Moten/Lopez/Cleaver

Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver have been working together for some years as a duo making innovative improvised music. Both are established figures in the New York Jazz scene. On this album they've come together with American poet Fred Moten. It was recorded during the pandemic, in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion.

Combining poetry with jazz goes back a long way. The idea, however, while retaining curiosity value, has never become mainstream. The Beats and, later, the Black Arts Movement tried to develop it. Some of the results have become iconic. This album, which has been compared to the work of Amiri Bakara with the New York Art Quartet, may well be up there with the best.

The problem – according to detractors – is that one is never sure what to concentrate on, the music or the poetry. This is a mistake, I think. As TS Eliot said, 'genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.' One can think of the poet in this context as just another musician, only a musician playing with words. If one is paying the right kind of attention to the poetry, there is no need to be preoccupied with trying to understand it. The words work like notes, the phrases like musical phrases. Just listen and you'll find out what you need to know. This doesn't mean the meaning of the words will be lost on you: Moten is poet who writes powerfully about the politics of being black in the USA, of how – referencing the death of George Floyd – “somebody black and poor can't breathe”. The title of the first poem/track on the album tells you what it's standing up against: “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me”.

Moten's poetry is ideal for this kind of project. Its phrases live for themselves, like the latest thought of an improvising musician. Derek Bailey once said of improvisation words to the effect that improvised music was like music without memory. This quality of living in the moment, shared by Moten's poetry – on one level – and musical improvisation, is what I think makes this album work so well.

I don't think it'll be forgotten in a hurry. I don't buy much vinyl but I'm tempted to buy it for that reason - and because, if I do, I can sit it next to my Iskra 1903 double LP (1972), which it reminds me of, possibly because that, too, hit me between the eyes when I first heard it. Bailey, Rutherford and Guy released that album of improvised music fifty years ago, in a different country, in a different context. Hopefully people will still be listening to Moten/López/Cleaver fifty years from now, too.

.​..and I think the little house knew something about it; don't you?

I always keep a look out for any new releases by Jumble Hole Clough. If you don't know it, it's the brainchild of Colin Robinson of Big Block 454, which describes itself as 'making exploratory, highly individual music that encompasses rock, funk, electronica, folk music, Dadaist collage and much more besides.' Jumble Hole Clough seems to have grown out of this. It started out, as Robinson puts it, 'to produce music influenced by the landscape, industrial remains and experiences around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire'. I would respectfully suggest that although JHC retains some of the eldritch oddity that I associate with that neck of the woods (it was once my stamping ground, too), it has, over the 39 albums now produced under the name, gone beyond it.

Of the 38 albums produced prior to this one it's hard to single out a favourite but mine is probably Answers on a Postcard. They're all more than worth a listen.

.​..and I think the little house knew something about it; don't you? is something of a departure – but less of one than might appear at first glance. It's a collection of generative music, an approach which has certainly not openly figured in JHC's music so far. As Robinson explains, 'you set up a system and some rules... A variety of probability and aleatoric functions are used, such as Turing Machines and nested Bernoulli gates. The probability process means that the music gradually changes over time.' Reading this, it was hard not to think of the work of Brian Eno. However, I was reminded of something someone once said of John Cage, that however much he used processes and aleatoric techniques to put distance between himself and his music, it still, somehow, managed to sound like John Cage. For all the processes, this album still manages to sound like Jumble Hole Clough - but in new and unexpected ways. The quirky, eldritch quality still shines through.

Jumble Hole Clough -as Cage once said of Satie- is indispensable.

The Day I Ran Away

One day in 1966 I ran away from boarding school. I was eight at the time. It was the beginning of my second term. I'd been sent there with the best of intentions. I'd been having problems at my previous school and my parents were at their wits' end. In their position, had I been able to afford it, I may well have done the same thing.

The first term had not been easy but my teachers had reassured my parents that things would get better. All boys take time to settle in, they said, some longer than others. To the adults in my life, things, understandably, didn't seem to be as bad as they really were. One had to accept that teachers knew what they were doing. What the teachers played down, I suspect, was the way violence was normalised inside that institution. For myself, as soon as I got back, I realised that the coming term was going to be at least as awful as the one before. For ten weeks, I'd been beaten at least four times a week and, at the end of term, the headmaster told me to remind him next term that he 'owed me a whopping'. Needless to say, when I returned, I didn't.

One morning, soon after the start of term, me and another boy who'd also had enough just walked off. I remember it vividly. It's a slide-show I can replay in my head at will. Chapel, which was held every morning, after breakfast, was over. We were walking down past the sports fields to the block where the classrooms were. As I remember it, he and I were talking about how fed up we both were. We'd never really spoken to each other before that day or been particularly friendly, but that morning we found common cause. Perhaps we gave each other the strength we needed to do what needed to be done. As we passed the rugby pitch we simply turned off the path and walked across it towards the fields and woods beyond. We had no plan. Like so many great rebellions, however many times it'd been dreamt of, when it actually happened it was a spontaneous act. I remember the other boys stood and watched us, jeering and laughing at us as we walked away. Looking back now it strikes me as curious that they thought they had something to laugh about. After all, they were the ones left behind on the inside of a violent neglectful institution, looking out. We were the ones on the outside, walking away. We were the lucky ones.

We just kept walking. We held out for a whole day. The school, as I remember it, was in the middle of nowhere. We made our way from field to field, furtively crossing the occasional road when we had to. I remember once peeping round a hedge to see a queue of police cars waiting at a crossroads, all, we presumed, out looking for us. Looking back it was probably one of the most exciting days of my life. We were wanted men. As we travelled we made a vague plan for the immediate future. The other boy knew the area slightly as his family home was not that far away. We decided to head for it as best we could but I've no idea whether or not we were ever actually travelling in anything like the right direction. He said we'd get a telling off if we made it but, knowing his mum, she'd at least give us each a plate of beans on toast. As the day wore on, we began to get hungry. The thought of that beans on toast spurred us on. I have a vague memory of coming across an apple tree at one point and taking a few bites from a sour apple, but I might've imagined this.

By the evening, it was obvious we were getting nowhere. We didn't relish the thought of spending the night out of doors, or huddled in the corner of some farm building. Not only would it be cold, scary and uncomfortable but it would raise the whole episode to a different level. We decided to give ourselves up. The next road we came to, we simply waited on the verge for the next passing police car.

I have no memory of the journey back. What I didn't know at the time was that the police had been to the school for another reason that day, to arrest the headmaster for taking indecent photographs of children. When we got back I did get the sense, though, as you do sometimes as a child, that the adults around us were preoccupied with important things we knew nothing about. I remember hearing low voices involved in earnest conversations, too far away to hear what was being said.

We were taken to the headmaster's study and given a stern lecture. Apparently, our crime was so grave that, for once, we were not going to be beaten. We were to be suspended. We should understand that this was the height of indignity, far worse than six of the best. Our parents were coming to collect us. I remember feeling disappointed that we'd not been expelled. Perhaps, I thought, we should've stayed out all night after all. But that was only a passing thought. It was immediately followed by the realisation that, although I was only suspended, my parents would surely never send me back. All through the lecture I remember standing there, staring impassively at the adult in front of me while feeling, inside, a sense of complete triumph, a feeling which he, had he been able to read my mind, would've described as insolence. I viewed him with complete contempt. We had broken the rules, yes - his rules. He viewed what we did as misbehaviour. In fact, looking back, I find it hard to think of a day during my childhood when I behaved better, right down to our decision not to worry our parents unduly by staying out all night.

We were sent to collect our trunks from the cellar. My father came to collect me. I remember the tug I felt when the boy I'd run away with was whisked away. I knew at that moment I'd never see him again. As I expected, I never went back.

There was no barbed-wire fence around the school. There didn't need to be. Most boys more-or-less happily adapted to the regime of cod-tradition, bells, beatings and rough team games. There were prizes to be won, one could become a good cricketer, even captain of the First XI. One could make a life for oneself there. Those who did, erected barbed-wire fences in their minds and rarely if ever felt a desire to cut through them.

My time at that school and especially the events of that day certainly played a part in shaping my life and, in particular, my political opinions. As an adult, I've always found complacency tiresome. I tend to feel more at home among misfits. I'm still intrigued by how people develop loyalty to institutions that abuse them. For example, I don't understand how anyone can feel patriotic towards a country that lets its most vulnerable citizens suffer, die needlessly, or sleep on the streets. When I look at the world's political institutions, authority figures and the public's response to them, I'm often reminded of Tom Waits' observation that we're 'monkeys with money and guns.' And then there's the business of having to choose between breaking the rules and doing the right thing. As people often point out, those who shielded Anne Frank and her family were breaking the law. Those who killed them were upholding it. When Rosa Parks, quite rightly, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person she, too, was breaking the law. I've come to the conclusion that doing the right thing trumps the rules. The more people think for themselves and set off across the rugby pitch the better.

Looking back, I'm not sure what memories from that day have left the deepest impression on me. Was it the impotent finger-wagging of the authority figures? Was it the jeering of the boys we left behind? Neither. I think, on reflection, it was the epiphanic moment, after we'd given ourselves up, when I realised I was free. There was a downside, though. I'd made myself into an outsider. As Camus said: The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I” but it is not his true “I”. His main business is to find his way back to himself.

I can relate to that. For years afterwards I felt lost for words. I was painfully shy in adult company, never sure of what I should say. I didn't make friends easily, although the next school I went to provided me with the safe, caring environment I needed. They also taught me to play an instrument and began turning me into a musician. In retrospect, it's obvious that Camus' project, the journey back, the search for my true “I”, was my project back then. Come to think of it, I'm still working on it.

The New Space Race

When we marvel at the latest shots of the Rings of Saturn or the surface of Mars, we're not unlike the Victorian public marvelling at the Great Exhibition, dreaming of a technically-advanced future that lay just round the corner. They couldn't know that the industrial revolution that gave rise to the exhibition would also give rise to two world wars. Like the visitors to the exhibition, what we're shown is the positive side: the wonder, the courage, the ingenuity.

Until now, that is. These days, billionaires seem to be blasting off into space all over the place. The mainstream media sell it as just the sort of thing these larger-than-life characters get up to. Space tourism, it seems, is about to kick off. Something else to add to the bucket-list - if you can afford it.

All very jolly. Okay, it's a bit controversial but not that much. If you want to do business in space it's the obvious place to start. I must admit, seeing Branson and Bezos in their spaceships I couldn't help but be reminded of Clive Sinclair driving around in his C-5. But, in a way, that's what it's all about: setting up a new sideshow in the society of the spectacle.

What's not dwelt on is that the Martian landscapes we see when landers and orbiters relay pictures back to earth could well be turned into quarries worked by robot bulldozers or even test ranges for new WMDs. Space is a free-marketeer's dream. If past experience is anything to go on, when we discover a pristine environment we almost invariably go on to trash it. Once you're up there there's going to be no original people to displace, fewer competitors, no 'red tape' and no inconvenient public to protest against what you're doing. Elon Musk's SpaceX has already said that it doesn't intend to recognise international law on Mars.

Here on earth, as things stand, it's becoming obvious that it's impossible to deal with the climate crisis and continue with a growth based economy. Space, though, is potentially lucrative. Jeff Bezos has said, 'We need to take all the heavy industry, all polluting industry and move it into space, and keep earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.' Behind this positive spin there is the reality that money is power. Putting aside the green-wash, in space, no government can tell you what to do. In the not-too-distant future it may be more easy for entrepreneurs to make their money in space, money that will serve to maintain into the future the power they currently enjoy here on earth. They see space as their best chance to continue with business as usual.

This is the new space race. It has nothing to do with the limits of exploration and everything to do with establishing economic control of the solar system's resources. Again, in the not-to-distant future, we might even see private robot-wars in space as corporations try to stake their claims to mineral-rights, planets and asteroids. I don't think this is far-fetched. After all, in the eighteenth century, the East India Company came to rule large areas of India and exercise military power there.

I'm sure the entrepreneurs see all this very clearly. There's nothing to stop them. And the winners will control the earth.

All at Once

Seventeen years ago I took part in an Arts Council project that culminated in a local art exhibition. I'd created a series of short pieces of electronic music which I paired with digitally created pictures. These were based on photographs I'd been taking of my own shadow, which I'd taken outside in the area around where we live. Looking back, it's very like things I've been doing recently, being confined to our local neighbourhood as we have been for the last year.

The other day I came across a track I'd created in the years after the project. It clearly belonged to it but since the moment had passed, I'd left it unfinished. Yesterday I finished it off and uploaded it to YouTube. For the visual element, I added the images from the original project.

The title of the track refers to a Kenneth Patchen picture-poem, All at Once Is What Eternity Is. 

I then added it to the Bandcamp album, SHADES, created of music from the original project.

The Wood

Over the last few days I've been walking up to the small wood at the top of the hill when I've had an hour or two here and there to spare, making this. 

 

The Window

I went for a walk across the fields the other day to a ruined barn. There's a small,  stone window in the side of it that always reminds me of the dark openings in neolithic long barrows.  It's obviously a very modern structure by comparison but the darkness is the same.  I took my tablet with me and recorded some footage.