednesday for the world premiere of his "Virtual Concerto" for
orchestra and interactive computer piano soloist.
"After 13 or 14 years of being in one place, it seemed like a wonderful
opportunity for me to extend the reach of the ideas I've been involved
with at UCSD," he continued. "The rarefied world of African-American
experimental music is something a lot of academic institutions don't
hear about. So I can act as a conduit, as well as a performer, clinician,
historian, scholar and critic, to widen that world. It seems to me that
going to Columbia and spreading these ideas around at an important
institution is something very few people get a chance to do. There are
new challenges out there."
Because his endowed position will not require him to teach at Columbia
full-time, Lewis will be able to regularly return to San Diego to work on
his music and writing at his North Park home.
But his departure is a major blow to UCSD's music department, and to
San Diego's cutting-edge music scene. Both have grown dramatically
under the auspices of Lewis, a down-to-earth scholar who has
performed on more than 120 albums, made repeated breakthroughs in
the world of interactive computer music and earned a reputation as
one of the world's greatest trombonists in any idiom.
"It's a great loss for San Diego and a great gain for New York City," said
Bonnie Wright, who in 1995 opened Hillcrest's Spruce Street Forum, a
live improvised music venue, with Lewis' encouragement.
"I'm really happy that George has a prestigious new job, which is an
endowed chair position. It's a way for him to further spread his talent,
generosity, humor and kindness. He was my professor and mentor in
the UCSD music department. He gave me the courage to begin Spruce
Street Forum and encouragement all along the way."
Award-winning new-music composer and performer Anthony Davis
credited Lewis for bringing him to UCSD, where he also teaches as part
of the Critical Studies/Experimental Practices program. Davis, who is
the composer-in-residence for the American Composers Orchestra,
will also perform on the same program at Carnegie Hall as Lewis.
"George and Jann Pasler really created the Critical Studies program,"
Davis said. "And he transformed and revolutionized UCSD and the
music department in his work with computer music and also his work
with improvised music. So his departure is a big loss for the music
department.
"But I also think the ideas we've been testing out in San Diego can be
used in New York, and he can see what will happen with a new program
at Columbia. At the same time, we can come of age at UCSD and go off
in new directions that are possible because of what George started
here."
Lewis is now completing "Power Stronger Than Itself," a
comprehensive book about the groundbreaking Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians, which will be published next year
by the University of Chicago Press. He has been on leave from UCSD
since mid-2002, when he was one of three professors to convene a
group of international research scholars at UC Irvine to explore
improvisation as an interdisciplinary medium.
"I'm not teaching in the classroom, but I am speaking to graduate
students on a regular basis," he said.
"They're doing research for papers and some are finishing their
dissertations. I find myself reading them on airplanes, through the
magic of e-mail, and then we go over the finer points when we meet.
"For me, UCSD is a very important place and the UCSD music
department is a very important institution. So although I'm leaving, it's
with a fond sense of regret. The great strength of the UCSD music
department is the ongoing notion that professors and students should
work together to be creative."
from Common Cause (May 5, 2004)
Disney Decides What You Should See
CauseNET for May 5, 2004
In yet another case of corporate media censorship, executives at Disney have decided not to distribute filmmaker Michael Moore's new documentary entitled, "Fahrenheit 911". Moore's new film is highly critical of the financial ties between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family as well as the action taken by the government in secretly evacuating relatives of Osama bin Laden out of the country immediately after the attacks on September 11.
Published reports indicate that although the movie is ready for release, Miramax studios have been told by parent company Disney that it has decided to ban distribution of the film.
Why? According to one Disney executive, "It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle".
Last week, it was Sinclair Broadcasting gagging Ted Koppel, by pre-empting Nightline's tribute to the Iraq war dead on its ABC affiliates, claiming that the program was partisan. Now Disney bans distribution of a politically charged film. Are we going further and further down the road where corporations determine all that people should see?
The more that media is concentrated in the hands of a few huge corporate owners, the more likely we'll see this type of corporate censorship. One of the bedrocks of democracy is the freedom to express all ideas, no matter how controversial. When ideas are suppressed, our freedoms are diluted. Think of how outraged we'd be if the local library cleared its shelves of all controversial books.
Is Michael Moore's film good, bad, or indifferent? Will it offend some people? Probably. But how will the public ever know? How can the public decide the merits when a handful of corporate executives decide for us?
Call today! Tell Disney what you think about this latest move to blindfold you. Contact the Walt Disney Company at:
(818) 560-1000.
Tell them you would like the office of Chief Executive Michael Eisner.
Or Write a Letter to the Editor of Your Local Paper:
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Donate To Common Cause:
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"Is Klezmer Revival a revival?" and its contents are copyright 1999 by Evan A. Variano. Please do not reprint or repost any part of this article without prior written consent of the author.
Is Klezmer revival a revival?
by Evan Variano
|
The Klezmer revival is popularized as something new, and the questions which accompany it are debated as such. Those involved in the discussion of this contemporary fascination with 19th century secular Eastern European music are almost all members of the revival, and the discussion itself is more a collection of monologues than an organized debate. A tabulation of the questions which comprise the majority of this discussion indicate that they are not new issues, but simply specific manifestations of much larger questions of Judaism. None of these questions have clear answers, and while some can be resolved to a degree within the revival's limited framework, all the questions involved with the Klezmer revival have more rigorously discussed counterparts in modern Jewish thought.
The Klezmer revival does raise some intriguing questions, which Mark Slobin describes as " the problems of how to study a reasonably rootless but deeply rooted music that has no geographic center, no living community it's attached to by continuous practice, a capricious and shifting audience, and no fixed body of music that defines its contours" (5). The response to such a difficult task has been musings and fragments of ideologies given by musicians to their audience. Arnold Eisen describes this phenomenon: "American Jewish thought is less an attempt (usually unsuccessful) at systematic theology, than an effort to make sense of a new and rather traumatic situation through the appropriation and interpretation of inherited ideas and images" (7). These inherited ideas and images constitute the bulk of the Klezmer dialogue, which can make it seem muddled and clichéd.
This confused feeling is perpetuated by the fact that the discussion is not a formal dialogue. Rather, it is comprised of musicians' commentary (both on stage and in liner notes), magazine articles, and camps and festivals for musicians. The spoken and written commentary presented to audiences can never be thorough, and are often just a collection of the "inherited ideas and images." The magazine articles mostly serve to announce the Klezmer revival, offering a portrait of the movement along with some well-known anecdotes. Musicians' festivals provide a possible venue for extensive discussion, but the music itself, and not the tougher questions surrounding it, can take precedence.
To resolve some of the Klezmer questions, Wesleyan University hosted the first Klezmer Research Conference in October of 1996. It yielded some excellent commentary and concrete historical facts, but still left the major questions unanswered and unclarified. The significance of the conference may be that all the issues were presented, with many of their unsatisfactory answers, and now can be organized and assigned their place in the larger questions of Judaism.
The three questions that Klezmer revivalists are always responding to are, "Is it really Jewish?" "Is it authentic?" and "Why is it here?", where 'It' can refer to the music or the revival. Only two of these questions (both musical) have answers; the other four can only be introduced into the larger issues of which they are a part.
Is Klezmer music Jewish? Yes. It has specifically Jewish musical features, and had a well-documented and Jewish place in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is the most secular of all forms of Jewish music, and thus has mixed more freely with other cultures, which can give the illusion that it is not very Jewish. Hankus Netsky explains, "Gypsy, Greek, and Romanian elements are so predominant that some scholars have dismissed Klezmer as a separate genre altogether" (6). However, he further shows that Klezmer can be differentiated from these other styles by specific musical techniques. These are the krekhts (Yiddish for groan or weep), the tshok (laugh), and the knetsh (sob). Not only do these techniques reflect the emotions of modern Eastern European Jews, but they are identifiable in other forms of Jewish music, including Cantorical music (Netsky 6).
The other clearly Jewish trait of Klezmer music is the Klezmorim, Klezmer musicians who constituted a subculture within the Eastern European Jewish world. Being a Klezmer ("vessel of music") was often a full-time occupation, or performed by those with the least demanding jobs, such as barbers. The job was hereditary, and certain families were renowned for their virtuoso performances of dance music. The Klezmorim had their own argot - an extensive canon of Yiddish slang used professionally. This argot, the klezmer-loshn, was adopted by Jewish youths due to its irreverence and connection with the worldly and far-traveling Klezmorim. The argot is related to the ganovim-loshn, the thieves' argot. This speaks to the fact that the Klezmorim were one of the lowest castes, portrayed in literature as one into which a reputable woman would not marry (Rothstein 25). Once in the New World, the Klezmorim caste dissolved, but Klezmer remained a specifically Jewish vocation. This is exemplified by the formation of the KlezmorimÂ’s own union under the umbrella of the United Hebrew Trades (Loeffler 30).
Clearly Klezmer is Jewish, musically and culturally, and can be reasonably called a subculture of the Eastern European Jewish world. The question now becomes, is the Klezmer Revival Jewish? Most of its participants are Jewish, and the revival has connections with many forms of contemporary Judaism - Hasidic, Mystic, and Conservative. It has a special relationship with the Yiddishist movement, and here is where the real debate over the Jewishness of the revival begins.
Yiddishism is cultural Judaism - the idea that one can be Jewish by appropriating elements of secular Jewish culture. Alicia Svigals explains, "It looks to Ashkenazic Yiddish culture as the source of a rich Jewish identity and proposes to salvage that culture." (44). Whether this is a valid form of Judaism is open to debate, and has been a major question in contemporary Jewish thought. Much of the debate over the Jewishness of the revival is just a reformulation of this larger debate about the nature of Judaism.
The Klezmer Revival is the flagship of Yiddishism, for the music is currently extremely popular, and is drawing much attention from audiences and the press. The revival has been called a subculture (Slobin 3), and there are a growing number of modern-day Klezmorim, or rather Revivalim, whose role as Jews is centered on this secular music. Svigals explains that for liberal, progressive, and especially gay Americans, there are only two choices for Jewish identity - Yiddishism or the Havurah/Jewish Renewal school. Both rely on the distinctly American idea that religion and culture are separable, with Yiddishism being disembodied culture and Havurah being disembodied religion. Svigals asserts that the latter suffers from "sappy liturgical music of the Israeli Europop variety.", hence the popularity of the revival among young gay New Yorkers. Klezmer, however, is not exclusively the domain of Yiddishists. Conservative Judaism, Hasidism, and Mysticism all have arguments for accepting the revival as Jewish, none of which escape criticism.
A Conservative argument in support of the revival suggests that the Talmud actually demands Klezmer, which helps fulfill the commandment for celebration, or simkhe (Rubin 18). Internal criticism for this view can be found in a two-millennium year old Rabbinical debate. Directly after the destruction of the Second temple in Jerusalem, instrumental music was banned to demonstrate mourning (Rubin 14). The ban was relaxed in the Middle Ages, allowing for dance music at weddings, and then reimposed in Jerusalem the 1860s. Current scholarly attempts to include Klezmer in the Talmud meet opposition from this same Rabbinical decision.
There is no contemporary Hasidic argument for the Jewishness of the Klezmer Revival, but the historical role of Klezmer in Hasidism is identical to a contemporary pseudo-Yiddishist argument. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Hasidic movement "Â…made religion more accessible to the masses by emphasizing dancing and the chanting of wordless melodies [nigunim]Klezmorim were frequently employed by Hasidism to enliven their gatheringsÂ…." (Netsky 6). Nigunim are not included in the repertoire of the Klezmer revival, and contemporary Hasidic communities have their own musicians to play these. However, the idea of music providing a "Jewish feeling" and serving as a gateway to broader participation in Jewish life is another argument given for the Jewishness of the revival. This is an altered form of the Yiddishist idea - one can become Jewish by becoming engrossed in the culture, provided that he proceed to deeper or more religious forms of Jewishness. This explanation of the revivalÂ’s Jewishness, and the objections to it, invoke the 18th century debate over the nature of Judaism that accompanied the rise of Hasidism .
Mystical views on the Judaism of the Klezmer Revival also exist. An idea which is startlingly close to Pagan thought, it has been suggested that Klezmer is a gateway to spiritual ecstasy - the emotion of playing or dancing to it constitutes a religious experience (Kirshenblatt - Gimblett 53). Giora Feidman, an extremely popular Jewish musician outside the Klezmer scene, offers a slightly different Mystical formulation. He claims that the music is not the cause of, but a response to, a religious feeling; "A traditional Jewish musician does not create music, but is simply a vessel for inspiration that comes from the Divine source" (Netsky 11). This view has etymological support, the Hebrew Kle meaning instrument or vessel. But, like Hasidism and Yiddishism, it can be questioned whether Mysticism, and therefore a Mystical view of the Klezmer Revival, is really Jewish.
The final formulation of the Revival's Jewishness is a Mystical-Hasidic view. The idea is that Klezmer can be a Jewish contribution to the contemporary world. The revival, by carefully extracting it from its historical position and bringing it to the forefront of contemporary culture, allows Jews and non-Jews to share in Klezmer's unique secular and spiritual benefits. This, like the previous arguments, is not a new idea, for "Claiming to distill the essence of Jewish soul music and to universalize it expresses a romantic mysticism reminiscent of the fin-de-siécle Orientalism of Martin Buber and his circle" (Kirshenblatt - Gimblett 53). These are the major arguments used to answer the question "Is the Revival Jewish?" I believe it is evident from them that this debate is truly an obscured subset of the larger debate, "What is the definition of Judaism?"
The next question in the Klezmer discussion is authenticity. This is possibly the biggest question in the Klezmer revival and is closely linked to the Jewish-American view of history. Research clearly shows that there is absolutely no authentic Klezmer music. However, the obsession with authenticity continues, and even though they know it doesn't exist, many Revivalim still let their audiences believe it does. What the longing for authenticity says about Judaism today is at the center of all discussions of this overemphasized term.
Historical studies show that Klezmer was never pure, always having been a dynamic genre identifiable mainly from its Jewish traits discussed above. Klezmorim played a huge range of music, from freylakhs to the waltz, in settings as diverse as Jewish weddings and the courts of Russian nobility (depicted in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard) (Bluestein 29). The New World witnessed drastic alterations of this already slippery genre, as it was politicized by Socialist unions, romanticized by record companies, and finally "Bulgarized" - much of the repertoire being abandoned as Romanian Klezmer tunes skyrocketed in popularity. Slobin explains, "The authentic context is one of interaction, mixture, accommodation, adaptation - words like that come to mind first, since what did a Klezmer do? Play what people wanted to hear" (4). Frank London continues, "Music that functions as Klezmer is Klezmer. If an Eastern European Jewish community needs the Lambada at a wedding, then itÂ’s Klezmer" (42). Thus, one cannot find satisfactory authenticity in the music itself.
The only chance of the revival being authentic is if the Revivalim are authentic Klezmorim, but even this does not work. There are great similarities, but also great differences. A comparison of the two is not so important here as the fact that the obsession with authenticity can be seen as more than just a game of match-up between the past and present. The larger issue, which is manifested by the search for authenticity, is contemporary Jews' search for connection with their history.
This search will not yield simple answers, even within the limited setting of Klezmer music. There are divergent images of history, and divergent interpretations of how we relate to it. The case of Mickey Katz serves as an example. A notable Klezmer band leader from the inter-war era, he is described by Hankus Netsky, a Klezmer scholar, as one of the "best second generation Klezmer players" who pioneered an "American style of Jewish musical humor which mercilessly lampooned American heroes and icons" (10). A Moment magazine article, however, calls him a clown and praises the Revivalim for once again producing respectable popular Jewish music (Lewis 46). While Netsky's view points to a continuum of evolving uses of Klezmer, Lewis depicts an early 20th century bastardization of Klezmer, with the revival reaching back past this to the purer form of the music.
These conflicting interpretations of history are to be expected, seeing how many changes the Jewish world has faced since the 1880s. A second generation Maskilim more closely resembled their grandfathers than do second generation American Jews; in some cases not even their prayers remain the same. It may be because of this separation from the not-so-distant past that the idea of revival, of bringing back to life, is so important today.
Indeed, revivalism is a relatively young movement in Judaism, being a product of the past century's changes. While the large question of how today's Jews are connected to their ancestors is nothing new, the idea of revival is being pioneered in the Klezmer arena and does yield new ideas. Among these, the most important is an extension of Judaism's relationship with history. While the God of Judaism is the God of history, and the laws of Judaism are the laws of history, revivalists are the first to suggest that the culture of Jews should be the culture of history. This idea is central to Yiddishism, but is compatible with many schools and deserves serious consideration in current discussions of the nature of Judaism.
The remaining questions discussed in the Klezmer revival take the form of "Why is Klezmer here?" The best answer to this is "Klezmer music (in all its forms) and the Klezmer Revival are here because this is America, and there are Jews in America." The answers given in the Klezmer debate are usually much more specific and speak to the question of how to be Jewish in America and how to be American when Jewish.
Klezmer music is here, in its current form, due to a century of alteration, misrepresentation, abandonment, and revival of Jewish culture. The first major change Klezmer faced was the formation of its union, and the political activities that followed. "Like many other traditional or folk institutions from Eastern Europe, the practice and profession of the Klezmorim underwent a radically new political transformation in the New World. This change could not have occurred without the very new sources of work outside the wedding circuit and roster of traditional Jewish celebrations: "the political rallies, parades, and benefit concerts" (Loeffler 35). As early as 1890, Klezmer bands were playing the Marseilles at Socialist rallies (34). Later, Klezmer's musical boundaries would be stretched further by the American influences known as jazz, swing, and big band. These were alterations towards American style, but the most significant alteration made the music more American while maintaining Eastern European style. Walter Feldman describes the "Bulgarization" of the Klezmer repertoire, the process by which all the popular styles of the late 1800s were exchanged for the newer, more exciting Romanian Klezmer dance genre - the Bulgar (11). Svigals explains that this change, "reflected the notion that Romanian Jewish society was a freer, looser, less socially restrictive place than the rest of Jewish Eastern Europe.[and] therefore connoted a hipper and more American way of being Jewish" (47).
This process of assimilation to America by choosing appropriate forms of Judaism, which can explain the prevalence of the Bulgar in all 20th century Klezmer, can also explain its disappearance. Svigals hypothesizes that Israeli culture eclipsed Eastern European Jewish culture, being more compatible with American notions of statehood and military strength (47). This would indicate that Klezmer fell out of favor after World War II because of an internal shift in Jewish culture towards Israelism, not American pressure to abandon Jewishness.
Some, of course, would disagree, claiming that the role of the Jew in America was much more at the mercy of American mass culture. They would quote the aforementioned repertoire alterations as sacrifices to Duke Ellington and can enumerate cultural abandonments that cannot be traced to internal shifts. Upon arriving in America, "The Klezmorim themselves took the lead in stripping off their most distinguishing socioprofessional label, the term klezmer" (Loeffler 32). "Musicians turned the term 'klezmer' into a pejorative, used only to denote musicians who couldn't adapt to the ever-evolving American music scene" (Netsky 9). The earliest recordings of Klezmer are a misrepresentation, engineered by American record companies. Producers increased the size of the ensembles, reduced the length of songs, and invented exotic titles that would appeal to folk-fetishists (Netsky 7), all with disregard for the folk themselves.
Both schools of thought, the one in which Jewish culture shifts internally to align with American culture and the one where American culture forces the hand of Jews, offer convincing explanations for the revival. The former, claiming that Jewish culture is used as a Jewish way of being American, explains revivalism as part of the American roots movement. There has been much interest since the 1960s in traditional cultures, from Delta Blues to Celtic folkdance, and there is no reason why American Jews shouldn't follow suit. This school also offers a musical-financial argument. 1960s attempts to fuse Klezmer with the new music of the time (rock) were unsuccessful, but in the past two decades forms have arisen (funk, world beat) that allow for successful Klezmer-fusion (Netsky 9,10). This may indicate that Klezmer enjoys popularity only when there is something good to fuse it with - each time American mass culture produces something compatible, Jews want to play it in a Jewish way, hence the revival.
The other school, which sees Klezmer as much more fragile and at the mercy of mass culture, connect the revival to Klezmer's earlier destruction. In reference to its beginning in the 1970s, one of the first Revivalim explains, "There seemed to be an unquenchable thirst for Yiddish music, as if it could fill the void created when American Jews divested themselves of their ethnicity in order to assimilate into the mass culture" (London 41). In this picture, American culture is a brute, which is now allowing Jews to celebrate their roots, but recently forced them to disavow themselves of these.
Conflicting characterizations of today's Klezmorim and predictions for the future of the revival stay centered on this same debate as to whether Jewish and American culture are inherently cooperative or antagonistic with brief respites. A common depiction of the Klezmer revival "subculture" is one closely connected, in membership and ideology, to gay pride and the Queer Nation movement (Svigals 49). This picture is another example of Jewish culture aligning itself with a popular and successful American movement, the two cultures complementing each other. Continuing along these lines, Svigals offers a "Klezmer manifesto", which presents a loud, proud, and self-respecting model of Jewish-American identity, one that no Jew could object to (47). It, however, has an implicit assumption that American and Jewish cultures are able to work together. The manifesto implies that the revival, and thus Jewish culture, will be strengthened if its members have a list of goals and act properly in the American cultural arena so as to achieve them. Alternatively, there are those who believe that a manifesto to preserve Jewish culture needs plans for self-defense in addition to the pride Svigals describes.
Implicit in the more confident picture of cultural cooperation is a prediction for the revival's end. Even if the tide of secular Jewish culture is free from American bullying, it probably will not stay focused on Klezmer music. Just as Israelism eclipsed Yiddish culture, the future will bring surprises that, while not destroying the achievements of the revival, may result in another hibernation.
Those who do see American culture as a brute have further reasons why the revival is not immortal. "Folkies" might move on from the roots movement, and this pop-cultural fad that supported the revival will be over, leaving smaller and primarily Jewish audiences. Even if the roots movement survives, it may not always provide so many non-Jewish Yiddishists. Much of the action in the Klezmer revival is in downtown New York, where "foreign" cultures can drop into and out of fashion in less time than it takes to be served in a sushi bar.
While the capriciousness of pop culture may well see the departure of non-Jews from the Klezmer scene, some suggest that the Jewish participants will soon be gone as well. The argument goes directly back to the definition of Judaism and the Yiddishism debate, for many feel that cultural-secular Judaism is not stable. If it happens that Yiddishism does not, in fact, provide a form of Judaism that earns the continued devotion of its members, then the movement is a failure and much of the wind will be gone from the revivalÂ’s sails. This, of course, remains to be seen, and Yiddishists may grow to outnumber their critics, with Klezmer serving as many Jews' liturgy.
In conclusion, I would like to examine an archetypal debate in Klezmer circles, the case of John Zorn. Zorn has been very successful with his band, Masada, and admittedly selects only what he likes from Klezmer to include in his music. He has provoked much debate about "authenticity" and "Jewishness", a debate which has been rather Babel-esque, for the issues at hand are once again specific cases of larger questions in Judaism. The first of these questions asks, "What is Judaism" - Can the Jewish elements Zorn selects remain Jewish when transplanted into secular culture? Secondly, Klezmorim are asking, "What are Modern Jews' role in History?" - Is Zorn continuing in an evolving tradition or taking part in a resurrection and expansion of Judaism only possible at the end of the 20th century. Finally, the discussion asks, "What are Modern Jews' role in America?" - is Zorn sacrificing Jewish culture to the identity-devouring mass culture, or expressing himself Jewishly in the Amercan arena? It is no wonder that the Klezmorim have made little progress in the debate, for in discussing Zorn's music they are really discussing the basic questions of contemporary Judaism. While I do not question the ability of the Klezmorim to contribute to modern Jewish thought, they are more likely to do so if they recognize their discussions for what they are.
Works Cited
Bluestein, Gene. "The Revival of Klezmer Music." Yiddish 6(4) 1987, 29-34.
Eisen, Arnold M. The Chosen People in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
Feldman, Walter Z. "Bulgareasca/Bulgarish/Bulgar: The Transformation of a Klezmer Dance Genre." Ethnomusicology 38(1) 1994, 1-33.
KirshenBlatt-Gimblett, Barbara. "Sounds of Sensibility." Judaism 47(1) 1998, 49-77.
Lewis, Joel. "Heavy Shtetl: The New In-Your-Face Jewish Music." Moment 20(4) 1995, 46-51.
Loeffler, James. "Di Rusishe Progresiv Muzikal Yunyon no. 1 fun Amerike: The First Klezmer Union in America." Judaism 47(1) 1998, 29-40.
London, Frank. "An InsiderÂ’s View: How we traveled from Obscurity to the Klezmer Establishment in Twenty Years." Judaism 47(1) 1998, 40-43.
Netsky, Hankus. "An Overview of Klezmer Music and its Development in the U.S." Judaism 47(1) 1998, 5-12.
Rothstein, Robert. "Klezmer-Loshn." Judaism 47(1) 1998, 23-29.
Rubin, Joel "Ruminishe Shtiklekh: Klezmer Music Among the Hasidim in Contemporary Israel." Judaism 47(1) 1998, 12-23.
Slobin, Mark. "Scanning a Subculture: Introduction to Klezmerology." Judaism 47(1) 1998, 3-5.
Svigals, Alicia. "Why we do this Anyway: Klezmer as a Jewish Youth Subculture." Judaism 47(1) 1998, 43-49.
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(from the NY Times; May 15, 2004)
The Sound of The City
by Rob Tannenbaum
New No More
Wacky profs and aunts celebrate their 25-year-old prophecy
May 10th, 2004 6:00 PM
"New Music, New York + 25"
Town Hall
April 27
With their tweed coats, reading glasses, and hip-length braids, the wizards honored on April 27 at "New Music, New York + 25" looked like beloved humanities professors and wacky aunts. The average age of Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, and Philip Glass is 66.0. Twenty-five years ago, when those performers joined for a new-music festival organized by the Kitchen and now celebrated by this reunion, Village Voice critic Tom Johnson said they represented a "distinct generation gap" in experimental music. The gap is now a chasm.
So these composers are no longer "questioning bourgeois values," which Johnson identified as the avant-garde's chief value: It's hard to épater when you are the bourgeoisie. "Nice to meet you, I'm Robert Soros," I overheard entering Town Hall, after the $600-a-ticket pre-show reception. If the original event was a landmark, this was a museum retrospective, a celebration of heft and durability and prophecy.
Solemnly Talmudic in black pants and white shirts, Reich and three other percussionists performed "Drumming Pt. 1" (1971), which ponders nature and mechanism by evoking first rain on a window, then machines toiling for Henry Ford. Played with sticks on four sets of differently tuned bongos, mounted side by side, "Drumming" unfolds in cycles, and as the players add then subtract polyrhythms, the metronomic central riff turns into, any fan of Krautrock would agree, an actual hook.
For the only wholly improvised piece, wily, stout Oliveros explained Tuning Meditation (1972), in which each audience member sings a sustained tone, then changes to another tone based on the collective hum. Something between a kindergarten lesson in acceptance and adaptation and a metaphor for democracy, it led to 10 minutes of glorious surprise: a sustained drone with wavering highs and operatic punctuations from ringers in the audience. Comical catcall: "Encore!"
Monk shifted focus to the unnaturalness of the human voice with Dolmen Music (1979), an episodic work that's elaborate but forbidding. Her six-person ensemble evoked gossip, argument, and disharmony by a series of wordless horror-movie gulps and plucked-rubber-band warbles, exchanging cutesy pouts that felt like Off-Broadway.
Ashley recited Love Is a Good Example (1987), using distorted cadences and a text that seemed cut up from psychology and physics textbooks to examine the poetry of technical language.
In the lone new composition, Anderson excerpted a work in progress about New York (her great theme) and 9-11. In her calming, even voice, she mocked the country's "super-size flag," playing a machine-hummed lullaby through an onstage mixing board. Anger has sharpened her comedy: We think foreigners hate us because we're rich and free, she explained, which makes us just like the beautiful high school girl "who says, 'They hate me because I'm beautiful.' No, they hate you because you're a jerk." 1979 can feel proud.
(from the Blue Corn Comics website May 13, 2004 )
On this year's Grammys broadcast, Feb. 8, the hip-hop duo OutKast
performed a mock Native American dance. As one viewer explained:
For those who missed it: He [Andre 3000] and his backup singers/
dancers appeared on stage in cartoonish lime-green "buckskin"
fringed costumes. The women were nearly nude. There is no doubt
this was an attempt to spoof Native peoples--the background set was
a tipi and an introductory voiceover mentioned that "the Natives
are getting restless."
The reactions were swift and scathing. As Indian Country Today
reported over the next few days:
I thought the number was in poor taste and the same type of
stereotyping crap the white community has been widely and rightly
criticized for.
I wonder how Andre would feel if Eminem performed a rap in
blackface....
Doesn't CBS and the audience members know that an ENTIRE RACE of
humans was mocked in such a ridiculous and disrespectful manner?
It reminded me of old [19]30s musicals' representations of Native
Americans, and the stereotypical characters in old "Hiawatha," Bugs
Bunny-type cartoons of the '40s-'60s.
I felt like I'd been mugged in my own home.
People were especially outraged because this incident happened just
after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction." An almost
bare breast caused a national scandal, but people ignored one of the
worst cases of ethnic stereotyping in years. Millions of people got
the impression that Natives are all about dancing in feathers and
fringe--still.
CBS offered a halfhearted apology--"We're very sorry if anyone was
offended"--that didn't satisfy anyone. OutKast has remained silent on
its cultural faux pas. That's ironic considering the group is African
American and should be sensitive to racial slights.
Meanwhile, the protests continue. On April 1, about 50 people
demonstrated outside a CBS affiliate in Minneapolis. Native rapper
Litefoot has asked OutKast to meet with him. He hopes Andre 3000 will
"say to the world 'we made a mistake.'" I wouldn't hold my breath
waiting for that to happen.
Rappers Rap Indians
For better or worse, rappers have used Indian words and images before.
In a Village Voice article (4/20/04), Christina Verán notes a few
respectful instances of borrowing from Natives. She then writes:
Far less reverent have been the feathered headdresses sported by
artists from MC Pow Wow of Afrika Bambaataa's Soulsonic Force to
hip-hop's quintessential court jesters, Flavor Flav of Public Enemy
and Biz Markie, to the late Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes--while in a suede
string bikini!--on a 1999 cover of Honey. Recently, Vibe featured
a headdress-donning fashion model of its own.
Some song lyrics have been equally questionable. Here's the Sugar
Hill Gang, in 1982's "Apache," after shoutouts to General Custer
the Indian-killer: "I sting squaws, then I run away/Hi Ho Silver,
is what I say." Jay-Z, in "Girls, Girls, Girls," states, "I got
this Indian squaw and on the day that I met her/Asked her what
tribe she with, red dot or feather."
At one rap concert, a largely black audience yelled "prairie niggers!"
(and more) at Litefoot and his crew. Concludes one observer: "I have
never bought into that facile, disingenuous fable that oppressed
people cannot be racist." Indeed.
For more on the OutKast outrage, go to
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stype425.htm.
Rob Schmidt
Blue Corn Comics
(from Accretions website/email listing May 4, 2004)
From: lisa hutton
Date: Tue, 04 May 2004 21:36:46 -0700
To:
Subject: www.mcmurder.com
marcos,
today was a very proud day in the computer art area as one of my students
received a cease and desist order from the McDonalds corporation.
the student had made this site a few years ago and we have literally been
waiting for this. free speech, first amendment, parody, and satire at
stake--nothing quite like being censored!
details at http://www.mcmurder.com/
where you can read the notice and see the site.
cheers,
lisa
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