Presenter Abstracts & Bios

Daphne Brooks

Liner Notes for the Hurricane: Crate Digging for Porgy and Bess

This lecture explores the discursive discography of key albums in the Porgy and Bess archive—from early Broadway recordings through landmark works by Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey and others. A close-reading of the legacy of liner notes for various interpretations of Porgy and Bess, this lecture argues, recovers the complex and often contradictory intellectual history of one of the world’s most infamous operas.

Ashley Kahn

Ashley Kahn is a Grammy-winning American music historian, author, professor and producer. He teaches at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music, co-wrote Carlos Santana’s award-winning autobiography The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (Little, Brown, 2014), and is a producer of Carlos (2023), the documentary on Carlos Santana (Imagine Documentaries/Sony Pictures Classics.) He has written books on two legendary recordings: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and A Love Supreme by John Coltrane, and one on a legendary record label: The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records. His most recent book is George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters. He also edited Rolling Stone: The Seventies, a 70-essay overview of that pivotal decade.

Kahn, who was recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Jazz Journalists  Association, broke into the music business as a tour manager and music festival producer, has held a variety of positions in radio, television, and online businesses. As a journalist, his byline has appeared in many publications and websites, including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The New Statesman, and others, and his writing has garnered four ASCAP/Deems Taylor awards, and four Grammy nominations. In 2015, he was awarded a Grammy for his album notes to the John Coltrane release Offering: Live at Temple University, and in 2017, he received the Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing from the Jazz Journalists Association.

Kahn has worked on many music documentaries in a variety of roles: as producer/director—Carlos; Kind of Blue: Made in Heaven for Sony Music (2005)—as a consultant/writer—Netflix’s Chasing Trane (2016) and Stanley Nelson’s documentary on Miles Davis for PBS (2018)—and as on-screen interviewee: PBS’s Soundbreaking: Stories from the  Cutting Edge of Recorded Music (2016); BBC’s 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz (2009); and many others.

Liner Noting in the Time of Streaming

Thoughts from a career-long engagement with the craft of liner-note writing, of adding story and context to recorded music, and how to find happiness in an age when physical formats are fading.

Darius Jones

Darius Jones has created a recognizable voice as a critically acclaimed saxophonist and composer by embracing individuality and innovation in the tradition of Black music. Jones has been awarded the Van Lier Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Artist-in-Residence and commission, Western Front residency and commission, French-American Jazz Exchange Award, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation Award, and Fromm Music Foundation commission from Harvard University. Jones has received acclaim for not only his studio albums featuring music and images evocative of Black Futurism, but also for his commissioned work as a composer throughout the United States and Canada. Jones’ fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s̶ suite but sacred) co-released on Northern Spy and We Jazz Records was listed as #3 in The Wire‘s Top 50 Albums of 2023 and among NPR‘s 50 Best Albums of 2023. Jones was the 2022 MATA Festival artist in residence and festival curator, where he premiered Colored School No. 3 (Extra Credit), and a JJA Jazz Awards finalist nominee for Alto Saxophonist of the Year in 2022. Jones has collaborated with Gerald Cleaver, Oliver Lake, William Parker, Andrew Cyrille, Craig Taborn, Wet Ink Ensemble, Jason Moran, Trevor Dunn, Dave Burrell, Eric Revis, Matthew Shipp, Marshall Allen, Nasheet Waits, Branford Marsalis, Travis Laplante, Fay Victor, Cooper-Moore, Matana Roberts, JD Allen, Nicole Mitchell, Georgia Ann Muldrow, International Contemporary Ensemble and many more.

Jones has been featured in The Wire, Pitchfork, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and DownBeat, among others.

Harmony Holiday

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday is the daughter of Northern Soul singer/songwriter Jimmy Holiday. Her father died when she was five, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. Holiday earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of Negro League Baseball (2011), winner of the Fence Books Motherwell Prize; Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2013), a “dos-a-dos” book featuring poetry, letters, and essays; and Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2017), which she is turning into an afroballet. She is currently working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln and an epic called M a a f A (Fence, 2020), an exploration of reparations and the body.
 
Holiday’s work tests the limits of language and memory, pushing at the elasticity of both poems and prose. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted of Negro League Baseball, “Chaotic and mesmerizing, with sex, violence, music, history and semantics moving at breakneck speed, Holiday’s debut is a rare event: in prose poems and in isolated lines, her long unruly sentences take in a mother’s funeral, a tumultuous love affair, Mississippi family roots, Northern branches, and the partly improvised, often confrontational styles of advanced African-American music from be-bop and post-bop to hip-hop and whatever lies beyond.” She is currently working on a book of poems and lyric essays on Reparations and the body, as well as a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln.

Holiday has taught dance at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and is the founder of Mythscience, an arts collective devoted to cross-disciplinary work that helps artists re-engage with their bodies and the physical world in this so-called digital age, and the Afrosonics archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics. In 2013 she was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles.

Big Ideas in Improvisation: Darius Jones and Harmony Holiday in Conversation

This annual series, presented by IICSI and Musagetes, showcases provocative thinkers and creative practitioners in a public forum as they share ideas and insights about the power, expansive force, and urgency of improvisation. These public lectures, aimed at a general audience, encourage us to consider how the artistic practices of improvisation developed by creative practitioners can translate into broader spheres of influence and action. Improvisational practices can put pressure on unquestioned assumptions, help us discover new ways of being, and put into action potential solutions to some of our most pressing contemporary global challenges. The Big Ideas in Improvisation lecture series is free and open to all.

Jesse Stewart

Jesse Stewart is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist dedicated to reimagining the spaces between artistic disciplines. He has performed and recorded with musical luminaries including Pauline Oliveros, William Parker, Hamid Drake, Joe McPhee, Douglas Ewart, Michael Snow,and  Stretch Orchestra (with Kevin Breit, Matt Brubeck).

Jim Davies

Jim Davies is a calligrapher and theatrical improvisor. He works as a professor of cognitive science at Carleton University. His book Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe explores why we find art compelling. 

Jamaal Amir Akbari

Jamaal Amir Akbari is an award-winning poet, arts educator, creative entrepreneur, and performance artist. He was selected to be Ottawa’s first English Poet Laureate after a 27-year hiatus in which the position had gone unfilled. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours including the 2016 Ontario Arts Educator Award.

Musicalligraphics

Combining improvised music, poetry, and calligraphy, Musicalligraphics is an interdisciplinary research-creation project by Jesse Stewart, Jim Davies, and Jamaal Amir Akbari.

DJ Zahra

Zahra Shakti is an experience…  An artist, performer, award-winning DJ, and radio personality. Zahra lights up every room with her radiant stage presence, creative energy, and live performances. As a DJ and on the stage, she has opened for musical legends such as Cimafunk, Ladysmith Black Mombazo, Natasha Diggs, DJ Scratch, and more. A record digger by nature, Zahra’s sets take audiences for a vivid and unpredictable journey through music, building from her deep knowledge in soul, funk, disco, house, hip-hop, and music from around the world. Her weekly stream Lunar Rotations garners an international audience, connecting her to many collaborations and performances with the likes of New York’s legendary Soul In The Horn, Amsterdam’s Lumberjacks in Hell label, Montreal’s music staple WEFUNK Radio, Toronto’s GoodBeat! and much more.

Instagram: @Zahra.Shakti

Twitch: Twitch.tv/ZahraShakti

Website: ZahraHabib.ca

Daphne Brooks’ Liner Notes for the Revolution: A Multimodal Experience

Daphne Brooks’ Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound examines the overlooked contributions of Black women in the history of popular music. She highlights how these women have shaped musical genres and cultural landscapes through their creative and intellectual labor. Intertwining historical analysis with personal narrative, Brooks advocates for a re-evaluation of the cultural and academic recognition of Black women’s artistic contributions.

In this exhibit, we invite you to immerse yourself in the sites and sounds of key artists celebrated in this profound work. It features projections of liner notes and images celebrated in the book, underscored by musical selections by DJ Zahra. 

This multimodal experience is co-curated by jashen edwards, Jordan Zalis, and DJ Zahra.

hakosalo_tuohino

hakosalo_tuohino duo takes the sonic properties of kantele still many steps further: from the acoustic sound immersive soundscapes are built in intuitive and open-ended fashion. With both performers having varied musical backgrounds in folk, classical, jazz, and electronic music, the duo is able to perform without preset plans regarding musical form and microscale decisions concerning sound material. Kantele-playing is traditionally improvised, and an interesting confluence to freeform electroacoustic live performance can easily be made.

The duo builds their soundscapes up from live kantele sound, which is the only sound source, and usually performs with specialized surround sound systems to help the performers and audience to reach their immersive sonic goals. The duo was founded in January 2024 in Oulu, Finland, and has already performed both nationally and internationally (for example in Vilnius, Lithuania and Sapporo, Japan).

hakosalo_tuohino duo is comprised of Osmo Hakosalo and Jussi Tuohino.

Osmo Hakosalo is a violinist, kantele player and a founding member of the folk music group Rällä and works as a Project Manager in Oulu University of Applied Sciences’ Center for Arts Innovation.

Jussi Tuohino is a sound artist and also works as a Senior Lecturer of music technology in Oulu University of Applied Sciences and advances the creation and listening opportunities of spatial sound in Oulu.

Liner Notes as Score for Improvised Music

How do we notate and talk about music? In hakosalo_tuohino there is no sheet music. In the old literature kantele improvisational music is generally described as other states of consciousness, methods similar to deep listening and ancient stories about understanding the phenomena of music. Music in general is understood as an always present ether, and instruments act as vehicles to travel to and back from music. Music is not made, rather than it is a place to be in. In the old texts you can find expressions such as hiljainen haltioituminen (silent enlightenment) or oman mahdin soitto (playing one’s own might), which try to explain the passing event or moment of being in music.

While electronic music often searches trance-like states via repetition, loud low frequencies and physical movement, the academic field of electroacoustic music has focused more on listening to the intricate dynamic present in everyday and abstract sounds. By combining the rituals from both worlds, the optimal balance of immersion in sound and arousing of the mind can be found.

In this context all the writings, descriptions and old archive texts act as liner notes for the music and performances. They allow the freedom of expression, which is vital to produce these musical states described above. One interesting liner note we use can be found from the first 10 seconds when our web page is opened (hakosalotuohino.com).

In the famous and often discussed essay “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction,” Peggy Phelan writes: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” (Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: The politics of performance. Routledge.)

What role do liner notes have in live performance, then? Should they in fact be something, which greatly affects the performance before it even takes place? We propose an experiment: As in our webpage text, we will first generate the liner notes (or the score) by agreeing on a set of words/narrative with the audience. (In current times we don’t usually get to dictate the rules, as they are at the same time given and hidden from us, as in ready-made algorithms.) We’ll then base our duo’s performance on the created narrative. After the experiment, we will discuss the experience with the audience and generate a new set of words and repeat the experiment. In this way the performance and liner notes will sum up to a feedback loop, in which both the music and text will feed each other in an organic way.

Bob Wiseman

Bob Wiseman is a multiple Juno award recipient, Governor General Media Arts Nominee and bearer of the Key to Bruno, Saskatchewan. His book Music Lessons on ECW Press, was listed by the Globe and Mail as a top ten music book (2020). Much of his music streams on Spotify and he has produced short films and videos to accompany his live performances. Currently completing a PhD at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation and starring in the comedy Lessons in Obscurity. Some career highlights – being kissed by Odetta, acting with Meryl Streep, added to David Byrne’s influential playlist and head-butted by Wesley Willis. He believes Sun Ra is in fact from Saturn.

Improvising Melodicism

In the course of my dedication and engagement with freely improvised music, a significant revelation occurred during a period of listening to works of Johann Sebastian Bach. This moment of epiphany profoundly altered my understanding of melodic composition, akin to hearing “sheets of sound” in his compositions—an intricate layering of melodic ideas that resonated with my own improvisational experiences. I recognized that Bach, along with his contemporaries, employed a form of improvisation within their compositions that mirrored my own experiences playing freely improvised music. Although this realization might not initially seem remarkable, it was a pivotal insight for me. Consequently, I embarked on an exploration to integrate the principles and techniques acquired through my practice into the creation of new compositions, specifically focusing on producing melodies that eschew the dissonances typically prevalent in my prior work.

Fan Wu

Fan Wu is a writer, performer, and curator. He is the curator for the Western & World Symposium, which seeks to bring the worldhoods of minoritarian music traditions together against Westernized global “world music” designations. His debut album, Touch the Ten Thousand Things Without Dependency (2023), is a drone/poetry album that explores how Daoist cosmology is brought into multidisciplinary improvisation. He has written a set of poem liner notes for Prince Nifty’s (Matt Smith) album Interplanetary Machines, a choral reflection of Carl Jung’s work on U.F.O.s, published with Second Spring.

Writing Workshop: Liner Note Poesis

“Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts, fears and emotions – time – all related … all made from one … all made in one. Blessed be His name. Thought waves – heat waves – all vibrations – all paths lead to God. Thank you God.” – John Coltrane, A Love Supreme liner notes

“However, the Lord and Julian Cope himself know how we need, need, need, the NME to embrace the unifying hands of our children across this big blue marble and NIRVANA’s tarty musical career. So please bless us again — we’ll forever feed off of your high-calorie boggy turbinates.” – Nirvana, Incesticide liner notes

What is the liner note when it’s not “about” music? For Cobain, it’s an excoriating screed against the meat-grinder music industry, the cry of a wounded teen soul at odds with the world; for Coltrane, it’s a prayer of gratitude, a sounding of the immanence of interconnectedness not afraid to name God. Both these (in)famous examples of liner notes invoke spirit not just through semantics but through tone and form. Here, the liner note refuses the logics of aboutness – describing, reviewing, praising, explaining – and becomes, as if by necessity, a parallel expression that re-activates the music’s energy, this time in the form of written poetry.

In their spirit, this writing workshop on the poesis of liner notes will be comprised of several phases:

– A short lyric talk on poetry in liner notes, moving through the above examples and other touchstone examples along with my own experiences as a musician-poet, discussing the diversity of approaches and the ambiguous relationships between liner notes and albums

– A listening-writing session where participants listen to the same piece(s) of music and have the option to free-write or to draw a prompt based on historical forms of liner notes

– A collective reading-writing session where participants may read their writing while I compose their writing into a new piece, in live time

I hope that this workshop opens the potential for free improvisation that exists in a room of people experiencing music together, each tapping into non-logocentric linguistic resources (of affect, spirit, subconscious flows) to all compose a set of new liner notes for the music we hear together. It’s important for me to make this workshop relevant across different backgrounds, including musicians, scholars, and a general interest audience.

Kevin McNeilly

Kevin McNeilly is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, a co-editor of Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, and a researcher with Improvising Futures and with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. A book of poems about early jazz trumpet players, Embouchure, is published by Nightwood Editions. He teaches and writes about contemporary poetics, media aesthetics, comics and listening. Audio, video and more can be found through his websites, kevinmcneilly.ca and kevinmcneilly.com, or on his Bandcamp page, kevinmcneilly.bandcamp.com.

Kevin McNeilly is also part of Panel 6: Liner Notes as a Way of Knowing: Poetry and Pedagogy

Eric Lewis

Eric Lewis is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, where he is also the Director of the Laboratory of Urban Culture. He was Director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI). His research focuses on the philosophy of improvised arts; his other interests include the philosophy of music and various interdisciplinary approaches to art, culture, and society. He is also an active improviser on brass and electronics.

Charity Marsh

Research reports from the eight IICSI sites will be presented as a series of liner notes in this creative roundtable discussion.

Alexandria Smith

Praised by The New York Times for her “appealingly melancholic sound” and “entertaining array of distortion effects,” Alexandria Smith is a multimedia artist, audio engineer, scholar, trumpeter, and educator who enjoys working at the intersection of all these disciplines. Her research interests focus on integrating feminist methods of making and scholarship into music technology. To explore how electronic music is embodied through practice, she has been experimenting with ways to integrate biofeedback training and sensor observation into her music and designing interactive media applications and environments for performers. Her recently engineered recording (recording, mix, and mastering engineer), “Tines of Change” by Mark Dresser has been acclaimed as “splendidly engineered” by DownBeat Magazine.

Alexandria is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

It’s All in the Mix

One day, I walked by a conference room at the University of California, San Diego, and saw Mark Dresser trying out a new bass. Kent McLagan, the engineer/luthier who designed it, was there doing some tweaks and taking notes for the next phase. They were working on building an affordable bass from sustainable wood 1 that could continue to incorporate Dresser’s novel additions to the instrument. The design included features that he has used for many years, such as pickups embedded in the fingerboard. There was also a new addition of metal tines that can be mounted below the bridge; inspired by the sonic characteristics of the African mbira and stroked rods designed by the late composer and close collaborator of Dresser, Robert Erickson. As a recording engineer, I immediately knew that I wanted to record the instrument and explore methods and techniques for recording in a way that could make the listener feel as if they were hearing it from a performer’s perspective.

Dresser “thinks of the bass as an orchestra.” To realize the sonic pallet he has developed through decades of musical research on novel techniques for the bass, McLagan had to build an instrument that had all the necessary affordances for Mark to realize the sound he was hearing. I had to approach tracking his bass as if it were an orchestra. All these collaborative elements needed to come together to make his recent critically acclaimed album, “Tines of Change (2023).”

To acknowledge this synergy of collaborations old and new, he specified the labor, i.e., his performance and research, McLagan’s instrument design, and my recording approach in the liner notes. Instead of writing a narrative about each piece/improvisation, he outlined the collaborative process and the materiality of the tools. He continued to foreground the work of McLagan and myself in interviews, writing, and presentation of the work. This led to acknowledgment of our individual contributions and collaboration by the press and listeners. Perhaps methods of acknowledging labor and talking about the critical making process (Ratto, 2011), can continue to be another compelling approach to engaging Listeners.

In this context, “It’s All in the Mix” discusses how liner notes can expand the listener’s perspective by acknowledging the various streams of labor that go into making a recording.

Part 1: One of the things liner notes can do is talk about the technical aspects of a recording in a way that allows the listener to understand the tracking and editing process of improvised music, an aspect of the realization process that can be seen as “taboo” in improvised music. In this part of the presentation, I will discuss other works such as Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (1970) that incorporated novel audio engineering practices that do not get credited in the liner notes vs. Ones that do and open up this approach for discussion at the end.

Part 2: Discuss the recording process of “Tines for Change” with listening examples and photos of the session. I will also include interviews with McLagan and Dresser to provide a further context of the work.

Dana Reason

Dana Reason is a Canadian-born composer, improviser, recording artist, and educator. Reason composed the feature film musical score for the documentary “The Wonder and The Worry” directed by David Baker (2024). In 2023, she co-produced Cinema’s First Nasty Women Compilation Soundtrack Vol. 1 (Kino) with Grammy award winning musician, founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, Terri Lyne Carrington. This soundtrack features 18+ diverse female composers written for the 4 DVD (Cinema’s First Nasty Women) of 99 archival films (2022). Reason was also the arranger for the award-winning Reconstruction: America After the Civil War Series, produced by Henry Louis Gates (PBS, 2019). Additionally, Reason has written music for two feature length archival films including: Back to God’s Country (Kino) and The Snowbird (Kino) as well as music for several shorts produced by Kino Lorber and has recorded over 20 commercially released music projects for labels including: Mode Records, Wide Hive Records, Red Toucan, Deep Listening, 482 Music, Circumvention, and Kino Lorber. In addition to composing, music supervising and performing, Reason writes about creative intercultural music practices, feminist improvisatory and sound studies practices, and has either published or been reviewed by the following: Routledge, New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Jazz Studies Online, University of Chicago Press, National Geographic, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Wesleyan University Press, Downbeat, Jazziz, All Music, and Musicworks. Reason is currently an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Music at Oregon State University.

CALL and (HER) Response: Improvisation and The Myth of Absence

Gayle Young

Over many years Gayle Young has combined music creation with writing about music. Her biography of Hugh Le Caine, The Sackbut Blues (1989), presents the story of early innovation in electronic music. Topics of articles she prepared for Musicworks Magazine include the design and construction her instruments (the Columbine and Amaranth) and an interview with James Tenney, both published in 1978. Young edited Musicworks between 1988 and 2009.

Young’s music includes unusual tunings, recordings of environmental sound filtered through tuned resonators, and compositions that encourage performers to interpret the sounds of spoken language in response to the rhythms and textures of Young’s depictions of everyday experience.

Words About Music: The Musicworks Magazine Cassette Recordings

Members of the New Music Co-op, based in Toronto, began publishing Musicworks Magazine in 1978, in association with A-Space and the Music Gallery. The New Music Co-op performed music by its members and by other composers of experimental music, playing at the new music ensembles.

From its earliest issues Musicworks was a collective undertaking, led by Tina Pearson as editor. Articles emphasized discussion with artists, covering a wide variety of practices in sound. Musicworks published one of the first (likely the first) discussions of Inuit music in an interview that appeared early in 1983, “Musicworks 23: Music Of The Inuit And Other Voices.” The music was discussed and described by the Inuit artists in their own words. (Oral history was still out of style in the academies.) Significantly, their music was featured in the first issue that included a cassette. Musicworks was the first publication to include a recording with every issue, combining the experience of sound with written discussion of the music. Many listeners hearing Inuit music for the first time did so in the cultural context provided by the voices of the artists in print format.

Some Musicworks articles include several pages of text and graphic illustration. With this format the magazine positioned itself to expand discussion of the music beyond a standard liner note. In this presentation I will discuss key articles that illustrate the interconnections between sound and text.

Howard Mandel

Howard Mandel is a writer, author (Future Jazz, Oxford University Press, 1999; Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz, Routledge, 2007), editor (The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues, Flame Tree/Billboard Books, 2008, as well as other books and periodicals), audio producer (including National Pubic Radio arts reporter 1985- 2019), adjunct faculty (at New York University, 1987 – 2014, where he designed curriculum and regularly taught six courses on music); New School Jazz Program, 2010-11, “Writing for Musicians”), and president of the Jazz Journalists Association since 1994. He has lectured at Dartmouth College, University of Chicago, University of Jordan (Amman), and under U.S. State Department auspices throughout Armenia and Kyiv (2003).

Now living in his hometown Chicago after more than 30 years in New York City, Mandel first engaged with jazz seriously as a grammar school student of piano, high school student of flute, student of sax, electronic music, liberal arts and writing at Syracuse University (B.A, 1972) and as a clerk at the Jazz Record Mart (intermittently, 1967-73). He was a copy-clerk, editorial assistant, overnight reviewer and feature writer for the Chicago Daily News (1974-1977), associate editor of DownBeat (1978-1981), contributing editor of Ear, editor of Newport Jazz Festival program guides, editor-in-chief of Rhythm Music magazine, and during a 40-year freelance career has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, Chicago Reader, music publications including Billboard, Guitar World, Sound Output, Jazziz and many others, besides being a columnist for The Wire (UK), New York Press, Swing Journal and Jazz Life (Japan), Bravo! (Brazil), and Rytmi (Finland). He has annotated dozens of recordings of jazz, improvised music, blues and even gamelan.

Mandel has a robust web presence as editor of JJANews.org, JJAJazzAwards.org, the blogs ArtsJournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz and Mandel’s Media Diet on Substack, host of video webinars (archived at YouTube) and podcasts (The Buzz, 2023 – present). He independently produced the radio series “Jazz Chicago” (WBEZ, 1979 – 81), “Improvisers Unlimited” (NPR Satellite Program, 1993) and “Jazz Chicago, Revisited” (WDCB, 2022), the recordings The Sunny Side of the Street (pianist Erwin Helfer and band, Flying Fish, 1980), Maybe I’ll Cry (vocalist Mama Stella Yancy, Red Beans Records 1981), Breaking the Sound Barrier (trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, CIAA,1982), One for Now (pianist Myra Melford, Nisus 1986), Future Jazz (Knitting Factory, 1999), and has produced conference programming, media summits, international Awards campaigns and gala events at major New York City venues as well as online for the Jazz Journalists Association since 1994.

Writing and Improvising: The Engagement

I’ve written liner notes for albums of jazz and improvised music (as well as other genres or styles) for 40 years, and would like to lay bare my process for doing so in a 15-minute colloquium presentation, using as examples between three and six 30-second audio samples of three albums I annotated in 2023, along with the resulting texts.

I’ll provide and discuss my annotations of Licentia Poetica by the quartet of vocalist Elma Kais, guitarist Knox Chandler, bassist Daigo Nakai and percussionist Klaus Kugel; Evocation by the drummer Andrew Cyrille, multi-instrumentalist Elliot Sharp and synthesist Richard Teitelbaum, and Catching Ghosts by reedist Peter Brotzmann, guimbre-player Majid Bekkas and drummer Hamid Drake. Using music clips to demonstrate issues I contended with and inspiration they provided, I’ll highlight the diverse challenges of these projects and some strategies I’ve employed as a writer to meet their requirements – fulfilling the needs of the artists, producer/label, readers (both at point-of-sale and as an enduringly useful reference) and my own desire for self-expressive by incorporating interviews, research, reportage, conjecture, surmise, interpretation, story-telling and prosody into text anchored by the music itself.

I contend that while the liner note writer must be responsible to the talents and egos of participating musicians, the commercial practicalities of record labels and readers’ expectations about the essay form, the writer’s primary focus should be on conveying through words the sense and substance of recorded music to readers who will be able to access the sound itself. The writer’s mission, in my opinion, is to produce work that is enlightening about someone else’s work in an entirely different medium, in a way that is complementary yet also can stand on its own.

Information, description, empathetic and imaginative response, an understanding of the context from which the music springs and into which it emerges must be addressed in an easily comprehensible narrative arc that adheres (usually) to formal constraints of language and compression. For the writer, the music is at least a prompt, at best an inspiration which stirs a new exploration of the related questions underlying topics writers-on-musical improvisation return to repeatedly: How does it work? Why do we want it? What does it “mean” (or convey)? Is our response subjective, or can we identify inherent qualities of these sounds? If the latter, what do they reflect to us about ourselves?

From first listening to turning in a final draft and invoice, the liner note writer consciously contends with those issues, and more. Success in writing such a text has modest financial compensation, but one reward that writers really treasure: Do it well, and if the music is timeless the writing has a good shot at living on without it, everlasting.

Jeff Albert

Jeff Albert is an Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the School of Music at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his areas of research and creative practice include improvisation and interaction, jazz performance, performance paradigms for live computer music, and audio production. He has released albums on RogueArt and Clean Feed Records, toured and recorded with Hamid Drake’s Bindu Reggaeology band, and co-led The Lucky 7s with Jeb Bishop. His 2020 record Unanimous Sources was named a top 10 jazz record of the year in the Boston Globe. In 2022, he performed on the world premieres of Mars Williams’ “Devil’s Whistle” and Ken Vandermark’s “Two Cities Large” which was commissioned by the Instigation Festival. He has performed in improvised settings with most of the improvised music practitioners in New Orleans and Chicago, as well as a number of European based artists. Jeff has given presentations at the conferences of the Society for ElectroAcoustic Music in the United States, the Symposium for Laptop Ensembles and Orchestras, the International Society for Improvised Music, the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, and the inaugural Symposium on Integrated Composition Improvisation and Technology. His article “Improvisation as Tool and Intention: Organizational Approaches in Laptop Orchestras and Their Effect on Personal Musical Practices” was published December of 2012 in Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation.

Always Read the Plaque, or at Least Some of It

I once thought liner notes should NOT be about the music itself because the listener brought meaning to the music and if they needed liner notes to get meaning from the music, then the music was not fully successful. That thinking changed completely in one moment in an art museum. I was carefully reading the cards by each piece of art and my companion was getting farther and farther ahead of me. Eventually she said, “if you have to read about it, you don’t really get it.” That’s when I realized that I had the same attitude about music, and I was wrong. The little card next to that Jackson Pollack piece opened up meaning for me in an exciting way,and I should try to do the same for my listeners.

This presentation shares examples of times when meaning has been gained (and lost) through the presence (and absence) of liner notes and other contextual materials about the music. The author’s experiences as an artist, producer, and listener guide the discussion that includes examples of liner notes written by the artist as well as notes by professional writers that have at times both helped and hindered audience understanding of the music. Additionally, the presentation will explore the question of how the artist’s intended meaning and the listener’s perceived meaning are created, and how important the alignment of the two may (or may not) be. Looking at the continuum between no information about a work, and a total explanation of the artist’s intention we will ask: How much context is too much?

Jennifer Messelink

Jennifer Messelink is a Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. She recently completed a PhD in Musicology from McGill University. While at Yale she is working on a book manuscript titled Quiet Resonance: Race, Gender, and Mood Music in Mid-century America which focuses on entanglements of race, gender, and sound technologies in the emergence of postwar instrumental mood and background music. Her publications include a keyword in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, an article in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and a forthcoming book review in the Journal of Jazz Studies. Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.

“Tinklin Treble, Rolling Bass:” Locating an Alternative Archive of Boogie-Woogie Liner Notes

The earliest liner notes can be traced to Columbia Masterworks, a classical music label that produced “albums”—cardboard sleeves that held several 78 rpm records with a booklet of program notes. These program notes were eventually pasted on the inside jacket of the record sleeve; a practice that became known as liner notes. In the early 1940s, John Hammond, Dave Dexter, and George Avakian produced 78 rpm albums of Chicago jazz and boogie-woogie with accompanying liner notes for Columbia and Decca Records. These liner notes offer a snapshot of the time-period in which a collection of white voices, following a European tradition, began to shape the historiography of jazz by emphasizing an origin story, major figures, and oppositional discourses of commercialism and authenticity (DeVeaux, 1991). Although the words of the African American musicians on these recordings such as Meade “Lux” Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Cleo Brown may not appear in the liner notes, this does not mean we cannot locate an alternative archive of boogie-woogie voices by looking at historically synchronous African American literature.

In this paper I draw from the scholarship of Daphne Brooks (2021), Brent Hayes Edwards (2017), and Shane Vogel (2018) to expand the sphere of liner notes beyond the text on record covers. I argue that paying attention to the conditions surrounding the emergence of the first liner notes on jazz albums reveals a vital historical and intellectual connection between Black musical performance and the written word. To do this I explore the boogie-woogie theme of Langston Hugues’ book of poetry Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) alongside the boogie-woogie “craze” of Carnegie Hall concerts, Café Society performances, novelty songs, and swing band recordings during the 1940s. Although Montage of a Dream Deferred is not a musical album per se— it is not a round flat record etched with soundwaves—I read Hugues’ collection as an alternative musical album. Hugues wrote a preface meant to be read as liner notes, and the sonic elements of the narrative capture a boogie-woogie soundscape of contemporaneous 1940s Harlem. Langston Hugues is famous for giving voice to the experiences of working-class Black Americans, as well as examining entanglements of European and African American cultural traditions in music. In Montage of a Dream Deferred he assembles diverse Black voices and experience in one unified work. In a similar way, boogie-woogie—a distinct style of blues piano rooted in working-class spaces of Black life during Jim Crow—can be seen as a metaphor for collectivity. The steady rhythmic ostinato of the left hand operates independently of the right hand, but together they weave a complex polyrhythmic tapestry of shared experiences and traditions. Albert Ammons once remarked that “the left hand tells the real story of boogie-woogie” (Silvester, 1988). Listening to the “boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred” in the poetry of Langston Hugues offers us alternative liner notes which speak of Black epistemologies and the struggle for racial justice that run parallel to the European tradition of program notes.

Kevin McNeilly

Kevin McNeilly is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, a co-editor of Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, and a researcher with Improvising Futures and with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. A book of poems about early jazz trumpet players, Embouchure, is published by Nightwood Editions. He teaches and writes about contemporary poetics, media aesthetics, comics and listening. Audio, video and more can be found through his websites, kevinmcneilly.ca and kevinmcneilly.com, or on his Bandcamp page, kevinmcneilly.bandcamp.com.

Reading Out Between the Line(r)s: Moor Mother’s Truth

Noise artist, improviser, and performance poet Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother has composed liner notes for three 2021 re-issues (by the boutique record label Modern Harmonic) of Nikki Giovanni’s early LPs: Truth Is on its Way (1971), Like a Ripple on a Pond (1973), and The Way I Feel (1975). “I wonder what it takes,” Moor Mother asks, “to be a poem whispering inspiration inside the ears of the world?” These sleeve notes, listening to and attending on Nikki Giovanni voicing her poetry, also offer a means of addressing Moor Mother’s own emergent and entangled poetics, which she names (with Rasheeda Phillips) Black Quantum Futurism. In Liner Notes for the Revolution (coincidentally published in the same year as these three albums are re-issued) Daphne A. Brooks asserts that “album liner notes,” as a mid-twentieth century sub-genre coupled to music advertising and promotion, a materially interstitial paratext, is “gradually transformed into a sphere that held the potential for literary and analytic experimentation”: liner notes served as a site where writers might spin complementary metanarratives and expansive discursive meditations on a sonic work in question, ideally opening up the conceptual universe of a record to listeners as they settle in to absorb its multiple layers of meaning. (6)

For Brooks, this opening up—and out—is particularly resonant for the intersectional work she traces as “Black feminist sound.” Taking a cue from Brooks, among others (including—time permitting—engagements by Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks with Black women’s vocalizing and musicking), I mean in these fifteen minutes to use Moor Mother’s sleeve notes as a means of opening our ears to her particular parrhesia, to the audible textures of her truth-telling: “the time for the truth,” as she puts it, channelling and re-making Nikki Giovanni, “has always been now right now.” This politicizing, declarative present, however, is neither transparent nor polemically direct, but inheres in a noisy collaborative dissensus (to borrow from Jacques Rancière) that wants to trouble as much as to affirm the intersubjectivity of our diverse audition, to rise together—as Moor Mother frames it—“up out of the ugly.” The second part of the presentation will elaborate on the prosody and soundscape of this dissensus, by offering brief close listenings to some of Moor Mother’s work, including her recordings “Zami” and (with the collective Irreversible Entanglements) “Nuclear War,” both of which recast the poetry of Sun Ra (and, lightly, Audre Lorde), as well as her improvised collaboration with flautist Nicole Mitchell at Le Guess Who in 2018. As artifacts of present-tense listening, Moor Mother’s in-the-moment poems emerge from and through the interstices of the music and of these precursor texts, not as commentary or elaboration so much as liner notes themselves. “It is our job as the listener,” Moor Mother writes about The Way I Feel, “to be open to all possibilities of truth and change.” That difficult and challenging openness is where her spoken truth wants to live.”

Marina Santi

Marina Santi holds a PhD in Educational Sciences and is Full Professor in Didactics and Special Education. She works in the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology at University of Padova, Italy. Her research deals with dialogue and argumentation concerning knowledge construction processes and the investigation of social interaction as cognitive potential for learning. She specializes in classroom discussion both as method and context for the development of higher order thinking skills and reflective capabilities. She is an expert on “Philosophy for Children”, a subject into which she has carried out a wide range of empirical research to evaluate the effectiveness of philosophical practice within communities of inquiry for the development of critical, creative, and caring thinking and the construction of inclusive social environments. Her recent studies focus on improvisation teaching and learning. Among her main publications: with Stefano Oliverio (eds.) (2012), Educating for Complex Thinking through Philosophical Inquiry. Models, advances and proposals for the new millennium, Napoli, Liguori; (2010) (Ed.), Improvisation Between Technique and Spontaneity, Cambridge Scholar Publisher; with ZORZI E. (2016) (Eds.), Education as Jazz. Interdisciplinary Sketches on a New Metaphor. New Castle: Cambridge Scholar Publishin.

The Lost, the Last, the Least Noteworthy on Liner Notes

How to deal with the liner notes from a pedagogical perspective? How to reason on their educational role in the music production, fruition, and dissemination? I try to face the issue by a backward view on the origin of notes as a way of human notation and noting (on) the world with the words. I propose to start the wandering inquiry on “note” by wondering about the roots of its multiple meanings in the Western culture, exploring the semantic power and potential of the word on the human worlds and works, starting with its etymology. Backward to the origin, we find just the unknown: “word of obscure genealogy”, admit the dictionary. It seems a twist of fate that the notable lies on the unknown, but starting the inquiry with such an ambiguity helps to relativize the destinations we will reach looking for the lost, least, last meanings of note. Where is born the note in languages? A light in the obscurity of the origin indicates a place in Europe: it is my country, Italy. Note derives from “nota”, a Latin word which travel ed around the world during the secles with their different uses. The etymology, you know, is not an exact science, and it moves by analogies and assonances; the main hypothesis on nota’s origin suggests a jump from the unknown to the known: nota should be connected to the verb “nosco”, which means “to know”. It is the past participle of the verb, which implies an acquired knowledge – known – that should be recognized and highlighted in some ways: with a sign, a mark, a trace…

Therefore, moving from the top-down etymology to the bottom-up semantics of “note”, the dictionary lists several meanings that emerge in the use in different contexts and even languages: note is effectively a sign, a mark, a trace… If the words are speech acts, if – as Austin claims – we do things with words, thus, is a note a sign, a mark, a trace on/of knowledge? I wonder if the liner notes would be one of the shapes that emerged in the phenomenology of wandering of human notes. Textual signs on musical trace; notes on notes to mark what should be notable.

The pedagogy of liner notes seems like all other educational tentatives to shore up the possible meanings of human works as meaningful textualities, as symbolic artifacts which need to be understood to become shared knowledge and part of the culture. Liner notes on the sound notes transform music into a well recognizable song opening the opportunity to be inspiring. A sort of prologue on the cover of a poem or a poetry collection. I wonder if the shape of liner notes can be reduced to textual signs on the covers. I wonder if cover itself as part of the new shapes of liner notes would be created by the digitalscape, which include the means used for sharing the music message. How many shapes could assume liner notes in the new times and spaces of knowledge co-construction? That is a fundamental pedagogical question which moves the discussion about liner notes beyond the usual field of music production and release, using them as possible metaphor of the process of culture creation, building on notes which generate the monumentality of the standards that the human works need to be transformed into humanities heritage. As liner notes are remarkable signs to highlight a music trace to transform it into a memorable song, can we consider education itself as a generalized form of liner notes on human works to transform them into culture?

Matthias Domingo Mushinski

Matthias is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University where his research and teaching experiments with ways of increasing our susceptibility to the music. He is particularly concerned with areas such as the generativity of forgetting, constitutive detachment, beauty, and the distinction—or lack thereof—between montage and ensemble. With tempered consideration, he periodically concludes that the recording of Kidd Jordan, Joel Futterman, William Parker & Alvin Fielder at the 2011 Guelph Jazz Festival might be the greatest album of all time; so if anyone would be willing to share their experience witnessing the real thing, he would most certainly be grateful to listen.

Amiri Baraka, Live at Birdland, and the Inconceivability of Black Music

This presentation offers a sustained engagement with Amiri Baraka’s liner notes for the album Live at Birdland (1964) by John Coltrane. In doing so, my analysis seeks to illuminate the specific ways in which Baraka’s encounter with the track “Alabama” (tributed to the victims of the 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing) experiments with ways of listening and thinking that resist the conceptual ground that formulates racial violence as a precondition for the beauty of Black music—a delineation most readily observed, perhaps, in Frantz Fanon’s designation of the blues as “a modicum of stylized oppression” (37).

Throughout his liner notes, Baraka develops two contradictory yet inseparable formulations. The first recalls Frank Wilderson’s affirmation that “slavery is and connotes an ontological status for Blackness” (14), as evinced by Baraka’s consideration that “it is because of vileness, or call it adversity, that… beauty does exist” (63). In contradistinction, the second formulation takes shape around Baraka’s resistance toward the regulatory logic that configures beauty as inextricably bound up with terror. Here, the crux of Baraka’s argument is revealed by his proffering of Alabama as a liquidated signifier— a beautiful word:

I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly… The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, in these musicians’ feelings. If that “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction. (Baraka 66-67)

Beauty as a destructive force, having nothing to do with it, but it is. But only if we “hold on” (Baraka 64), because if we do hold on, “Coltrane Live at Birdland” emerges as an indispensable site of significance for studying the configuration of Black music as constitutively detached from the violence visited upon Black life. What would it mean to go against the grain of Fanon and contend that the beauty of Live at Birdland has nothing to do with racism, while simultaneously preserving the music’s radical force as an act of protest and critique? What new formulations of difference and relationality would this require, and what categorical disruptions would they prove to be necessary?

Drawing on Nicole Mitchell’s notion of the “edge of beauty” (44) as an alternative reality, AbdouMaliq Simone’s elaboration of generative modes of forgetting and detachment—as well as, though briefly, Fred Moten’s gesture toward “dis(re)membering” (122)—my argument runs that Baraka’s liner notes open an arena for reflection regarding not just the conceptual ground that animates the relationship between Black music and racial violence; deeper still, by joining Coltrane’s ensemble, Baraka offers resources that are useful to any discussion regarding the enmeshment of relationality and difference in the broadest sense.

Monique Lanoix

Monique Lanoix is associate professor of philosophy at St. Paul University in the School of Ethics, Social Justice and Public Service. She has published on care work and aging. She has also written on disability and dance and teaches courses on disability as well as medical ethics.

Parallel Streams: From the Page to Interstellar Awakening

In discussing the foundational aspects of his approach to choreography, Merce Cunningham explained that he did not choreograph to music. In fact, he would only add the musical piece at the end of the finished choreography. For Cunningham, the only commonality between the two art forms was that they evolved over time. Creating a dance to music would detract the spectator from experiencing the dance in-itself as it would encourage them to view the dance as an interpretation of the musical work. This challenges dancers, but it allows spectators a greater freedom of interpretation. The musical work and the dance are to be perceived as parallel streams creating an indetermined space where the audience member can find and explore their affective reaction.

Using Cunningham’s insight as a starting point, I examine how liner notes and the musical piece it accompanies can also be thought of in terms of parallel streams. If some liner notes are informational explaining date and place of a recording, the list of musicians, etc., others are broader. Put differently, they can be opaque. In the first part, I mobilize the notion of opacity as put forward by Edouard Glissant. On opacity, Glissant writes, “…opacity…is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics” (1997, p. 190). In order to explore opacity and how it is relevant to music and liner notes, I examine the liner notes of the 2000 re-issue of Sun Ra’s Lanquidity focusing on Tom Buchler’s writing. He does not try to direct the listener to any particular way of listening to the music. Rather, he describes parts of the physical environment, such as the house where Sun Ra lives and where his creativity takes full swing. He draws the reader’s attention to the seeming disarray of that environment, which plays an essential role in Sun Ra’s way of being in the world. Significantly, Buchler quotes Sun Ra; this is a way of offering some insights if not on how the music was composed but on the purpose of the piece. The quotes draw the reader’s attention to the goal of Sun Ra’s music: that of openness to multiple things including other worlds. Buchler’s notes are especially suited to the music of Sun Ra as the latter’s creative works had a purpose. As Buchler explains quoting Sun Ra,the music is meant to “wake [people] up from their slumber” (liner notes). The liner notes are both revelatory and yet opaque. I suggest this, in turn, parallels Lanquidity. Notably Sun Ra does not prescribe or precisely say what the listener should be or do when they wake up. Even in the last piece that hints at other worlds, the undiscernible voices leave exact conclusions to the imagination. The liner notes and music weave a pathway to an awakening, another way of being in the world which was also central to Glissant’s proposal for a right to opacity as grounding a more truly emancipatory postcolonial project.

Nick Fraser

Nick Fraser has been an active and engaging presence in the Toronto new jazz and improvised music community since he moved there from Ottawa in 1995. He has worked with a veritable “who’s who” of Canadian jazz and improvised music and with such international artists as Tony Malaby, Kris Davis, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Braxton, and William Parker. Nick’s recorded works as a leader include Owls in Daylight (1997), Towns and Villages (2013), and If There Were No Opposites (2021). For 10 years, he co-led the co-operative group Drumheller, who released four critically acclaimed CDs between 2005 and 2013. Other projects that occupy Nick regularly are the Florian Hoefner Trio, Ugly Beauties, Peripheral Vision, the Lina Allemano Four, and Titanium Riot. Nick is a PhD student in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph.

“Fraser not so much plays the drums as hurls himself whole body and soul against skin and metal… truly talented.” Bill Stunt, CBC Radio.

“The Toronto drummer is perhaps a little too progressive for the hidebound Canadian scene… Fraser is a deft and sensitive percussionist with a hint of an enigmatic streak, a feeling for economical gestures, and an innate sense of form.” Mark Miller, The Globe & Mail

‘Mop Mop’ AKA ‘Boff Boff’ AKA ‘For Big Sid’: Max Roach, Transcription, Composition, Improvisation, Rhythm, and Creativity

This presentation will expand on my MA and PhD work, which argues against the process of “transcription,” a prominent pedagogical practice involving the embodiment of other people’s improvised acts. In the jazz education system (and in drumming instruction), Max Roach is often spoken of as an innovative accompanist and improviser in the 1940s Black Avant-Garde Music (or “bebop” as it is often called), a technical master of the drumset, and as a soloist of uncommon melodic and architectural integrity. Indeed, he is quoted as saying that structure was what interested him in music (Riley p.32). Roach’s solos are often used as introductions to the transcription process, due to their structural and rhythmic clarity. There are several things about Max Roach that don’t get talked about quite as much (if at all):

-His continued involvement with the cutting edge of music, whether it be working with Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, and Connie Crothers, his interest in the early flowering of rap and hip-hop, or his work in notated music (the drum concerto Survivors, for instance).

-His work as an activist. After recording the Freedom Now Suite, he spent much of the 1960s deeply involved in the civil rights movement. He and his wife Abbey Lincoln both suffered immense professional consequences for speaking out to the degree that they did. In Nat Hentoff’s liner notes for 1967’s Drums Unlimited, politics is not mentioned, which speaks to the quite limited ways that musicians such as Roach were able to express themselves in the context of the commercial recording industry.

-His work as a scholar. He was one of the first jazz musicians to be granted a full-time academic position, teaching at UMass Amherst from 1972-94. It was here that he founded M’Boom, his ground-breaking and under-recognized percussion ensemble.

In my view, these things that make up who Max Roach was deserve to hold a higher place in any conversation about him, as they make his work more accessible and point to broader concerns than say, the symmetry of how he phrased his solos or accompaniment.

A piece that Max often used in his work is called “Mop Mop,” first recorded by Coleman Hawkins in 1943. Although credited to Hawkins, “Mop Mop” is a most likely a more folkloric piece of jazz “riffing.” Not composed per se, but culturally co-created. Likewise, because it is simply a solo drum version of “Mop Mop,” I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say that Max Roach “composed” his version (“For Big Sid”) although he’s credited as having done so. In any case, pianist and writer Ethan Iverson, who has generally argued for dealing with Black music on its own terms and for elevating its place in general music education (particularly in North America) writes: “Phrasing the rhythm accurately is harder than it looks. It would be great if all American musicians knew how to play “Mop Mop.”

For this presentation, I will discuss and perform Max Roach’s version of “Mop Mop,” “For Big Sid” (as well as my own version) in demonstrating some of the problematic aspects of the transcription model of jazz education. I will also examine Max Roach’s use of the term “generosity” in Nat Hentoff’s liner notes to the 1967 recording in looking at the potential roles “Mop Mop” can play in jazz performances, and I will draw parallels to how items of “discourse currency” (similar to “Mop Mop”) can be treated across fields of study.

Philip Freeman

Philip Freeman is a music journalist publishing regularly in DownBeat, The Wire, We Jazz and the New York City Jazz Record, as well as Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, and other outlets. He is the co-founder of Burning Ambulance, an arts and culture website, newsletter, podcast, and record label. He is the author of New York Is Now!: The New Wave Of Free Jazz; Running The Voodoo Down: The Electric Music Of Miles Davis; and Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century. His latest book, In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music Of Cecil Taylor, will be published in 2024.

Technique is a Weapon to do Whatever Must be Done—Cecil Taylor’s Use of Poetry as Liner Notes

Cecil Taylor is best known as a pianist of breathtaking virtuosity and overwhelming power. From the release of his debut album, 1956’s Jazz Advance, to his celebration at New York’s Whitney Museum 60 years later, he carved a path that profoundly influenced jazz and avant-garde music more broadly around the world. But he was much more than a musician. Taylor was a multidisciplinary artist, incorporating dance and poetry into his concerts and collaborating with dance troupes and theater companies. He was also a well-known figure on New York’s cultural scene, often to be found in the audience at jazz clubs, ballet performances, and poetry readings.

From the beginning of his career, Taylor was mingling with poets and painters at the Five Spot Café (where his group was the first musical act booked) and other Greenwich Village clubs, art galleries, bars and coffee shops. He was a friend of poets like LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Diane Di Prima, Thulani Davis and Steve Dalachinsky, some of whom he shared stages with in the 1970s and after. And beginning with 1966’s Unit Structures, he wrote long poems that served as liner notes to his own records.

The prose poem “Sound Structure of Subculture Becoming Major Breath/Naked Fire Gesture,” which runs nearly 2000 words, explores his creative philosophy and compositional approach through dense thickets of poetic metaphor. Two years later, he wrote another poetic essay in the notes to a self-titled album by the Jazz Composers Orchestra, on which he was a featured soloist. And the poem “Aqoueh R-Oyo,” which serves as liner notes to his 1975 solo album Air Above Mountains, includes several lines that explain his ideas about music more clearly than he ever did in an interview. He writes, “technique is weapon to do whatever must be done” and “Music does not exist within notation/which proceeds from heredical/cultural aggrandizement association.” He wrote another long poem which was included in the live LP Embraced, a controversial collaboration with fellow pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.

In this paper, I will explore Cecil Taylor’s lifelong interest in poetry, and show how he incorporated it into his liner notes and into his performances. Through analysis of specific passages, and quotes from interviews he gave on the subject of poetry, I will draw parallels between his writing and his music and point out the ways in which each influenced the other.

Rob Wallace

Writer, musician, and teacher Rob Wallace holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His recordings can be found on the pfMentum, Ambiances Magnétiques, and Nonessential record labels. He is the author of Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism (Bloomsbury) and co-editor (with Ajay Heble) of People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! (Duke). He is an Associate Teaching Professor at the Honors College of Northern Arizona University, where he teaches courses on poetry, improvisation, popular and “world” musics, global studies, comic books, and intermedia arts, as well as leading an experimental/improvised music ensemble. He is a part of many ensemble projects including Summit Dub Squad, F-Town Sound, Wall of Skulls, Reference Sine, and the NAU Faculty Jazz Combo, and is the co-curator of the Interference Series. Wallace has collaborated with a wide variety of musicians from around the globe.

Notes on Notes and Tones; or Drummers as Writers

Drummer Arthur Taylor, who accompanied a host of legendary artists and recorded on numerous pivotal albums (most famously, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps) was also one of the first professional jazz musicians to publish a book on the music that was not an autobiography. Notes and Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews (1972) offered audiences a diverse and often candid set of opinions from an eclectic group of artists, ranging from Miles Davis to Nina Simone. Taylor’s questions to his peers elicited perspectives that were at the time not often expressed publicly (or, at least, not to white/mainstream audiences). Discussions of racism, unfiltered views of the music business, and sophisticated takes on musical influences and genealogies, among a variety of other topics, make Notes and Tones an engaging and important book over a half-century later. Another notable feature of the book is that Taylor was not only a fellow musician but specifically a drummer. Frequently satirized in popular culture as brutish or goofy, drummers are not often valorized for their intellectual or literary achievements. However, Taylor’s book is actually part of a larger tradition of drummer-writers and percussionist-poets, whose linguistic affinities are matched with their skills at rhythmic and timbral sophistication. This presentation will use Notes and Tones as a focal point of the larger drummer-writer tradition, indicating the importance not only of drummers as time-keepers but as record keepers (to paraphrase Sun Ra) of history and mystery.

Sonic Inversions

or, Brandon Davis, Walter S. Gershon, Jonathan Kay & Joe Sorbara

Brandon Davis

Brandon Davis (he/him) is an improvising musician and composer who has been active since 2011. With roots in Toronto’s avant-garde improvising and singer/songwriter communities, he is a versatile musician with experience in a wide variety of contexts. He has performed and recorded in folk, pop, metal, electronic, jazz, improvisatory, experimental, and classical contexts. and has filled roles as varied as guitarist, ukulele-player, vocalist, producer, and audio engineer in addition to his primary work as an upright bassist. In each of these contexts, he is a committed, intentional, hard-working and deeply present musician motivated by a passion to create vulnerable, honest, and impactful music. He is currently in the second year of his doctorate at the University of Toronto where he studies the phenomenon of unselfconscious decision-making in improvisation, and is enjoying having recently become a father.

Walter S. Gershon

Walter S. Gershon (Ph.D.) is an Afro-Caribbean percussionist, saxophonist, and educator. As a musician, Walter has played with a wide variety of musicians and musical traditions including Mansour, Roberto Miranda, Rod Poole, Dana Reason, Badal Roy, and poets Quincy Troupe and Eintou Springer. With Renee Coloumbe and Mark Graham, Walter formed free/grove collective Erroneous Funk and is currently working with a Norwegian free collective (Sunniva Hovde, Tor Einar Bekken), modern expressions of traditional Malawian folk musics (Hovde, Rosha Vole), and a new Latin American contemporary songbook trio, Os Dualistas. Walter is also Associate Professor, Critical Foundations of Education at Rowan University (NJ, USA). His scholarship focuses on questions of sensemaking and sensibilities for disenfranchised youth, often using sonic methodologies to better understand young people’s ways of beingknowingdoing within and outside of schooling. Forthcoming work includes two books, one on qualitative sound methodologies (Routledge) and a genre-defying sonic ethnography in text and sound and sound installation with conceptual art responses from Dr. Jorge Lucero (MIT Press)

Jonathan Kay

Jonathan Kay is currently a PhD candidate in the department of East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco under the mentorship of Dr. Debashish Banerji. As a young jazz musician from Toronto, he began a search of non-western ways of musical knowing bringing him to live in Kolkata for 10 years studying North Indian Raga music on the saxophone and boro esraj. His research explores the horizon’s between music and philosophy based upon intersections between the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari by developing transcultural models of musical experimentation through contemplative approaches to improvisation.

Joe Sorbara

Canadian drummer and percussionist Joe Sorbara (they/ them) has spent decades developing a reputation as a dedicated and imaginative performer, composer, improviser, collaborator, organiser, listener, writer, and educator. A consummate sonic adventurer, Sorbara’s music draws on a vast array of influences, most notably the African American Creative Music tradition. They have performed and recorded with Ken Aldcroft, Anthony Braxton, Jared Burrows, JP Carter,

Nikita Carter, Christine Duncan, Paul Dutton, François Houle, Germaine Liu, Joe McPhee, Hafez Modirzadeh, Evan Parker, William Parker, Allen Ravenstine, Clyde Reed, Steve Sladkowski, and Friendly Rich, among many many others. Their own projects include a new sextet featuring Ted Crosby, Tania Gill, Rebbecca Hennessy, Michael Herring, and Aline Homzy; and The Imperative with Jay Hay and Karen Ng. Collaborations include duo projects with Norm Adams, Paul Dutton, François Houle (SoHo), Jonathan Kay (The Rest), Thollem McDonas, and Steve Sladkowski, as well as groups Never Was (with Madeleine Ertel, Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and Patrick O’Reilly); Alien Radio (with François Houle and James Meger); the large international new music ensemble, Aurealities (with Lina Allemano, Christine Duncan, Anil Eraslan, Matthias Mainz, Albrecht Maurer, Tom Richards, Samuel Stoll, Laura Swankey, Chris Tonelli, and Emily Wittbrodt); the Imaginary Percussion Ensemble (with Germaine Liu and Mark Zurawinski); Mars People (with Emily Denison and Daniel Kruger); and Reliable Parts (with Jared Burrows and Clyde Reed).

Sorbara is a long-time student of master drummer Jim Blackley. They hold an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music from York University in Toronto, a Master’s degree in English from the University of Guelph, and they are currently studying toward a PhD in Critical Improvisation Studies. Joe has worked extensively as a workshop facilitator and guest lecturer and began teaching through the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph in 2007.

Liner Notes for an Imagined Musical Work

At their core, liner notes are written expressions of sonic reception (on intention, attention, expression, reception, see Gershon, 2020). This distinction is significant because liner notes, unless composed by musicians, often represent neither the artists’ intentions nor our attentions. Instead, liner notes are doubly translated. First, they are an act of auditory reception where sounds are filtered through a listener’s sociocultural norms, values, experiences, a sensorium that is further informed by personal preferences (e.g., Stoller, 1997; Ramos, 2023). Second, this combination of sensorium/experiences/preferences is again translated from sounds to words, adding another layer of interpretation. In instrumental musics, interpretive translations are more pronounced, authorial acts that seek to wrangle sonic expressions, often beyond words and full expressions unto themselves, into written language.

Further complicating matters, as Jonathan Sterne (2021, p. 50) argues about the relationship between the portable amplifier he calls “the dork-o-phone” and his voice, liner notes assimilate the music. That is, they become our understandings of the sounds, amplifying and attenuating voices, communities, and perspectives, sounds that are always already misheard (Gershon, 2017).

Our presentation consists of a paper and a performance. The written paper utilizes critical, open constructions of liner notes (e.g., Brooks, 2021, p. 50), to open up new possibilities for what and how they mean and function. More specifically, our polyvocal paper voices four distinct, independent liner notes for an imagined album. Through a process of collaborative dissensus (Gershon, 2009), each contributor expresses their particular perspective without the need to agree with one another or resolve discrepancies. In these ways, collaborative dissensus is a methodological construction that echoes forms of polyphony, musical and Bakhtinian (1982). The resulting work produces a polyphonic whole, a set of written and spoken texts that echoes the processes and products of collective improvisation (e.g., Lewis & Piekut, 2016; Caines & Heble, 2015): Liner notes for an imagined musical work.

Our collective paper will be followed by a musical improvisation by the author/musicians whose documented imaginings have just been read. Inverting the relationship between music and liner notes, our audio paper/performance follows a presentation of our polyphonic, polyvocal notes, a sonic explication of our written imaginaries. Where it is necessarily the case that our words will inform our musical play to some extent, we intentionally complicate such tendencies in our approach: each author’s contribution is independently constructed, not shared with other collaborators prior to presentation at the conference, and will not be reconciled irrespective of position or degree of dissonance.

Additionally, the contributing authors are working musicians practiced in forms of collective improvisation in the Black American Creative Music Tradition such that a deeply complex set of interrelationships with the notes and the emergent musical gestures will arise. Importantly, our musicking will add yet another layer of collaborative dissensus. Polyvocal, polyphonous liner notes, then, to an imaginary musical work followed by that very music, echoing and rejecting, affirming and contradicting, perhaps unwriting its written imaginaries while forming emergent relations and understandings.

Stuart Broomer

Born: Toronto 1947

Published compositions:

When I hear the word “ear” I reach for the side of my head:
Seven Compositions. Exile: A Literary Quarterly. Volume 5: Number 1 and 2, 1977.

Found Theme for the Age of Reason Musicworks 12.

Books:

Time and Anthony Braxton (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2009.

Co-Author (with Brian Morton and Bill Shoemaker):
Arrivals/Departures: 50 Lives (Lisbon: Gulbenkian Foundation, 2013)

Editor:

Coda: 2002-2005
Secret Carnival Workers: Paul Haines (Toronto: 2008)

Writings on Music (Features, reviews, liner notes):

Coda Magazine 1964-67, 1991 – 2005

Record Reviews:

Several thousand:
Coda: 1965-67: 1991–2005
Cadence: 1993–1997
Amazon.com, “editorial reviews”; 1998–2003
Musicworks: 2003–2024
Point of Departure: 2006–2024

Liner notes: 1997 to present 

Approximately 125 liner notes, including the following highlights: 

12 for Anthony Braxton (including Sextet (Parker) 1993 and Piano Music (1968 – 2000); 13 for Simon Nabatov (8 of them settings of Russian literary texts); 8 for Evan Parker; 6 for John Butcher (including five linked LPs); 5 for Joëlle Léandre; Other artists include Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Satoko Fujii, Lotte Anker, Don Pullen, Marilyn Crispell, Roscoe Mitchell, Polwechsel, Rob Clutton.    

Musician: 

Toronto New Music Ensemble: 1966     
Stu Broomer Kinetic Ensemble:1967 (4 to 8 musicians) 

Performances included: Perception ’67, University of Toronto; Opening festivities, 300 Years of Canadian Art, National Gallery of Canada; Bill’s Hat: film with live musicians and performers by Joyce Wieland: CIncecity Cinethon; Art Gallery of Ontario. Michael Snow Event, Expo ’67. 

Recordings: 

Bill Smith/ Stuart Broomer: Conversation Pieces (Onari,1978) 
Stuart Broomer/ John Mars: Annihilated Surprise (Ugly Dog, 1984)  

Film Soundtracks for Stephen Broomer:

Variations on a Theme by Michael Snow (2015) 
Potamkin (2017)  
Fountains of Paris (2018) 
Tondal’s Vision (2018)  
Phantom Ride (2019)  
Lulu Faustine (2020) 
Fat Chance (2021) 

Sounding Musical Architecture: Writing Liner Notes for Abdul Moimême

I met the guitarist Abdul Moimême in Lisbon in 2010, as he generously became a guide to the city for fellow journalist Kurt Gottschalk and me, both of us there to review the annual Jazz em Agosto festival. At a dinner Abdul prepared, he introduced me and a couple of other guests to the music of the Swiss minimalists diatribes, with whom he played, their label and his own works for prepared or augmented guitar, an instrument already highly evolved, and one that’s been evolving and mutating ever since, sometimes under metal sheets. The music was something of a revelation to me, though I had been a keen auditor to a range of improvisatory practices, there was something distinct in the sonic palette, its openness to silence, and there was also the elastic space that characterized his own work, conditioned in part, perhaps, by his day job as a municipal architect. I also felt an immediate resonance with my own past labours, working under the lids of grand pianos with mallets, foil, cardboard, vibrating plastic tape reels, the uncollated galleys of books about Salvador Dali and Aleister Crowley, junior school alphabet cards, etc., from 1966 to 1985. We discussed music on-line and soon became fast friends. I reviewed some of his works as they appeared over the next year and offered to contribute a liner note to any of his forthcoming works that might have me. He accepted, though he was particularly concerned about length, needing a single panel of the Creative Sources CD jacket format.

Something happened in the process for that first liner note, something different from the 80 or so notes I’d written up until then, inspired by Abdul’s alter ego, an architect’s description of the black-box theatre in which the concert had taken place. In a sense, the performance was as much about the space as the musical dialogue and I responded with my own equivalent architecture, the sentence, writing a single sentence employing every technique I could muster to avoid run-on. Since then I’ve written three more liner notes for his work, highly distinct from anything else I’ve done in the form, as much homages to my late friend, Paul Haines, the most creative liner note author I’ve ever read (and who wisely only wrote about 15 of them, one of them about my solo piano music that, I’m ashamed to say, has appeared in a magazine and in an anthology of Paul’s writing, but has never appeared on a recording), and who, like Abdul, seemed to work suspended between two muses become one.

Eventually I evolved a technique for these “briefs”, so far one I’ve only applied to a Cecil Taylor note other than to Abdul’s. It’s semi-improvisatory.

I listen as intently as possible to the recording once, jotting down a couple of notes. When next I listen to the music, I aim to write as close to a complete draft in the length the recording lasts, associating, thematizing. I will edit and correct later, adding detail like a record producer in a studio, but the note is as directly connected to the recording as possible. Fabula (for Fabula with Axel Dörner, Ernesto Rodrigues and Ricardo Guerreiro [Creative Source 220CD])

It was Plato who wrote, “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city will tremble,” but then, Plato lived, by our standards, in a very small city, one that—with its distinguished plays, music and mysteries– we might readily confuse with a theatre, a concert hall, a place of worship, a site less lived-in than designated for ritualized performances, a place that might mark borderlines, whether between the old mode and the new, the sacred and profane, the place before and after bells, a place isolated within a larger building, like a minimalist’s large-scale appropriation of Russian nesting dolls, like this performance in the town of Montemor-o-Novo some 300 miles south of Montemor-o-Velho, that is, “the old main hill,” and some hundreds of miles north-west from that other room in the midst of which has been placed (box-like) a cathedral, a kind of Tennessee jar (“round it was, upon a hill”), but here in the Cine-Theatre Curvo-Semedo the performance is so intimate the theatre itself must be excluded and a new relationship installed, the audience instead gathered on stage with the musicians and the curtain then drawn to create a “black box” effect, the ceiling exceedingly high, the air cold, the bells distant, the fabula unfolding from the instruments in a way that can be neither translated nor precisely misunderstood (various secret passages present themselves; connections, routings are magnified: the trumpet’s brass tubes are moving granaries; the wound wires of guitar and viola grow train-tracks in space; minutiae mask themselves and slither seductively in computer circuitry), but later, when the fabula reaches its inevitable conclusion, we all—audience, musicians, and shared air alike–discover the black box and the folds of its cloth walls no longer there, and that we can’t leave, that we can never find ourselves outside of them.

(for Exosphere: Abdul Moimême at the Pantheon [Creative Sources 394CD])

The first of Abdul Moimême’s CDs bore the titles Nekhephthu and Mekhaanu, suggesting place names in an imaginary geography, and suiting perfectly those alien soundscapes.

The metal-on-metal scrapings called up the shunting of cars and locomotives in a railroad yard, and yet it was a railroad yard in space, its ground an illusion, its boundary a dark absence, the shapes of its transport sometimes bright and streamlined to hint at the interplanetary. Heard in the Santa Engrácia Church (that is, Portugal’s National Pantheon), this music is established in a particular locus, both mythic and familiar, short steps from the creaks and groans of the Lisbon docks.

There is a sense in which Moimême’s guitar music is at once epic and abstract, physical and metaphysical, the reimagined instrument itself become projectile (resembling as well an aerial view of a ship), but both its launching mechanism and target are here subject to inquiry, the former seemingly less knowable owing to the very scale and ambition of its temporary locus, its grandiloquent site, this circular celebration of itself as slingshot and landing base, from its stony compass and silence, the reverberant sound hang of its room, the river viewed from its balcony flowing westward as only a deception before cultural currents run equally North and South and East, that sound no immurement but a delay of centuries, remains of heroes gathered for codification, until things can be heard clearly, as if a late Richard Diebenkorn glimpsed from the air is once again a farmer’s field, a Mark Tobey the street map of a town in which you cannot get anywhere from everywhere, less true than its opposite, in which the thin light of Newfoundland, the cod of Alpha Centauri and the mix tapes of Africa jostle for space in the leafy, shadowed marketplace beyond, the Pantheon’s economy class, the Feira da Ladra, (a thieves’ market, yes, but site, too, of semantic dispute). As the Pantheon’s sonic architecture engages with Moimême’s guitar and his particularly subtle and detailed use of feedback, together they create speculative star maps in sound.

The Pantheon, centuries in the making, is here a monument to its own sonic deconstruction, a place so resonant that everything becomes a metaphor for itself, a potential site for a reading of Antonio Lobo Antunes’ As Naus (The Ships, translated into English as Return of the Caravels), in which the long-gone sailing ships return to port, filled with centuries of seamen, spices, colonial victims, precious metals, calumny and decay. It might be chanted by the leftovers of politicians or aptly sung by the remains of the sainted Amália Rodrigues.

Was that concluding explosion a large one heard from far away, or a small one, very close?

A Late Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day

(for Dissection Room, eponymous CD of trio with Albert Cirera and Alvaro Rosso [Creative Sources 549CD])

Amid a reserved popping of balloons and the squeak of gurney wheels, The Body of Music is wheeled into the Dissection Room and lifted unceremoniously to the one available slab. It’s been busy today and, between the regular day and night shifts, a twilight crew has been added. Abdul, Albert and Alvaro, enlisted by the arbitrary whim of the alphabet, inspire either hope or fear among the regulars, following a random distribution. Will their methods speed things up, get clearer results, avoid the usual putrefaction and liquification brought on by the unseemly heat? Or will they simply make everything somehow worse? Things begin in an orderly fashion … the sound of a body bag being unzipped will suggest the gourd güiro or perhaps more precisely the metal ratcheting of the güira. Accumulated gas in the abdominal cavity bursts forth and hisses with the first incision, and then things are underway.

The three work methodically, evidently independent of one another, yet somehow weaving a shroud of harmonics, a transparent veil through which one another’s activities pass discreetly (heirs to the works of Messrs. Bailey and Parker, circa 1975), demonstrating the weirdly near fraternal twinship of bass and saxophone under these circumstances, amid the topographical incisions of prepared electric guitar.

Beginning around the 28-minute mark (of the 53-minute hour), something happens in the room—a blackout, perhaps from an electrical short, or something vaguely fractal in the room’s geometry. Other materials quietly intrude, some falling from above. Parts le over from previous dissections (Body of Knowledge, Body of Science) enter the scene, building to a climax from the 35th minute on.

The nature of the project, lightly concealed, begins to reveal itself. It is no mere dissection. The Drs. Frankenstein and Barnard and the Comte de Lautréamont observe from above, nodding approvingly at the components appearing on the slab (jewels, a sewing machine, binoculars, an umbrella) when the sudden jolt of electricity brings sputters and groans to the corpse and smiles to the assembled mouths.

The Body of Music, now reanimated, is returned to the gurney, struggling to sit up as Alvaro, Albert and Abdul start to wheel it, the three moving quickly in the hope that a certain speed will dissuade the body from tipping the gurney before they get it outside. Once clear of the building, the attendants head briskly on a long, paved path, out finally to a verdant field beyond, where migrant workers harvest pulses for the coming feast.

for Transition Zone (with Fred Lonberg-Holm and Carlos Santos) [Creative Sources 712CD])

HAPPY ENDING

…someplace he had just wandered into and now he wondered not just why or how or even when, but who, who was this someone occupied as much as the one occupying, in there some self or not-self going on, or two of one and/or the other, like some seared seer in some sad seersucker wandered into a euphemism like WASHROOM or RESTROOM in a lost and futile decade’s diner (the Future Diner the neon had declared, whether promissory note or veiled threat), no washing or resting initially in mind, but then transfixed by the circulating signs of the stall door message handles turned in every case to occupied (or some semblance thereof, like occupied [some message in numbers, a puzzle mathematical] or occupied [promotion of said diner’s food] or occupied [state of being resulting from said food, leaving one or it or here the past tense of a noun] or occupied [some great bird not just extinct but now misspelled]), but somehow slipped away to stand in the recent past of an exterior doorway, backlit by the diner’s neon or the desert sun, the air a threatened veil, dust motes en regalia … that the digestion was a metaphor, some puzzle of hearing, some auditory hallucination, like a watery echo of an essential but incomprehensible warning, muffling up through the narrow passages of nothingness pinched between the trio’s machinery, whether promise or admonition or domination, some subset let loose, some variation on the solid state, like promise or admonition or just admonition, even domination…(the real song realized not on the jukebox’s recurrent medley but in the artfully sustained creak of the wooden screen door’s rusted hinges and muted thud-click when arriving back in place, the ring of hammered metal from the adjoining service station, the rush of fuel from the gas pump outside, the terrible memory of things as yet unhappened, nothing so hollow as the sound of a mridangam or all that rubbing, a dead letter office of lost sounds finding new life)…or some misbegotten pilgrim’s perplexed arrival at a tripe festival later rendered stranger by learning a little further down the road the festival subject had been apple pie, then graced with the realization that if tripe were an occasion for commemoration and celebration he truly was among the blessed, truly he…by the stream of…sat…to read…”More than the absence of hope, it was the dreamclang–hirsute, bloody, vituperative–that made the sounds of diner so refreshing.”