Youtube Trash Talking

Fly on the wall unintentional episode, drinking and hanging with our buddies from In Cloud Orbit talking mad trash watching Youtube videos of Steve Vai and Buckethead and trying to deconstruct the Future Islands Letterman performance, or at least being incredibly entertained by it.
Paleolithic Hunting Club


Check out this episode!

Black Arts Jazz: Playing Out, Being Out Talking Out

In the latest episode we are not as prepared as we should be but since we are talking about "free jazz," "playing out," or "Black Arts Era jazz," or whatever you want to call it. Staying true to the form of the music we improvised and let it happen and talked music and talked some trash.


 

A Machine That Does Nothing: Daniil Kharms

This Podcast episode is on the great Russian writer Daniil Kharms.

Daniil Kharms was a Russian writer from the 1930s and one of the founders of the avant-garde group called the OBERIU.  This group was one of the last little flare-ups of Russian modernism before Socialist Realism took hold as the official state sanctioned method for creating art.  Artists were expected to create something that carried on the state’s ideology. 

The avant-garde was celebrated but fell out of favor after the revolution.  These pre-revolutionary modernist experiments were seen as a pre-revolutionary decadent form and were discouraged.  The OBERIU directly challenged Socialist Realism and all existing conventions.  Daniil Kharms explains his literary theory in violent terms saying that his words are an object and could quite literally smash a window out:

It isn’t just words or thoughts printed on paper; it is a thing as real as a crystal inkwell, standing in front of me on the table.  It seems that these verses have become a thing, and one can take them off the page and throw them at a window, and the window would break.  That’s what words can do! (13 Kharms, Yankelevich)

Kharms does all of the wrong things on purpose.  He juxtaposes good and bad writing techniques, smashing them together to create something new.  Some of the ways he questions what a story is and what it is supposed to do by directly questioning what a narrative is.  Consider the story in Blue Notebook #10:

There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.

He couldn't talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.  

He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine and he didn’t have any insides at all.  There was nothing!   So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.

We’d better not talk about him anymore (45 Kharms, Yankelevich).

He starts the first sentence off with the kind of details that build an image in the reader’s head, “There was a red-haired man…” Kharms then abruptly abandons the constructive framework of narrative and piece-by-piece tears the entire story down to oblivion.  Kharms revels in oblivion, taking his time naming each non-existent appendage of the non-existent man.  The lack of story and character is the story. 

Kharms stripped words and narrative of its normal uses and meanings.  He wrote stories that break all of the rules, but function and work all the same because of the dark humor and irony.  Kharms treats writing as an event and plays with the idea of writer’s block.  Not writing anything is itself a story or often the story.  Kharms adds random outbursts of unexpected extreme senseless (to the plot) violence and pointless miracles that serve to either abruptly end the story or to provide a dark humorous punch line.

People often read Kharms in the context of political allegory.  George Gibian writes in Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd:

Kharms and Vvedensky, however (incontrast to Kafka in Austria-Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or Beckett in Ireland and France), were satirizing and parodying the monstrosities and absurdities of a special set of circumstances, of their own age, of Soviet Russia of the first Five-year plan and the middle 1930s.  Language and rationality were being abused, facts distorted, values turned upside down.  Hundreds of thousands of people were being arrested, ostensibly for the purpose of creating a new, classless, perfect society (Kharms, Vvedenskiĭ , Gibian 28). 

While it is tempting to pigeonhole Kharms and fellow OBERIU writers as a reaction to the world around them and this was no doubt a part of it, the OBERIU were part of a larger global trend trying to reinterpret the world in new ways with new methods.  Kharms viewing his poems as a physical object is similar to William Carlos Williams poem The Red Wheelbarrow.  Williams constructed that poem the same way a sculptor would make a sculpture.  The big difference is the subversiveness of the OBERIU most of the members were jailed as World War II loomed on the horizon and many of the authors died in jail.  The manuscripts that were left behind stayed out of the public sphere until 1967 and have continued to trickle forward inspiring and finding new audiences.

Things on the web:

Absurdist Monthly Review The Complete Searchable Daniil Kharms

The Blue Notebook read online

NYTBR Kharms review that got me into his work.

Bibliography

Cornwell, Neil. Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. Print.

Kharms, Daniil, Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenskiĭ, and George Gibian. Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd: A Literary Discovery: Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971. Print.

Kharms, Daniil, and Matvei Yankelevich. Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007. Print.

Roberts, Graham. The Last Soviet Avant-garde: OBERIU--fact, Fiction, Metafiction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.

Wanner, Adrian. Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-story. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2003. Print.

Sun Ra Bootleg Guide

These are some of the better quality Sun Ra Arkestra Bootlegs available on Sugarmegs.  There are many available bootlegs of varying quality.  Each performance gives some insight on what the Arkestra was like on any given night.  This link will take you to the search page simply search for Sun Ra on the site: Sugarmegs

Sun Ra online Discography

See the Arkestra live

SunRa1978-03-13HorseshoeTavernTorontoCanada

SunRa1978-09-27HorseshoeTavernTorontoCanada

NOTES: This one is a little rough quality wise but I included it since it is part of a trio of recordings from this location.

SunRa1978-10-31GrendelsLairPhiladelphiaPA

SunRa1978-11-04HorseshoeTavernTorontoCanada

SunRa1978-11-24 ZellerbachAuditoriumAtUniversityOfCaliforniaBerkeleyCA

SunRa1988-09-01DetroitMI

SunRaArkestra1981-12-01WestCoast

SunRaArkestra1984-10-31LushLifeNYC

NOTES: Around the 2 hour 39 minute mark there is a really cool Halloween chant.

SunRaArkestra1985-05-11ParodyHallKansasCityMO

SunRaArkestra1985-10-31MunichGermany

SunRaArkestra1986-12-07KaliszPoland

SunRaArkestra1988-09-03ChicagoJazzFestivalIL

SunRaArkestra1989-09-04Chicago

SunRasPlanetSaturnLoveAdventureArkestra1988-09-06 GeorgesRestaurantChicagoIL

Sun Ra Media

Paleolithic Hunting Club Sun Ra Podcast
  

Joyful Noise a good documentary from 1980 by Robert Mugge.

 

Space is the Place a Blaxploitation movie released in 1974 by John Coney.

 

The Influence of Sun Ra

Sun Ra was one of the most prolific and innovative American Composers of the 20^th century alongside other innovators such as Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.  You can trace Sun Ra back to the origins of big band jazz.  He studied with Fletcher Henderson who was one of the first people to write arrangements and put together a big band jazz group.  He took that knowledge and stretched the traditional arrangements out by using unusual voicings.  He was always pushing the envelope with a single-minded focus on music that never ceased.  He was like a monk in his devotion to music.

This single-minded focus on the music is why the Arkestra was so good.  The Arkestra produced two of the best saxophone players in jazz history in John Gilmore and Marshall Allen.  John Gilmore was a member of the Arkestra from the mid 50s until his death in 1995.  Marshall Allen joined the Arkestra in 1958 and continues the legacy of the Arkestra by being the musical director. 

            John Gilmore was a big influence on John Coltrane, in the JC Thomas book Chasin the Trane, Thomas reveals:

Gilmore showed Coltrane how to reach certain notes in the overtone series that some critics claimed weren’t even on the horn.  But they were; Gilmore was certainly playing them and Coltrane was definitely hearing them.  In return, Coltrane taught Gilmore some of his harmonic discoveries, which the latter often used with startling effects (Thomas 182).

John Gilmore continues on in the Chasin the Trane book, explaining the influence of the Arkestra on Coltrane:

Trane really wanted to play more avant-garde music, but he didn’t get the foundation until he listened to Sun Ra a lot.  I think we helped him get his Oriental and African music together too.  I’ll tell you this, whenever I saw him after he’d studied with Sun Ra he was smoking (Thomas 182).

            If you look at the records Sun Ra was putting out in the 1950s he was easily ten or fifteen years ahead of his time.  Songs such as India, Watusi, Aethiopia, and Africa break the mold of merely extending existing jazz ideas.  They are employing exotic scales and rhythms not common to the jazz form.  This would of course become commonplace in jazz from the 1960s on.  The Arkestra was way ahead of the curve.  This put him in the company of pioneers like Ahmed Abdul Malik with Jazz Sahara released in 1958 and Charles Mingus’ Tijuana Moods.  Tijuana Moods wasn’t released until 1962, but it was recorded in 1957.  All of these releases were using traditional jazz and adding new worldly expressions and rhythms to the canon.  

Sun Ra was a leading innovator in the Free Jazz movement that went on to influence rock and roll and early proto-punk bands like the MC5.  In the 1960s the Arkestra moved to New York and contributed to the Black Arts movement.  The Arkestra performed the music for Amiri Baraka’s play Black Mass, and often performed at Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre.  We see how Sun Ra’s use of art to transcend was being employed by many artists of the black arts movement as Nathaniel Earl Bowles describes in his paper: My Music is Words-The Poetics of Sun Ra:

their shared reliance on energies and forces beyond the realm of initial human understanding. Indeed, this was one of the main forces behind the music of the African-American avant-garde in the 1960's – sound as a vessel for both cosmic energies and primal feeling, manifesting itself as the sound of the ecstatic truth (Bowles 28).

           

Sun Ra was able to operate independently from everyone else, and yet he had a comprehensive understanding and awareness of the history of all African Americans.  He used his art to transcend all politics and social stigmas.  He was able to achieve all of this while still operating within the same limitations that all African Americans faced.  Baraka said that:

Ra was so far out because he had the true self-consciousness of the Afro American intellectual artist revolutionary.  He knew our historic ideology and socio-political consciousness was freedom.  It is an aesthetic and social dynamic.  We think it is good and beautiful!  Sun Ra’s consistent statement, musically and spoken, is that this is a primitive world.  It’s practices, beliefs, religions are uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the past (Sinclair 3).

Sun Ra used his art to make a stand, but it was his own stand.  He used the past to create a unique and bold vision that was part of the Black Arts Movement but also free from any one movement.  Sun Ra was transcending all of humanity.  He wanted to free everyone’s mind from all man made constraints.  This is why he is not easily categorized.  This is why people say he’s crazy.  If you look at the facts he is anything but crazy.  He held his band together in a way that few bandleaders have done and exuded the kind of discipline that keeps the band going to this day.

Sun Ra was there at the beginning of BARTS.  On the day the school opened The Arkestra marched down 125^th street while local artists waved the Black Arts flag.  Baraka referred to Sun Ra as the “resident philosopher” (Baraka 298).   Baraka and Sun Ra were both operating in a time when anything seemed possible.  The artists of the Black Arts Movement were breaking new ground and laying the foundations for the next generation of artists to grow and develop.  Sun Ra’s poem Like Seeds illustrates this idea:

They are alike…Seeds and words.

When seeds are sown, they become potential

They become potentially active…..

            When words are so-oned

            They become potentially active.

Yes…indeed…in deed…

       Alike they are       ………..(Ra 68)

Baraka and Sun Ra were both conspirators in using art for revolution and liberation, “indeed” and “in deed.”  They both knew that the only way to be free was to operate independently from the existing white power structure.  They were not playing according to the existing rules.  They were making their own rules up as they went along.  By doing this they provided the groundwork for “potentially active” artists to come alive to follow and innovate in their wake.

Further Reading

Below are some interesting links of academics writing about Sun Ra such as the Bowles paper quoted from above as well as Sun Ra’s links to Afrofuturism, which Wikepedia defines as:

An emergent literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past.

).

My Music Is Words-The Poetics of Sun Ra by Nathaniel Earl Bowles

Robot Voodoo Power by J. Griffith Rollefson

After Afrofuturism by George E. Lewis

                                                Bibliography 

Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill, 1997. Print.

  

Bowles, Nathaniel Earl. "My Music Is Words" – The Poetics of Sun Ra. Diss. Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2008. N.p.: n.p., n.d. "My Music Is Words" – The Poetics of Sun Ra. Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Web. 27 Dec. 2013. <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-04292008-173116/unrestricted/mymusiciswords.pdf>.

Sinclair, John.  Sun Ra: Interviews and Essays.  London: Headpress, 2010.  Print.

Sun, Ra, Adam Abraham, James L. Wolfe, and Harmut Geerken. Sun Ra Collected Works. Chandler, AZ: Phaelos, 2005. Print.

Thomas, J. C. Chasin' the Trane: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975. Print.