Alternate Narratives in Free Jazz (re: Paul Motian)

[ep1str0phy]

Please forgive the awkward title--this is really part of a conversation we've been having on the "overrated Blue Notes" thread, but these thoughts seemed like a total tangent, and they regard an issue I've been grappling with a bit lately.

I've long been fascinated by the historiography of "out" jazz, especially in terms of the last half of the 20th century. The "easy narrative" (i.e., the Burnsian conception) has it that 60's free jazz was an apoplexy of experimentation that held questionable long-term value--and it's common knowledge that many conservative scholars of the music have dismissed post-free developments (e.g., the AACM--especially Anthony Braxton) as exceedingly abstract and more akin to European New Music than anything jazz related.

I feel as if these blanket dismissals of the jazz avant-garde are ultimately contrivances of convenience. This is not because said criticisms lack some germ of truth--though this is an entirely different topic that has been covered elsewhere on this board. It's rather that these gross dismissals ignore the interstitial relationships between musicians who are revered as exponents of the jazz mainstream and the more "hardcore" elements of free music.

I'm thinking especially about a musician I've been listening to almost exclusively in the past couple of weeks: Paul Motian. Motian has been contentious on these boards (I believe there were even some odd suggestions of racism with regard to his hiring practices), and his technical quirks are infamous among both cognoscenti and casual players. That being said, the fact that his music has neither been fully "accepted" as part of the lexicon of (capital letter) Free Jazz is curious to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-JdKhfPu98

Motian's playing on the first Liberation Music Orchestra album operates within a sphere that encompasses both Sunny Murray's intensest coloristic playing and Rashied Ali's powerful "pan-rhythmic" accompaniment. It's mind-boggling how intense and passionately free the hookup with Charlie Haden is, and their playing behind Don Cherry's solo on this track catapults the trumpeter into a realm both earthier and more nebulous than anything that can be found on his own contemporaneous American records.

...which is why it's super curious to read Chuck Braman's interview of Paul Motian (here: http://www.chuckbraman.com/paul-motian-interview-2.html). He cites the four most important innovators of free jazz (and this is a bizarre list by any rubric--he spells the names wrong on the website) as Sunny Murray, Rashied Ali, Andrew Cyrille, and Paul Motian. Yes, you'd invariably have to add at least Milford Graves, and even if discussing "strictly" free jazz and not European free improvisation, you have to take Louis Moholo and John Stevens into account. That being said, this is maybe the first time I've heard Paul Motian mentioned in this regard--and I actually had to look up his wikipedia page to see if "avant-garde jazz" was even listed as one of his genres (it is).

It's especially bizarre if you consider that Motian continued to play very abstract music well into the 90's, when celebrated firebrands such as Archie Shepp had more or less abandoned abstract playing and even players such as Rashied and Murray became preoccupied with traditional timekeeping. This shit is super out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of_uJPpjPH4

It got me thinking that Motian is not the only example of this. Haden would never be mentioned among the vanguard of free jazz bassists were it not for his interactions with Ornette, but his playing on sides with Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, and on many of his own projects is equally out--and probably even more rhythmically freewheeling outside of the Higgins/Blackwell axis. Players of lesser stature but similar conceits--such as Ed Schuller or even Mark Helias--are seldom mentioned in the same breath as William Parker, Fred Hopkins, and other contemporaries. I've in fact heard a number of well-regarded and very accomplished free musicians shit all over Haden's playing.

I struggle with the reasoning for this, and I've come to the (half) conclusion that this has at least something to do with the insularity of experimental music and the free jazz community. (More specious, but--returning to a very contentious issue that I personally know only a little about--I think it's partially a race thing, though not on the part of the musicians themselves.) It's also, naturally, the ineffective and incomplete histories of the established jazz and free jazz vernaculars, respectively, that have yet to come to grips with the fact that yes, there was some convergent evolution in terms of Motian v. Sunny Murray, and players on both sides of the free/mainstream divide would do well to listen to both of them.

Edited September 4, 2014 by ep1str0phy

[Steve Reynolds]

Thanks for that wonderful essay

The two improvisors/musicians I know best and see the most who are, IMO, as adventurous and as against the grain/out as any "jazz" musicians I know - Tony Malaby and Mat Maneri - were both hired by Paul Motian and both play in bands that play his compositions from time to time.

Without Paul Motian, these brilliant musicians never see the Vanguard stage and both of them are eternally grateful that Paul Motian always reached out to the exciting experimental young musicians.

For me, I love his playing and I love his own music through the 70's and like much that came after.

His drumming is oblique, somewhat clunky at times, but maybe the best for me when he got up to a mid tempo rough groove. There are a few tracks on the seminal Not Two Not One disc on ECM from maybe 1998 with Paul Bley and Gary Peacock.

I was set to finally see him in January 2013 when he passes at the end of the previous year. My man Tony was to be with his band - and alas the band that replaced him was Branford's.....

[mjazzg]

Interesting thoughts indeed. Certainly I'd have to agree about Motian who is one of the free-est drummers I've heard whether he's playing Free Jazz or not. Another musician who seems similarly to be missed from the story is Jimmy Giuffre.

There are people on this board that know a lot more about this history than me, many of whom witnessed it first hand so I'll defer to them for their observations with interest

[Steve Reynolds]

Fwiw I met the fine young bassist Max Johnson in June shortly before Charlie Haden died and he was emphatic that Haden was the best bassist in his mind, bar none. What he mentioned was the "sound"

For me among those mentioned above, I prefer Helias and Schuller again because of the "sound" and they are both very advanced and precise with bow, unlike the 2 more heralded free jazz bassists.

Max Johnson has some of that precise quality in his playing with the bow as well.

[xybert]

I guess there are two things at play. I was watching an interview with Mike Patton on youtube and he was saying that he doesn't care whether people consider him a rocker or avant garde or pop or whatever; it's entirely up to the audience to decide, as far as he is concerned he is just an artist doing his thing. Increasingly i see it the same way.

It like, there are a lot of cool people in the world, and just because that group of people is cool and have their ways it doesn't mean that you cannot be cool unless you are part of that group. You can be cool and have a completely different thing going on, and some will think you are cool and some will snear at you. Just keep doing your thing and let the historians and writers do their thing, but increasingly their thing means nothing to me, other than 'hmm, that's interesting' or purely as a record of 'this guy existed and did this', it makes no difference to reality. Artists Artists Artists.

[clifford_thornton]

Motian was definitely in the scene during the 1960s; working with Paul Bley, he was part of a couple of different quartets, one with John Gilmore on tenor sax, the other with Pharoah Sanders. Motian may also have played with Albert Ayler at that time, sitting in. He even was in some of the Jazz Composers' Guild Orchestra rehearsals/concerts. Bley's music should help us dial back in to the "progressive" or "inside-outside" music of the mid-60s, as he was coming out of Parker, Powell and Ornette Coleman into a rhythmically free music with an ambiguous tonal center that still swung like mad and had a hefty blues feeling. He could play with Milford and with Motian.

The linchpin of the blend between (rather than divergence from) free music, bop, "third stream" and Blue Note progressives is Bill Dixon, who advocated for an inclusion of a variety of approaches in coffee house/loft/underground jazz during the first half of the 1960s. George Russell, Freddie Redd, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp could certainly coexist in this environment and had quite a bit to share politically, if not always aesthetically.

(IIRC Stollman first met Ayler at a Freddie Redd gig)

[Guy Berger]

Great discussion.

That version of "The Sunflower" is great; even the later stuff has outside playing - consider the version of "Drum Music" on LOST IN A DREAM (ECM, with Jason Moran and Chris Potter).

[ep1str0phy]

Artists Artists Artists.

Pretty much!

The main thing that I glossed over was Motian's seemingly total obliviousness to categorization--a characteristic shared with many of his peers in the inside/out continuum of jazz and post-jazz drummers, albeit manifested very weirdly in Motian's case. Unlike, say, Graves or even Cyrille or Moholo-Moholo, Motian's later work is all over the place in terms of both repertoire and the idiomatic nature of his projects. There are huge (macro--i.e., ensemble) differences between the On Broadway music, later iterations of the Lovano/Frisell trio, and the later work with Lee Konitz. Of course, it all sounds like Motian, but I can't think of too many heralded "old guard" musicians who played so fast and loose with genre--it's similar in that regard to Braxton, who always sounds like Braxton but often engages with different musical idioms very directly (e.g., Seven Standards (1985)).

On a more pragmatic and real level, I think that the historiographic disconnect between Motian and the avant-garde--especially post-Bley Motian, since (as Clifford notes) music like Turning Point is regularly mentioned in discussions of 60's free jazz--has to do with (a) his association with Bill Evans, which was always and inevitably going to be some of Motian's most "enduring" and "popular" music, and (b) the fact that Motian's penchant for rhythmic subtraction and silence rubs up against the post-Coltrane continuum in a really uncomfortable way.

Speaking to the latter, I always got the sense that this is why guys like Giuffre (and, to a lesser extent, Dixon, because he definitely experienced a late career resurgence) have been relegated to appendices in the Free Jazz story. Rhythmic silence and an emphasis on color over power didn't not predominate in American free music before the AACM, and it's tough to square Motian with a lineage that has come to elevate heavy players as iconology. The sort of facility conveyed by early Gary Peacock is more common in free jazz and free improv than Haden's bulky, almost introspective folkiness--save for players in a post-Jimmy Garrison lineage, since that hews more toward "big" and "brawny." One player who does share a bit with Motian--and whose playing I've always enjoyed, despite his relative obscurity--is Dixon drummer Laurence Cook, since his emphasis on shading and dynamism is pretty unusual for drummers in that continuum.

Whatever the case, I do ultimately subscribe to the notion that it's best to just "do what you do" and work it out from there--and part of what moves me so much about Motian's music is that it presents a world that absolutely benefits from an integration of "outside" musical dynamics and "inside" technical conceits. Later Motian is so shadowlike and impressionistic--it makes the music doubly profound when he bursts into an apoplexy of rhythm (that version of "Drum Music" that Guy mentions is a favorite. It's notable how many of the players in that lineage--Joey Baron, Jim Black, Tom Rainey--have come to define a very distinct but very real part of American progressive jazz.

[David Ayers]

Nice post.

[xybert]

Yes, great post. I'm a bit out of my depth, and it doesn't help that i find it really hard to gather my thoughts when it comes to stuff like this (when it comes to thinking i'm a shower singer, ya know? It's like, it sounds good and all makes sense in my head, but when it comes to getting it down for public consumption i suck) so thanks for (i think) getting the gist of what i was saying and not destroying my sloppy post.

This is actually a really interesting topic for me, and i wrote a long post yesterday but ended up not posting as i kept second guessing myself. I think what i mainly want to express is that I think Paul Motian is awesome, and does he really need to fit in to the Free Jazz narrative? And that brings me to the point about the narrative seeming to be not only "this is how it happened and who was important" but by extension "this is who was and is hip." And that's where i've gotten to the point where as i'm so massively out of step with the narrative in terms of who is hip and who isn't that it's like... i'm happy for the narrative to exist but it has no power over me.

[Leeway]

A very interesting and thoughtful OP. I guess my reservations about the OP and followup is that I'm not prepared to grant Motian superiority let alone supremacy either as a drummer or as a jazz leader. Nor am I convinced that some hybrid form of composed and improv music is necessarily superior either form alone.

But I suppose my biggest reservation is how this "alternative narrative" seems to break down along race lines. It's been said that the story of America is the story of the color line, and certainly the story of jazz is the story of the color line. And in the OP we seem to have a new development story (myth?) led by another white hero and his descendants, while on the less-favored side of the line remain many of the progenitors, innovators and deep spirits of the music, who turn our to be AFrican-American. think we've seen this story before. The OP makes a glancing reference to race matters in the last paragraph of the OP, but then shies away from it on a lack of knowledge. I think any such critique needs to address that more clearly and more directly.

[clifford_thornton]

ep1str0phy definitely knows his stuff, and is no stranger to "race matters." Just FYI, not trying to be snarky.

[AllenLowe]

only thing I will say on this:

race is significant but primarily, in regards to what Leeway says 2 posts up, IMHO, because of the dichotomy largely created by white liberal critics, not the musicians or the music. It's that old bug authenticity, and it leads those critics to create false distinctions that lay along racial lines; not saying that musicians are not aware of these distinctions, only that the true dynamic, as observed by fellow jazz players, has little or no relationship to the dynamic as understood by those white liberals.

beyond this, I don't see this as creating a white hero myth; I see this as the problem that the jazz world - including critics - has in accepting, in an orderly way, musicians who do not fit into direct categories, either by style or race; I have seen this in some of my own experience; the 'outside' musicians think I'm too conservative, and the 'inside' players are unsettled (with exceptions in both camps, of course). On the critical/racal side, lets face it; if my blues CD had been put out by a 55 year old African American saxophonist, it would have been hailed in the national press as a profound 'return to roots.' They love those angles.

So this may be some of what creates the critical ambiguities about Motian. Because ultimately musicians are not, by and large, any more anylitical than critics. And they often have their heads up each other butts.

Edited September 8, 2014 by AllenLowe

[Leeway]

ep1str0phy definitely knows his stuff, and is no stranger to "race matters." Just FYI, not trying to be snarky.

Yes, I do get that, but I still think the theory is dangerously flawed, and that it creates a race issue (or at least the appearance of one) that cannot be so easily put aside or ignored. Some might find the "alternative narrative" convincing, or at least consoling, but I don't include myself in that camp for reasons I stated in my previous post. My concern here is to make known a concern about the OP's thesis, and its implications.

[JSngry]

Rhythmic silence and an emphasis on color over power didn't not predominate in American free music before the AACM, and it's tough to square Motian with a lineage that has come to elevate heavy players as iconology.

Hello Ran Blake...

This can get "racial", but in my experiences and reflections on same, it's not about race strictly as skin color as much as it is race/skin color and the "Survival Impulse" that gets developed as a result. When one has survial in the fullest forefront of one's instincts, one tends to not value the pervieved "passive" qualities of life in general, because passivity can well get you killed. Literally. If there is blame to be found in learning that lesson, I can't find it.

Of course, people who have the luxury/random acquisition/learned option of the ability to not worry too much about what happens when you don't do something, much less developing what you don't do into your mechanism of what you do do, they may well see it differently, as well they should. Becuase they can. Again, no blame in that that I can see.

Of course, it's much more complex/diffused than all that, but I don't have the longpost in me this evening. Suffice it to say that the best way to move forward is to just do it, and that looking for answers can end up in either finding excuses or clearing a path. Or both. Or neither.

Hoping, but not expecting, to live long enough to see history be repeated (or if you like, "made") as a result of forgetting it, not of remembering it. Or even better, remebering it but not getting tripped up by it. Over, not through.

That's freedom...and probably delusional;.

Oh well.

[AllenLowe]

there are no implications, racially speaking, that I see in his initial thread - except those I just mentioned. It's mistaken to see this whole thing as a search for a white hope - it's simply an inquiry about reality.

[clifford_thornton]

Right, that was my feeling as well.

Barry Altschul is another example, though busier in his approach. Aldo Romano was also coming to NYC a fair amount during the mid-60s and also derived a lot from Graves and Murray (I think he's less involved with the avant-garde today than Altschul is).

[ep1str0phy]

Whoa--I was sick for about a week and didn't have it in me for anything other than getting out of bed, rehearsing, and playing a show. This is some intense conversation.

I'm doubly glad that Allen commented on this, because (weirdly, maybe) as a musician of color who has deep associations with a long lineage of Asian American and Black American creative music, I don't feel very qualified to comment on behalf of the very curious and (I think) legitimately marginal role of the "white man in free jazz." Full disclosure: I'm full-blooded Filipino, and the minute I made overtures to any sort of ethnic narrative in my own work, everything I did became political in some way, shape or form. As long as there's a thread of civilized discussion here--which is something I legitimately appreciate about this board--I'm going to go ahead and push harder on this.

Part of what sparked this dialogue for me was reading the liner notes to the Motian ECM Old and New Masters box, where Ethan Iverson says, "There have been many great free drummers, but I believe Motian might have been the greatest." This is absolutely the first and only time I've heard someone say this, but considering Motian's association with the hugely influential Jarrett American Quartet, the Frisell/Lovano trio, Liberation Music Orchestra, etc. etc., a case can be made for his status as premier player in free music--I have not seen this argument anywhere in any of the crucial texts on American free jazz. Guys like Clifford are honestly way more on the ball about this than I am, but I feel like I've read a lot about this music, and considering the fact that people have made comparable arguments about Graves, Ed Blackwell, and so on, I genuinely wonder why so few people have gone to bat for Motian within the framework of classic "free jazz."

The idea of an "alternative narrative" has nothing to do with setting up some sort of pyramidal structure with Motian at the top, in no small part because the continuum of free music is way too heterogeneous to hold up any one player as the "irrefutable" truth of the music--there are guys like Louis Moholo-Moholo, Sunny Murray, Andrew Cyrille, Rashied Ali, Milford Graves, Steve McCall, Paul Lytton, John Stevens, etc. etc. who have vital and profoundly personal approaches to percussion that only rarely cross spheres with what Motian was doing. Rather, I hope there's a discussion in there about why some very legitimate contributions by white musicians at the dawn of free jazz are so commonly disregarded or swept under the rug--not just Motian, but also Blake, Burton Greene, maybe Marc Levin (I have no concept of his actual ethnic background), Bill Folwell, Steve Tintweiss, and even some well-regarded musicians like Karl Berger, Perry Robinson, Michael Mantler, Steve Swallow, David Izenzon, Altschul, Haden, and the Bleys (who are often acknowledged in the narrative of jazz in general but whose places in the canon of classic free jazz are still sort of vague).

Part of me feels like this has to do with how the narrative of free jazz has evolved into discussion of what may be post-hoc described as a monochromatic genre of fire breathers, fundamentally related to Civil Rights on the earlier end and Black Nationalism and cooperative protest on the latter tip. It's interesting to me how we've reached a point where the vital and extraordinarily important "jazz acronym" organizations of the 60's onward (the AACM, BAG, UGMAA, and so on) are experiencing a renaissance of interest, whereas we still have very minimal critical and theoretical study of either, say, Burton Greene's music or the Jazz Composers Guild. (I happen to know someone who has done comprehensive research on the latter, but the fact that we got an entire BAG book before a readily available paper on the JCG is pretty boggling to me.)

Bill Dixon factors into this to, considered he predated Braxton as a cerebral, almost scientific icon of the Black avant-garde. Dixon received far less critical and commercial acknowledgement in his lifetime than the league of fire music tenors that emerged in roughly the same time period, and I feel as if this may be in part due to the fact that it's difficult to square a lot of Dixon's music with the idea of "free jazz as a music of struggle." The fact that Dixon's music has far fewer explicit spiritual or ethnocentric overtones than, say, Shepp or even Ayler makes it asynchronous with either historical narratives of free jazz as "freedom music" or, using a very disagreeable and denigrating term, "Angry Black Music."

And so music like Dixon's, like Motian's, is inconvenient--it has little or nothing to do with the Burnsian historical narrative that posits 60's free jazz as some entropic entity, and it's way too early (in a chronological sense) to lump together with the music of the AACM as jazz that simply "got to European." In a more charged sense, I feel like the contemporary fetishization of free jazz as this bloody, heaving music of ethnic masculinity may have had something to do with why we can simultaneously celebrate Shepp's rather conservative modern day music while having relatively little to say about Motian's still bizarre and constantly evolving later work.

I'd lastly like to qualify this by saying that I don't mean to devalue free jazz that is either prototypical "fire music" or explicitly ethnic--for one thing, I play this music on a regular basis and can see firsthand its very real value within communities of color and as an alternative to the jazz mainstream--but I think that there's a place for conversation about why white experimentalism is treated as if it is "outside" the technical and theoretical narrative of classic free jazz, considering it is very much a part of that story.

Edited September 16, 2014 by ep1str0phy

[alankin]

Thanks for the post.

[clifford_thornton]

Thanks Karl.

Dixon and the Guild really haven't been talked about enough. To paraphrase things Bill said to me, he felt that black musicians/critics thought of him as "too white" but being a black musician necessarily meant that he was always going to be too "black" for the white/European avant-garde. Of course being a painter, professor and writer - while I think it made him a more compelling human being - actually seemed to confuse people and work against him critically. Bummer. Ben Young's Dixonia book is essential reading if you want to follow that thread.

Part of the challenge with the guild had to do with its diversity - figures allied with Black Nationalism (Shepp and Ra - Ra in perhaps a different way) rubbing elbows with white musicians like the Bleys, Greene, Mantler, Rudd, Jon Winter, etc. At the time, as Bill has said, "the white musicians weren't faring much better than the black musicians" - but no matter, being white certainly gave you a pass with club owners and record labels that being black did not allow.

The guild wasn't unimportant at the time, and musicians who were NOT part of it have tried to lay claim to being in it - Milford, Marion Brown, Rashied Ali - there definitely was and still is some cache to being part of that first wave. At least George Lewis acknowledges it as being fundamental to the creation of the AACM (my understanding was that Bill at least was rather guarded about the AACM and BAG in terms of their aesthetic and political viability, if not outright dismissive).

I don't know Levin's lineage but I believe he's Jewish. Nice man, fascinating artist. He lives in Malaysia where he has worked as a psychologist for many years. Among Bill's other students at the time of the late '60s, also white (and also obscure), were saxophonist/clarinetist Ed Curran, drummer Cleve (Robert Frank) Pozar, and trumpeter Ric Colbeck. Colbeck was British, Pozar is from Minnesota and I think Curran is a New Yorker, though he now lives out West. You might also recognize Pozar's name from his fantastic recordings with Bob James, when he was in his "free" period. I'll try to think of more to add to this. These guys all came into Bill's orbit after the dissolution of the Guild.

Edited September 16, 2014 by clifford_thornton

[Leeway]

I'm glad you feel better. I'm also glad you have pulled in the boundaries, if only a little, of your original argument. I still have considerable reservations about your argument though.

Reading it reminded me of the arguments about "reverse racism" and "affirmative action." You say: "I hope there's a discussion in there about why some very legitimate contributions by white musicians at the dawn of free jazz are so commonly disregarded or swept under the rug..." Sounds terribly conspiratorial. Who swept? And what rug? All the musicians you cite seem well-known to me. But you seem to think that white musicians were actually the oppressed class. Can't agree with you there.

You say: "It's interesting to me how we've reached a point where the vital and extraordinarily important "jazz acronym" organizations of the 60's onward (the AACM, BAG, UGMAA, and so on) are experiencing a renaissance of interest, whereas we still have very minimal critical and theoretical study of either, say, Burton Greene's music or the Jazz Composers Guild. (I happen to know someone who has done comprehensive research on the latter, but the fact that we got an entire BAG book before a readily available paper on the JCG is pretty boggling to me.)"

So once again the story of poor white musicians while powerful monolithic black forces claim eminence? Your thesis seems white victimization.

Your analysis of Dixon versus Shepp is cringe-worthy. From what I read, you are arguing that Dixon was "less black" than Shepp so was outside the free jazz mainstream. In my view, that's an inherently racist analysis.

It just seems to me you're trying to rewrite the history of the music by applying white-out. While your follow-up post tries to obscure the race implications, they are still there.

I've intended to ignore this comment by Allen Lowe, but since I'm at it:

Lowe said: "On the critical/racal side, lets face it; if my blues CD had been put out by a 55 year old African American saxophonist, it would have been hailed in the national press as a profound 'return to roots.'

To me that's the single most racist sentence I have read on the Board in a long time.

[clifford_thornton]

Your analysis of Dixon versus Shepp is cringe-worthy. From what I read, you are arguing that Dixon was "less black" than Shepp so was outside the free jazz mainstream. In my view, that's an inherently racist analysis.

Uh, I knew Bill Dixon quite well and can verify that he felt this way. Spent HOURS talking with him about this.

I.e. people "viewed" him as "less black," not that he was...

[Leeway]

Your analysis of Dixon versus Shepp is cringe-worthy. From what I read, you are arguing that Dixon was "less black" than Shepp so was outside the free jazz mainstream. In my view, that's an inherently racist analysis.

Uh, I knew Bill Dixon quite well and can verify that he felt this way. Spent HOURS talking with him about this.

I.e. people "viewed" him as "less black," not that he was...

That's my point: people viewed him as "less black," but he did not himself. Yet here, that argument is resurrected by the OP by opposing him to Archie Shepp and noting "Dixon's music has far fewer explicit spiritual or ethnocentric overtones." That seems to be the argument Dixon was pushing back against.

[clifford_thornton]

If you've spent any time with the volatile political-critical environment of the 1960s, you'll know that white musicians were often viewed as inauthentic thieves in many circles. Some might have been. Many were not. Does one have to be Black to play Black Music? This is something Bill and others raised often at the critical, musical and educational level (Bill founded and taught in the Black Music Division at Bennington College). I think it's interesting food for thought, and being reactionary doesn't really help us learn more.

I can tell you for a fact that people like Burton Greene got the short end of the stick from Black critics for being a white, Jewish free improviser and thus "inauthentic." Sure, he was valued as a collaborator by Black musicians like Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Alan Silva, Rashied Ali and Henry Grimes, but on the political end that did not matter. "The Burton Greene Affair" from DownBeat still haunts him, and that's probably the most significant US press he received in the first twenty years of his career. Not that I don't understand the reasoning behind it from a critical "line in the sand" perspective, but it's important to consider.

I can also tell you that Gordon Emmanuel, a white vibraphonist who was raised by a Black family in South Chicago, was barred from the AACM in the late '60s once the organization structured itself as a Black music/arts collective. Emmanuel identified as socioeconomically coming from the same place, but on the surface (racially) that wasn't what the organization wanted/needed at the time. It created a fairly big rift, as a matter of fact.

There have been theses on the Guild but no definitive text and with a number of the participants gone, it's hard to say whether that'll happen.

The Guild's members were Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Paul and Carla Bley, Jon Winter, Burton Greene, Mike Mantler, John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, and overtures were made to Coltrane and Ornette. I thought Silva was a member but there's been some lack of clarity on that. The Guild sponsored concerts for which not all of the performers were members, but I think one performer had to be associated with the Guild.

Your analysis of Dixon versus Shepp is cringe-worthy. From what I read, you are arguing that Dixon was "less black" than Shepp so was outside the free jazz mainstream. In my view, that's an inherently racist analysis.

Uh, I knew Bill Dixon quite well and can verify that he felt this way. Spent HOURS talking with him about this.

I.e. people "viewed" him as "less black," not that he was...

That's my point: people viewed him as "less black," but he did not himself. Yet here, that argument is resurrected by the OP by opposing him to Archie Shepp and noting "Dixon's music has far fewer explicit spiritual or ethnocentric overtones." That seems to be the argument Dixon was pushing back against.

more complicated than that. I have some thoughts that are hard to organize while at work, so will try to post them later.

[colinmce]

As usual, I am a bit slow and the conversation has progressed, but even so:

I was halfway feeling, or at least understanding, Leeway's critique of Karl's original post. But the most recent elaboration squared me fully with what Karl is intending to get at and I'm on board. Without sounding too blunt about it, I think Tony is being overly reactionary. I don't think Karl is arguing what you think he is, or with the force you're implying. I don't see the ethos of "white victimization" anywhere in that post that puts it on par with the "Crow-Jim"/Stan Kenton pity party of the 50s. The point he's making-- and Bill Dixon is a perfect locus-- is that critics, the vast majority of them white, have (as per usual) constructed an absolutist, essentialist narrative that paints black and white over gray. I get that this is touchy, uncomfortable territory, but no less than Dixon and Anthony Braxton have spoken at great length about this, and both have been truly victimized by these narratives. Both have different artistic as well as tempermental orientations, but Braxton has said outright that the important contributions of white musicians like Marsh and Giuffre were under-recognized, and that history was in effect distorted. It is, of course, very easy to backslide into a less-nuanced interpretation that comes closer to what Leeway is seeing, but I don't get that at all from what Karl wrote. But they very fact that these things happened is worth noting. And I don't think this has to take away from the incredibly real strain of Black Arts that runs through the 1960s NYC avant garde scene. But we have to make something of Paul Bley, Burton Greene, Joseph Scianni, David Izenon, Paul Motian, Michael Mantler, Barry Altschul, Steve Lacy, et al. Tony accuses Karl of trying to apply "white-out", but that suggests erasing Black artists in favor of white, putting the onus of innovation on white players rather than Black. This is not the same as simply taking them into account. We have to pay heed to Bill Dixon and Anthony Braxton on this point.

In sum, I think the problem being addressed is, in the end, a typical and predictable failure by critics to give due dilligence to the full story, which is always complex, in favor of a simpler suggestion. This is, as far as I can tell, the thrust of what Karl is getting at. Once we stray from this path and get to the personal experiences of individual white artists, especially vis-a-vis black artists, then I think this whole conversation gets a little more muddled. Strike that-- infinitely more muddled. The personal is always political, so it's hard to separate the two-- just ask AB-- but it can be done to some degree as far as this conversation goes. So I'll leave it saying I agree wholeheartedly that the typical narrative of free jazz in the US from the 50s up to the mid/late-60s AACM era is sorely lacking. (Post AACM, into the advent of European Free is, IMO, a whole other book).

Edited September 16, 2014 by colinmce