Home
Articles
Reviews
Hot Links
About Us
|
Old Timey Avant-Garde in the New South Dynamic Systems, Free Play and Improvisation by Heather Palmer
|
|
|
I have no reservations about the value of improvisation. To me it has been the single most liberating factor of my life, socially, politically, and musically. -Tony Oxley
I play free
music because it can’t be grown out of. I change, the music changes. If
I have an intuition I can follow it. Any intuition or development that I
may have is not going to be restricted or limited by the setting within
which I operate. And that’s where the freedom lies.
Performance practices that resist systemization and frustrate expectations promote a dynamic exchange of expressive possibilities that reach across social, cultural, economic, and national borders. For example, the foundations of improvisation demand risk, trust, openness--playing from a level of consciousness removed from the purely rational and knowable. These foundations all have liberatory potential—that of co-creation with other players, with difference, with mystery. Improvisation as a practice calls us to a shared sense of community based on these qualities and challenges, a call with a particular sense of urgency given our current cultural climate in the face of globalization.
The creation of dynamic systems in independent improvisational communities helps to define spaces autonomous from exclusion and segregation. Further, the performative moments supported by these communities serve as a model for ethical relations based on the concept of improvisation as inter-subjectivity in practice. This article both theorizes and provides concrete examples of how improvisation provides this liberatory model of communication that frees up spaces for the construction of new—and more ethical--social arrangements. Ultimately, I argue that this radically communicative moment offers us a model for ethical relations based on the practice of what is called inter subjectivity--how being as a radical becoming occurs as a mutual co-arising, contingent among and between interdependents in the improvisational moment. This process occurs in both acts of willful listening and playing.
In order to concretize these concepts, I’ll briefly trace the one trajectory of the independent improvisation community as it has developed in the Southern United States, the 20-year history of the Shaking Ray Levi Society (SRLS), the South’s first non-profit 501C3 organization dedicated exclusively to promoting improvisational music through performances and educational outreach programs. The performing duo, The Shaking Rays (SRL), are the first US group to record on Incus records, the record label of British free improvisational guitarist Derek Bailey. The Society is comprised of musicians and artists who have performed and recorded with other well-known players from the improvisational community as Fred Frith, John Zorn, Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith. They have also produced shows with the likes of Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and Andrea Centazzo, just to name a few in the long list of who’s who veterans and emerging players in the free improvisational world that the Society has worked with. Conceived and led by the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based team of Dennis Palmer and Bob Stagner, the Levis use storytelling, synthesizers, samplers and percussion to achieve their distinctive sound.
Dennis Palmer and Bob Stagner at Eyedrum, Atlanta Ga 2009 (photo: LaDonna Smith) As we’ll explore, the multifaceted and incongruous history of the Shaking Ray Levi Society demonstrates that unlikely groups of performers who connect in improvisational settings open dynamic systems of communication that often overcome the reduction of the unknown to simplistic categories and concepts, even in those areas like the South that are defined by stasis and tradition.
On
Productive “Non-Knowledge” As many have pointed out, improvisation as a practice has been a critical component in artistic expression, yet it remains a controversial subject in contemporary Western music and in the academy, despite being the oldest form of musical expression. Distinctive characteristics of the practice of improvisation such as call and response, recursivity, reflexivity, feedback, and recombinant sonic explorations of elements that would not “naturally” occur together in standard musical structures, stress the fleeting and radically flexible creative moment. Such sensibilities do not necessarily lend themselves to the goals of academic knowledge and the search for foundational certainties. Essentially the job of an academic is arrest the dynamism of systems, the flux of experience, to slow it down, to categorize and define it. Thus the aims of improvisation are clearly counter to those of the academic.
Incus Records founder and legendary guitarist Derek Bailey explains this tension between the academic project and the project of improvisation: “Improvisation is always changing and adjusting, never fixed, too elusive for analysis and precise description; essentially non-academic. And more than that: any attempt to describe improvisation must be, in some respects, a misrepresentation . . . ” He then goes on, in characteristic fashion, to baldly state: “Only an academic would have the temerity to mount a theory of improvisation.”
Similarly, I’m not necessarily concerned with mounting a comprehensive theory here, but rather in exploring the sensibilities and possibilities of improvisation and the knowledge it generates. The improviser’s ability to tap into the flows of playing/sensing is a type of knowledge that is not common, a non-knowledge, a sensibility that is not expected or status-quo. As theorist Georges Bataille explains, “man only gains access to the notion which is most loaded with burning possibilities by opposing common sense.” Or perhaps opposing common sense in the pursuit of non-knowledge entails that one never knows exactly what one is doing, that one never feels at home or at ease, that one isn't seduced by the comforts of familiarity, identity, certainty, or mastery in terms of one's response, and continued responsiveness, one's openness to the body, the world, to expressive possibilities. I notice that when I forget myself as a “stable” or closed, discrete subject, as performing improvisers do, and lose myself in the materiality of sound, there is a slippage of “me” as a stable subject. This slippage also functions as a sort of sacrifice, the sacrifice of self as the singular and personal interiorized subject. This type of sacrifice is a necessary part of the practice of improvisation, and makes true communication possible as a “becoming-for-others” in the Levinasian ethical sense. For example, Bataille’s language in the following passages from Inner Experience is charged such sacrificial energy, and his prose, like much improvisation, performs what it makes explicit: Now to live signifies for you not only the flux and fleeting play of light which are united in you, but the passage of warmth or light from one being to another, from you to your fellow being or from your fellow being to you (even at the moment when you read in me the contagion of my fever which reaches you); words, books, monuments, symbols, laughter are only so many paths of this contagion, of this passage. The force of such a passage shares with good improvisation the insistence of presence that reaches outward from a place that is not interior and personal. This type of improvisation, as a streaming both outward and inward, provides a model in our ethical relationships to others. The materiality of sound as an expressive force is the passage of light from one being to another, from player to player, player to audience. The force of this communicative expression allows the passage of light to emanate along the path of contagion, to become a kind of kindling for the heat of improvisation.
Another
barrier to open and dynamic systems of communication, musical or
otherwise, is the tendency to submit the unknown to reductive and
simplistic categories and concepts. Categorization and conceptualization
rob us of the experience of “this-individual-here-and-now,” lived in
immediate shared sensuous experience. In this mode of relation,
representations of the other, or that which we do not understand, fall
immediately within a general type, an a priori idea, or an essence,
conceptually located in a greater whole structure or order. This
egocentric model ensures a relational system that is fundamentally based
on closure, exclusivity, and homogeneity. One way to avoid such
trappings is to defer our desire to know or to master the unknown.
This is a productive deferral of knowledge since, as Jacques Lacan
explains, “when we know something, we are already not conceiving
anything any longer.” So, to take a simple example of how this works, when people hear that something is from the South, or is Southern, particularly in certain circles, there is a tendency to dismiss it out of hand as quaint, regional, and perhaps even reactionary. To me, this is intellectual and ethical laziness.
The
challenge offered to us by the practice of improvisation is to risk
knowledge, what we think we know, and to open up to uncertainty—the
radical questioning of what we know. Improvisers are attuned to
these moments of what theorist Gaytri Spivak calls “productive
bafflement,” in which players
sustain sonic exploration without the goal of any final mastery.
Their interactions make us acutely aware of the tension between
uncertainty and certainty, the self and others, the known and
unknown, and what we might do in the face of this risk.
Improvisation as practice functions as a mode of inquiry that seems
both self-shattering and affirmative. The transformative potential
of such a space relies on the players’ ability to tap into these
libidinal forces and flows not fettered by precepts or prescriptive
dogmas.
One time the Shaking Ray Levis were playing at the Tin Pan Alley in New York and a highly respected fellow improviser advised them, “Now Boys, don’t go playing that hillbilly hoak-um stuff—they don’t like that up there.” Essentially, they were being asked to repress their difference from the other improvisers in the service of a closed system, which is counter to the goals of improvisation as lived practice. Counter to such reductive assumptions, improvisation offers us as a way of re-thinking terms of communication so often grounded in an ego-centrism based on the often violent repression of difference and alterity—or otherness. This type of repression can occur at an aesthetic, cultural, or material level and belies a fundamental lack of empathetic imagination. Empathy, or empathetic practice, takes an act of will and imagination, which opens up to another’s heart, if you will—whereas emotions like pity or sympathy, laudable as they may be, don’t require much—they aren’t necessarily transformative emotions, they are more passive than the active practice of empathy.
Our sense of self is, in essence, a co-creation with the public sphere, ideally, a playful improvisation with others. This is not simply about “discovering an authentic voice,” and then “finding common ground” with other players, but rather a preservation and even celebration of our radical incommensurability. As Derek Bailey explains, he looks forward to the moments when “you are taken out of yourself”--when players introduce something that so “disorients you that, for a time, which might even last a second or two, your reactions and responses are not what they normally would be.” He goes on to explain, “You can do something you didn’t realize you were capable of . . . [an example] might be the production by some member of the group of something so apt or so inappropriate that it momentarily overwhelms your sensibility—and the results of this type of thing are literally incalculable” .
One of
the incalculable results of this dynamic is that it reveals how an alien
otherness inhabits our most intimate inwardness—and it takes a de-centering
or disorienting of self to move into a new field of relations, an
empathetic extension out of the comfortable boundaries of habit. This
empathetic extension is most concretely revealed in the practice of
musical improvisation, which takes creative imagination and will, a real
opening up to a back and forth between these interior and exterior
dimensions of the self in acts of co-creation with others, including the
physical space we inhabit. The possibilities of such collaboration are
unexpected, dynamic, and arresting—for one example, the Shaking Ray
Levis’ collaborations with New York performer Shelley Hirsch, the
avant-garde
vocalist and performance artist. Her work encompasses story
telling pieces, staged performances, compositions, improvisations,
collaborations, and installations.
At a recent show in the folk-art gallery
Winder Binder, in Chattanooga, TN depicted in Figure X, Hirsch and the
Shaking Ray Levis performed, resulting in a tapestry of
“vocal-tellings” from both Hirsch and Palmer about their experience of
Southern culture against the backdrop of D. Palmer and B. Stagner’s
distinctive Southern improviser stylings. Palmer effectively describes
such vocal tellings in a recent interview with Roulette: Shelley is the damnedest best vocalist you’ll ever hear, and she is on the beam at what folks in the Ol’ Time Avant Garde call “Vocal-Tellin’” ~ Vocal-Tellin’ is ah! weaving of singing sounds that conjure up stories from a variety of real and mythical cultures. It’s always ah! real high time when we perform with her, she’s fantastic at creating space – where we “whoop it up” with a heart-felt dose of percussion, hollering & Moog synthesizer playing.
This type of play is heavily context-bound, and the aesthetics of place helps us to think of such relationships in topographical terms—locations, spaces, territory, places, because we co-create with our surroundings all the time. Although at first pass it seems contradictory to insist that a communicative or performative style grounded in a radical specificity of place in fact embraces cultural and existential difference. But groups like the Shaking Ray Levi provide a counter to homogeneous “geographies of nowhere” and the politics of dislocation. For example, I’ve heard Southern improvisers such as Davey Williams, LaDonna Smith, Bob Stagner and Dennis Palmer speak repeatedly about how the sonic interplay of specific birds of the region—the catbird, the mockingbird, the chickadee—has deeply influenced them. Dennis Palmer’s vocal style is distinctly resonant with fire and brimstone preachers of the Southern Baptist preachers he grew up with. And, of course, the baying of hillbilly hound-dogs and banjoes echoing through the Appalachians.
This type of geographical authenticity does not foreclose an openness to difference—rather, it articulates and plays with the potential of expressive forms. It is a highly evolved form of creative play with specific cultural elements, along the lines Stephen Nachmanovitch explains in Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts:
I’m concerned that writing off of a particular type of expression as somehow reactionary because it is influenced by locality and an aesthetics of place would lead to the erasure of difference, and not the openness to difference as an ethical and aesthetic imperative. Derek Bailey explains that for both idiomatic and free improvisers, the main concern is authenticity. For the idiomatic player, authenticity in terms of his relationship to his idiom; for the free improviser, the lack of a stylistic tradition with which to identify opens up the “possibility to develop and maintain a personal authenticity. To find and work with a clearly defined personal identity”. And, I would argue, to find and work with an authenticity of place as sensibility. And yet, in the current climate, and even more so, the paradox is that the more we globalize, the more homogenous and less distinct or “authentic” our relationships seem to become. And this problem with homogenization, musical or existential, directly impedes our ability to become empathetic, to develop an ethical system of relating to the other, as difficult and demanding of our will as it may be. I’m interested in how particular ways of being are valued at the expense of other ways of being and also how attention to the dynamics in the practice of improvisation might help to forge a sense of character in which the ethics of self-care is linked to the care of community. The Shaking Ray Levi Society has actualized the link between self-care and care of community in their many outreach educational programs with kids. Since 1986, they have worked with local schools, hospitals, and recreation centers in disadvantaged areas, teaching improvisational workshops, such as “The Shaking Ray Drum Work-Out” shown in Figure and most recently; they have also begun to include Moog synthesizers in their curriculum as shown in Figure. In these workshops, the students not only learn their own expressive possibilites in an environment of trust and co-creation but also the very concrete values of free play. Nachmanovitch explains the evolutionary value of such play: . . . play fosters richness of response and adaptive flexibility. This is the evolutionary value of play—play makes us flexible. By reinterpreting reality and begetting novelty, we keep from becoming rigid. Play enables us to rearrange our capacities and our very identity so that they can be used in unforeseen ways. [ ] Some of these unforeseen ways are to help students become less rigid and inflexible when dealing with their own and others’ expressive possibilities, a model of relationship that will hopefully extend beyond the improvisational moment and into their dealings with others as adults. Since the demand and obligation of globalization is to find ways of being with others without doing violence to them, it seems that improvisation’s dedication to the free play of non-egotistical desire, expression and pleasure resonates nicely with such aims. I'd like to figure out what we need to retain and what precepts need to be shattered in the service of this desire for free play. When we are challenged by new concepts—such as having unlikely combinations of players, doing festivals in odd places such as Chattanooga, Tennessee rather than, say, Atlanta or New York, or playing with the notion of an “Old Timey Avant Garde,” we take the risk of discomfort. And the value of such a challenge is to acknowledge the multiplicities of existence and the playful excess barred from closed systems—in language and in musical idioms. This play, as Nachmanovitch tell us, “ . . . fosters richness of response and adaptive flexibility. This is the evolutionary value of play—play makes us flexible. By reinterpreting reality and begetting novelty, we keep from becoming rigid. Play enables us to rearrange our capacities and our very identity so they can be used in unforeseen ways . . .” []. The beauty of such unforeseen ways of relating to difference is evident in any successful improvisation, in which the players are openly listening and relating to others, and to the other within.
The work of the Shaking Ray Levi Society in building a strong improvisational community in the South seems at first glance “improbable and absurd.” They have really blazed a trail by bringing folks like Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailey, Min Tanaka, John Zorn, Fred Frith, to an unlikely place like Chattanooga, TN, a region characterized by tradition and stasis. Yet surprisingly, they have had to work the hardest against reductive, rigid, unimaginative and really just lazy stereotypes about Southerners that deny the South’s emergent and strikingly original creativity.
There is a surprising resistance to those who challenge these stereotypes. It seems folks want to put their work in some Southern ghetto—to ghettoize, if you will, this amazingly varied and rich organization. Reactions run something like—oh, the Shaking Rays—those hillbilly improvisers, I’ve seen them once, I know their shtick, it’s very homely, quaint and regional. But they’ve also gotten another, almost opposite reaction--oh, those guys, they think they are avant-garde, what pretentious assholes.
The reactions indicate a clear double-bind playfully referenced in the concept of “Old-Timey Avant Garde in the New South.” Rigid stereotypes about the South prevent many audiences and players from thinking cease productively about the work done here. As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tells us, “When you think you know something, you cease to think about it at all” [].
For example—to think you already know everything about improvisation, the avant-garde as a critical concept, or Southern culture, might mean that you aren’t open to the work of an organization like the Shaking Ray Levi Society. It happens all the time when cultural stereotypes overshadow the work itself. Playful use of terms and sensibilities like Old Timey Avant Garde and the New South are ironic contradictions that simultaneously complicate, ridicule, preserve and transform rigid and unimaginative beliefs. The problems with reception I’m outlining here are by no means unique, and are illustrative of the problems already raised—namely, the egocentric tendency to reduce others to simplistic categories, forgoing the multiplicity of possibilities and play that such odd, improbable, and absurd concepts can open us up to.
As a fan and long-time observer of the Shaking Ray’s work, I applaud the deeply ethical and aesthetically valuable work they’ve done in such a climate. I hope their work will inspire others trying to establish such communities against difficult odds because in the current climate the paradox is that the more we globalize, the more homogenous we seem to become. And this problem with homogenization, musical or existential, directly impedes our ability to become empathetic, to develop an ethical system of relating to the other, as difficult and demanding of our will as it may be.
Time and
again, witnessing successful interactions among players improvising, I
see restrictive codes being shattered in service of this desire for this
type of ethical free play. Derek Bailey also explains that the aims of
such liberatory goals of improvisation are not concerned with assessing
if a piece of music was “good.” A more critical objective is “raising
the improvisation to a level where all players are involved equally and
inextricably in the music-making act. And the achievement of this
experience is always seen as a liberation” []. "And it is in his commitment to the maintenance of his freedom, which very often entails a sacrifice of, or a change in, his musical identity (his ‘idiom’ in fact) that the free improviser finds his authenticity. Authenticity in free playing is to be committed to the evolutionary or developmental implications of improvisation."
This type of authenticity does not close in on itself egocentrically, rather, it is placed in the service of the ethical implications of improvisation.
Improvisation as such an ethical model of communication offers us a dynamic system by providing a space to explore what the ethics scholar Emmanuel Levinas calls our “mutual lived immanence”—an empathetic extension of self in emergent moments of inter-subjective relations. Immanence means both an interiority/existence within and exteriority/being extending into all parts of the universe. And there are apparently at least three major definitions of Inter-subjectivity: 1) "a consensual validation between independent subjects via exchange of signals." 2) "a mutual engagement and participation between independent subjects, which conditions their respective experience," and 3) the one I think is most productive, “a mutual co-arising and engagement of interdependent subjects also communications and relations on both intra and inter subjective levels.”
Clearly, as I think we are all aware, our current global cultural climate poses obligations, demands, and risks so similar to the obligations, demands, and risks players experience in the improvisational moment: to live with and for difference, to put our comfortable sense of self on the line . . . to preserve and sustain diversity, and also to recognize interdependence, common interests, and what unites us as a global community, as players. Levinas also proposes an “ethics of Alterity,” which denotes the radical difference of the Other (cultural other, other players) which resists being subsumed to the same—conceptually, musically, relationally. Levinas seeks an ethic of relationship in the space between self and other that insists on difference. Along these lines, I'm interested in exploring how improvisation can offer an anodyne to the negative effects of globalization and geographies of nowhere. Improvisation in practice is simultaneously ethically open and radically local by insisting on relationality and uniqueness. The uniqueness of individual players is not erased in service of idealized universality that runs the risk of homogeneity, but rather an insistence on specificity of style that arises from politics of space, geography and culture. For example, the Shaking Rays are distinctly Southern, but Southern culture is a filter through which expressive forces flow revealing roots in a still strong oral culture of storytelling and revivals, speaking in tongues. The authenticity of such distinct flavor doesn’t foreclose the possibilities for collaboration with others, but rather opens them up. Distinct cultural features are a filter of sorts, but not the ultimate ground that limits possibilities for expression in new dimensions.
It is helpful to examine how this functions in a specific recording: take, for example, the 2005 The Gospel Record: Reference Edition, recorded with Derek Bailey, Amy Denio, and Dennis Palmer in 1999, a 14 minute release of seven traditional Southern white gospel songs and Derek’s improvisation. Because it challenged conceptual expectations of such a genre, many critics and fans were unsure how to interpret it: was it an ironic joke? a homage? a subversive satire?
Largely ignored because it was so anomalous, most critics were just baffled because there isn’t a conceptual or aesthetic precedent that it fits; many seemed suspicious it was a joke or worse, something serious. So it is radical in ways that challenge, frustrate, and invite us to commune with difference and the improbable and absurd.
I think
free improvisation as a model of interaction and relation to difference
speaks worlds to an ideal of sustaining and preserving difference
without overcoming it. Derek Bailey There has to be some degree, not just of unfamiliarity, but also a fundamental incompatibility with a partner. Otherwise, what are you improvising for? What are you improvising with or around? You've got to find somewhere you can work. If there are no difficulties, it seems to me that there is pretty much no point in playing. I find that the things that excite me are the trying to make something work. And when it does work, it is the most fantastic thing. Maybe the most obvious analogy would be the grit that produces the pearl in an oyster. Or some shit like that.
So, I ask, let's be responsible for playing with the other in "some shit like that," playing with the things that challenge us and frustrate our expectations. This respect for difference and interdependence, the creative extension of intention in empathy and deep listening is, again, quite the act of will—a relational field of play that is, like any good conversation, musical or otherwise, messy, vibrant, sometimes noisy, and yes, often improbable and absurd.
-Heather Palmer
In
Memory of the great Dennis Palmer, Chattanooga fellow
References and Notes
Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music
(Great Britain: Moorland Publishing in association
|
