Chapter Two: Roots Underground

When one learns to play from a tradition, one’s bottom line is already drawn by culture: the system, material, techniques, aesthetics, etc.

When you do free imp/exper, you’re trying to get to the bottom line of the  nature under the culture that gives rise to it. This chap is about the natural, chap 3 about the cultural bottom line.

This chapter’s mission is to look at the archaic, a-/pre-historic roots of music, to explore the idea that what we’re calling this pan-cultural improvised/experimental music is a fountain of the same natural well that is the source of all cultural results. The one variegated biology of the many various biographs.

Its discursive sources will thus be literature about the origins of music, or the universals of music, before getting into the specifics of different Asian-traditional musics. That info will be related to aspects of the aesthetics/practices of the current improvised/experimental global scene.

It will also pick up on the Treeunity, emic/etic, and cata/apo-phatic tools/rubrics laid down last chapter, and apply them to the particulars presented here

 

Chapter Two: Roots Underground

ellipses...separate unexplained omitted text

bold parts include little notes to myself included here for various reasons

opening, to touch on the question of how one best analyzes a given music without imposing undue baggage on it:

In May of 2012, I added two firsts to my life’s significant experiences: I visited Canada for the first time, and I attended an academic conference in which I didn’t participate with a presentation of my own, only went to listen and learn from colleagues both young and...my age.

(My old friend serendipity added a 3^rd thing--JB movie--but that story may or may not go into story 1, w/ the Oxford project, somehow.)

It was <explain AAWM>. I went because.....<Tenzer’s book; my own wrk as analyst in both bks, w/ story 1 touches>

[run down details of interest from prgm; focus in on Larabee (as linking w/ Rup Sheldrake part below), Steven Brown (rtn of comp musicol, link to VG, Lomax); mention Gage response

for analysis part: When a Western ethnomusicologist transcribes foreign music using the system of Western notation, there are potential neocolonial subtexts at play, as well as the potential for filtering out sounds difficult to represent in Western notation. Not belonging to the dominant cultures of classical music, I am critical of Western notation at the same time as I am embracing and participating in the use of it. The invention of new graphics and signs and the incorporation of recordings and videos as extensions of Western notation, however, gives me the space to tap into a language that feels to me more personal. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/finding-the-score-within/

...

MOVE THIS TO THE MUSICOSOPHY PART OF THE FRAME, AT THE END, AFTER JRNLSM & OLOGY PARTS these players will have an Asian frame & bkg in common; also, American, or relationship btwn Asia & America/West, in global round, & current history; more largely, though, is their common bkg as humans, individ & collective...and that as both atman & brahman, per Hindu/Buddhism, and nature, per Daoism. [summarize that whole monistic paradox, of how super/nature really is <Spinoza> https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/ban-spinoza-lifted/] [pt: the whole power-over thing--tho it’s always already-- started with Plato, intellectually, literally, his transcendent realm, later Christianized (ALL power-over started with force of violence, not intellect, from VG’s fall from “Eden” as from the Bible’s, & Cain & Abel. here let’s say the over/of dialectic covers West/East, between, and overlord/peasant, within, the cultures; and of course yang/yin; also culture/nature But Plato is the good start for us, departing as he did from the pre-Socratics, and that in the time of Athens’ fall to Sparta, understandably enough). Aristotle’s counter idea—that form was immanent, not transcendent—was the twin root of materialism/specialism/scientism. Both are resolved in Bohm & Sheldrake.]

THIS WILL BE PART OF THE METHODOLOGY OF BOTH JRN & OLOGY; SPECIFICALLY THE RSRCH PART ESTABLISHES THE FIELD OF DATA, THE THEOREMIC = SOPHIC PART OF THEORY (PHIL, MEANING, ETC.), THEORETIC = SYSTEM (CRE-IMP AS PROCESS, & ANALYTICAL; [explain why I prefer “theoremic” to “theorematic”, per “systemic” to “systematic,” using dictionary: former emphasizes the emic/etic distinction, just as logo/sophos is so paired; and aesthetic/aesthemic? (an aesthete is detached, an aestheme immersed? etym: aes = sense, thetic is the thesis of the sense perception) thetic/themic? (a theme is a story we live, a thesis is one we don’t?) academic/acadetic? the true (whether independent, maverick, adjunct, tenured) v. the faux (careerist) scholar? (I know I’m departing from etymology in this play, but am just throwing these out to make the point, then leave it) alt: we are all both, toggling back & forth

this whole etic/emic theme is foundational to this section, and the whole book. An emic mindset comes first, as the thing one really believes as truth [from Chap 1, the first ring of the tree that starts out as the whole tree, gives way to the next {etic} layer within which it becomes the core of the tree] It turns into etic when one grows, changes, etc., and sees it as merely one way of seeing things among many. It may still hold up in new ways, or in some ways, but one is no longer wedded to it as “the truth.” Everyone goes thru this, and everyone either holds or seeks his/her current emic TRUTH even in the wake of all past ones and other ones turning into etic narratives, like leaves turning on a tree. childish belief in Santa Claus is emic, later disbelief is etic, later internalized goodness is emic; mountain/no mountain/mountain; “when I was a child, etc….when I became a man, I put away, etc.”

from Eurojazzland end, and diss intro The disciplinary rubric of “folkloristics” has always been a natural one to frame discussions of music itself called “folk,” for obvious reasons; the major aspects of storytelling and poetry, and oral-traditional transmission have been even more prominent in Chinese and other Asian traditional music in both high (court) and low (peasant) incarnations than in their Western counterparts, especially set against the advent of polyphony, evolved systems of notation and harmony, equal temperament, and the rise of a secular and commercial music industry over the course of the last millennium in the West.

Less obvious and known, but just as intuitable, is the way what is now generally called “improvised music”—meaning not only a hybrid of composition and improvisation, with the former driving the latter, as in pre-“free” jazz, but a full-blown spontaneous and unscripted expression—has also developed apart and away from the literate- and into the same oral-aural-traditional world of folk music, both in practice and (in my own work, anyway) scholarly theory. That shift is more counterintuitive, because that music we call (categorically) “improvised” now has in fact developed largely out of those engagements between the West and the Rest called jazz and Western art music, both of which have been theorized and otherwise discussed in print via the discourses of musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular and cultural journalism. Yet it is telling that the first major box set of recent retrospective CDs of 1960s saxophonist Albert Ayler, for example, was released on a “folk” rather than a “jazz” label; also that so much of his repertoire came straight out of American and European folk music. Drummer Sunny Murray has called the music tagged “free jazz” (his own purview) an American folk music on a continuum with all so-called “jazz”; add Braxton quote at end of Eurojazzland here [and even the score-writing, chart-making, math-techy AB leans more in the direction of literacy as subservient to oral-aural, rather than the reverse; also, the Coleman/Haden symbiosis] pianist Cecil Taylor’s method of transmitting even his most complex and ambitious compositions to large ensembles to perform has been oral-aural more than scored to read, by conscious choice and preference; and much of the spread of this post-1960s part of American “jazz” out to the rest of the world has been effected by musicians anywhere and everywhere mixing their own local/traditional musical roots and fruits (indeed, as Americans themselves spread their various local styles to larger arenas) through the improvisatory collaborations with American musicians, moving beyond the practice in earlier decades of imitatively swallowing it whole as an import.[1]

The scholarship from folklore studies, then, will figure accordingly larger in this study than in my previous two, with a triple dose of the oral-traditional from (1) outside the West; (2) inside music that is all spontaneously improvised, none scripted; and (3) collaborations between musicians already generally called “folk” and the conservatory schooled and trained (both from various traditions). (The perceptive reader, of course, will also see the influence of this oral-traditional approach in my own departure from the literate-traditional journalese, acadamese, and literary-fiction devices of my earlier work to the tales about the music I’m spinning here, and in the way I’m spinning them.)[2] at some point in discussion of what to call it, settle on “creative music” for the book—first out of homage to AB/AACM tag, second with my own new spin, from Sheldrake. [Also Stravinsky's self-tag of "inventor" of music--like a creator.] Just as I’m shaking away all the diff disciplinary approaches—jazz, other genre-tags (wrk in the genre-salad ref) experimental/exploratory, improvised, ethno/musicology, etc.—so am I shaking off all the half-baked working titles for the music that have emerged out of those disciplines and reactions against them

folklore tradition, via Szwed & Lomax, resonates better—less unconsciously “etic,” more unconsciously “emic”, let’s say {pt: the dark side of etic is, simply, death’s framing of life as an abstraction, maya; the dark side of emic is idolatry, attachment, mistaking its transience/impermanence for “eternal life”}—with the part of the Western intellectual tools/traditions/terminologies at my disposal than do the trads of musicology, composed & ethno musics, and journalism, on all 3 levels (reportage/logos/sophos); it’s the least fraught with colonial/imp/chauvinistic baggage, & most amateur (amatory, amorous) in aesthetic, even as is the object of its study [explore way to wrk in “aesthemic”?].

Part of my concern as a scholar of music has been to present both deep background and a carefully wrought frame for the music I discuss. Like its history, music is story, told by specific tellers on specific stages, is thus as manifold as them; per Mr. Faulkner’s oft-cited maxim (“The past is not dead—it isn’t even past”), its past, though swimming in subconscious depths, drives the full lives of much of its presents, much as the evolutionarily older parts of our brains and other organs drive much of the more recently evolved parts of our organisms’ structures and systems. As the organisms we are comprise earlier and diverse systems, music consists of previously sounded facts and histories; it provokes speculations when only clues, traces, and echoes of same remain; and as story, it suggests its own theories to explain itself, if often hypothetically—all as distinct from (if often resonant with) the other-tethered “fictions” of what we call (oral-traditional) myth and folklore, and sciences soft and hard, and literary arts. That said, history, like music, is inevitably a creative-nonfictional concourse of discourses engaged by the proverbial blind men reporting on the nature of the elephant as felt from the variously quite different parts of its body. What we “know” would more properly fall under the category of creative fiction if set against what we don’t know we don’t know.

I see that double task of depth and frame for the music discussed here as even more urgent than in my previous work, driven by a thesis opposite the one (typically argued) that the closer to the present an account gets, the less authority one can claim for it. That thesis presumes that the best considered one will survive and prevail, given sufficient time...but history itself also shows that every narrative is only one of many possible; and that judiciously refraining to judge too soon, however prudent, may also be irresponsible. Without reliable witness, the music might then suffer the ghostly fate of the sound of the tree falling in the forest that no one hears, which later generations can then only imagine, at the mercy of whatever “definitive” history the “winners” deaf to it then write. as mentioned in my Acks, this one will be diff; mainly by moving thru all those ways into the “one big lie” Rob E. Zee says all the truth in the world adds up to

My mind turned to such thoughts upon hearing my colleague Paul de Barros put this danger well in Icons Among Us, a film about the most current voices in jazz:

If you look back at what we now consider a Golden Age in the music, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, you think of more than music. You think of integration, the Civil rights Movement...a kind of bohemian outsiderism...That was part of the message behind that music, part of the urgency of it. We understand that, and we understand the relationship between Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman with black freedom. We do not understand what the relationship is between Bill Frisell and the society...They might hear Charles Gayle, or Dave Douglas...or Robert Glasper, and they may love it. But they’re going to forget it immediately if it doesn’t mean anything to them, if it doesn’t have a place for them in the culture, in the society.[3] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=icons%20among%20us%20netflix

While I take his point and agree with its general thrust, I have to counter that I do think of some larger social context and truth that couches the music of Frisell and similar peers when I hear it, including not a few of the African-American players, Glasper and trumpeter Nicholas Payton (also in the film) included, whose work has expanded beyond, without eliding or shorting, that Golden Age’s moments.

Each of the musicians here, accordingly, will suggest her and his own such unique background and frame [ie, analytical-theoretical, too; trace anal-the steps back thru both bks, build on them here; mention Tenzer’s bk & http://aawmjournal.com/; each artist has a trad cd they have rested in as a safe zone, but their choice to do creative-improvised both redefines said traditons & embarks on a new definition of world music, according to their roots and my perception, for their current work and its implications for the future—but their larger common ground is their shared human history and culture in the global round, and that too wants its deep background and frame. That global frame, shared by them all, will be what I hear reflected in the music De Barros sees as wanting it (details ahead). in short, those details summarize: the music I write about is an extension of the jazz de Barros can identify as pegged to black American culture/social politics: the assertion of the individual against all power-overs, and pro power-of, vis-à-vis the collectives of which s/he is part.

to place at the end of this part, referring back to this promise: the million-dollar work 4 nothing these artists do is the perfect reflection of American & global society as a whole, especially (for me, since I’m in it, much as these musicians are too) academia; that, and women are the group hardest hit by all this, being at the lowest econ/social rung already; it’s a folk music by virtue of being noncommercial; also, American-{& VG}reflecting, in the aesthetic of freedom-cum-communitarianism, collaboration of fully individuated egos, melting pot/salad bowl?

As for that deep background, I blame my era, mainly, for the spell of its thrall. Few journalists, musicians, or scholars of jazz before my coming-of-age decades (that same Golden Age of the 1950s-60s) thought to reach farther back than our own American centuries, mostly just the 20th, when thinking in print about the music’s roots and larger historical contexts. Like the country, “jazz” was young, and all stories about it tended to start with its “birth” in New Orleans through people such as Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton; having mentioned them so casually, return to them later with mention of Leo Smith’s mention of Swing That Music, and Lomax’s Jelly Roll book; the reason “jazz” has always been in quotes for so many is that it signals the kind of pigeonhole imposed by a slaver culture on something that is free in order to control/commodify, as indeed it has, tho never absolutely/conclusively; compare successive assessments of black music as way deeper than first pop jazz recs to the process of dating the Sphinx (indeed, the earth) back earlier and earlier as more knowledge/theories emerge earlier musical history, typically no farther back than mid-19^th century, was discussed as part of jazz’s prehistory. The rubrics of creolization and syncretism were employed to explain the way the details of their various influences linked up, gumbo-like, to create the new idiom.

a graf somewhere in all this glancing at Grauer’s points about ethno starting as a grand narr kind of thing, a la modernism, but evolving (as most wd have it) out into a postmodernist concern with the fragments of such wholes. Position myself in that intellectual history (and away from the anthhro/ethno project of preserving/saving cultures from extinction; rather, am after the thing about them that survives, morphs, emerges reborn & triumphant over in & thru the modern)

My baby-boomer’s formative initiation into the music, though, included Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, with Gil Evans’ treatments of Spanish classical and folk music wrk in Lomax contrib. thereto, evoking the history of the Moorish occupation of Spain; and the Swingle Singers setting Bach to their jazz choral style, and the Modern Jazz Quartet suggesting the European chamber music tradition with their approach. It included the Third Stream movement, more generally. All of these moved my concept and experience of the music away from the arenas of popular entertainment and American race relations, as couched in the 20^th-century modernism and American songbook and African-American roots (blues and church) music, to encompass the larger arc of Western art music tradition and its different times, places, and facets.

A little later, Miles, again, and George Russell, and Yusef Lateef all gave me cause to think about ancient Greek modalism and Middle Eastern influences in the American jazz vernacular; John and Alice Coltrane celebrated Africa, and they and Paul Horn India; Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra recalled ancient Egypt, as did the Art Ensemble of Chicago; and the Black Artists Group introduced me to the Dogon people. Generally, the revival of Black History and Egyptology in those years inspired me and other white jazz buffs to start thinking about our own deeper ethnic-historical roots and identities, and to take similar excursions to them through the music (German, Irish, and Scots-Irish, in my case). Albert Ayler’s unbridled disgorgement of North (African-)American and Northern European folk material alike suggested a deep unity of both, and Ornette Coleman’s music’s Texan and Ozark (via Charlie Haden) inflections likewise invoked America’s own most proper black-and-white “folk” place at the emerging world-music table that would be set rapidly in the mid-1980s, and serve up its fare fully with the onset of the internet. These were just the first of many more such mixes and matches that have come since.

This experience, with my hearty consent, led me to the understanding and relationship I forged with the music throughout my working life in it. A regular part of my projects with my late-‘80s band the Northwest Creative Orchestra were collaborations with other musical traditions—Japanese-American with Andrew Hill, Australian Aboriginal with Vinny Golia, African slave-trade history with John Carter. Accordingly, when I moved from the cultural poetics and aesthetics of making such music, and of presenting it with exotic panache as a journalist and promoter, to substantive discursive scholarship, it was natural to gravitate toward such work, past and present, that also acknowledged “the ancestors” and their global connections so—Joseph Schillinger, Wilfrid Mellers, Marius Schneider, Curt Sachs, Gilbert Rouget, Alan Lomax, Victor Grauer, Francois-Bernard Mâche? Michael Tenzer?—scholars steeped in vast ranges and samples of material, often music-makers themselves, from which they developed custom-tailored analytical frameworks and soundly grounded theories, however also speculative/subjective, about deep historical and cultural contexts. Such affinities made even more sense when I shifted from American to Eurasian music in my second book, for the deeper and more conscious draws on folk traditional roots suffusing the latter. point: in acad wrtg, there is typically a discursive lit revu, where the author demonstrates his/her awareness of what the peers in his field and others he cares about are saying about the subject or related subjects, and positions his own points in relation to them. Describe my history, from AB bk on, as a discursive scholar, and what it is now: my eclectic selection of sources, much like it started out with the AB bk (although that was also shaped by AB’s own reading); actually, my biggest discursive partner here (as anyone who has outgrown, aged beyond, the best work of his or her best years knows) is me, in my own earlier work—most esp & imm, NSSM (although, as mentioned in Acks, I do have a more-than-usual fellow feeling for my sources in this one. Earlier work was more about connecting with peers and historical lit to establish my place in their concourse, & to position my own voice therein; that’s done, I’m talking mostly to my own earlier work here ...and appreciate those other sources for their role in helping me do so)

To that end, my graduate work at Wesleyan with Anthony Braxton exposed me to a world music as much as a jazz and new music center (and its world-harvested archive of field recordings from world-class ethnomusicological research)—but even more to a mindset that eschewed the genre lines between them. Braxton’s syllabus for his African-American Music History class was as idiosyncratically ingenious as is his music: it included recordings of early Western organum and polyphony, along with other world music (both low/folk and high/court cultures) sampled from anywhere and everywhere, along with the more expected African and African-American material. The assumption behind such eclecticism seemed to be that his own ethnic identity, like everyone’s, was at the center of a circle whose body and circumference consisted of the rest of the world and history, to which the center’s organic access came naturally through its common humanity. While counterintuitive at first glance, his approach was certainly a truer reflection of real world and history, as the geneticists have shown us,[4] than the segmentation and class-hierarchization of historical styles and genres.

All this education and experience led me to the site of the body itself as both the most primal (it is hard-wired by the semi-traceable knit of evolution, a way to read the now-fixed one (physical) history of life, from cell to organism) and most immediately accessible one (it is constantly regenerated, a way to read and experience the evershifting fluid present) for investigating spontaneously improvised and idiosyncratically composed music. Acculturation may be impossible to escape, but the exercise of trying to ignore it to explore one’s own subjective physical-psychic instrument does, I suggest, produce some direct intimations of the natural ground of all culture, as well as of the free fall in the space beyond all such ground’s “gravitational intrigues” (to borrow from Braxton).

This center-everywhere-circumference-nowhere corporeality has seemed a perfect solution to the false dilemma between the blinkered exclusivity between cultures/traditions/genres and a too-diluted universalism (one mirrored in the various religious concepts equating the identities of the divine and the mortal); it is complicated, however, by the conflicting human nature every body comprises. One side of that conflict is defensive; I will shorthand it to three easy-to-see traits: envy, shame, and chauvinism.

The phenomenon of ethnic envy, and the awkward embarrassments of failed collaborations it can lead to, has certainly been a part of the music history I truck in, especially in cultural concourses such as my own native country. Apart from the most general and specifically ethnic “white-men-can’t-jump” (read “swing”) motif running through its historiography, John Cage with Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor with Betty Carter and Mary Lou Williams, and the whole Third Stream movement itself are famous examples in jazz history and lore of such mixed/questionable results. My late colleague Franya Berkman recounted from her interviews for a book she was working on when she died about Ghanaian drummer Obo Addy how fellow percussionist Fadoumou Don Moyé, famous for his work on the same African instruments in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, would stop playing as he did when Addy was in the room, out of respect for the tradition he was honoring in his own home context by appropriating its spirit and affect in a respectful, creative spirit. I saw Braxton, conversely but with the same respect, play a freely improvised duo at Wesleyan with his Wesleyan colleague (also Ghanaian, different lineage) drummer Abraham Adzenyah that by Braxto's own account suffered from the same kind of disjunct Moyé chose to avoid; the same game plan (spontaneous improvisation) produced more copasetic results, understandably, when Braxton performed on the same stage with drummer Max Roach some months later.

If we added up all such clashes or calamities of chemistry—inevitable in a milieu that fosters spontaneous invention and openness to inter-stylistic, interpersonal, and genre-crossing experiment—we would no doubt have plenty of material for a category we might call global minstrelsy, driven by mutual envy between the respective performers of it. here wrk in that note about losing one’s life to save it, by foregoing one’s comfort zone context for the unknown; see p. 8 in unzipped souls

Another angle of the same ethnic/cultural self-consciousness is just as deep at the root of American national identity: the impulse to ignore one’s ancestral background to the point of suppression (shame), for the sake of the melting pot. At one time or another, each of America’s different groups have evinced it, albeit for different reasons. The Europeans on the low end of the socioeconomic totem pole in both/either Old and/or New World in their moments—Germans, Irish, Scots-Irish, Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans...maybe not so much French or Scandinavians—played down those roots and played up the original American Dream: starting over, with a new self-invented identity. Their counterparts on the higher end—the more monied Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the armed and organized, the aggressively religious, the landed gentry, the merchants/slavers/capitalists—champed at the bits of their Old World constraints so as to run freer to do what they did here (not to mention the useful idiocy the presumption of equality and egalitarianism in American society proved [is still proving] to be for their purposes). Occasional such dodges also came and went according to which nation America was at war with, or legally complicating or excluding from immigration or open citizenship (my own German-American family took to passing as Swedish for a generation or two; Japanese, Muslims, Jews, Russians, Chinese have all had to deal with such situations on one level or another, official and not, at various times). Those from non-white groups—Asians, post-Emancipation African-Americans, Latinos...not so much Native Americans, with some notable but transient exceptions (pre-Trail of Tears Cherokees, Christian-friendly tribes, some boarding schoolers)—played down, with mixed and often personally tragic results, their un-hideable otherness to try and face down racism.

Of course, yet another face of ethnic-cum-national identity politics has always been its opposite: the chauvinism that reacts haughtily or defensively against all such embarrassments of envy and shame, real or strategic. The examples of that are too obvious and well known to mention, especially in the power-over groups among us, but also in those they’ve oppressed, who have sometimes played the victim cards as if they were winning hands (the Stockholm syndrome).  also, there’s a certain laziness in this option that’s always popular: “my story and I’m sticking to it, don’t bother me with the “other’s” “facts”

None of all this is typically so much the truly reactive turn away from or corruption of one’s core-cultural/racial self as it is a strategy to avoid being pinned and played by the prejudice and ignorance of one’s fellow citizens in a pluralistic society. In my own time and demographic, the same impulse has often led me and my peers to self-identify more as a “citizen of the world” than an American, or a white American, when we’ve been ashamed of our national or ethnic identity for its histories and policies and/or postures abroad or at home.

Pondering these (more public than private) strategies of assertion and effacement of identities in the American and international cultural arenas leads naturally beyond the narrowly collective of the ethnic-national-racial; they also extend, as a deeply human-natural ploy, to the dynamics of gender, of generation, of personal ego itself, most reductively. Taking the three faces of envy, shame, and chauvinism, consider—and I will forego any supportive examples from the music or culture to let you reflect from your own knowledge and experience—how they play out between women and men, old and young, and between every individual: the envy and shame toward one’s “others” that sometimes troubles healthy self-esteem, and the too-forceful assertions of the latter in reactive defense.

Fortunately, the positive flip side is just as real: the open curiosity, sympathetic compassion, fundamental recognition, and (not least) security in strength all make the risks of vulnerability to threats, perceived or real, worth taking—and that side is where the collaborations and hybrids of this music that bursts out of traditions, systems, and scripts live.  To generalize it to human nature writ large is to say that no one likes to be pigeonholed; all prefer to find their sweetspot-right relationships vis-à-vis their roots, their fellows, and their “others”; and no one wants to dominate or be dominated if they can be joined, respected, loved by peers instead. Insofar as people themselves are seen, named, defined by their fellows patronizingly (looking down) or sycophantically (looking up), the problem remains—be it in language, sociopolitics, or the arts—at the root, in the individual body. or maybe wrk in that “lose life to save it” note here...?

Each of the musicians studied here evinces different paths to and from that positive affect, all sharing in common both the option of safety in their respective areas of expertise and the renunciation of that safety in favor of more vulnerable but also more compelling openness to their “others.” ///run this part against bullet list in Acks that is similar; gaurd agst rep\\\ Sainkho Namchylak found spirits kindred to her traditional shamanistic/Buddhist roots in the Leo Records stable of new-and-improvised experimental jazz-oriented musicians networking from her Central Asian part of the world through St. Petersburg to Germany to America; Jin Hi Kim found another cross-cultural platform for her related shamanistic-folk-Buddhist roots in the more American Maverick composer-based new music scenes in San Francisco and New York and, later, the more jazz-based improvisers close to it; Wu Man, Mei Han, and Min Xiao-Fen were all Conservatory trained in Chinese-traditional instruments and repertoire, but turned that training into a springboard to the destinies each found more satisfying and natural to their musical souls and voices, engaging other traditions and new creations from anywhere and everywhere, including the grassroots ethnic minorities in their own Chinese back yards that were not offered in their conventional schooling there; the Asian Americans involved with Asian Improv Records (AIR), in the post-1960s zeitgeist of exploring roots suppressed by the melting-pot paradigm, drew on familial and community lore and custom, and on more formal knowledge, to inflect their American music with Asian identities both primal and historical. Miya? Jason? Taylor? Fred? add them in so too Pauline Oliveros and Randy Raine-Reusch, our two non-Asians, honored the Asian roots in their instruments, and embraced Asian spiritual and music traditions in both their lives and music, including collaborations with the other musicians here, that brought them into the connections with the Asian identity profiled in their group portrait. Besides the abovementioned openness-to-otherness’s subtle aspect of the body-as-baseline, each mined for their new material by turning away from their instruments as conveyors of learned traditions and aesthetics, seeing them instead as voices (literally for Sainkho, by extension for the others) with stories and secrets of their own to be told, under their properly creative coaxing and coaching.

so-body is baseline (which makes Sheldrake impt here; morph fields are like music, language, culture, history, science/math, in their transcendence of the bio-individuals who make/feed/shape  such fields, and the influence of the latter on future such persons); music & discourse are both material manifestations of morpho fields: “ bodies” of info (oeuvres, bodies of wrk) w/ a certain time-forged shape that shapes each new organism (like me), empowering us to both perpetuate them as they are and to tweak them into some new shape (see Sheldrake’s last chapter on creativity in fields). The dualism we all experience arises from any/all conceptualizing of the inconceivable, from religion to secular philosophy & science, in all of their degrees of quality. [work Bellah book in here somewhere] Experience—I AM—is the eternal emic truth to all such etic idolatries <such is my meditation on my own relationship to my chosen subjects, my chosen presentations/explanations of them, and my chosen sources of them. Contrast that to previous books...

then pre/a-historic folk trad, generally (the one that, like the body, both primal/archaic and still living/renewed [see Grauer & Tenzer]; glance at how that works out in musicians too; recall Minja’s answer about the appeal of glissandi in ganga singing, how it just felt good to do, physically. Highlight that as an important part of a music-aesthetic of the body, how a music of timbres & textures covers emotions and sensuality in a healthy way, countering the music of the brain which is pitch relations, metered rhythm, etc.--rationalism); this is where I talk more about the folklore approach, touching on Szwed (Sun Ra & Miles are both country boys)/Lomax (jazz was a subset--& problematic for him kind of like it was for Adorno--his larger purview of black music), GL/JAMS (AACM roots were Great Migration rural, AB is country boy); as an ethno, I’ve been “collecting” all my life too, and now want to theorize on all that

then protest music. Draw on Eurojazzland & ISIM for both, and glance at elements in these players. Say I’m selecting the feminist ones. 

As a submotif throughout, weave in AB system/aesthetic to the one I’m positing here; I’m an AB man, even on my own, like VG is to AL; his head’s naturally like mine, and his influence on my life as musician and mentor has formed and branded me; getting totally away from him to wrk out this individuation is what authorizes me to pull off a credible homage & torchbearing like this

Finally, most recent/surface, the civilizational traditions (Asian, from Mongolia shaman/Buddhism to Korean to Chinese shaman/Daoism/Buddhism to Asian-Am), including political (Fred Ho, esp.). Bellah bk for emergence of Asian religs from shamanism

<>

Shift in segue from that personal-social-culture terrain to that of music, in genres

America is the place where all come to make the new culture; once it is in place, all the old histories/cultures bubble up from their depths (Roots, Born Fighting, etc.). connect all this to the notion that the current wrld turmoil hangs on globalization & internet, & the global tensions between modernism—forget postmodernism, which is just the grab bag of 10,000 things that always brackets/grounds any unifying theory (eg Die Moderne, or Arche)—and medievalism/archaism. Caveat: suggested resolution is that the archaic has many positive/healthy things to offer modernism, & vice versa, just like has always been so in smaller historical microcosms (Ami history, jazz history, Greece & Rome, Europe, etc.); emotion v. intellect, soul v. technique = the new/old dialectic, in new/old global context in which the world has become so suffused with American culture. <that’s another aspect of my study; it was jazz and modern art music that drove Sainkho, Mei, Wu, Jin, Min, Pauline, & AIR guys, albeit deeper into their own roots too in the end; the deep history I’ll draw on here will be Fukuyama, Part 2, for his similar reach back to the roots of the state in the organic relations of family; scan for epigraphs; Canetti, for the resonance between the concept of organic-unscripted crowd behavior and imp music; wrk Sheldrake into this part too, as body-based/culture-linked; more specifically, the morphofield concept resonates perfectly w/ the nature of improv (a probability field of potential activated by a germ)>; Dylan, “land of the free, you can call yourself whatever you want”

rise of Euro scene, thus Euro folk & art music history; following all that down in the way I have is what led me to Asia in the way that it has...and beyond history into prehistory, more with each book.> bring in the  bits about the Eastern Bloc (from my E Germ to Leo’s Russia) jazzers drawing more seamlessly on folk as well as (the more Western) commercial/bourgeois entertainment and high art trads:

wrk in Eurojazzland end [Schill/Caucasus—link to Leo/Russ—AACM motto, rural blacks at its heart, in diaspora thru Great Mig, same culture as Lomax saw, for frame; mention his similar melding of the folk and the jazz in his work, and his assn w/ Ros Rudd, & AB’s comment about him over Hammond] ISIM for deep hist <the social bodies organizing, in music as elsewhere>, then discussion/notes re: genre issue: per notes, the Icons film, my link to STN, iPod article, etc. pt = “jazz” the music is primal/global, not 20^th-cent Ami; “jazz” the word is one of many insufficient words.] recall “big history” (from diss? NSSM?) and scope of AB bk too; here I will invoke an even bigger history, both past & future (Precession & Ancient Knowledge)

Deep future is the other side of the deep past: eg AB’s & GL’s wrk, Sun Ra, Afrofuturism generally...space; link to Deep Future article, abt scholarly discipline/discourse of same [mention it as an academic counterpart of big history]

so: once we see that context suffusing the music, overlaying the previous smaller scope of the dialectic between Af & Eurologics in the arenas of Western high and low cultures of the 20^th-cent Ami moment, we may be well advised as scholars to leave behind the journalistic, jazz-studies, cultural studies, ethno/musicology, interdisc methodologies and turn to the one where such mythical and everydaily truths and stories interweave comfortably and richly: folkloristics. <move stuff on this from Acks to here?>

Icon pt = more folk music in Europe to draw on (me: by implication, more history; Dutch sop sax player Tineke Postma); Europe more excited about extending & developing potential of the music (Jessica Lurie)[that is a point stretching back to Louis; see my notes, his book]; Bugge Wesseltoft, Frisell, Payton (anti-exclusionary, anti-reification)

Courtney Pine: Amis have a better sense of jazz-as-global mix now than Brits (who still wonder what genre/trad box to put things in) N Payton quote agst genre

[a la Lomax, Sachs, Seeger—big picture, big theory; in my case, what I’ve been “collecting” all my life, and selected here as the cross section that best supports the larger areas and issues of my concern, is not the folk music of various ethnic groups, but the similarly countless expressions and creations of “folk” in that trad of imp and exper—creative—music. What’s generally called “experimental” (STN), “imp” (ISIM), “creative” (AACM)

here put the graf about exp/imp/cre terms; say they call to mind the ways music is categorized, into genres; but talk about the diff btwn them and such genre-names (it is the diff btwn names of 10,000 things and names of the One, which by def fall short, in the way any names for God does in Jewish trad, or Buddhism, or any such aversion to naming the ineffable giver of all names, or capturing it in images (including photos of people) or idols (including all modern such—work, ego, eros, nation, etc.); see p. 157 PK

deepest bkg is the oneness of the root system—w/ each other, other species, the wrld & cosmos—and that’s why we want to get back to it when we are caught up in the surface frictions of our various shoots

also: draw on Fukuyama for his own turn back so far, and suggest that the conflicts of personal incentive & public common good that led to private property rights apply also to intellectual property (re: issue explored here, at a glance, but in depth in Book 2); Kingsley, Grauer...again, we need to find our deep global/historical connection. Glance back at NSSM neologisms (monautarchy, etc.) for social arrangements

it all comes down to the quest for balance: no power-over, all power-of...and that happens in the realm of potentia, but always tilts in actu...subtle is potentia, gross actu.

as af-am music narr in US sounded and effected liberation, & that as a template for other groups (including, here, AIR; the pipa players are good egs of self-lib from the boredom and bad faith of a life in the elite), so will I see in this music—its frame—a narr of global lib, starting, as with af-am, with the grossly stressed America <yet even its most stressed are in better shape than much of rest of world>, and moving out from there. The lib in question is still from poverty and oppression, more economic than gender, just as af-am was more economic than racial, bottom line—but gender is a wider circle than race or nation, though the song’s narrative is wider still, at the circle of universal equity/justice/security/peace/prosperity

when I sort all this out, I need to contextualize sources such as Icon, Fukuyama, etc., as just what I have at hand in the moment to help me see the big pic; I don’t want them to become dated

pt: the current trend toward living alone, having less children, is one possible way affluence self-regulates population; the trend toward power-of justice driven by the powers-over themselves is another. so with universal affluence gradually comes fewer people, thus less stressed world, w/ no violent manmade/preventable decimation such as war or disease or famine (real natural disasters still a constant possibility)

the sacred quest is to change that; sometimes it happens (Golden Ages, peace & prosperity, cooperation & compassion), others not (the opposite)

That said, I argue here that all such misfires are only human-natural subsets of the larger primal and ongoing process of true syncretic synthesis. The deep background suggests the details of the best frame. move all above notes about the frame to next section

Musica Sui Generous

Comedian Steven Colbert’s sweet/acid wit hit me where I live when he turned it on John Zorn and Ornette Coleman. When they made mainstream news for receiving prestigious awards (Zorn’s MacArthur, Coleman’s Pulitzer), Colbert played snatches of the more jarringly esoteric bits of their music while grinning like a hopped-up rat, replete with top hat and cane, snapping his fingers and swaying and dancing in place like a cheesy vaudeville hack, as if they were the catchiest, swingin-est sounds ever to top the charts. As hip a master of the inside joke as Colbert really is, the joke here was clearly on the musicians and a fawning egghead public gullible or freaky enough to take them/selves and their art as seriously as they do.

A key element of all humor is surprise, and the funny in this bit lies partly in the shock that he mentions such musicians at all. Smart media platforms such as Colbert’s and his erstwhile mentor-employer Jon Stewart’s, or Charlie Rose’s, or even BookTV’s routinely introduce authors promoting their books on a wide range of nonfiction fields, musicians from a similarly wide range of genres, scientists, politicians, philosophers, actors and others in film and theater—seemingly the healthiest cross section of cutting-edge voices literate global culture has to offer those audiences hungry to hear them—without a glimmer of awareness that the music and musicians I and many consider right up there in importance with the cream of all of such crops even exist.

What explains this blind spot? I am asking it first, here and now, before delving into the music itself, because there is an audience for this music that is such an acquired taste (surprisingly, even to me who knows why there is, about which surprise and knowledge both ahead answer: it is a folk music (knowledge) but also an esoteric, damn near autistic one (per Babbitt—but then maybe the majority of the “folk” have those traits too) (surprise). It is global, and networked through media, festivals and smaller venues, and academia and culture-industry grantors, along with a host of labels that put out its recordings; and it overlaps with the mainstream culture that ignores it, as some of its artists work on the margins of those contexts as well as their own more central one. Whereas all my prior work was reportage and preachments to that choir of cognoscenti, my agenda in this one is to pique awareness of and interest in it by pointing out things about the music that might prick this bubble of mainstream ignorance/indifference.it does have its coverage...in NYT, on internet now, more than when I wrote that

The best way I can describe this music in the overview is to do so through my own experience as a player and student of it, and see if that microcosm can speak for the macro. Even when my focus is on the musicians and their music, my own voice and story are the foreground here, unlike my previous work. They are people who have feasted and continue to feast at a banquet table from which I’ve had a few good if inconspicuously fleeting meals; those few tastes are all I wanted and needed to perform my true function as “restaurant reviewer” for this part. Any fewer would leave me under-informed, while any more would be to tarry at the table through the time allotted me to forge my best words about it.

“I just don’t think in terms of genre” (N Payton)

me: the whole genre system has been like the OZ illusion, now unmasked and unanonymous; the mountain it is has been revealed as nothing more than the tip of an iceberg—or more precisely, a tiny spike on a vastly larger planet (C Mingus:  call it black music, not jazz? no, just music)

When I spoke above of “the music industry’s amateur underbelly genres,” I might have added those of “jazz,” “art music,” “world music,” and “folk.” I mean no disrespect to the any of the music marketed through any of these rubrics; it’s the system of genre-framing itself, for sociocultural, academic, and commercial conveniences, that constitutes the underbelly. Indeed, the road into the music generally called “improvised,” “experimental,” and/or “creative”—the tags I would be holding if I tried to situate it in the genre-framing system—Is most typically through immersion/training/full-professional-embrace of a traditional, or formal, or pop genre, to the point of being able to do it in your sleep. mention egs from my subjects: Sainkho, Jin, Mei/Min/Jin; the Amis came up in Ami music ed & classical & jazz; caveat: this “boredom” that ends one’s life in that bag is where another life just begins; everyone has to make peace with the “boredom” of a chosen sanity, within which one can safely and productively go crazy enough to move beyond it; it’s just a matter of what place in the grand scheme one wants to end up in, and what price, sacrifice, etc. one is ready, willing, and able to pay One gets to a point of barren boredom with the whole package—the history, premises, community, aesthetic, skill, the hero worship (iconoclasm is a motif here, kill the fathers) etc.--, and turns to its components, fault lines, shadows/sidelines/implications, etc. to drill down for the essence of a music one can call one’s own. That process is self-explanatorily “improvised” and “experimental” and “ creative,” because by definition it is the classic mystic’s journey of finding a way where is no way; fn: experiment & experience have the same root but those tags stand more as anti- or a-descriptors than as new ones to add to the genre soup-and-salad wrk that into similar text below; also peg it to Schillinger’s pre- rather than descriptive, and to S’ line about NOW-looking-at-past v. NOW-looking-at-future; draw on ISIM nslt here, wrkg in the social angle question [wrk in notes abt Jazz 101 & Shipton re: def of jazz; state my rhizome thing] [The One is the rhizome, the 10,000 things its shoots]

What’s interesting, then, is that it is largely a musician’s music, in the sense that we/they make it mostly for our/themselves and each other, in the spirit of Milton Babbitt’s famous utterance of indifference to the audience—but of course that’s not as arrogantly autistic as it sounds, heard as a refusal to connect by pandering or manipulating instead of by integrity and freedom. As has Babbitt’s music and that of his peer composers, it is the very stance that did in fact attract a listening crowd beyond the small circle of fellow musicians, which begs the question: is that crowd isolated from abovementioned mainstream media/culture because its personality’s traits trend unhealthily to the sociopathic, narcissistic, autistic themselves? or are they healthy mavericks scouting out habitable lands for us all when said mainstream runs dry and/or afoul of its health or vitality?  again, is the autism of the folk its freedom from the Crowd? (seen from their perspective; from normal human concourse, from the Crowd’s pov)

per the alonetime book, all individualism, healthy & not, on spectrum trending to autism; all collectivism/attachment, healthy & not, tilting toward totalitarian/herd

...

wrk this out: amateurs-as-dilettantes are those invested in the genre, the identity, the role of the genre—one can say one’s a pop, or a rap, or a jazz or a classical musician with no self-consciousness about whatever the word is; the problem with it, the underbelly of it, is that we all come from diff parts of the world system, quintessentially so in America, and the dynamics and machinations of exploitation and power plays and ploys have happened in and shaped the music industry just as everywhere else. [if I can name you, I can control you, esp if you buy into the name completely; if I can deflect the name you impose on me, I remain free of your control over me] They add up to what I think of as a global minstrelsy—caricaturizing both “other” and “self” [ie the Bob Dylan mask; it’s hilarious that he complained to Ed Bradley about feeling like an impostor, not the person people think he is, after having changed his name and identity] that is by definition unaware of, or at least indifferent to, itself as such. It all adds up to a picture of the height of a love life as being an arrangement of institutionalized prostitution/consumption, detached from that initial impulse of Eros that birthed the artistic Werk. Again, from emic to etic, from amateur-as-dilettante to professional-as-cynic.

amateurs-as-lovers stay detached from that game, that identity, even if they function in the genre but not of it, as those here also do in their various ways. It’s a nuanced distinction that I don’t make as a ploy to pass judgment on anyone as to which they are, based on my own fallible impressions—but it is useful here, to pinpoint what I like and dislike in my own possible experiences of music, either as a listener/scholar or a maker, and to navigate to and settle on the way to talk about the music here, without throwing it into that genre-soup-or-salad as just another of its ingredients. in short, emic v. etic

(In this analogy, the dilettante-amateur is so in the genre cages by virtue of being there alone, whether sincerely, cynically, or unknowingly; they are profis in the sense of being in it as a career, a community, a brand...but all those things make them amateurs in my bad sense. Like party liners as opposed to independent minds with a sense of responsibility to that. Proof: I don’t choose it for myself, for same reason I don’t choose to compete in that or other fields. Don’t want to be judged, spied on, overheard, forced to play on demand, etc.; do feel comfy w/ recording; despite my words about Andrew Hill & Glenn Gould, I’m more like the latter now. So, thus my interest now in this music, whatever it was earlier...same, partly, but this is kind of a pruned attenuation, selecting for the literati path of it, and the heightened def of the idiosyncratic nonidiom as a whole...

In fact, this is a long and ongoing process in music scholarship, especially that of the music I’ve always written about. It’s been called variously “nonidiomatic,” “improvised,” “experimental,” and “creative”; spell out where each comes from, in my own life [AB, ISIM, STN, AACM, respectively]; then move into “folk,” thru AB & Sunny quotes, Ayler, etc., from Eurojazzland & ISIM nslt. Talk about how it’s counterintuitive, because folk generally means trad/rural, and this music—including jazz—has always been urbane if not always urban, cosmopolitan (and often cosmically political, like religion; egs = Tranes, Pharoah, Ayler, CT <shaman>, AB)...and transparently drawing on the materials of many traditions and influences, ad hoc, as opposed to channeling whole (even while tweaking  self-expressively) those handed down from the past. BUT pt out that Lomax’s seminal contrib. to folkloristics was to unify both black & white jazz & folk, also to politicize it, thrust it into the mainstream cultural moment {indeed, leading to that moment I mentioned myself coming up in; mention Sk of Spain as having drawn on Spanish folk music Lomax collected}

establish my creds as not only longtime  jazzjrnlst & newmusic-rooted, acad-interdisc a la that & ethno, but also part of that pomo zoo via STN—but say that now, for this, folklorist trad will be the framework

This approach is not one I’ve seen applied to this music, but it calls to me here for several reasons:

v    the sound (including rhythm: all “active existential,” thus idiosyncratic

v    the aesthetic (grassroots, balance btwn ind & team, non-hierarch)

v    the  mythoi (narrs signaled by extramusical info, also trad & modern narrs)

v    soc-pol contexts (various, mutable, as seen btwn Af-Am, Korean, Tuvan, East German, Russian, etc.)

[bring in quotes from AB, Murray, etc.; review Brodsky for Schill’s affinity to this, via Caucasus]

How is it then part of what is generally understood as folk music? and how would a scholar then situate it in the folklore discourse, with the tools and in the tradition of folkloristics? <answer: basically, thru egs of Sachs, Lomax, Mellers, Tenzer/AAWM? and see my folknotes file, in Lomax folder; methodology is to collect, then look at/for patterns, to compose theories & inferences from; thus my paradigma and chap 6/11 phenom charts are similar to cantometrics, in their departure from conventional-notation-as-lit-abstract>

<Use Sainkho’s quote—quote her as a colleague, mention her degree, then glance at the similar artist-scholar dimensions of Jin, Wu, Mei, PO, Miya, Fred...AB [for his classes at Wes, which not only located Af-Am music in its usual genre suspects, but in all of Western music itself: brilliant rhetorical ploy, defining “Af-Am” as the center of the whole world whose circumference is nowhere, just like all other such centers…really mirrors VG history...also a reflection of Wesleyan’s identity, as both universalist religion per my opera story ending, and as both world music and jazz/avantgarde center>

move into the peculiarly Asian folk presence in these musicians, both American and not—Daoist, Buddhist, shamanist—no Hinduist, as wd be if I were focusing on Rud & Vijay, who do make cameo appearances here as sources and chars in my look at AIR; I will glance at them in the same way I glanced at Asia in NSSM chap 5, to suggest the next book to be written

Even though those added examples <of genre, jazz & art music> are generally considered the more sophisticated in their various ways, not least musical, what casts them in the same category as the others is simply the act of categorization itself. This enterprise falls within the category of I-forgot-more-than-you’ll-ever-know-about-X, after a ripe adult lifetime of exposure to literature—journalistic, academic, anecdotal—haggling over what the descriptors applied to music mean, imply, and maybe ought to just shut up about. That said, this “non-idiomatic” music bears a nature that contains-while-transcending the genres rather than stands apart from them; that said, some musicians draw on some of those genres more than on others for their transcendence; and, finally, that said, I choose here to draw on each in turn and all overall in my literary-cum-scholarly portraiture of the music...but also on one more than all others, in the end. “folk”; unpack it as both genre and descriptor of “The One”, like my other three

The discomfort so-called “jazz” musicians have always had with so-called “jazz” is a famous and well-established example; “classical” likewise disturbs more than satisfies thinking sensibilities, both for covering too wide and disparate an aesthetic and historical range (like “jazz”) and for its resonance with elitist high culture (like “jazz” with vulgar low/pop culture, and/or re-envisioned as elitist high culture in “America’s classical music”). As for the rest mentioned here, one aspect of their rhetorical decline is that they are all fast becoming as dated as yesterday’s “swing,” “bop,” “cool,” even as the new media culture has spawned giant salads of micro-genres after their kind.[5]

note 2 self: idea for opening of first musician profile, to speak to them all: each will be a little story about, and suggested/inspired by all—my subjective thread of their work as the global-feminist-shamanist gesture I’m making it. Nothing intended to deify/reify them—a good read, to come and go with the rest of the book, just like their music does. Like the autobio of a music in AB bk approach. Per this from Slate: “Public music criticism—a wasteland—isn't much help. It mainly focuses on individual works or single performances, when it isn't giving us drooling profiles of artists. This has nothing to do with our current mode of listening, which only rarely obsesses on particular works or genres, let alone worships particular figures.” that fits in naturally with my exposition on the jrnlst mode of wrtg abt music This is where my folkorism comes in: I’m trying to nail “our current mode of listening” by doing what Sachs & Lomax did, collecting such works/genres/ethnographies & making my own narrative therefrom. That’s my way out of the wasteland. http://www.slate.com/id/2289177/pagenum/all/#p2

also from there: “The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn't care what that song says. Other times he doesn't even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon network. To paraphrase Yeltsin's famous offer to the Chechens, take as much free music as you can stomach. We'll see where it gets you.” wrk that in w/ the politics of music industry

also, quote abt slew of genres, from n+1 iPod story

one element of all this too is the generational attitude of moving on from the past giants, w/ all due respect (Glasper, Shipp, AB)

re-organize all following into its best order, then wrk it down

===

To begin unpacking all this, return to the image of a tree. It starts its life small, and underground, as the compact unit of a seed. As that cracks open into its growth, it goes in the two directions of down (to ground) and up (to air and light); over time, its survival and strength require it both to deepen and to stretch further up and branch further out.

The root system too spreads and thickens as it deepens, while the stem starts its climb as a single trunk until a certain point when it too splays off into branches, which themselves branch off further and more, like the roots, finally ending in its leaves, flowers, and fruits; thence its girth and height.

Throughout this differentiation it remains, of course, one and whole. I suggest, in this conceit, that the root system images the timeless, ahistorical—what I called the (not dead or gone) archaic in my second book—base in nature of human culture; the tree aboveground stands for that historical culture itself, the part we generally tag “nurture” as distinct from “nature,” and “conscious” as distinct from “subconscious.”

Imagine further, however, that this tree comprises sentience and free will in its components, all of which get to decide which of its parts they want to play: the roots are roots because they’d rather be roots than bole or branch, fruit or bloom, and so for those and all other parts. The genres named above exist because their artists and fans like and embrace them, defined so; they would rather be what they are than any other part of that “music industry,” for a range of reasons from the personal to the social, from the aesthetic to the political, from the financial to the spiritual, from the noble to the less so.

I was brought up on and comfortable with these genre distinctions, until, in my 1960s coming of age, I joined the rest of my emergent postmodern world in contesting and transgressing them all <draw on Luca>; “free jazz” was a new one of them then, as also “creative music,” “fusion,” “postserial,” “aleatory,” to name those I got most caught up in.

[scan the 4 “takes” in notebook for pts to wrk in here; recall James Franco intvu w/ C Rose, about his unification of diff genres in his own interests/persona (freedom from careerism)

As always, it’s the wariness of the musicians themselves with being pigeonholed that repels such tags. What sets the music and musicians discussed here apart from all such genre-mongering is their doggedly non-generic nature. part of it is the fear of photography or recording as “soul” capture, or the impulse against idolatry, iconoclasm, the Protestant disdain of art, impulse not to say the name of God, Buddhist mantra “neither is it that,” etc. via negativa

introduce my jazz-hist syll as current, since my final graduation & books: my spinthesis on the conventional jazz hist survey class for most basic consumption, while also informed by my most advanced work as an ethno-theorist

also: use that lit revu, combined w/ Lomax revu, to give an overview of the discourse I inherited/joined, and am bldg up to expanding on (thru Body Studies as part of the source, w/ folklore, Sheldrake,  and creative wrtg)

frame then is: the million-dollar work 4 nothing these artists do is the perfect reflection of Ami & global society as a whole, esp. (for me, since I’m in it, much as these musicians are too) academia; that, and women are the group hardest hit by all this, being at the lowest econ/social rung already; it’s a folk music by virtue of being noncommercial, and the commercial interests have too much of the pie at home and globally, buying off the cultural, political, media & other interests. The ones they don’t buy off are the ones they starve out (this music; that’s what makes it the real folk music, now that the folk are more empowered & aware, but still not enfranchised)

Brodsky 48: One of his major (albeit not greatly acknowledged) contributions to the world of music was his ethnomusicological field research.12 In 1927 the State Institute of the History of Arts commissioned Schillinger to document via phonographic reproduction the folk music of four Georgian tribes (Khevsouri, Mokhevi, Mtiouleti, and Ajara) in the Caucasus. These tribes were previously unknown to musicologists, and Schillinger was the first to "capture" their musical culture; this music represented European polyphonic music forms of the tenth to eighteenth centuries. Public recognition finally occurred in 1927

sounds like it has VG.s Af sig

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[1] document all mentioned; wrk in Szwed’s wrk as impt here, for its evolution from Af-Amist anthro to creative music scholar-biographer; cook up a few lines about folkloristics as the best methodology of choice; eg., the prevalence of networks & collabs among the artists here, as opposed to some self-contained body of solitary work = the way folk arts/artists work: part of a crowd and a tradition, even when most individuated and innovative (like Dylan, the way he steals, transforms); tie all that in to the free-culture/creative-commons trope, seeing hiphop culture as folk too

[2] see Ake Chap 1

[3] Icons Among Us

[4] natgeo family tree film; ref the genomic website; VG

[5] <?find that iPod piece, from n+1> [it will segue well into PK’s words about When the Sun]