GUELPH JAZZ III

Exactly twice in the past I have heard John Coltrane's Ascension twice in the same day: first when I bought the original LP -- getting to the end I said to myself, "gotta listen to this again, closely," and again when the work became available on CD with, lo and behold, a second, previously unreleased take.

But to hear Ascension twice in one day, by different groups of musicians in radically different realizations, now that was something I was looking forward to.

Before that, though, there was a staged interview with Fred Frith ranging over the length of his career. Fred would be on stage that night for the second Ascension, holding down the bass chair.

 

We were coming to the end of the colloquium, with excellent papers by, among others, Andrew Dewar and Alex Rodriguez.  The afternoon workshop featured artits from Mozambique, Norway, Austria and Canada, with Matt Brubeck hosting the event (and playing his clothes-pin cello).

The second onstage interview of the day was with the softspoken but intense Abdullah Ibrahim.  I'd run into him the night before in the hotel lobby and introduced myself, acting like the complete idiot fan -- but he was kind and gracious, as he was during his interview. The final colloquium event was the first performance of Ascension, energetically played by a large Ontario ensemble. Finally it was over to the River Run Centre for a spectacular Electric Ascension by ROVA with an enthusiastic band of friends.  ROVA had arranged for the concert to be filmed, so there were boom cameras flying around over our heads as the music filled the space of the room and of our imaginations.  Watch for the film when it's released.

and we closed the night over at the pub, wondering at all that we had seen and heard this day, wondering at what we would hear tomorrow.

Guelph Colloquium Day 2

The morning started out with a keynote address on ethics and jazz pedagogy by David Ake from the University of Nevada, Reno.  After that I caught panels on Jazz Activism, Curating Diversity and Inclusiveness and Improvised Spacemaking.  My new Italian-in-Canada friend Sara Villa gave a good talk on women Beat poets and jazz poetry, a topic much in need of such attention. David Jackson offered a presentation on Bill Dixon (one of my favorite trumpet playes of the Free Jazz era) and his "17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur."

The noon hour was given over to a workshop on the topic of one man bands,  Easy enough for a percussionist, perhaps; maybe even easy enough for a hurdy gurdy player (though who ever expected to find that instrument at a jazz festival -- rather like Rufus Harley's adoption of the bagpipes to play things like an amazing jazz version of "Eight Miles High") -- but the prize for most surprisingly fulfilling the concept of the one man band goes to Colin Stetson, who brought his bass sax from Quebec.  Rahsaan Roland Kirk had pioneered the sax player as one man band, appearing on stage wearing a whole music store hanging from his neck. Kirk would play three horns at once, in harmony, than top it with a note blown on a nose flute.  Stetson does it all with one horn and his body.  He has the entire horn miced so that he can produce a plethora of percussion effects along with making use of the sound of his breath, and he appears to be expert at circular breathing, as was Kirk. And, still in the Kirk mode, as Rahsaan would hum harmony lines over his own flute lines, Stetson mics his throat and sings along with his sax.  This would all just be show if it weren't for his remarkable musicianship and composition skills.

The second day closed with a performance by Muskox, who I would tell you reminded me of early seveties Happy The Man, if more of you outside D.C. and New York had ever heard Happy the Man.

GUELPH JAZZ FESTIVAL AND COLLOQUIUM 2012

This time the Rolling Thunder Gil Scott-Heron Review rolled into Guelph Ontario, where you will find the only jazz festival with an academic conference attached to it.  Michael New and I were the speakers, chaired by Rob Wallace.  Our panel was in the first session, and well attended, so we went into the rest of the sessions worry-free and on an up note.  I'd gotten the idea to present a Gil Scott-Heron panel here when I was in Guelph last year to be one of two keynoters along with Jayne Cortez.  That year, the outdoor portion of the festival featured a performance in tribute to Gil, so it seemed we'd find a receptive audience there in 2012, as we did.

 Later in the day, Rob Wallace teamed up with Joe Sorbara to offer a workshop on John Stevens's book of improvisation exercises.  I hadn't known anything about Stevens, so it was a revelation to hear Alan Stanbridge's intro putting Stevens in the context of British improvisation in the 60s and 70s.

 The first evening's performance was by the group Beautiful Tool (the name apparently contributed by cellist Peggy Lee's mother!).  I described their music to a friend afterwards as Norah Jones on acid.  Mary Margaret O'Hara's front woman act was, at the least, eccentric, and her singing was as beautiful as the tool of the group's name. Especially memorable was a duet featuring Peggy Lee's cello and O'Hara's singing on a radically revamped rendition of "I'm Forever Chasing Rainbows." The group's book includes many intriguing originals. I was really struck by their opening number, "When You Know Why Your're Happy," a studio version of which you can find on an earlier O'Hara CD here.

UNMITTIGATED GAUL

NEW FROM FRED WAH

Speaking of Fred Wah, the Canadian Poet Laureate has a new chapbook out from the memorably named Book Thug.  Wah's note on the text informs readers that the book grew out of a workshop titled "How to Write a Poem for the Queen." A meditation on the occasional poem by a poet who is asked to meet such an occasion . . . "Can a 'poem in honour of' engage a similar discourse to the poem simply written 'For'?"


I was born, speedy creek, below freezing
White snow and sheets
Now the prairie light so incomplete
Between two sentences

Click here for ordering and other information.

LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN

The good people at Belladonna Press provided me with a copy of this delightful book last summer just as I was heading off to the University of Kansas to teach a graduate seminar.  I took the book along with me, thinking that I should at least mention it in the course as the seminar was a study of developments in innovative African American poetry, only to find that one of the students there had already read it.  Word travels quickly in the poetry world.

I'm glad that the book has a subtitle so that people picking it up won't expect something like George Butterick's Guide to Olson's Maximus, or even just pages of glosses.  This book is not intended to fill in the background for every allusion in Muse and Drudge (but I do wish more readers of Muse & Drudge would listen to "I'm Your Puppet" by James and Bobby Purify).

That said, you can learn a great deal about individual passages of Mullen's work in the pages of this book.  Much of it is correspondence, a post-card interview stretching across a period of time, in the course of which you can follow Mullen thinking through the issues that Barbara Henning brings up.  There's also a fine introduction by Juliana Spahr.

You can find out more about this book by clicking here to visit  Belladonna Press.

 I recently visited poet/editor/publisher Susan Schultz at her home in Kane'ohe, Hawaii. That's Susan with her back turned taking a cell phone photo of a dragon fruit, and this is the very dragon fruit she is shooting. Back there in the kitchen you can see husband Bryant putting the finishing touches to a wonderful dinner.  Daughter Radhika is keeping an eye on the Olympics for us.

 I first became aware of Susan's work when I read some of her poems in journals years ago, but I think our first meeting was at a reading we did in D.C. organized by Rod Smith and company.

One of the great customs among traveling poets is the exchange of books.  I left that night with copies of two recent volumes from Susan's TinFish Press, The Revolution Happened and You Didn't Call Me, by Maged Zaher (easily one of the best titles of the year), and my friend Tim Yu's intriguing 15 Chinese Silences, without a doubt the best thing ever to come from reading Billy Collins. You can learn more about TinFish editions here.

My journey was also rewarded with a copy of Susan's own Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series, pieces composed to fit on a time card or index card (some flexibility in that form -- back when I was using index cards for lectures, I favored cards the size of a paperback book) -- including my own favorite, Susan's "George Oppen Series."

Reading so well worth a journey of a thousand miles is hard to come by.  You can find out about Susan's Memory Cards and other Singing Horse titles here.

McKayla Is Not Impressed