Written by Guest Reviewer, Jim Feast
Clifford Allen begins his book Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on Rogueart, which is an exploration of the pianist’s works and philosophy, with this important insight, “The music in this volume [that of Shipp and his compeers] is quintessentially a New York music, and to narrow it down even further, it’s a Lower East Side music” (21). Allen describes the LES neighborhood, “In the 1960s and 1970s, the neighborhood was a haven for artists, musicians, theater makers, and writers due to low rents and squats … Many of these spaces were absent amenities like hot water, central heat, and insulation, but those with a do-it-yourself spirit and camaraderie were able to restructure these buildings into functional creative environments” (ibid.).
In this essay, I want to take Allen’s insight to the limit. By this I mean, I will argue that the unique situation of the Lower East Side (LES) neighborhood is closely reflected in the direction Shipp and compeers took their music. Moreover, acknowledging this will seem an atypical focus for a study of jazz, it will be said it is the economic position of the LES which is the shaping force for the form of the music. In the 1980s in the LES, two competing economic modes coexisted; the capitalist one in which the tenants paid rent to the landlord who owned the real estate, and the emergent DIY one in which those in Allen’s words, “with a do-it-yourself spirit and camaraderie,” took over abandoned, derelict buildings and made them livable, earning their residence by shared labor not by cash since they paid no rent. Further, to add another peculiarity, following the theses of Jacques Attali, I will suggest music and only music has the ability to see in advance changes in a society’s economic arrangements. Music does not provide written prognostications, but as Attali argues, in discussing how eighteenth-century classical music previewed 19th century political economy, it acts by tracing out musically the semiotic properties of the forthcoming economic environment. Just as the 18th century musicians worked out the semiotics of the slowly emerging revised structure of capitalism, the LES jazz musicians laid out the semiotics of the DIY/anarchist reorganization of the economic terrain, an arrangement which only partially surfaced, never emerging into a full-blown system. Even so, Shipp and his fellows picked out in advance what (if it did come to pass) would be the lineaments of a post-capitalist society.
1 … is the place
The first two things to notice is how the emergent DIY LES economy was buffeted by varied political forces and how the LES jazz players found a home in the clubs within this alternative economy.
It is worth bearing in mind that the deterioration of the neighborhood was part of “planned shrinkage.” As explained by Kim Moody in From Welfare State to Real Estate, this involved “the withdrawal of capital and services from the neighborhood in hopes the devastation would drive the poor from the city. (77) As Roger Starr, NYC Housing Commissioner in the 1960s and 1970s, put it, bluntly enough, the city needs to “stop Puerto Ricans and the rural blacks from living in the city.” The reason had to do with the economy, Starr went on, “Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and turning him into an industrial worker. Now [in NYC] there are no industrial jobs. Why not keep them peasants?” (76).
This shrinkage was aimed particularly at the LES, and its effects were beginning to be felt in the 1980s when the area became of interest to upscale buyers. As Allan notes, “By the early 1980s, SoHo and the East Village had become quite attractive to the real estate market” (22). Moody fills this in, there was a “Puerto Rican population of the Lower East Side east of Avenue A … This old immigrant area became a destination for Puerto Ricans moving from the island in the 1950s. … By the 1970s, however, young whites, often professionals, began moving into Alphabet City and transformed the neighborhood” (77).
More details are provided in Christopher Mele’s Selling the Lower East Side where he notes the 1980s saw a seesawing between LES residents who would have liked more lower- income housing and improvements to their living spaces, and those like Starr who wanted to usher out the poor and make the LES a new upper middle-class enclave. The city backed a two-pronged pro-development (middle class) trajectory for the neighborhood by modifying the fiscal and cultural environment.
On the fiscal front, Mele notes, “The agency ostensibly created to protect low-income neighborhoods from disinvestment, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, became the institutional strong arm for private revitalization.” This meant: “Many of the city’s tenant self-management and ownership programs were severely curtailed, underfinanced, or totally eliminated to promote private redevelopment rather than community empowerment.” The city’s programs included the demolition of city owned buildings in keeping with the idea that empty lots would be more attractive to developers. (238)
These struggles within the housing market were matched by the city’s actions to eliminate the area’s rough, free-wheeling edge.
In the early 1980s the police mounted an antidrug effort called Operation Pressure Point, sending over 230 officers and 40 detectives along with numerous vehicles and helicopters to begin what locals described as a military invasion of Loisaida. To drive out the entrenched two-decades old drug economy, the police occupied streets, corners, empty lots and parks: within a month 14,285 people (!) were arrested on drug-related charges. (239)
The crackdown almost hit peddlers, “The police also periodically cracked down on the ad hoc outdoor flea markets along St. Marks Place, Second Avenue, and Avenue A, which were a source of income for some residents and many homeless persons” (239). And the policing extended further to blocking gathering places, including outdoor ones in how “in the mid-1980s the area’s many lots were fenced in, preventing their use as gardens or make-shift junkyards,” and in how it curtailed the creation of gardens in city-owned empty lots. “In the 1970s the city was supportive of gardens, often leasing … unkempt lots to residents to grow vegetables and flowers. With the rebound of the housing market, however, they placed a moratorium on leasing lots to gardeners” (238. 239). Indoor spaces were also shuttered, Police raided and closed down several of the neighborhood’s illegal after-hours clubs, dampening the area’s hedonistic atmosphere” (240).
As Mele concludes, “By controlling the use of public space, the city helped construct an identity more inclined toward middle-class residents that developers ultimately were seeking to attract” (240).
These city activities did not go uncontested by neighborhood activists. In one example, in 1982 “HPD planned to auction part of its stock … to the highest bidder” (238). (These were buildings the city had taken over when the owners failed to buy taxes.) “Protest by community groups and housing organizations thwarted the auction plan, forcing the city to reinstate a moratorium on sales” (ibid.) Again, when a plan designated as AHOP was brought forward, ostensibly to help artists, those who made $40,000 to $50,000 a year, by turning city-owned buildings into artist housing, it was defeated “after community groups protested the availability of subsidies for middle-income rather than low-income housing development. (238). The neighborhood groups saw that “AHOP was a blatant attempt to re-create SOHO style development – that is, to harness the downtown culture scent to trigger a domino effect of upscale redevelopment” (239)
These were some of the ways the community intervened to block city projects while on the ground they acted to thwart gentrification by taking over the real estate. While the city was encouraging the wealthy to buy buildings, indigent people were seizing them. Journalist and historian Sarah Ferguson states, “At the height of the movement in 1988-1989, there were about two-dozen squatted buildings on the Lower East Side” (154). Moreover, in another type of counterattack, while the city thorough drug busts and other actions to clean up the neighborhood attempted to make the LES more tractable and attractive to the wealthy, those organized around the squats took the opposite tack. As Ferguson puts it, “The more militant squatters saw themselves as establishing a kind of beachhead against gentrification – their presence brought property values down “ (ibid.)
Shipp and the musicians in his circle found living spaces and performance opportunities in this volatile landscape including in new venues opening in squats. When Steve Dalachinsky and I interviewed bassist extraordinaire William Parker (for the book Resistance), Parker noted how musicians found squat clubs congenial. He began by mentioning that in 1983,
a more ongoing musical scene was starting up in a squat being run by Sarah Fairly on East Sixth. Although it was a squat, the tenants obtained grudging permission from the city to occupy it. They had an unoccupied basement, “and this guy from Italy, Sandor Genettti … [started] using the basement as a performance space.” The Shuttle opened shortly after that. Parker gigged there, [noting] “I played down there with everybody, Miguel Algarin, Allen Ginsberg, Don Cherry. …. You go down there and there was music, boom.” (578)
Simultaneously, a vacant public school on Ninth Street renamed Charas was taken over by a community group, which gave rooms to activists and artists. Parker explains, “Between 1983-1984 Jemel Moondoc had a studio, the drummer Sunny Murray had a studio, the trumpet player Butch Morris had a studio, Gunter Hampel had a space.” (579).
As Parker told us, despite the lack of amenities, squats had big advantages.
Those places were very easy to start. You had low overhead because you weren’t paying any rent. You didn’t have any neighbors who were going to complain regardless of what was happening. … You show up a particular night and there was the living room. You play. People would come. And you could develop a very good feeling in the time when you were playing, and people would hang out. Once the event starts, it’s just as nice as Carnegie Hall or any place else you play music. You play music and you communicate with people. And it was serving the needs of people in the neighborhood. (580)
A few of these places were run by black activists, who contested whites’ control of real estate. Parker mentions John Dahl who ran Some Place Nice from 1974 to 1988. Like Ray Taylor, who also had a performance space, Dahl was black. He felt the black community had to empower itself. Parker said, “He would always talk to us about owning stuff. About how come we don’t own a grocery store … How come we don’t own our own music store. I mean, when you need reeds, how come you have to go all the way uptown?” (581)
Then, Parker mentioned, “There was another place, Jarman Jones, another interesting guy, had a place on Fifth Street between Second and Third where we used to play all the time. … He rented it for $200 a month and he’d just open up the doors. He would fit as many people as you could and you’d have a place to play.” (581)
An extraordinary place in this mix was Ray Taylor’s Living Room. Steve said this, “But the difference is that those places, Five Spot, Slugs – I like Slugs a lot – they had their own ambiance. They were great places, but they were not run by independent wacky guys like Ray Taylor.” Steve goes on:
The key thing here about political independence is that the [squat] spaces were either run by a regular guy – like Ray Taylor’s Living Room was where he lived. You know, it was a squat. That was where he lived. It was both kind of joyful and, I don’t mean this in a negative sense, and pathetic going in there to see a gig. I heard some of the best music I heard in the ‘80s in Ray Taylor’s living room. The thing is the guy ran the place. (580)
Steve then made the significant point, “If you wanted to buy wine, you gave him a $1 for wine. These things weren’t businesses. Sure, the guy wanted to make a little bread, but they weren’t businesses.” (ibid.)
In his book The Final Nite, presenting a prose poem, Dalachinsky has more to say about Taylor’s Living Room in the light of a performance given there on July 13, 1989, by Parker and Charles Gayle.
There are squatters and there are those who squat with a purpose – Ray Taylor is such a man – he has opened up this “living room” to us 5 days a week & there amidst its “comfort” we get to hear the best of East Village jazz … Appearing there thru July … is Charles Gayle, a squatter himself & tenor saxophonist without living peer … Gayle, who refuses to play even the smaller underground clubs, seems to quiver with the forces of his own being as well as these surroundings which for all intents & purposes are the farthest from selling out that one can achieve without actually leaving the scene. Parker, who also lives down here, has unceasing energy and the pair play more for the playing than anything else (27)
I don’t know enough about Gayle to know why he refused “to play even the smaller underground clubs,” but if we cross reference this to what Dahl said about the ownership of spaces in the black community, it might be Gayle was disgusted by the way white-owned jazz clubs took the lion’s share of money made by black musicians.
So far, if I suggested these “freer” jazz players were ignoring the reigning proprieties of jazz in the way squatters disregarded those of building ownership, it would be an analogy. In this context, it should be stressed that the jazz innovators had first-hand knowledge of the squatters’ rationales and practices. Playing in squats meant one’s performance dealings: setting up the gig, getting paid, and so on, were world’s away from those experienced working in a traditional club where the owner is paying rent, where you had to pay a cover charge – there was no, “If you wanted to buy wine, you gave him a $1 for wine” – and where there was a distribution of money earned probably not friendly to the performers. So, whatever the musicians’ attitudes toward squatting, pro or con, when they were playing in or attending or thinking about these squats, they were involved in places where the infrastructural ideas supporting U.S. society, such as that one cannot simply begin living in a building without paying rent, were up for grabs, they entered a space, a pinball space, where new ideas began to ricochet.
The musicians were in an historical opening, a temporary time when the very locked-in basis of capitalist society, the existence of private property, was destabilized. Is it any surprise that in the 1970s and ‘80s the same prevalence of squats was found in the South Bronx where hip hop originated? Is it any surprise that it was in the squat-filled Lower East Side that the U.S. incarnation of punk music was being born?
The question can be raised as to whether the LES jazz players were developing a language in which their strictly musical choices reflected the semiotic integument of a new understanding of not only of community ties but of the early functioning of a DIY economy. A number of writers can be used to make this connection.
2 The prophetic vocation of music
In this section, two major points will be made to lay the foundation for a later musical analysis. First, while the squatting movement, the flea markets and homeless encampments might be viewed as temporary expedients that coped with economic displacement but did not threaten the underlying system, many in the squatter community believed they were helping give birth to a new economy. Second, given these new forces were in play, the first place where the fundamental semiotic dispositions of this DIY economy would be registered was music. As noted, in Attali’s view the deep semiotic of the nineteenth century was the belief in a self-adjusting harmony, which had been previewed in eighteenth-century music, so the new jazz would record the elements of the DIY economy at a similarly basic level.
While by squatting building the activists were undermining the rules of real estate, one journalist, the already mentioned Ferguson, sees the broader implications. She argues the questions raised by squatting touch on the fundamentals of the American economic system, noting squatting existed behind battle lines drawn by Starr and the other gentrifiers.
Her immediate subject is the homeless encampment in Tompkins Square Park. In 1987- 88, the city allowed a homeless village made up of tents and lean-tos to exist in one corner of the park till it was violently cleared out on August 6/7, 1988 (against an active citizen defense of the space). In Resistance, Ferguson describes the background to this August event.
The battle over Tompkins Square grew out of a much larger and decades-old struggle to preserve the multiethnic, working-class nature of the neighborhood against the forces of “urban renewal” and gentrification. For the squatters, homeless activists, artists and social renegades who agitated there, defending the park was part of a much more ambitious gambit to liberate space, to wrest control of the city’s abandoned building and rubble-strewn lots and create a new kind of community operating outside the realm of property law.
The act of squatting city-owned buildings, of exempting them from the cycle of speculation, was not a symbolic protest but an eminently hands-on assault on the bedrock of New York capitalism – real estate – which offered tangible results: You got a cheap place to live and consort with fellow radicals making art and ragging on the system. (142)
Ferguson quotes radical priest Frank Morales, who was active in the squatter movement, who outlined the military aspect of this tug of war. “We saw the taking of buildings as part of a counterattack in this spatial war … seizing territory as a defensive strategy against this onslaught to remove and push [poor people] out of the area – became the center of what we are talking about. The idea of building communities of resistance was precisely that” (143).
Let us move to the second point. In Noise, French philosopher Jacques Attali argues that music is the most advanced sector of society in that at the beginning of an historical period it works out in advance all the semiotic possibilities of an emergent culture. This might seem a fantastic, even absurd, claim. His argument: “Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code” (11). Later he continues, “and the prophecy announced by today’s music [is of] the potential for a new political and cultural order” (19).
But what does he mean by saying music “explores … the entire range of possibilities in a given code”? To take one example, Attali treats of how “The theory of political economy of the nineteenth century was present in its entirety in the concert hall of the eighteenth century” (57, my itals). Nineteenth-century political economy turned upon noting how the unplanned, anarchic capitalist economic system ultimately led to a fruitful and happy coexistence of buyers and sellers, a sense anticipated by “the way in which music [in the eighteenth century] elaborated the idea of harmony … [in a way that was] fundamental and premonitory” (59). He adds, “We may hazard the hypothesis that the emplacement of the musical paradigm … foreshadowed the mutation in exchange [that is, creation of an industrial capitalist society based on monetary exchange] … particularly in the way in which the search for harmony as a substitute for conflict [in economic thought] would come to dominate it” (ibid.).
It might be appended that, while not presenting music as moving in advance of other segments of society, Goux in Symbolic Economies is in accord with Attali in seeing one overarching semiotic system forming a seamless whole that is found in every avenue of a society. “It is as if it were possible, then,” he writes, “to discover the same mode of symbolizing in all the practices characteristic of a social mode of production and exchange. Law, religions, sexualities, kinship relations, dominant intersubjective relations, etc., could be analyzed from this perspective” (73). Moreover, while not granting music a place as a previewer of emerging economic structures, he does give it pride of place as the most primordial of human creations. In a point that will be returned to, he says that “music is without doubt the signifying practice that most nearly approaches the biotic anchoring point of the subject, an appeal to some internal source of open-ended organization of the cultural symbolic system” (193).
It might be supposed a group of musicians’ ability to preview the semiotic architecture of an at-the-moment nonexistent but emerging economy occurs when those players are in a liminal space. Attali makes the point in relation to the collapse of harmonic music at the end of nineteenth century, which “was highly predictive of the essentials of the [economic and political] ruptures to come,” saying that “practically everything that happened [of significance in music] took place in Vienna” (81). He shows that those who supported and fostered this music were the Jewish bourgeoisie, adding, the Jews’ “political marginality formed the foundation … of cultural marginality” (82).
In the same way, those titanic musical innovators in the South Bronx or on the Lower East Side were people on the margins, and from that vantage could observe that in the squats the principles of social organization around private property were being contested. Here, they could musically visualize the coming state of society where the mix between free activity, not under the control of money, and the money economy were fighting it out.
It is from this outlook we can study Shipp’s music. As we will see, his driving idea is the question: What would it mean to be free if the world had freedom?
3 Shipp’s thoughts on creativity and the outlines of the DIY economy.
In a moment, we will see how the playing styles of Shipp and his colleagues are an active embodiment of the semiotics of the new DIY economy, but to anticipate this we can look briefly at how Shipp’s advanced ideas of creativity, as revealed in his recent Black Mystery School Pianists, align with the features of the new economy. While a full-blown version of this economy never came to existence, following the Tompkins Square Police Riot of 1988 and the gradual elimination of most squats in the 1990s, it is possible to sketch out three contact points: 1. the passing along of a tradition, 2. the tool (piano), and 3. time.
Tradition
The central component of the squat movement was not that people were occupying buildings in the way activists occupied Tiananmen Square, for instance, but rather that they were going into abandoned, broken down tenements and reconstructing them into living spaces. The skills they needed to do this, those involving woodworking, electrical wiring, masonry, plumbing, and other trades, were individually acquired by undergoing an apprenticeship, whether formal or not, on a farm, construction site, workshop or in another venue of master-journeyperson contact. This provides to women and men a patrimony of craft, a forged knowledge of the hand-working skills, and of materials and surfaces to be worked.
Within the squats there is a forceful reinvigoration of the artisan world. Recall that in 19th century U.S. artisan culture the details of craft processes, ones not shared with outsiders, were called the trade “mysteries.” Shipp employs the same word when he discusses a particular jazz tradition which has lived a subterranean life. He writes, “The word mystery [in his book’s title] … implies a secret code passed through an underground way of passage and, yes, outside the mainstream of jazz’ (21). This jazz tradition is passed down as a trade practice, bequeathed from experienced worker to newbie. Giving it a transcendental turn, Shipp shows how this transmission worked for him in connection to Coltrane. “When I was young, I would lie down in bed while listening to Coltrane and fall asleep and I would hear Coltrane’s language as speech. He was saying things to me –what he was saying don’t remember, but it was a language” (57). This passage suggests the depth of learning involved in understanding one’s craft by which one gains and sharpens skills, passed on at both fully conscious and fully unconscious levels.
Tools and Surfaces
人可以隱瞞真相，但是音乐乐器永遠不会說慌！
(People may conceal truths but [musical] instruments never lie.)
— Chinese saying
Moving to a second dimension of creativity, Shipp underlines the close connection between pianist and instrument, stating that each keyboard has its own voice. The way a musician understands an individual piano is pointed out in Shipp’s remarks on Paul Bley. “He had the talent of going to a different piano and quickly figuring out what that instrument can do and what the personality of that instrument is” (40). In more spiritual terms, Shipp describes his own collaboration with the keyboard, “I have a very specific understanding oof the nature of my own talents as an improviser. I carry within my head a complete spaceship piano. When I play piano, I become one with the spaceship” (41).
These meditations can be linked to a couple of elements of squat culture. To return to the work process, in painting, nailing down floorboards, installing pipe, pushing in insulation, planting a window box, alone or with teammates, the individual must maintain engaged touch with the tools used, the materials to be worked on, installed or re-revealed. The unity Shipp finds between a jazz player and chosen instrument exists, perhaps in a lesser form, but still tangibly so, in the communion of a squatter in the act of rebuilding with her/his tools and worked materials.
To go further, Shipp’s spiritual note suggests a further connection. Goux’s comment that music is “the signifying practice that most nearly approaches the biotic anchoring point of the subject” brings this up. Without examining Goux’s complex argument, suffice it to say that he believes human consciousness is a sedimented structure, each mental layer corresponding to an historically developed economy and its semiotics. The notions in the lowest, now most overwritten layer, the one nearest the biotic, are from a pre-money, barter social organization. In some sense, the squatters’ DIY economy replicates elements of this earlier barter system. For example, rather than paying rent to occupy a space, squatters contribute labor. In fact, some activists went so far as trying to codify a non-money method of exchange. Ferguson interviewed former squatter David Boyle, who recalled,
Our inspiration was the [Spanish] Mondragon cooperatives … So, we thought we were going to be setting up some kind of cooperative economy on the Lower East Side. And the first step was giving value to people’s labor, so the sweat equity thing really dovetailed with that. We actually printed our own money with some labor guy’s face on it that were used as receipts. If you couldn’t pay your rent money to the building … you could pay it with labor notes (149)
The relevance of these remarks to Shipp’s thoughts is found in Goux’s description of the ontological aspects of the barter system. In such an economics, each object of exchange must be individually sized up and compared with that for which it is going to be traded. Goux says such giving of uniqueness to objects spills over into a mingling of human-created or appropriated (whether harvested or crafted) objects and their signifying counterparts. “If the signifier [such as the word] stands for the thing in simple equivalence is because it is the thing itself … it is a double of the things with the same properties, powers, faculties” (171). This doesn’t mean that in some magical way an individual is liable to merge with the objects of nature but rather that the language created by humans (as they perceived it in a barter economy) merges with what it describes.
While this would no longer be considered true for spoken or written language, it is not so clear in relation to the contrast of natural and humanly created sounds, which share many common properties. As I understand it, this is part of what Shipp is describing in his mention of the “spaceship piano.” Moreover, it could be said that the rhythm and counterrhythms of work: planning, nailing, fastening, planting and so on are imbued with mixed human and natural properties.
Time
The last element Shipp highlight is how jazz playing unfolds in time. He writes, “When pushing notes down, the phrase questions the phrase before” (57). He adds that an improvisation is “Organic growth in an original void … [setting up] pyramids in sequence” (53). The importance of these two passages cannot be overstated in that they identify an original way of sculpting the future.
His ideas diverge from conventional views on two fronts. “The phrase questions the phrase before,” which is to say, while the present arises from the closed moments of the past, it moves forward by shifting the ground. In mainstream thought, say, in histories of technology, innovations occur by building on the work of predecessors, standing on their shoulders. This is true, too, of the jazz improvisor – in Shipp’s discussion of Coltrane, we saw how creativity is filtered through what had been previously thought through in jazz soundings – but when, for example, the jazz pianist playing a solo concert inserts new notes, this reconfigures how (to listeners) the improvisation appeared before. The overall sense and structure of the piece is unknown till the last note is pressed. “Organic growth in an original void.” In conventional thought, in capitalist economic histories, for example, the system makes choices as it develops but they are all within the same, non-transgress-able background network of buying, selling and money. For Shipp, the improvisations build musical structures, ones resting on a void. To me, this means that for the great improviser, the jazz background that has come before is all tentative, all transgress-able, down to the deepest premises, since the player is always scouting for unrecognized paths. For Shipp, then, the future has no closed implications.
Later in this essay the squatters’ views of the future will be set out and a fuller discussion will be reserved for those pages. At this juncture, it is easy to grasp the affinity between their outlooks and that of Shipp. They are reconfiguring their plans as they go, reacting both to the city’s undermining moves and neighborhood shifts. They are dismissing the dominant paradigm whereby one can only occupy housing by buying or renting it. Since the features of the emerging DIY economics are undetermined, the squatters, too, are moving into an uncharted void.
Musical Semiotics of a New Economy
So far, an analogy has been made between the jazz occurring in the 1980s on the Lower East Side and the concurrent squatting movement. The same proposition can be examined inductively. As noted, only the outlines of a DIY economy managed to emerge before the movement fell apart as the squatters were cleared in the 1990s. Still, if following Attali’s line, it is argued that a prescient music can trick out the semiotic basics of the as-yet unformed new economic arrangements, and further if the music of Shipp and her peers can be seen as playing this role in building a semiotics, then his work in ensembles and solo performances should serve as previews of the organization of work and personality in the forthcoming DYI economy.
4 the organization of work / the ensemble
& the city came down around us
–line from a Steve Dalachinsky poem written 11-15-93 while observing a performance of the Charles Gayle trio, Matt Shipp sitting in
In the following, we will look at what music suggests about how both the interaction of groups and personal expression would change if society were differently constructed. The circumstances of Shipp’s small groups and solo work are expertly dealt with in Allen, whose interviews and own comments bring out the features of these musical contexts. He takes up the story of how ensembles work together in the freer jazz universe, bringing out three important aspects of group improvisation.
Talk
Idealizing, one can imagine a traditional jazz band approaching a recording date. The leader hands out the charts in advance and confers with the members about what tunes will be played, the order of the solos, the tempi and connected matters. It would not be necessary for the leader to know much about the other players aside from their musical strengths.
In contrast, when Shipp and other Lower East Side musicians are informally planning a recording session, which will involve spontaneous improvisation, they do so with a prior grounding in conversation.
Bassist Joe Morris says this about how Shipp organizes a session: “Basically, he is coordinating the configuration of everything in dialogue with people socially, and then in a musical dialogue. A lot of the planning and configuration is him trying to understand how it will work, proposing and examining things, making a decision about it with people” (59, my itals). Morris later makes this more explicit, “I listen to [other people’s] music sometimes and think they should stop reading the paper and talk to each other. They should talk about what they like and they should talk about what they do and they should talk about how they’re stuck” (61).
He explains that for those he plays with “you’re able to engage in [high-level] improvisation … [because] you can adhere to a framework that you’ve developed in conversation with people” (ibid.). Shipps adds when discussing his playing with Rob Brown, “because we’ve been playing a long time together, spoken about music and listened to records together, we can know what we’re going for” (172). Listening to music helps them to work together on the transmission from past artists Shipp talked of in relation to Trane. Let’s imagine when they are listening to an artist from the past, they begin discussing what they appreciate in the players. In this dialogue, each is self-revealing not in the sense of saying, “Here’s who I am,” but in saying, “Here’s what went into making me who I am.”
To repeat the previous point, again idealizing, in a traditional jazz gig it is only necessary for the leader to know the depth and musical skill of her or his associates. (Of course, there are many exceptions to this in traditional work. Ellington, for instance, based his compositions on a thorough knowledge of his band members’ personalities.)
In general, in a Shipp-led session, he and his fellow players have thoroughly familiarized themselves with each other’s full personalities through debate, unfettered talk, listening to music together and kibbitzing. From this basis they create an inter-reliant music.
In The Moment
In a more traditional jazz setting in preparation for a performance, the players will know the tunes and their tempo in advance. If one is playing in a freer jazz setting, without the blocking of a tune, although tempo and other basics may have been agreed upon, an individual player’s awareness of his or her bandmates’ moving-along excursions must be acute, enormously attuned to the crossing wavelengths of the other musicians, demanding what might be called versatile listening.
Mark Helias, who had less contact with Shipp before making a recording with him than is generally the case for those Shipp works with, made this interesting comment, “once we got over the initiation [as they began playing], we assessed subtleties in each other’s approach and that allowed us to create together … We listened and we were rewarded” (188).
To assess the subtleties would seem to demand an all-around awareness of the unfolding moment, something (that according to some interpretations) is described in the I Ching. According to Jung and his school, the I Ching is about predicting, but not in the sense of knowing what will happen later but rather in being fully aware of what tendencies are contained in the present moment. By knowing these currents, an accurate view of what will take place is obtainable. As Jungian commentator Marie-Louise von Franz puts it, “According to it [the I Ching], one can determine the meaning of a given moment.” (26-27, my emphasis). One relies on the magical predictive power of the I Ching because all the directional strands of a single moment are well-nigh unfathomable.
However, there is more to the story. The philosopher of cognition Brian Massumi, who studies actions taking place below registering consciousness, can contribute here. It’s hardly news that improvising musicians select the notes to play without thinking about it (as people do many tasks). Massumi looks at how cognitive studies have unpacked a below-consciousness level of thoughtful, decision-making “awareness.” He writes, “A second aspect [of this level] is the taking form of a field of potential holding within itself a multiplicity of paths of action, corresponding to different outcomes.” To use an example to explain this abstract language, when a musician is improvising, say a pianist playing against a backdrop of drums and bass, in her or his mind, taking the sonic environment into account, and operating below consciousness, each instant offers a number of possible options. These options, these tendencies “fight it out among themselves,” all taking place simultaneously until “the co-motion of tendencies works itself out, and one issues forth into action” (ibid.)
In one sense what this tells us is that the ability to make split-second, considered choices among many possible actions is not some extraordinary gift possessed by improvisers, though they may have honed it to an exceptional degree, but rather a common human trait. But this also throws further light on the first point. These below-consciousness sorting of possibilities and choice, taking place at lightning speed, are based on a thorough drawing upon all of an individual’s background memories. If, for example, today Shipp is playing a duet with bassist Michael Bisio, the fact that they have already, along with playing together, spent time talking about music, listening to records together and hanging out means that when they interlace their music, they are drawing on, along with their knowledge of each other as musicians, that of each other as full human beings. This explains what I mean by versatile listening. This occurs when in a musical interaction between players, where their improvisations complement each other’s, they are listening to each other knowing the full palette of the humanity of the other musicians. This explains how Shipp and his collaborators can play together like sorcerers with mind-reading skills.
Setting Off
The players’ hyper-awareness and in-touch interaction is not an end in itself. In Mantis, Dalachinsky points to the danger of simply opening yourself to whatever other players are putting down without using that as a bridge to enhanced creativity. In the context of an interview with Elvin Jones on the occasion of the drummer’s once-yearly duets with Cecil Taylor at the Blue Note, Dalachinksy notes, “I recently had the occasion to ask him why he used the mallets almost exclusively, he ended his statement by saying these meetings with Cecil were not ‘contests’ but had more to do with accompanying and listening on equal terms” (49). Dalachinksy notes ruefully (and iconoclastically), “I do feel at times though listening is good, listening too good is not so good, and that for most of the set the 2 rely too heavily on their already well-established languages.” (49).
A way to avoid routinized improvisation is brought up by trombonist Steve Swell in talking about his playing with Jemeel Moondoc. “I loved listening to it [his music], reacting to it, and if we were playing together, taking a solo after he did. Trying to find that degree of originality in my own playing. He inspired it” (27). In other words, Swell in a follow-up solo was not directly responding to what Moondoc had just laid down but to his overall modeling of creativity.
A similar point is made by Rob Brown when he notes that playing with Shipp, “If we’re going to play a gig, then as well as now, I doubt we’d specify any kind of length of anything. My approach when we do that is, we’re just setting up for an adventure and it’s going to unfold” (44).
The ensemble adventures out; each player guided by his or her sympathies and attentive ear. But how does this come across in a given musical interplay?
Prism 1
I want to look at the performance of Prism 1 by the Matt Shipp trio, which consists
of himself, William Parker on bass and Whit Dickey on drums.
The focus will be on the group, but I want to begin by characterizing Shipp’s playing, which molds much of what goes on around it. He begins in the right hand with a cropping of notes, a pause, then a heavily pronounced chord figured below. This is repeated with slight shifts of timing and emphasis six times. Then he introduces a three-set figure, one more explosive but still with the stately separation between notes as in the first motif. This is repeated twice, then back to the first riff for six more repetitions. After running through these two sequences a number of times, the first figure begins but then descends further down, shifting to an apparently unrelated, rhythmic run of lower notes, which in a moment will be intersected by the returning first motif. Eventually, though, this lower run pattern totally displaces the two opening set-ups. In due time, this new figuration itself will be replaced
Throughout, Shipp takes up a figural pattern, like the opening one, which is repeated, but more like a draft than a finished motif since each iteration chisels the phrasing, slightly sped up or slowed down while the rhythm granularly deviates. The pattern is later set aside, replaced by one, as memorable, as fleeting. The listener may be enchanted by a repeated, melodramatic bass figure or a reiterated floating lyrical flow of notes, either of which has a vigor or sweetness that another musician might have dwelt on for an entire tune. But this figure is dropped and a new one, equally inventive and demanding of attention, comes forward.
While this is going on, there is a powerful interplay of drums and bass under the piano lead. When the first figure appears, Parker plucks a few strings, as if finding his place, then starts setting up runs of notes that engage in their own evolution. Since in any free setting, the rhythm section does not need to hold a tempo or a schematic of the harmonic pattern, each member of that section develops his or her own parallel syntheses mutually striving to define the musical space. Attali describes this, talking about music in terms of work, “labor is not confined in a preset program. There is a collective questioning” (142).
Since all instruments for much of the performance are playing at once, due to loudness and place on scale, it’s as if the drums are playing over, the bass under (and half hidden by) the piano. What is evident in the beginning is that Parker is playing lines of notes at high velocity with each note well measured and articulated. Meanwhile Dickey gets underway with a staccato beat and a lot of cymbal use. Does this suggest that from the beginning Parker and Dickey are instantly off “doing their own things”? Not at all. Go back to where Shipp makes his first change from the two-accent emphasis, which he has played six times, moving to the more explosive second figure. As Shipp changes over, each of the other two players also pivots; Parker, not slackening his pace, now lets each note resonate a bit more before the next is plucked; at the second turning point, when Shipp leaves the second portion and return to the opening motif, Dickey lets go with his first forceful, punctuating drum roll.
Although the near entirety of the 30-minute track consists of spontaneous simultaneous improvisation, there is one solo where the other players step back. At about 18:40, Dickey takes a four-minute solo. It begins with a set of separated strokes, ended by a longish pause, then a set of fast runs; continuing through a brief slotting into a funky rhythm, a set of rim shots, then the cymbal balanced against runs on different drums in the set. All this in fast but not hurried succession. It’s a procession of arresting moments, riffs and sequences, a playing that leaves indelible sounds and rhythms, only to be tracked away in the next riff in a practice akin to Shipp’s. As this is the only solo on the track, it suggests each musician has a similar approach. Each motif is something to be refined but then branched out from, possibly, returned to, effaced.
Let’s make a distinction. The Art Ensemble of Chicago as they played in Chicago in the early 1970s – I grew up going to their concerts – often performed pieces that moved from style to style; perhaps parodying a military march, shifting abruptly to a period of free blowing then to a dirge. Each style was a long band of sound, sustained for many minutes before being shifted away from. Shipp’s trio is not gliding from style to style but from fully formed rhythmic/melodic motifs, which are not held for long passages, only given a space to breathe and then let go.
It’s evident that in Prism 1 (1) there is a very close signaling between group members so that each musician moves along creating a structure: upper (Dickey), lower (Shipp), foundation (Parker). Without any emphatic pointing, byways are charted, new sections segued into, moments broached as if by magic or intuition. And we know (2) this appearance of intuitive grasp is no unexpected turn. It comes from them all holding the same frame, something established through talk as well as playing and listening. And we can’t take this similarity to mean they have a similar perspective or the same opinions on music so much as that in their hours of talk they shared a glance. In other words, they thought over and talked over their musical and human sensibilities and this allowed them to feel in advance (to a degree) what another musician would “put down.” (3) Yet, as mentioned in the discussion of Swell’s comment on Moondoc, as they created, they looked for openings, continually modifying and tinkering with what was at hand while staying alert and ready to make a new disjuncture, setting to one side what was musically on hand to open a new vein.
The New Work Culture
Is it such a little thing to create a world?
— Aimé Cesaire
Following Attali, I suggested these prescient musicians are sketching out in advance the semiotics of a new arrangement of society. This is not to say they are laying out a utopian blueprint, but an exemplary set of practices that foresee those that will be employed in (what is imagined to be) the cooperative realignment of society in both work culture and self-creation. The depiction drawn so far of the trio’s playing forecasts the new work culture, which involves individuals mutually empowered and empowering.
In the ensemble playing of the Matt Shipp trio, the music hinges on intuitive overlap without overt direction from a band leader, chosen chord structure or dominant rhythm. We can see this way of working is markedly distinct from the way things are done at a job in neo-capitalism where employees are tightly controlled, indeed, with the advent of new forms of surveillance, even surreptitiously controlled. At the workplace, the employee is hit by both the prescriptive demands of the boss, and, if a service worker, the exegetical demands of customers or, if a producer, demands by the speed of the line.
By contrast, the trio is inner plotted. Like skilled craft workers, they piece together an evolving network of sound, filling in the blanks of the moment with an improvised structure that keys into both the subjective and objective makeup of the passing instant.
The graces of a non-hierarchical, democratic work processes have been forecast by two authors; one Marxist, one anarchist, who predict (in one case) that this is how (if a better future comes to be) work will be structured, and (in the other) that such a way of working is a natural state, one sadly betrayed by our current economic set-up, which will re-emerge as capitalism withers away.
Dan Clawson in Bureaucracy and the Labor Process visualizes the way of working that will exist in the post-capitalism future.
A bureaucracy necessarily involves hierarchy, with some people giving orders to others. … In contrast [ideal] communism involves total democracy, the election of anyone above the level of an ordinary worker, with no fixed hierarchy and no one having the right to give commands (except insofar as the right is temporarily delegated) … Moreover, instead of a plethora of rules and an illusionary focus on bureaucratically defined expertise, in communism regulations are reduced to a minimum, freedom is maximized, and everyone becomes technically competent to do the work. (16-17)
In Mutual Aid, Kropotkin, trained as a naturalist, broadens the scope of this idea by saying such mutually supportive, equalitarian systems transcend species. He writes, “All animals, with the exception of some carnivores and birds of prey, live in societies. In the struggle for life, the gregarious species have an advantage over those that are not [gregarious]. In every animal classification they are at the top of the ladder” (215). It is this cooperative guiding of practice which the new society will reinvigorate that is prefigured by the trio.
The Shipp trio, as it moves through a piece, has a mercurial complexion; each riff tinkered with, each player solidly knowing the job and knowing his playing as a contribution to an evolving solidarity and to a multi-awareness, blossoming and undergoing unremitting temporizing. This shimmering prefigures the actions of the work group in the new era, which will frequently shift to take account of the materials, interpersonal connections, and arising obstacles.
Such is the template of the new work group (as predicted in advanced by jazz) that will be dominant in post-capitalism. Lightly tied to tradition and held maximally by bonds of civility and self-respect, the workers/musicians forge ahead, ever-tested, ever-new, ever-free.
It might seem the person of today, one like the “whatever person” of Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory, has little connection to history. Indeed, it might be argued that the individual lines taken up by the players in Prism I, lines that constantly evolve, then mutate, then disappear, bear a resemblance to the new, evanescent selves Dean sees as emerging in communicative capitalism. She describes the new self in this way: “We can choose any identity, but we lack the grounds for choosing or the sense that an identity, once chosen, entails bonds of obligation. Rather than following norms … we cycle through trends” (77). However, the two milieus through which our profiled musicians move, that of the jazz world and the squat environment, link them to collective history in special ways. And it is this double affiliation that re-measures the personality, giving individuals a different anchoring.
Jazz, as we will see, has a sui generis relation to collective experience, so that even in flowing through a moment, the jazz player finds a backward-passing current that ties her or him to a long-standing tradition. Moreover, living in ways that cross and re-cross the borders between two existing economies: capitalist and squat, give an individual, as we will see, the ability to conceptualize a storyline in a way not given to those who have only lived in one context.
Of course, in Prism 1 there was already a sense of lived history, earned through each musician’s knowing and anticipating fellow players’ tastes, roots and style; however, in the solo performance we will examine where Shipp makes extended quotes from jazz standards, something not done in the trio work, he gives the recital a fuller sense of collective musical history. Moreover, crafting an hour-long solo in which one musical phrase pops up repeatedly through the whole work, also something not done on the trio piece, attests to a developed narrative vision.
heritage
The music captured in Prisms 1 involves collective history both insofar as the players work together with a full knowledge of each other’s background, both musical and beyond music, and in that many jazz cadences and rhythms are heard in the composition. However, there is no direct reference to musical history of the type Shipp makes in the solo we will examine in which he extensively quotes two jazz standards. This is not to say groups Shipp works with never work so overtly with traditional material as attested to by his trio CD To Duke, on which they play a selection of Ellington tunes.
When Shipp talked of his relation to Coltrane’s music, he was not only naming a personal connection but signifying that this link was special because jazz and other black music have a different relation to U.S. tradition than other American arts, including other forms of music.
I will hold back on a fuller explication of this thought in order to look at the general sense of tradition felt by LES jazz players, then at how this understanding involves storytelling, and then at how heritage and storytelling are captured in a few of Shipp’s works of solo piano
Jemeel Moondoc says his group Muntu “embraces the living and the dead, ancestors and deified ancestors: gods,” suggesting how his group pays homage to previous musicians, including gods such as Bird, Duke and Lady Day (Moondoc’s liner notes quoted in Allen p. 23).
As William Parker explains in Allen’s book, the LES musicians’ approach to the tradition is as free-flowing as is their line of attack on a more unstructured performance. Speaking of musicians assembled for a concert, he notes, “Sometimes we’d say ‘okay, we’re going to play “Summertime,” but there was never ‘we’re going to do this’ or ‘do that.’ It was okay, you play “Summertime’ and I’ll do what I do, and I know you’re playing “Summertime” and we’ll meet somewhere over there” (32).
Bisio puts the connection to tradition in other terms, “We [Shipp and I] were both taught you had to know what came before you, you had to have a handle on that and you had to add to it if you could” (141). Circling back, as it were, Shipp ties the jazz tradition to their specific home environment. Speaking of his musical peers, he says, “They were the recipients of those who lived in the [LES] neighborhood like Bird and Mingus, Marzette Watts” (27). The point is made with equal eloquence by Allen. After saying there is a deep source to this music, he expands, “That source is a neighborhood, filled with relationships and deep history, and … it’s also a spirit that sonically transverses the long-gone, the present, and the about-to-be-birthed” (28).
Narration
Jazz with knowledge of and honoring of the past would seem to have a narration ready at hand, the tale of how a given performance draws from and modulates the past. It is not put quite this way by Shipp and his associates, but they all see jazz as having a story to tell
Bassist Joe Morris explains how listeners react to concerts in which he is participating with Shipp. He begins that in these events “it’s really a narrative flow. In any situation like that [where they are giving a concert] when you leave the stage … people are going to say you were up there telling a story.” (64). What exactly is this story? Morris explains, “A narrative is a series of ideas that flow out and they don’t really repeat; they keep going in a sequence like reading prose.” (64).
For Shipp the storyline has to include both objective and subjective features. On the one hand, he says, playing involves “tapping into things … an openness of mind that lets you be in a certain area where you can partake of the natural permutations” (72). If this is put in terms of storytelling, “natural permutations” can be seen as the possible routes out of a given musical sequence (“the hypothetical unfoldings”), which will suggest, according to rules of harmony and other givens, various preferred directions to take, just as a narrative can branch into various paths depending on another set of rules. On the personal side, Shipp goes on, “Improvisation generates from need and desire … and [it] needs to arise from some type of story or narrative that is in oneself” 177). Later he expands, “I use the word language because if you are an improviser it is going to be translated into musical language, though the underlying storyline is a language on its own that may not be able to be reproduced into words” (177).
Let’s look at the story he tells at Michiko.
Performance at Michiko (NYC), July 6, 2019
Two narrative elements stand out in the solo concert at Michiko Rehearsal Studios on July 6, 2019. The first is that motifs, always differently framed and rendered, crop up repeatedly. For instance, a sequence of three chords, followed by three more that are only slightly different, create a haunting cadence as they reappear. Another recurring, five-chord sequence, resembling the first in tempo and enunciation, also pop in and out. There are a number of “clasps,” that is, a characteristic breaking of a sustained sequence, perhaps a banging thrumming of bass chords or a series of breakneck, repeated runs or a very quickly pressed series of notes that are barely heard before they vanish. This set of eight or nine elements, always embellished, always slightly differently nuanced, run throughout the piece giving it a finished, story-like quality. Moreover, the six chords often show up in such a way to open a shift in emphasis, almost like chapter headings, signaling the beginning of a new playing field.
The second new element is that at about 21 minutes in, Shipp plays “Yesterdays.” After a quiet moment, the Jerome Kern tune is played straightforwardly till, out of nowhere, a couple of bass chords slam down, then the tune continues as if nothing happened. Next Shipp takes off with a series of speedy runs, melding into a flurry of quickly pressed notes. What is notable is that these runs and quick notes are not ones taken from the chords of “Yesterdays” but rather the re-emergence of motifs that are already part of the spontaneously composed work. After this interruption he returns to the tune, and then, in a new move, begins integrating “Yesterdays” into his already created themes. For instance, he begins a sequence of vibrant, quickly posited chords, recalling an earlier sequence, which now includes a chordal succession from “Yesterdays.” Then, when he is almost finished with dallying with this tune, he plays a moderate run of notes, including near the outset three notes from the Kern melody.
This second difference bears more scrutiny. When Tommy Flanagan plays “Yesterdays” on his Storyville album Solo Piano, handling it with great taste and deliberation, he uses a standard approach. He provides shifting variations in attack and intensity, often branching away from the melody in improvisations but staying with the chords provided by the Kern.
This can be contrasted with the far less conventional approach of Art Tatum, who in 1933 covered the piece. Tatum does two things not seen in Flanagan. After running through the piece a few times with his characteristic flair, flavor and flashing speed, staying within traditional limits, he switches over to playing the piece stride style, resetting the piece as it might appear in the hands of earlier adepts such as Waller or Johnson. Even more unusually, in a few places, he brings in highly rhythmic, memorably repeated phrase sequences, which have no discernible links to the original material, then drops them and returns to the appointed tune.
Immediately, the difference in Tatum’s rendering from Shipp’s is evident. Tatum suddenly diverges from a traditional approach and conceives the song in the stride style he had inherited from his forbears. Shipp is not relying on a style already familiar to the audience. Shipp begins by introducing listeners to his unique sonic universe and then incorporates “Yesterdays,” meshing it with his own work. As we saw, Tatum also brings in his own unique patches, ones unrelated to the tune to which he is improvising. As when Shipp at the beginning of his playing with the “Yesterdays” drops in some heavy bass chords and then quickly returns to the tune, Tatum’s own thoughts are interpolated without any association with the jazzed-on melody. In contrast to Tatum, Shipp’s placing of the bass chords is part of a narrative sequence in which the detached chords are then followed by Shipp’s putting characteristic passages of his own side by side with Kern’s tune, then by the momentary inclusions of both his passages and riffs from Kern in the same period till, in a fadeout, a few notes from the melody appear in a string of notes.
Seeing how a number of motifs are spread throughout the solo and at how Shipp interpolates a jazz standard, step by step, into his own repertoire of musical figures, it is possible to conclude he is engaged both with storytelling and paying homage to the jazz past.
“Naima”
We can take the latter point further by looking at how Shipp covers a standard when that is his exclusive focus, and he is not using it within a larger musical conception. On his 2014 CD I’ve Been to Many Places, he tackles Coltrane’s “Naima.” His inventive take places his reconceptualization of the tune at the third stage, as it were, of his processing of “Yesterdays” at Michiko. At that stage, the Kern chords were delicately twisted into joining a sequence of chords that had already appeared in Shipp’s pre-“Yesterdays” playing in a way that unifies the Kern piece with Shipp’s own stylings. “Naima” starts with Shipp using a very light touch to play the melody. Then he begins a bursting run of notes, followed by another such run, then another. Most but not all start with a few similar notes; all, usually near the end, contain a fragment of “Naima.” This series, in which each run is slightly deviated, slightly deflected, and differently emphasized, hold tightly to the Coltrane tune, never letting it out of sight in the varied runs. He concludes the piece by returning to a lyric recapitulation of the melody.
While few jazz musicians would follow Shipp’s method of improvising on a standard in this way, taking one single type of executions, the long run of notes, and using it exclusively to craft the extemporization; the core construction, which begins with the melody, then uses the original’s materials to structure the variation, then returns to the tune, is certainly the most common way for a jazz player to set up an impromptu. It might be said this is how jazz pays homage to the past.
A Subject Linked to The Past
The experience of the squat scene and of the collegial relationships created between ensemble players, on and off the bandstand, paved the way for the birth of a tentative new self, one that surfaces during the intensity of a performance. This new self has two attributes: a special connection to the past and a special link to the future.
According to some views of current conditions, Shipp and his compeer’s reliance on tradition is an anomaly, even an impossibility. For thinkers like Dean and Lukacs, the present moment is one in which people have lost all historical sensibility. Lukacs sees this as especially visible in the arts, which have become so commercialized that they slavishly follow the latest fashions, neglecting or forgetting what belongs to their historical legacy. He states, “It is of the essence of the market,” in the competitive society “that new things must be produced within definite periods of time, things which must differ radically from those which preceded” (8, his itals).
Yet, if one follows Lukacs’ argument a little further, it turns out that he admits inadvertently that a tradition-minded segment of aesthetic production could exist given it occupied the impossible position of continuing a precapitalist culture under capitalism. As Lukacs explains “The culture of precapitalist periods was possible because the individual cultural products stood in a continuous relation to one another: one developed further the problems raised by its predecessor” (ibid.). Not only did this show organic growth, but its achievements had a collective tone. In these societies, “in any area a coherent, plain and yet original culture arose, a culture whose level went far beyond that of the highest achievement of isolated, individual capacities” (ibid.).
In some illuminating pages, Chris Cutler (in his quirky style) explains how one area of culture maintains the impossible condition of maintaining a folk culture appearing in a times when capitalism reigned supreme. He begins by describing the position of U.S. blacks before the Civil War.
While the whites, then living ‘inside’ their changing world, integral to its change, individualized & put away the remnants of their collective identities … the blacks were left “outside,” with nothing but their communal identity (expressively reinforced by personal suffering). In other words, although the slaves were affected by the changes in relations & consciousness in the “mainstream’ of society ‘outside,’ they were not a party to them. This is how, uniquely, Black culture adopted a communal perspective to the complexities of plantation – & then urban – life. (53, his itals)
He goes on to note how the group carried their slave inheritance after emancipation. “When the slaves were eventually ‘freed’ … they carried with them a unique ontological instrument, a folk culture able to express a collective response to Capitalist-existential conditions” (54-55). This carrying was facilitated by their continuing exclusion from mainstream society. “As slaves they might be free, but as blacks they were still non-persons” (55). The decisive point is this:
Very loosely one could say that the blacks had lived through the accelerated transition to Capitalism w/out being a part of the process. Thus, they were able to experience the alienation at the heart of capitalist relations w/out having been ideologically incorporated into its establishment. Their culture, still a folk culture, was able to come to its own terms with this reality. (55)
Cutler is not alone in making this point. In Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas writes, “the blues, America’s most radically black artistic form, offered a rare example of an oral folk form developing in a media age yet largely and independent of media influences, a phenomenon possibly only in white and black, literate and illiterate America” (390). She points out, “The blues came in all likelihood from the slaves’ oldest work songs, carried almost intact from Africa … The simple three line (AAB) twelve-bar form off the early … blues … was itself African and rare in the folk music of the West. … they centered, as African music always had, on complex rhythms, untranslatable in conventional Western systems of musical notation” (ibid.)
To apply this particularly to jazz, it might be noted that as it developed, black jazz was largely shielded from mainstream pressure to conform to trendiness. Since its beginnings early in the 20th century up through the 1940s, racial prejudice kept black musicians in a segregated enclave, which gave them an outside view of fashion-dominated, mainstream white culture. Black jazz, steeped in knowledge of its living tradition, created their sounds organically in a way that resembled the one Lukacs attributes to the art of societies that predated competitive economic arrangements.
Even when black jazz musicians, beginning in the 1950s, were integrated into the mainstream culture industry, they (and other musicians allied with them) were able to maintain this heritage. This brings home again the significance of Bisio’s thought: “We [Shipp and I] were both taught you had to know what came before you, you had to have a handle on that.” One can deduce that because the players were intimately involved with a living tradition that, whatever the upsets and “downsets” of their careers and personal life, they would still have a solid sense of continuity, being continuers of a living folk tradition. To put this in other terms, the individuals in this tradition have a past in the broader sense.
The narrower past is that of a biological person’s particular struggles, upbringing, learning and vicissitudes. The broader sense refers to an individual’s links to a long-standing collective tradition, which is both known and respected and consciously departed from in new-going elaborations.
The first attribute of the self in the post-capitalist era is that it has a broad past. What of the future?
Storytelling and the Broad Future
One argument that had much purchase in the last few years is that all the great narratives, les grands récits, are dead. Such grand stories were ones, like those told by those by Christianity and Marxism, which visualize humanity as taking part in a centuries-long project, whether establishing a class-less society or being judged after a second coming. Many contemporary thinkers say such stories are no longer believable or believed.
It may be objected that these proclamations are disingenuous, at least in emphasis. None of the advocates of this position, discussing, for example, Communist beliefs, would dispute that the Marxist movement had a legacy in various countries and that it exists at present in a few of them. In other words, if we take one of these récits, such as Christianity, no one would dispute that it has the beginning of a story: its early years, its present condition. The only part that is questionable (in the eyes of postmodern thinkers) is the possibility of the future it envisions. Grand narratives are abandoned as if they were no more than their endings.
A few reasons are advanced for the collapse of the grand narratives. Lyotard talks of “the blossoming of techniques and technologies … which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means” as well as “the redeployment of liberal capitalism” (37-38). A slightly humbler version for the loss of faith in these narratives in the U.S. would be that the unsettling of the major mythic narratives supported by the working class. Since the mid-1970s, the U.S. has been pervaded by jobs that are not long-lasting but short-term, contract work; by unstable love partnerships; by the sudden closure of workplaces and whole industries, which leave many adrift, and even epidemics that shatter all norms. In this context, many people have tentative future life plans (their imagined stories) abruptly scuttled, breaking their life narratives. Talking of middle management, Hawken puts it in this way, “As the job base of Fortune 500 companies continues to decline … as health and pension benefits are curtailed … and with job security becoming a nostalgic relic … today the loss of jobs and benefits is never far from people’s concerns” (126).
If we can maintain that each society has broad patterns to which people’s individual lives conform, we might say in the U.S. the once-reigning one (for the white male) was of continually rising in one’s profession, leading to ever advancing financial and social capital. We have already seen that path has foundered; and, deeper than that, it is premised on a sense of the endless stability of the competitive society, which, with the environmental crisis, is hardly a credible belief. The squat culture also hung on an unverified premise: When the competitive system collapses, it will be replaced by one of DIY democracy, and that presently we are living the transition to that new system. Any who participated in the squat culture learned that possibility stands near the horizon. Their life patterns can be grounded in the sense that they are living in two worlds, one disappearing, one being born.
Going back to David Boyle and taking up other things he said in the same interview, he gives an idea of the future: “Our inspiration was the Mondragon cooperatives … Rather than pursuing some kind of military program, the Mondragons believe the best way to achieve independence was to control the land and industry. So, we thought we were going to be setting up some kind of cooperative economy on the Lower East Side” (149). Morales, quoted earlier, said, “The idea of building communities of resistance was precisely that. It was a hands-on ideology, not abstract but ultimately practical” (143). He explains, “There was a level of self-organization in the beginning. … We weren’t just inhabiting space, we were actually changing the environment, working it, in a ‘freedom in action’ kind of way” (154).
A number of supports beyond a simple faith in the squats ability to reshape society existed. We can consult Sartre’s description of the Soviet Union in the early aftermath of the Russian revolution where he enumerates what factors sustained the Soviet citizens’ belief in the triumph of communism. Admittedly, one could hardly imagine a society further from that of the LES squats than the one that came to be in the U.S.S.R.; however, Sartre’s focus is on the beliefs that existed in the earliest days of Soviet rule, before the appearance of Stalin as head of state.
Using his own specialized vocabulary, Sartre notes five attributes of the Communists beliefs. Many in the Soviet Union did not accept Communism but those who did imagined a growing natural unity between the different ethnic groups making up the nation, which would emerge as more and more of the populace accepted the rhythm of the historical trajectory. He says the CPSU “attempted to give the ensemble of different collectivities and groups called Russian the means that would forge its human unity. … [and there was] a real and present unification of that multiplicity by the future” (122, his itals).
The squatters, too, saw their growing movement expanding, doing so through agitation and coalition. Morales explained how his group reached out. “We got on the radio [on WBAI] and said ‘show up at Seventh and B on Saturday morning if you want to work,’ and like 50 people from the tri-state area would show up, mostly because they wanted to volunteer to help out” (153). Simultaneously, connections were being made to other social struggles. Ferguson notes, “There was an early crossover between homesteading and the Central America solidarity movement” (153). She adds, “The growth of squatting also coincided with the surge in activism around homelessness. … Indeed, the more activist-oriented squatters … sought to recruit homeless people into the squatting movement by giving workshops in city shelters” (153).
Sartre mentions that the early Soviets felt their socialist ideal would become more visible as more institutions and thus the people staffing them became tied into the communist workings of these institutions. “National unity would first appear to him [the militant] as a future synthesis manifesting itself inexorably through a kind of convergence of all individual destinies” (122).
The squatters also began to forge a collective sense of themselves, especially as legal avenues to building occupation were cut off. Early on, it was conceivable that those in the buildings being reclaimed could follow legal routes to home ownership. However, in the early 1970s, they “found the city had cancelled its homesteading program” (148). Those who had hoped to take the legal route were pushed together with “radicals who wanted no part of ‘the system’” (148). These joined with those who “squatted from necessity, or to sustain their downwardly mobile art careers,” and those who wanted to “demonstrate with their own hands the criminality of the housing bureaucracy that could leave so many without homes” (148-149). Now everyone was excluded from the system and became outsiders. As to those who had hoped to work within the system, “Their outsider status was reinforced by the state’s refusal to recognize sweat equity as means of creating housing any longer. That refusal helped to define a more radical and desperate population” (149).
Sartre goes on to claim that for the Communist militant the future was physically present in the work she or he did in helping build the infrastructure of the coming society. “Each producer … grasped this future … through the very materiality of the productive effort … grasped through hardship and exhaustion” (122). By its very nature, squatting involved collective labor since the individuals involved were taking over abandoned, broken-down property, which needed to be refitted and reconstructed. It was predicated on “people using ‘sweat equity’ to fully renovate buildings for low-income housing” (Ferguson, 146). Some of these rehabilitations were quite elaborate. “At 519 East 11th Street, the homesteaders installed an African fish farm in the basement, along with solar panels and a windmill on the roof” (ibid.). Boyle says that the work on buildings was part of a shared ethos. “I felt that if we were trying to produce some kind of small utopian thing, you had to work” (151, my itals). He says further, “And the first step was giving value to people’s labor” (149).
While the Soviet Union may have been the first beachhead, as Sartre notes, Communist militants expected a red wave would quickly spread across the world. “Through this internationalism – a future unity of peoples –the Soviet citizen discovered that his country was designated (by History itself) to draw all nations into a convergence of a single destiny” (122, his itals). The squatters on the LES also felt part of an international movement. Their occupation of abandoned buildings had been inspired by European actions. Squatter Steve Harrington recalls, “Becoming legal would have been too much dealing with the system. We’d been squatting in Europe … where becoming legal was up there with informing on your neighbor” (Ferguson, 152). Morales points to the squat at 327 East 8th as a hive of global connectivity. “People from all over the world were coming there — from Brixton, Latin America, different parts of the U.S., Italy, lots of film crews. Wherever people were squatting, they would hear about squatting in New York, and they just showed up there” (Ferguson, 152). Squatters often viewed themselves as part of a planet-wide movement to replace the outmoded capitalist system.
Lastly, Sartre notes that while the Soviets saw an eventual globalization of the movement, they also saw the national triumph of Communism as intimately linked to Russian’s past. While the Soviet Union would one day be part of red world, before this came about, the Soviets saw themselves as part of “the epic of the Revolution … Future history of the USSR and past history of Russia were illuminated by a reciprocity of lights” (123). The LES community, too, had formidable ties to the past. In Ferguson’s words, “This conception of the Lower East Side as a kind of final frontier for urban struggle drew from the area’s radical history – a culture of dissent that dates back to the neighborhood’s formation as an immigrant entry point and working-class slum, home to socialists, anarchists, feminists and numerous competing ethnic groups” (144). She tells readers, “It’s worth reviewing this early history because it helps account for the degree of political and economic exceptionalism that evolved on the Lower East Side” (145).
For the squatters, the future was hardly nebulous. Their general view was that the coming society would be embodied in a cooperative economy where those who worked controlled the products of their labor just as the squatters not the property owners held the buildings. This belief, especially when the legal routes to gaining the building was taken off the table, created a sense of being an outsider; and through the increasing contact with other social movements and international squatting, the cooperative labor, and a shared knowledge of LES history – to borrow the film title — they became a band of outsiders, moving toward what seemed a very possible future.
In the 1980s anyone who was half-aware the collective future promised by capitalism, which envisioned a gradual embourgeoisement of the populace, could see this promise could never be fulfilled. The future beyond capitalism foreseen by the LES squatters provided the hope of moving toward what seemed a viable replacement. While only a few jazz musicians were squatters – Shipp himself was couch surfing for a while with no place of his own – they were embedded in a scene where the squatters’ vision of the future pervaded the atmosphere, creating an underlying narrative of movement from one socioeconomic system to another, creating in these players an ability at storytelling grounded in a sense of a broad future.
This gives the second component of the individual that Shipp’s music presents as something to be found in the new person. This individual, the new women or man of the DIY economy, will have a collective future in balance with the possession of a broad collective past.
6 concluding
… an artist
wakes up to another reality
shot suddenly
by a dart of a closing call
coming from
nowhere.
Yuko Otomo, “The Supper at Emmaus”
Attali has outlined how at the beginning of a transitional epoch, certain strands of music immediately work out the core semiotic principles that will govern the new social organization. To use Otomo’s words, it is as if the artist “wakes up” to a new reality “shot suddenly … from // nowhere” (52).
The competitive society is sustained by no-longer-believable myths: the idea that hard work pays off; that if anyone (especially from a minority) is not successful, it is due to his or her own limitations; and its biggest myth: the capitalist, competitive society (the destruction of nature notwithstanding) will always stand.
As we saw, in the 1980s the freer jazz community, including the music of Mattthew Shipp, had one foot in another society, that of the once-vibrant squat world, which provided a sense of a socio-economic system differently organized, putting an emphasis on community and mutual aid. In these musicians’ creativity they do not provide yet another myth. Rather they present a practical model of how work will be organized and what the features of the new self that will be.
破翼而亡，也不要在云里分离
Rather die with shattered wings than face separation among the clouds.
— Chinese expression
For those who believe the capitalist system is destined to pass on and be superseded by a different social organization, the outlines of this successor system are hazy. The experimental introduction of a DIY cooperative economy has been tried in the U.S., for example, by the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. Their ideal, like that of those who led the St. Louis general strike in 1877, was the cooperative commonwealth. This experiment failed. It was tried again on the LES in the 1980s and it, too, was crushed with the eviction or coopting of the squats. In this case, its outlines became clearer, if not in reality, then, in its basic semiotics in the jazz of Shipp and his associates who created a music of indelible strength.
Works Cited
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—- The Final Nite & Other Poems: Complete Notes From a Charles Gayle Notebook 1987-2006 (New York: Ugly Duckling, 2006).
Dalachinky, Steve and Jim Feast, “William Parker Interview: Land Without Lords,” in Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side, ed. Clayton Patterson (New York: Seven Stories, 2007), pp. 573-582.
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—- Michiko performance A recording of the performance is available
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—-, “Naima,” I’ve Been to Many Places, Thirsty Ear 2014. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3yYRy0xJwk. Accessed January 26, 2024.
—- “Prism 1” Prisms, Brinkman 1993. Available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/wat ch?v=IBLDu0tcmig&t=1s. Accessed January 31, 2023.
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In Memoriam: Steve Dalachinsky, September 29, 1946 – September 16, 2019