Spring Garden Music -- Jack's Essays

Anomalous Music

First I ask myself, what is it that I and my partners have been doing the past thirty years, playing a music that has gone under the name of “free improvisation”? This music has been around since the early sixties, now the playing preference of perhaps a few hundred musicians around the world, and known to a commercially insignificant number of listeners. More than any other musical form, it is played within an egalitarian community, despite the ebbs and flows of individual careers. Anyone can play, including those completely untrained, and those who would not even describe themselves as musicians. What interests me here however is not to describe its actual features so much as to explore its internal principles, its potential that does not await realization, and its political horizon and implications.

Let me try to correct the terminology. The Greek nomos, usually taken as custom or law, also means tune or melody. That means that when we speak of free improvisation we might rather call it a-nomos, anomalous—not out of tune but out of melody—which is correct; it is music that does not form the kind of unity known as melody. Alternatively it might be called autopoietic music, self-creating, from a concept of Franciso Varela: a machine (as in Deleuze/Guattari) that is “self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space”. This is a more arrogant version of “anomalous (tune-less) music” but at least it sets a good tone for questioning: is a self-contained space possible at all? And what is the perspective for talking about this as opposed to other musics? That its practitioners are also at a loss to answer this would make the discussion fruitful for all and not just a Q and A.

Either anomalous or autopoetic is a better appelation than “free” improvisation, the most common name it has gone by over the years. “Free” implies chaos, noise, an unassimilable Real or a mythic totality, a metaphor for what is impossible to conceive as epistemologically “real” and beyond concrete realization. This presents an image of a dream or mystery, such that when “free music” is placed alongside categories that are not totalities but discrete and distinguishable objects, the impression is given that other musics, and their players, are something less than free. To stamp our music with this word is tendentious, an unfair privileging, a kind of advertising for one’s own product that lords it over the others. It is disingenuous to disregard the categorical differences of the adjectives modifying music. That it is unfamiliar to all but a handful of the population, at least in the form of sound improvisation (such as electro-acoustic improvisation, or eai), is no excuse for hyperbole. In fact, to call it “free” has the counter-effect of disqualifying itself from consideration, by placing it on a non-comparable level above the others, which merely want to indicate their particular form as an option for choosing it. Calling it anomalous gives us the chance to enter a conversation rather than let it fall into a misconception, or make a claim that is obviously ideological. “It is what I call anomalous music.” “What do you mean by that?”

Certainly anomalous does not, like jazz, call to mind specific, identifiable traits. But to abjure melody is truly, if only partially descriptive, one of many traits known to music that can be ticked off as missing, and a firm rule of this music. In fact, this is perhaps the only kind of music that cannot be constructed in imagination from a written text, even if a transcription were to be made, but must be heard live to have a comprehension of what it is. “Without melody” means specifically that it is not cyclic; it can be melodic but not have a singular, repeatable melody as a component. “Anomalous” as “lacking melody” has the advantage of including both the more well-known subcategory known free jazz and music that, unlike free jazz, lacks any hint of a pulse, consistent tempo, “drive”, or rules concerning instrumentation.

By denying nomos as melody this kind of playing does not deny nomos as rule, to which musicians and non-playing listeners must conform. All music in some way follows a rule or constellation of rules just in order to be recognized as music even by its practitioners. The nomos of music is not completely relative to culture and history. A Balinese waving a mallet in front of a gong but making no sound is not making music; there might be long silences, but they must relate to sound perceptible to humans in some way. Sound is the least common denominator, the sine qua non. In our day however the converse has also become a rule: when we or anyone makes any sound at all we cannot not be making music, no matter what our intention or protest of lacking musical ability. This is because the rules of music now have invaded the listening as well as the making of sound. Music is both the consciously created object and the experience of sound—that is what the postmodern aesthetic has bequeathed us. The listener attending to the rustle of trees or the traffic or the coughing of an audience can hear it as music. This much is a diachronic development, an historical rule of modernity (Edgard Varese, for example) that extends through today, namely, the ever-widening expansion of listening, of the ability to hear music in all sound, the aestheticizing of sound that has paralleled the aestheticized everyday. Music history tells us of one scandal after another, and eventual listener acceptance until the next barrier is reached and breached. The barrier separating music from noise is obviously a rule meant to be broken—and rebuilt somewhere else. As soon as someone says surely that is not music, someone else will pop up and say, I can hear it as music. Similarly, you may think you are making a rational argument in prose; I might hear it as poetry, however perverse my intentions. The argument would be recognized, but an alternative hearing is possible alongside it, just as one may include traditional music and a dripping faucet in the day’s aesthetic enjoyment.

The abandonment of melody is just one step in this direction away from the effort to foreground and isolate a signal out of a sea of noise, and a step towards hearing noise itself, what was formerly foreclosed as expendable interference, as the signal. Or rather while appearing to eliminate the signal/noise dichotomy, this music re-establishes it elsewhere. Instruments can be played but they can also be simply used as tools under the formulation of “extended techniques”; all material is simply the means of making sound. The most radical elimination of all is perhaps the composer; even the player is not a composer but the one who makes sound at that very moment, without plan or forethought. Indeed it is misleading even to call it “improvisation”, to the extent that connotes a theme or melody as its base. What is or is not music is in question, not whether it is good or not (the Modernist issue of quality) and so there can be no complaint that one’s partners have done something wrong (as a rule, musicians govern their relations in playing by strict moral codes unknown to the public). There are no mistakes, but at least one absolute rule: the players are trusted to strictly follow what they consider makes musical sense, quite possibly on a level they have not previously imagined. There is no rehearsal possible; whatever the musical judgment, it is fully there each time it is played. Performance is by no means necessary, in fact the frame of performance, and all that is necessary for musicians to fit their playing into that form, can get in the way; alternately it might inspire the players to play in the presence of others, there is no way to decide a priori. This music has only artificial endings, it does not truly conclude; in fact one could say the ultimate rule is to keep the playing going, interesting and seductive enough so that no one thinks of stopping. Without the frame of the intended ending, anomalous music fulfills what is often said of music, that it happens outside of time, even that it stops or destroys time.

Besides the rules common to all music--the inevitably acquired skills and habits of the players, and the ability to make musical sense out of sound—there is also the inescapable rule that human intervention in the world of sound requires specific judgment. The rule might be as simple as immediate choice among alternatives, but to judge is to rule over sound, and not let nature take its course. John Cage's formula, "let sound be sound", is a romantic mystification that, fortunately, he was not permitted to put into practice. The necessity of judgment contradicts the claims of conceptual art, anti-art and noise music, that deny they are making art or music. There is no escape from being and playing within this transcendent rule, however much it might open the door to categorization--genre and species and all that marketing and hierarchy of players that follow. As musicians those who take the rough rode of improvisation would like a pacified relation with the world and not to be taken literally as outlaws, heroically disobeying “imposed” genre categories—that can only be a promotional posture. We do not want to play from a sovereign position outside of music, guided by superior intuition, or even, in the community of players integrated through sound, to think of ourselves as commanding our playing. To the extent that we think of ourselves as musicians--at times ambivalently--we surrender to others, that is, to the acknowledgement that we create something that might be useful to others, that is, culture.

Conceived in this way, no matter how it is judged aesthetically, anomalous music is the limit, the horizon of musical possibility, and it touches or imagines the limit of social possibility as well. In fact I would argue that, as a simple communal experience of following what is going on, like a collective conversation, it only barely fits the category of ”experimental art”, the signifier that replaces the historical avant-garde and the music world to which this music has been assigned. It does not have a musical world of its own. That would necessitate a musical object at the center, and there is no such object; whatever status and judgment of the art object might be possible is bolted on and can be unbolted and discarded— in fact that is the cyclic story of this music, were one to seek out the details.

2. The inside and the outside

The micro system of the human endeavor called music is paralleled in politics and more than that, they increasingly mirror each other in the contemporary world. Both are subsumed under an ontological order for which there can be things and people not easily comprehended or categorized but at the same time are not unambivalently outside. Like the ancient “Greek” and “barbarian”, the modern “inside” and “outside” function together as an ideological pair, dividing being between them. Today’s border is like the geographical river, presumed to separate but actually joining the two, and the two are thought to comprise the whole. This order includes the urge common to art and politics to frame and represent an “outside” as that which it is not. For left culture this self- and other-perception of an inside and an outside assumes politics and art as the dual-functioning mediator, even the intercessor between them. Music for instance is divided this way, some being considered “out”, while the “inside” is called mainstream or conventional, yet as with its counterpart, the signal/noise dichotomy, this distinction is fragile and tends to break down over short periods of time; its expected breakdown is part of what constitutes it. For the art of left culture the arrow tends towards noise, just as for left culture politics it tends towards the outside, those seen as excluded, where attention is directed. We don’t have real art, it argues, we don’t have real political value, they do. Yet sociologically those who included in the label "artist"

This dynamic has increasingly become the driving force making Art a component of the broad culture and a common ground for those who perceive themselves on the left. Art is the model for “creativity”, with negative liberty (freedom from rules) as its ideology: to be an artist you must first of all lose your chains. Art is freedom incarnate, and “free” democratically opens its doors to all. The historical tendency, which originates in Victorian times, has been for those who think of themselves as included (roughly, those who see their aesthetic as powerful in the world) to turn sympathetically toward those they identify as excluded (the depoliticized and disinherited). If asked, the included may well think of themselves as alienated, but culturally they respond as if their world lies beyond their family, neighborhood and coworkers, which constitutes the world for those seen as excluded. Even in rebellion the included take on the tradition of the wider culture and are embarrassed by their inside position, which they think of as privilege, in the face of those on the other side of the wall. They see themselves politically divided by a stone fortification from rebellious slaves and peasants, laborers, recent immigrants, the poor of the world. Culturally their outside is figured as the bohemian, the suffering genius, the mad, obsessive-compulsive artist. In the past few decades this figure has been formulated as the Outsider artist, untouched by the corruptions of the market. On the one hand the suffering multitude, on the other the suffering artist. Since in their imaginary they are divided from suffering, those self-perceived as privileged must ignore, mis-recognize and even disallow their own actual suffering. At the same time, however, the wall functions to keep those inside from getting out, which they are often tormented to acknowledge. Here art and politics diverge. Towards the outside the political inside is guilty for their privilege of not having to suffer, and is obliged to pay politically, whereas the artistic inside, the spectator especially, thinks he is missing something that is outside and envies it. The outside others are what the privileged cannot be or reach, the gap of desire.

Here then is the paradoxical desire of both politics and of art, stronger now in its postmodern development: to include the outside, which is the political project, and to be or at least to validate the outside, which is the envy at the core of the spectator of art. These are two aspects of the same imaginary, both of which involve a vision of progress and irreversibility but are ultimately non-technological or scientific. The first would be considered the thrust of liberal democracy since the 19th century (Mill and the gradual expansion of the electorate—and now doesn’t the whole world vote in the US presidential election?) The second aspect has gone under the name of avant-garde, at least since the late 19th century, and continues today as a mass phenomenon (since Warhol we’re all artists—at least the cultural left) rather than encased in the modernist “movement”. The desire which has increased in strength with globalization is to be inside at the same time as outside, at least in imagination, that is, to be the power on that threshold, the generous gatekeeper. Art enables a soft or weak politics, one which does not wish to have or be confused with Power, does not have to be hypocritical. Will to power is seen as the masculinist Old Left, a Grand Theory idea, a politics for which art could only be a kind of advertising. We don’t make, we create.

The outsider subject of such politics and art is not the self and not the collective in which one finds oneself but more generously the other, which then gets framed, colonized, and its lack of privilege reversed. This is the kiss of death, but it is impossible to accept that one has killed what one wanted to keep pure. The presumed inside, in this ontology, can only think of itself as anti-colonial, anti-racist, and necessary for the world in order to correct its ways. To hold such opinions of oneself is considered an act, in itself virtuous, and need not be transformed into anything more overt. From this point of view, as soon as one interpellates and recognizes the outside, which means to distinguish and value it, the door is at least swung open to let in the outsiders. Presumably they will, if there is a critical mass of like opinion, eventually cross the threshold.

This is as far as I have gotten as of this writing. I have removed many loose ends (such as whether left art and politics compensate each other, which I suspect), and if I look through this one more time I will find much more that needs re-examining, elaborating, or deleting. It is not mine to do alone, but calls for our joint effort, at best in face-to-face conversations. You may email me at jackwri444 at aol.com.

Pulling my head out of the business end of music

Actually, I have no right to keep this long essay online, since this apparent withdrawal was only one phase of a repeated cycle. Only a few weeks after editing it for the nth time I went back on my word and dived back into the fray of organizing tours, as if writing it were merely a prelude to reversing it. The sentiments remain, like the dregs I will some day again choke on the next time I'm drained and fed up. What I'm a junky for, and willing to prostitute myself to the "infinitely expanding marketplace" for, is probably obvious, I'm only glad it's no more harmful a substance than the next musical excitement almost within reach.

I want to leave the music business. The extent to which I can do this and still be playing music in front of others is another question. It is also a question how long I can avoid the urge to organize another tour, since the organized tour, rather than recording or playing gigs as they come up, is my preferred mode of musical experience. My business efforts have not failed, they have simply come to overwhelm the actual artistic focus of playing and developing music. In other words “work” to which I give a positive valuation in my life has been increasingly replaced by “work” that has the negative connotation of a means to an end, as in "the working world". My intention is to reverse the order, to spend my time with actual music and other creative pursuits rather than devoting my life to business.

This desire has been present for at least two years but, as a kind of junkie for musical experience, I have only gotten more deeply mired in the business of creating musical events of my choosing. The effort now to reverse the order of my work life even comes at a time when I am relatively successful in getting gigs and organizing tours. The hard work of soliciting venues and promoters, helping others (mutual back-scratching and networking), maintaining the image required of a serious musician, alongside scattered but genuinely positive responses to my music—all this has gotten me to a very good place in the music world. I have little reason to complain beyond normal grousing, not enough by itself for me to want to lighten my work load. I have thankfully not become a star; for a combination of reasons not all of my making; my name or image does not attract audiences automatically like a magnet. Yet when I perform I am known to some through reputation, and that has certainly helped my business. I have preferred listeners rather than a public, and that is largely what I’ve had. I consider it my special triumph to have been able to limit my performing partners to those whom I choose on the grounds of my musical interest in playing with them, which is often not the case for professionals who are paid decent amounts of money.

Something has changed in the music world, perhaps inevitable and foreseeable, to bring about this desire to withdraw, and I will try to explain.

“Musician” has usually been a difficult vocation that, with the recording industry now largely in control of the profession, provides a living for a decreasing number of players, with a few top sellers and many competing for their slots. The American free improvisers, who appeared in the mid-seventies and played neither composed music nor jazz, were not able to bring home the bacon, that is, could barely cover the costs of playing their music before an audience. Nor did they expect to, with rare exceptions, without broadening and adapting their music to a version of rock, jazz or other commercial music. Significantly, “improvisational” was an attractive code word for “creative” in the eighties; it was a label slapped onto any music that could hope to be marketed, mostly where actual free playing was not in evidence. Actual free playing was underground and unknown except to its players, their friends, and passers-by. Only people willing to be cast as eccentrics and exiles from normative values would enter and remain in the field. There were then not many who would jump straight from music school into this music. Such players, inheritors of some aspects of the defunct avant-garde, tended to hold a view of the artist as independent; one’s reward was not social, typically it was even perversely anti-social. One would have to sacrifice social satisfaction (such as pleasing one’s parents by choosing a reasonable career) for a quirky music fetish. The obscurity of the free improviser in the seventies and eighties was comparable to that of visual artists before the expressionist market explosion in the fifties; it kept the numbers down, discouraging all but the boldest or most reckless heretics. Like librarians, we were supposed to be compensated by doing what we loved to do, always an argument for low pay and status. Largely for this reason many defected to more promising fields by the late eighties, at least supplementing free playing with paying gigs that had decent audiences.

Beginning in the late nineties and continuing today, improvised and composed music in the avant-guard tradition was reborn as a niche interest among younger musicians, where it could be considered popular at the same time as an alternative to the mainstream. Obscurity became a semblance of cultural transgression, reversing its role in the social order, now functioning to attract rather than dissuade. Free improvisation became a minor sub-genre, a realistic possibility, an opportunity in the age when the artistic, "creative" individual merges with the socially conventional career seeker, as had happened earlier in the visual arts. Once again it has been confirmed that the twentieth century avant-garde, which had been in conflict with the dominant culture, can only be resurrected as an aesthetic and not as a critical movement. In the pluralist marketplace every niche is its own consumer group, competing for the entertainment dollar and in no way in conflict with the market system. Free improvisation has come to offer a vocation based on expectations that it would be a growing cultural field and not on real and stable income, like traditional working class musicians. Even the state and foundations have begun to give its sanction in the form of grants; universities provide courses in the proper way to improvise freely, and not just jazzily.

This trend is wedded to a broader social development, also of American origin, which encourages all kinds of personal expression in a public format and stage performance in particular. The thrust behind it is egalitarian, at the same time ego-enhancing, and even of therapeutic validation: we all have the right to the kind of self-esteem that comes from audience (social) approval. The fifteen minutes of fame, which was quite a joke at the time of Warhol’s quip, has now become a social ethic, an entitlement on the way to being a duty. The only way to be counted as a human being is to be “in public”, and the public refers today simply to people who witness you. Performance and the mania for self-presentation is a non-political egalitarian advance, a continuation of New Left “participation” by other, more available means in a conservative political environment. One can pursue one’s love of music not as an amateur in private but actually perform it; in fact amateurism and the embarrassment to reveal one’s inadequacies has been overcome by the new performance ethic. Whether professor or politician, one is judged on the basis of the effectiveness of one’s performance, not far from the applause meter in fifties games shows. Joined to Reagan-era entrepreneurial fever, in the form of DIY careers-for-everyone, the performance ethic has finally reached those with tastes familiar to the anti-social eccentrics of the eighties.

There are improvisers from the seventies and eighties attractive to the American performing market today through a reputation as legendary and once boldly creative, but none without jazz credentials, which is still the recognized stamp of authenticity in the US. These players are in demand and often invited to festivals, where they are expected to draw the best audience. Besides them are growing numbers who compete through upward-mobile determination, organizing and business skills, trend-setting intuition, and beneficient factors such as gender, age, race, appearance, etc. Such factors are not surprising, since the audience for free improv/free jazz constitutes an enclave of young, urban, apolitical but ideologically multicultural liberals, who have grown up in retreat from a conservative world. What that means practically is that if I tour with another unknown old white man like myself, for instance, my audience will generally be considerably less and gigs harder to get than if my partner is someone of more popular identity and image. This is merely a fact, however inconvenient.

Since only a handful of “in demand” musicians make enough money to be able to refuse door gigs, what constitutes a professional or vocational free improviser today reasonably includes those who simply get a myspace page and start signing up for gigs. To many venue presenters a myspace is even more attractive than a personal website, the dominant advertising medium of only a few years before. It indicates youth and social networking over the “traditional” self-marketer who presented signs of long-term commitment, accomplishment and acceptance. Audiences are likewise not required to be committed, even to pay the musicians who have entertained them. This is evident in that door gigs, which used to be scorned by performers as a mere first career step are increasingly being replaced by passing-the-hat, which makes paying for a performance voluntary. This is akin to busking in the street, literally begging, a considerable step down from the status of worker paid a known amount for a job. Yet given the new cultural situation, to be on a stage is actually considered a step up in status from any kind of wage work, even if one has to work a demeaning temp-job in order to do it.

Most gigs are available first-come, first-served, such that those who began twenty years ago are waiting in line, hustling and back-scratching no less than those who got in the business two months ago. As the flood of CD’s has driven down sales for each individual player, so the flood of prospective players, all seeking to perform as often as possible, has created a buyer’s market. The buyers—presenters, promoters, organizers—are themselves DIY’ers who have only a certain number of slots to offer, and rarely any money besides the door, if that, minus any cut from the venue. Audience growth has not kept pace with the number of performers, partly because of the in-group nature of the urban scene, which attracts a singular type of defined customer rather than curious music-lovers.

The market is where the musicians are, virtually all of them, whether they recognize it or not. If you want to get beyond playing for your friends you must have visibility and status or put in the work to acquire it. High-brow entertainment, even for an audience of five, is still entertainment and part of the culture industry. Venues are not interested to present players without something of a text or image to promote them; it is hype that brings in the audience beyond the few regulars. In this sense, these musicians are indeed workers, although reluctant to see themselves as such. Unfortunately, the adverse proportion of musician to audience means there is no possibility for collective bargaining, or even individual pressure for better pay and conditions. In this sense these players are entrepreneurs, but lacking a business that actually accounts for itself in financial terms. This is where youth comes in, for the young have visions of future success—or at least an obliviousness to the possibility of failure--which sustains them and appears positively as idealism, as American as the struggling basement band next door.

Already there are signs that free improvisation no longer holds the attraction it did even five years ago. List-serves from ’98 to ‘02 that overflowed with enthusiasm for free improv have been wholly replaced by spam for concerts and cd’s. Private sessions, solely for the sake of musical exploration, have taken a back seat to gigs and recording sessions. This is clearly not a question of money, since the gigs barely pay for carfare and the cd’s cost players more than they earn. Rather it is considered nonsensical to spend time playing music off stage when gigs, even for a handful of listeners, are available. Finally, public funding is becoming available for any music that is “adventurous”, but it must be charted notationally or graphically to qualify, and university credentials are the best authentication for funding boards. Improvisers are encouraged to put their hopes on building their resumes and possible livelihood from music with compositional elements or at least appearance. To step beyond the improv youth ghetto requires credibility in the adult culture, which requires fresh but tamed young players.

I myself have clearly taken advantage of the growth of free improvisation and greatly encouraged it. Ambition of the young, plus the current unity of business and artistic career has brought into my musical world a huge number of players who challenge and interest me. It is largely because of them that I returned East from the boondocks of Colorado in 2003 and sought out these players, who had developed a new way of playing that attracted me.

A market seemed to be opening, of musicians if not audience, and I began to pursue the route of professionalization to make myself available. I did what I had to do: created a website that would promote me, allowed an article on me to appear in Signal to Noise, reworked my resume to make myself more attractive to promoters (my earlier bio had proclaimed that I was “not in the marketplace”), released cd’s by the carload (until ’99 my project had been to make one recording every ten years—now I have over forty!), and tracked down every contact to a potential gig. As an older and obscure musician with no ties to accepted music I had to become a self-promoter, though I painted my image as close as possible to the difficult reality. I refused many common but unethical devices musicians use to promote themselves, such as listing famous musicians with whom they were no longer or never were real partners. On the non-commercial side, I organized weekend sessions called No Net of around nine players, a marathon of playing to push our development as a musical community. Yet taking on music as a career was still a big step towards conforming with the normal functioning of the world, which had always been problematic. Through all this work I gained a place that most musicians would find enviable.

The amount of work this takes is a burden common to many mid-level musicians (in the scene hierarchy, that is) like myself, and for me it has been sustainable, though with increasing reluctance. My father was a low-level bureaucrat and I always vowed I would not follow him there. This is in fact what the job entails: a large amount of office work for the small amount of actual reward of playing music of my choosing. That this proportion of non-musical work is increasing certainly contributes to my choice to withdraw from it.

There is a deeper problem for me elsewhere, an inner contradiction with the music world that would not necessarily be a concern for other players. The more successful I am as a professional the more am I limited to playing a socially determined role and fulfilling a certain image, and I find this confining, claustrophobic even, and alienating. As a lover and player of music I am in contradiction with the job I have to do and the reward structure. It is assumed, for instance, that a musician would hope for a larger audience, an appreciative public, and better pay. It is true that I am often disheartened when, as recently, I played in a huge auditorium with an audience of only two. Yet I have always preferred small, diverse, even accidental groupings of curious and hesitant listeners over a large, scene-driven self-congratulating elite public clamoring for a spectacle. The ultimate of the spectacle is the festival, and I have not generally sought them out as good playing situations or for self-validation (morale-boosting). Festivals do sometimes open the door to more gigs and more money, and so makes my job easier, and more possible to play with other musicians, such as Europeans, who expect to be paid better than Americans generally do. But my preference is the more intimate situation with a diverse audience—low pressure, minimal concept of what will happen, and a more spontaneous, authentic response from listeners (especially evident in conversations afterwards).

I have not changed with the times. I am still back there with the social pariahs, and have not rejoiced in the new market situation, only in the new players, most of whom would not have been drawn to a music without the promise of normal social success somewhere down the road. In the past I was happy with a small audience and no wide appeal, only resentful (to my later regret) of those who did find ways to manipulate promotional appeal. Now a preference for small audiences can no longer be taken as a cover for the lack of a market, instead it is an anachronism, or worse, a sign of musical failure just as large audiences and sales of cds represent musical success.

I never intended to be successful in providing a service people would pay for. My aim was to challenge myself and follow my musical path, and to do this I had to play with people who were interesting to me. Many of these people were European, and as an unknown I had to become or at least appear to be a professional in order to get the kind of gigs that paid well enough to get me to Europe and to pay the group. My musical interest was not the one-shot highly paid concert, which is the financial life blood of European players, but the serial performance possible with the tour, which requires a huge amount of organizing. I have been able to tour there because of my tenacity and ability to cultivate relationships, but as state funding decreases and competition increases there is more and more work with less result.

Whether presenters or other musicians perceive oneself as a professional, "serious musician", is crucial, and the rules for this have changed. In the 80’s to invest the money for a single record was considered enough to establish oneself, a kind of union card. It cost me a quarter of my income in 1982 to do this, but it was the only price I had to pay. As for image, an improviser was only half-considered legitimately as a musician anyway, so this was not a concern. One who only played freeform might be thought of as a kind of homeless wanderer outside normal expectations, an anomaly respected for one’s personal choice perhaps but not with any pretence of making a contribution to art or society, which requires actual followers, devotees, or consumers. For an ex-sixties politico like myself, who resisted the Reagan reaction, this absence of social role made sense. I felt I was experiencing the world more immediately, in its fullness, at least not mediated by others’ understanding of how one functioned as a supposed member of society. There was no "scene"; my audience was mostly other musicians, friends-of-friends and accidental walk-in listeners. What I played did not fall within a genre of music for which they were the consuming public. At best they wanted to hear something they didn’t quite grasp, that perhaps they didn’t even want to judge, as one normally judges Art first in order to value it.

All this has radically changed. Last fall percussionist Andrew Drury and I played in Mostar, Bosnia and got an unusual response from a woman, “…but what is your motivation?” This is a question that would not be asked in more culturally sophisticated Europe or in the US improv scene today. Our motivation is understood here as part of the profession of the musician, who normally wants an unambiguously positive audience response, an indication that he is on the right path. Such is not my desire. Back in the eighties I may have been Johnny Appleseed spreading free improvisation in America, but I also saw myself as a kind of Socrates, as if asking people, “Is this mess I just played music—if not, then what IS music? And what do you want?” This was obliquely related to other questions that were being thrown under the rug, about the boundaries we put on all our experience, political and otherwise. Improvisation for me was revolt by other means; I meant to keep revolt alive--that was my life purpose as it translated into music. As I have felt politics must engage self-inquiry and doubt, so also music—in the moment it is actually played as well as in reflection. This too is revolt, related to the periodic revulsion for one’s own music, as of one’s political choices. So I didn’t want a complacent audience of followers but listeners who were conflicted, and even in conflict with me as to the value of what I did.

Today, that one should embody revolt through improvisation is not possible to maintain and communicate. What is valued for performance in improv is the same as for other genres—not the actual process of intelligent searching but the presentation of what one has found. I play today mostly for a specific cultured public, and as an accepted musician I have a respected place in that small world. This provides a secure setting in which to present music, since the response is all but guaranteed, yet in the denial of conflict that very guarantee denies a fully spontaneous interaction with listeners. There is a conventional frame around the music which values it before a single sound is made. Performances are linked one to another, and a tour is successful if it becomes a series of simulacra, without the risk of failure. Musical failure and business failure have become identical, and without the possibility of failure—rejection of one’s own music--there is no growth, at least for me. From a musical point of view this situation is boring and alienating. This re-minted avant-garde music world is no different from other market exchanges, except that here one is buying the ideology that the end is idealized Art or expression, and not profit and personal advancement. Whatever means are necessary is subordinated to that supremely valid end, which is seen as vaguely an alternative to the dirty world of capitalism, hierarchy, repression--and to political conflict. An artist is on the right side, liberal, tolerant, etc. almost by definition, without lifting a finger to confront what everyone knows to be exploitative and unjust.

To many this is very seductive, not only as a role in relation to the world but in relation to one’s own artistic activity. It is indeed very unusual for a performer not to be enchanted when receiving attention from a consuming public or disappointed when that is lacking. A public is a condensed, singular entity, as opposed to multiple listeners, who may or may not “buy” what they are hearing; it is no wonder the former is preferred. Similar with written criticism; the performer is thrilled with a complimentary review, regardless of its lack of literary value or insight, criticism that could be very useful to the player. Today the ideology of Art reigns supreme, including the belief that the best rises to the top and is recognized and rewarded almost without hesitation. “Obscure outsider” is only a stepping-stone to the media success story we can read in the small avant-garde music press (Signal to Noise, The Wire) just as we find in mainstream magazines. The story of the unacknowledged and only posthumously recognized artist is a thing of the past; the acknowledged front-runners today are considered comparable to the geniuses that the past suppressed. In the internet age what deserving art could ever remain unheralded? This is parallel to the ideology that we (on the “left”) are at least in the process of uncovering all the oppressed in the world and are finally giving them their due, if only by publicizing them. In fact the Art world of publicity and promotion is as self-congratulatory as the entertainment industry that it seeks to distinguish itself from; its small scale seems to belie this, yet only reinforces the notion that the elite stands for something better. We can have our cake (the artist who suffers nobly from low pay) and eat it too (we are accepted in our lifetime). This validates those most favored in the hierarchy as well as those struggling upwards for recognition. It satisfies the desire to have one’s self-esteem mirrored in the world, where profession, skill, and class (musician as a worker bonded with other workers, for instance) has been replaced by one’s ability to intuit and match what the market calls for. The art world is the triumph of the same neo-liberal capitalism that artists would generally be horrified to find themselves schmoozing with.

I wish to distance myself from this, and that means distance from my own petty struggles to be included and accepted, my competitive resentments. I want my artistic ups and downs to be truly my own and not allied to what the marketplace offers me. In practical terms, pulling back from the business means I will have to minimize my aid to other musicians (mostly Europeans, who get little response when they write directly to American promoters unless they are highly visible); to stop planning grandiose tours in Europe and instead depend on my partners to do the work; to cease soliciting gigs as a daily and continuous activity. I will lose the pleasure of being considered one of the best tour organizers around, of having something to point to that validates me as a musician. I must not respond to the next great playing experience with someone by saying, “we should do a tour!”. I will have to hold back, which is not in my nature to do!

Improvisation, unlike composition, is dependent on actually playing before and with others. So I might lose a lot of what I love to do, the intensity of new musical discovery, of searching new routes of expression and influence. I might also lose the surreptitious pride I have in being something of an “international” musician, and whatever other promotional label that might be applied to me (the "Johnny Appleseed of improvised music" has served me quite well!). But I expect such a retreat, however limited, to open up a space in myself that puts me in touch with the world once again without the mediation of role or job, a place of no importance. Importance is always comparative, a social and market factor, but a player’s true, personal relation to what he or she does musically always has another track available on which to be understood. My purpose now would be such self-understanding.

This shift away from the music scene brings me closer to my self, my history of self-questioning and openness to change, which goes back to my early teenage years. It is a history of engagement followed by pulling back, spiraling and recycling from the active to the contemplative life and back again. Actually, for about ten years, from ‘89 to ‘99 I was mostly reading, writing, painting, and thinking. Now my function must again change with the times, from full-fledged booster and participant to the sidelines. Who knows what is to be found there, even musically?

I certainly expect to continue playing and even some touring in the US. I am welcomed to play here, especially outside the large cities, and so must expend little effort, but without enough pay to bring my European partners unless they can find support on their own.

I am not looking for a rest, because I am not tired; quite the contrary, I have more real energy for my own interests as ends in themselves. My first enthusiasm is to create some open space, then watch to see what will fill it.

June-September 2008

An Avant-Garde Reborn--
Free Improvisation and the Marketplace

I recently came across something I had written twenty years ago, and it gave me a small jolt. I was asserting my interest in playing music out of my need and desire to play, and simply making my music available to others. I was scornful of those who slighted their love of music for success in the marketplace. Now, instead of pursuing that dream I see myself thoroughly wrapped up in the means to that end, and the end becoming confused with the means. Instead of a lover and creator of music there is most often the conventional career musician, filling out endless job applications--not much musical adventure in that!

     In North America at least, the late 90’s saw the beginnings of a sudden and unexpected expansion of the miniscule world of free improvisation, a resurgence after its decline in the late 80’s. Thanks to the internet and a horde of young new players, and to 90’s-style niche market diversification, a share of the "music world” was allotted the improviser, just like the big boys of jazz and pop music. Once ignored as an unkempt, uninvited guest, improv has been given a meager blessing, its legitimacy as music; the outsider has been invited in and chomps down on the meal with all the others (or at least scraps from the table). And obscurity, which had protected those who were not focused on increasing sales or audience size, became just another word for outsider status, a much coveted label.

          Improvised music depends hugely on the community of players, and it has been growing, and new venues becoming available, through people who are genuine musical enthusiasts and at the same time are attracted to career. The desire to become successful as musicians, rewarded ultimately by fame and good fortune, is as normal for young people as the avoidance of career is abnormal, a sign of laziness or perversity. Careers are booming as the market expands [note: this was written in early 2007, before the financial crash and the dimming of many career expectations]; there is hardly an unknown young player today who can’t, with a minimum of work and contacts, tour the east coast and Midwest, and even return with some pocket money. The number of new CD releases floods a decreasing market, yet the current optimism is such that few of these young musicians care that sales are virtually nil. And the openness of audiences and musicians to hearing what was previously uncategorized, not even “underground”, is genuine. Something of a public exists here, not spectating an Avant-Garde enshrined as past culture, as the 80’s began to resurrect it in museums, but desiring to be challenged by what is untested and unknown to the broader culture. It is miniscule in size, which is part of its attraction, and unpredictable where it will go. This is a basically happy and positive situation; a thousand flowers and ambitions are blooming with no end in sight—that is the period we are in.

    What can’t be overlooked, however, is the shift that has taken place in the relation of this music to the music market. Culture is constantly being turned into capital, and this is no exception, despite the poverty level rewards. Strictly as music, improvisation is an “infinite game” (the concept belongs to James P. Carse), in which the aim is to keep the game going, not to create winners and losers. This is generally what has attracted young musicians and audiences to this music at this point of our cultural history, part of its transgressive appeal. The marketplace, on the other hand, is the dominant finite game on the planet; only as it is expanding, with space for everyone and an endless level playing field, does it seem transparent. To the voracious marketplace nothing can be allowed to exist outside itself, and there is no art that cannot be judged according to its degree of public acceptance, that is, its price tag. This is, incidentally, the dream of both conservative and liberal market enthusiasts, the political spectrum few of us genuinely stand outside of today. The social condition in which we are enmeshed makes it difficult for us to play for others without subtly being turned into a market phenomenon. One is currently either a star or presumed to want to become one, no matter what one actually wants.

Improvised music has advanced from being a forgettable freak appendage to jazz to become a genre of Art, categorized under avant-garde, something to be taken seriously, subject to market categories as all culture is. This makes it difficult for us, as players, to judge what we do, what truly reaches us in our private spaces, apart from any gain it might promise. Our relation to listeners tends to be mediated by aesthetic categories, as if we were trying to create for a specialized, niche market, and this confuses our needs with others'. It is relatively easy to discern what sounds or looks good by standards collectively established, especially by a small in-group. It takes the skill of pleasing others, as we have been taught to do from earliest childhood. The effort to define and create good music, to communicate one's vision, to make a positive impact on a group, even by disturbing them--these all fall under this category of pleasing ourselves by pleasing others. To respond to positive response and avoid failure is what the market is all about, creating the symbiosis of happy consumer and happy producer. It might not produce much wealth but simply personal glory, achievement in the eyes of others, which is inseparable from our sense of what is art.

This is the wide path of the American Dream (shared of course by many who are not American), which in the past decade or two has added to it the dream to be an Artist, the profession that today seems most idealistic and innocent. Who wouldn't like to have a show or at least some scrap of themselves viewed and approved as an object by others; who doesn't want to present "their stuff" as performer, to have their own blog and myspace? Can we conceive of ourselves fully existing as persons today without something to show others? The suffering of this path is considered a worthy suffering, but it is the sacrifice of one's selfhood for the success of one's image, even the prized image of standing fiercely independent of such worldly concerns.

On the other hand one can choose to create out of the tension within oneself, to recognize doubt and weakness and failure, to place the self and its motivations inescapably at the center. This might only be glimpsed by others, and will never give them the same pleasure, if any. To know one is a self is to despair of being one; a dangerous enterprise of solitude and insecurity. “Artistic integrity”, a phrase used to sell art products, actually refers to being as alone as possible with one's judgment, without even self-righteousness as recompense, and this is rarely a pleasant situation. It denies the market interest—those who love our music, invite us to festivals, shower us with praise, buy our recordings or don’t—any say in what we do. It means to share what we create, to invite and welcome, knowing that the vast majority will be looking for tags and labels on us that attest to our value.

This is the situation we are in, the options available. Those who step beyond the local scene of friends and supporters will find themselves in the marketplace, aware of it or not, where the determining factors are trends and desired image, matched with the “givens” of the performer--ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, management skills, and personality type. Compared to the machinery of matchmaking between market and person, the actual music is of minor importance. This is the dirty secret that venue promoters, matchmakers of audience and musicians, can’t reveal. As for the musician, once aware that one is in competition with every other improviser for scarce gigs, one is under pressure to subordinate music to the effort to expand the ranks of one’s consumers and increase one’s appeal. One is often expected to choose and reject partners, make decisions about cd releases, etc. with that in mind. “Be careful who you play with”; “don’t play for the door” are normal caveats. This transforms music into a product and oneself into its producer and the entrepreneur of a business.

For myself, given that my playing grew out of political engagements in the sixties and seventies, this turning of the world has presented a dilemma. It seemed like the world was making it easier to do what I had always wanted, to share my music alongside others who were doing the same. How could I stay aloof, the "Johnny Appleseed* of free improvisation" and miss out on this resurgence of free music? So I left my obscure hole in the wall and entered the marketplace through website, extensive bio, interviews, multiple recordings and reviews, in order to engage in the work of persuasion and communication.

The problem is, those who cannot be easily matched to the market--an older white male, with no interest in playing electronics, like myself—are not going to present an attractive image, no matter whether their music is appealing or not. If I am a "legend" it is not something that attracts more people or promoters than in the past; new, truly contemporary aesthetic experience is primarily seen as territory appropriated by the young. Venues now, like the mainstream, are looking for the largest audience possible, and image is what draws people, even for the avant-garde, who claim a more advanced cultural critique. Lacking visibility and credibility, I am required to become a super-entrepreneur, spending vastly more hours organizing per gig than I ever did in the past, and far more than those who fit the profile. These are often unaware of the market as a function of their success. I don’t blame them; what musician would want to think that it is not their music alone that has opened the doors for them?

I have no regrets about my decision to become a career musician even if in practice I must yield to my own critique, and often find myself unsure how to handle the consequences. If I want to play for others and with the partners that most stimulate me then I must play the game to a great extent. Competition for venues and for desired partners is fierce, requiring tasks harmful to my well-being, including the psychic draining that comes from hesitating to tell the truth to promoters, and drawing away energy I would rather expend pleasuring myself with music. Actually making music often seems the afterthought, a surprise and occasional reward. After all, it is myself as entrepreneur, not the maker of music, who works to create the musical opportunities, bargaining with those who decide who will be allowed to play. In the process my own darkly competitive spirit is easily aroused, always ready to lash out at imagined foes, desires that humble me a regular basis. I curse myself for my fantasy as the shunned underdog, triumphing valiantly “in the end”, and for taking rejection personally.

In fact I have had some measure of success from my efforts, in conventional terms; I am occasionally invited, occasionally paid to play, and there are some who come specifically to hear me even when I play alone. In spite of the superior attraction of young musicians, I have been able to retain the same average level of audience I had in the 80’s. And to one who never cared about selling records and never wanted more than a handful of audience, this is an achieved goal. But the main benefit of my work is to have available for playing and touring almost all the players that I find who can stimulate my growth as a musician. I am free, as many of the more visible players are not, to play and record with virtually whomever I choose, and only them. Only my entrepreneurial labors, and my partners’ apparent interest to play with me for the sake of our music, could have put me in this position.

Contrary to the divisive spirit of music politics, a spirit I have often shared, I do not find anyone to blame for the emergence of improvisation as a genre on the market—not other musicians, not the world, not capitalism. I do not even feel I have betrayed myself for taking on music as a career, which surprises me. I see no dichotomy between those who effortlessly fit the needs of the marketplace and those who do not or do not care to. I do not value the music of the latter more than the former or vice versa. The legendary and current stars of improvised music desire to communicate their music just as much as those who play for only a handful, who have never drawn up a bio statement or pursued a touring schedule. We all play in a public space that unavoidably relates us to others, so on some level it pleases all of us to please others.

This is a contextual music, like all others. At times it might sound like I’m promoting the familiar myth of artistic individualism, the Self vs. the World. On the contrary, I conceive the self as seeing through ego’s desire to be ranked above and aloof from the world of others, a desire which the market easily exploits. At the depth of the self is not our separation and struggle against others but the opposite, an experience of universality that takes the form of what I would not hesitate to call beauty. We do not create beauty, it is through our life in the world that we receive it, work with it, share in it, and let it pass through us and others effortlessly. I would hope that as the ladder of the improv music world becomes more elaborated, as the star machinery that separates the worthy from the forgettable becomes more conventional and predictable, we could remember the common base of our interest in playing for beauty, for our own sake, individually and as the community of improvisers. I don’t think we should despair that improv will go the way of every other genre. We’re not there yet, but there is already a social logic at work of which we should be aware.

February 2007

[Basically this same article has been translated into French and published in the publication Improjazz, Jan. 2008 and is available here ]

Why I do this and Why it is public

A huge variety of purposes motivates the players of different musics, some hidden, some overt. Wakened from a deep sleep I might well say that I play to open the heart, mine and others in some way that joins us. As I become aware of what I just said, I want to modify and elaborate this, embarrassed and expecting misunderstanding. I could instead say that I am motivated aesthetically, which places the motivation in the mind that evaluates alternatives, and makes playing a kind of argument for a set of ideas or principles about what the content of the music should be. But in fact I am aesthetically pleased only when some break has occurred in the wall that normally stands inside me and between us. Without such walls life would not function, yet without their breaking there would be no growth of the self. This is also called love, not the sentiment of personal attachment but the deepest and original purposes we share. That is, when we make our life choices we hopefully say, this is what I love to do, and so life becomes an elaboration of that love. And, of course, also a manipulation and betrayal of it--let's not forget that!

For me, then, this is the possibility especially for the solo performance, when there is no other player to rely on; it is the opportunity, surrounded and encouraged by elements of ritual, for a mutual opening. My work, my artistic oeuvre, is not to present or represent my music to you but to progressively remove the obstacles to our full relation. For my part I must get past my own anxiety, my fears of displeasing, my embarrassment and self-consciousness in order to uncover my deepest and richest self--that is my self-opening. When I play a concert or a studio recording you are there in my mind, the one being that you are individually, as if you are the whole world. You are the one that makes my playing a public act (and more of you does not make it more public!) I am not doing this to demonstrate any principles or to gain your favor but by this self-opening to suggest a path to the recesses of your own self. This is what I really think is going on between us. I am allowing you to see, if I am able to glimpse this myself, how what seems so impossible and even disruptive to normal consciousness could be so unexpectedly simple and direct. Your part is what you bring or don't bring, whether you come to judge, to be challenged, to dismiss or applaud, or whether you come without such expectations, free to meet, to find the music as an event happening in yourself.

Spring Garden Music

essays and thoughts--jack wright

Liner notes for Up for Grabs saxophone solo SGM 12

Ears Only -- the Spring Garden Music CDR series

Letter to NoNet workshops, 2004: reductionism and free playing

free improv and the avant-garde

What do we have to do with this mess [the Iraq war]?

Where does politics meet up with our music?

Earlier writings--1983-1992

This is Music

Where does this music come from?

Circulate: Gigs and musical contacts for traveling improvisors in North America

free improvisation as a social act

Letter to Ear Magazine--early 1988

Theatre of the Moment--1988

on free improvisation