Joseph Jarman RIP....

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

"Jazz musician and composer Joseph Jarman has died. The New York chapter of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has confirmed the news on their website, stating that the avant-garde luminary passed away yesterday, January 9. He was 81 years old.

Jarman began playing music as a high schooler in Chicago, learning to play drums under Walter Dyett (whose program taught Nat King Cole, Bo Diddley, and many others). During his stint in the army, he took up saxophone and clarinet, joining Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band in the years following his discharge from the armed services. One of the first members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Jarman was also an early member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a group with whom he’d continue to play until his 1993 retirement.

A student of Buddhism, Joseph Jarman founded the Jikishinkan Aikido Dojo in Brooklyn in 1985. In the 1990s, Jarman largely retired from music to focus on his passion for Buddhism, though he would return to performing and composing by the end of the decade. - Pitchfork on line, just now.

RIP Mr Jarman.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

From "Liberation", France (Google translation)...

"The American jazzman died Wednesday at the age of 81. He was, in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, an ardent defender of the total show.

"The Art Ensemble is like a cake made from five ingredients: if you delete one, the cake does not exist anymore!" This sentence delivered by Joseph Jarman in an interview with the monthly Jazz Hot in 1978 recalls that, for the one who has just disappeared at the age of 81, the most emblematic formation of the Association For The Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) had no reason to be anything but complete. He had integrated it in 1969, following the death of two members of his own formation, and from then on, the name of the native of Pine Bluff (Arkansas) will be only associated with this "set of individualities in harmony and complete freedom, that is to say a sensibility one,in the words of a relative, Anthony Braxton (they will record together in 1971 a wonderful Together Alone ), which he had met a decade earlier at Woodrow Wilson Junior College in Chicago.

Joseph Jarman has just left the army, where he left the chopsticks for saxophone and clarinet. He will then sympathize with bassist Malachi Favors and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, two other musicians who will make the Art Ensemble. All three are close to pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, the incubator of all new ideas that will come."

Total show

Five years later, in May 1965, Jarman will be one of the twenty signatories of the original charter of the AACM, an organization that will revolutionize the world of jazz, advocating both the emancipation of all and the responsibility of each one. Jarman finds himself there all the more as he practices the theater and writes poems. This is one of the peculiarities of his first album, Song For in 1966: he declaims in a dark voice texts that recall the influence of Amiri Baraka, in a commitment that sees beyond the terms black nationalism. Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City's text is exemplary of his vision of a world where, while sharply criticizing segregation, he questions the question of power, "black or white." This line of conduct will always be the same when integrating the Art Ensemble."

[Alyn_Shipton]

A lovely man, who was most helpful when I was making the Jazz File on the Art Ensemble. Heard him play a solo set at the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago. He was also working a lot with Myra Melford around that time. There was a distillation of the series on Jazz Library in 2007 and though he's not mentioned in the billing, he appeared in it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/jazzlibrary/pip/y5pw9/ Sadly for rights reasons, not one of the Jazz Library shows that became a podcast in the R3 website archive.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I've got that "filed" in a trunk somewhere, somewhere, somewhere...will dig it out. A lot of people seemed v. moved by his passing, and the drummer Alvin Fielder, who also died last week.

[Serial_Apologist]

Which leaves Roscoe, still going, thankfully, and a vital continuing musical inheritance. Who else from that original bunch?

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Good tribute now up on Richard Williams' "Blue Moment" blog.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

From the current LRB blog (dated 28 January 19) by Adam Shatz ... the whole piece is on line:

"In Chicago after his discharge in 1958, he succumbed to the bottle and the needle, and lost his ability to speak. Hoping to recover his voice, he travelled across the States on a Greyhound bus. In spring 1959 he arrived in El Paso, a city ‘full/of dust and silence. High off – pills, smack/other deadly joys, mute, silent and noiseless.’ He ‘wandered into the white district’, where he was beaten up by a racist police officer:
‘don’t you hear us boy!’
I write on my pad ‘MUTE’ ‘I CANNOT SPEAK’
bang, against my chest, night stick
‘nigger this ain’t where you want to be,
now about three block thata way is the
nigger-wetback place.’

Next stop, Tucson, where he spent a few months recovering from depression in a veterans’ hospital. After reading The Teachings of the Buddha, he was able to speak again. When he settled in Milwaukee, he met the Japanese Zen Buddhist priest who became his lifelong teacher. ‘I give you ten thousand years and then I will kill you,’ the priest told him. ‘And I said: “OK.”’

He returned to Chicago in 1960. At the Woodrow Wilson Junior College, where ‘all areas of music were open,’ he met two of his future bandmates, Favors and the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, and joined the Experimental Band, an ensemble formed by Muhal Richard Abrams. The Experimental Band evolved into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a black musicians’ collective and school founded in 1965; Jarman was one of the twenty signatories of its charter.

He quickly distinguished himself as a saxophonist of lyricism and imagination, and as one of the AACM’s most radical innovators. In one of its first concerts, his quartet performed Imperfections in a Given Space with John Cage. Sitting at a table, Cage made sounds with erasers, paper and water, amplified with microphones, to which Jarman’s quartet replied. ‘I don’t care what you do,’ Jarman’s mother told him, ‘I hope you never play with that guy again.’ He never did – and Cage would condescendingly recall his concert with a group of unnamed ‘black musicians’ – but the experience reinforced Jarman’s decision to ‘present a total expression that an audience has to approach with greater involvement than mere listening’...."

[Serial_Apologist]

Wonderful stuff - thanks for that Bluesie.

[Ian Thumwood]

For all his avant garde posturing, John Cage was notoriously hostile towards jazz. I wasn't aware of the Jarman incident but I knew he famously ridiculed Miles Davis when he bumped in to him in an airport lounge in the 1980s. Apparently Miles made a complimentary remark about Cage's music and the feeling was not mutual with the composer allegedly ridiculing Miles' dress sense and wig.

Cage disliked improvisation and I believe changed is opinion towards jazz as the latter became more serious. I don't think he was like Jackson Pollack and continued to appreciate more vintage styles of jazz and tended to consider the music in condescending terms.

[Serial_Apologist]

For all his avant garde posturing, John Cage was notoriously hostile towards jazz. I wasn't aware of the Jarman incident but I knew he famously ridiculed Miles Davis when he bumped in to him in an airport lounge in the 1980s. Apparently Miles made a complimentary remark about Cage's music and the feeling was not mutual with the composer allegedly ridiculing Miles' dress sense and wig.

Cage disliked improvisation and I believe changed is opinion towards jazz as the latter became more serious. I don't think he was like Jackson Pollack and continued to appreciate more vintage styles of jazz and tended to consider the music in condescending terms.

I could be misrepresenting Cage here - it's a long time since I read "Silence", his manifesto in the early '60s - but from what I remember his misgivings about jazz were twofold.

Firstly he felt, not without justification, that its practices contradicted its supposedly self-vaunted spontaneity, because it fell back on habits.

Cage was strongly influenced by the ideas of Zen Buddhism, which in the late 1950s was being presented in lectures by his friend, the British-born Alan Watts, who did more to popularise Zen than anyone, firstly in the States, and then through followers in Britain and Europe. Somewhere - I'd need to dig it out - there are accounts of discussions between Watts and Cage in which Watts put forward the view that Cage's idea of expression in all areas of life, music included, would assume totally new forms once it had rid itself of all historico-cultural "baggage". The result would be entirely new forms of music unrelated to past practices, oftenusing electronic means of sound generation. This Watts felt was a misinterpretation, pointing out not only the efficacy of long-tested practices in Zen monasteries as evidence, but also examples in Western arts and crafts promulgatory of the state of centredness that accorded with the concept of "no-mind". Interestingly if incidentally, musicians from jazz and other disciplines who went further than free jazz in the devising of ideal practicable circumstances for the creation of free, spontaneous music, have also criticised jazz as being far from the spontaneous form - the "sound of surprise", accorded it by Whitney Balliett and others - indicating that it is often full of "pointers" that make it goal-ornentated.

Secondly, Cage would probably have seen jazz as the very personnification of the elevation of the ego, in terms of its "obsession" with originality and developing a "personal voice" - the apex of the Western individualism that reproduces capitalist relations through such means of internalising them, as opposed, not to the suppression of the ego as such, (which not only mind-altering drugs, but Zen and other meditation-based spiritual pathways have been accused of), but, through "Spiritual" practices that incontrovertibly reveal the ego as illusory, seeing through the ego to understanding it as in part social construct, in part ontological paradox, and thereby being liberated from enslavement to the social and cultural memes that keep it in being.

It's interesting that a convergence, of a sort, took place in the early 1950s, between the Zen advocates of a spontaneity that placed ultimate faith in their nurturing through tested disciplines - including archery, calligraphy, swordsmanship and horticultural practices as well as musical practices of many kinds not excluding writing and following scores - when entered into in a stilled mind; and those post-war composers based in Darmstadt such as Boulez and Stockhausen, who deliberately fell on the "purity" of mathematical formularisations, as being means to free composition from the tainted baggage of all Western music aesthetics, feeling the latter to have been guilty by association in the condition of humanity that had led to WW2, Hiroshima etc. This happened when Cage visited Darmstadt and became friends with Stockhausen, Boulez and co. There are passages in "Silence" of a very high order of humour, describing conversations that enlivened the differences between these two "camps" - Cage gently chiding Stockhausen over the latter's obsession with controlling or trying to control all the elements going into musical composition to produce something of Platonic purity as symptomatic of the Western scientific mind and its mission to control the natural order by translating theoretical reductionism into actions on the natural order disregardful of their contexts, or the mutual interdependency of all natural functioning, predicting ecological disaster way ahead of their time. Cage:"Karlheinz: stop trying to push your notes around all the time!" etc.