Steve Lacy

"I feel that music can be comprehended from many different levels. It can be regarded as excited speech, imitation of the sounds of nature, an abstract set of symbols, a baring of emotions, an illustration of interpersonal relationships, an intellectual game, a device for inducing reverie, a mating call, a series of dramatic events, an articulation of time and/or space, an athletic contest, or all of these things at once. A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectitian, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-around good fellow."

-Steve Lacy, from Sept. 1959 Jazz Review
(he's only 25-years-old!)

i'm reading Steve Lacy: Conversations edited by Jason Weiss

Mingus

comically escorted to the police car
his instrument abandoned beside two mattresses
at the curb with the garbage,
the reporters, his wife. if i were her
i would not rescue that wooden bass.

in his space with his
small, white daughter. feeding her
wine, rants...
'in this country they'd call me
a nymphomaniac.' erect
for three days, minimum. he teaches her
how to rip thick rope,
split it into pieces with her bare hands.
speaks to a five-year-old
like a grown woman. and if i looked back
would my childhood be much different.

father teaches her how to enjoy
dark beer and piano players.
'and when you grow up, how many men
will you love... say it again.'
one man. speech that is all

poetry, all contradictions, all
up on that soap box. i want
to hear these same words from someone else.

waving around an ancient rifle.
(his son will wail 'too many bullets
not enough soul.')
with a camera in his face
'i hope you all get blown up by the communists.'
when they come for him

a brassy bass sound
by fat fingers pulling like falling.
used gravity in his favor.
audience that doesn't know when to clap,
when to shut up and listen.

listen to that man with cameras
in his face. says he speaks for all negroes.
a temper turns revelation to lunacy.
'no education,' he says. a big, angry, sexed-up, black
jazz musician man. small, white girl.
large, black rifle. large, brown bass.
it's hard to hear when you're white. it's hard
to know what to say when you're an example.
all instinct, no discipline in the mouth.

and why should he be different
than the rest of us. sinking
in my chair. hope for compassion behind
the audiences' laughter. oh, the comedy! the tragedy!
the cops are the two to his third stooge.
the bass-- the greek chorus. 'the victims,'
he says, 'which they call citizens...'
they are going to throw out his instrument.

PART 2 of artistic bravery and claiming (family) history

"i'm such a schlemiel, my wife went to America to send money for me to join her!
instead, she found a rich goyishe banker. now she's an e-Pinsk-opalian!
so i needed a new job, thought maybe i'd be a moyl... but i just couldn't cut it!
so i went door to door, thinking i'd be a schnorer. turns out, everyone in this city is looking for the same job!"

there it was, the ridiculous yiddish humor i know and love. Kleynkunst!, a tribute to "Warsaw's brave and brilliant cabaret" was that fabulous jewish combination of music, humor, social commentary and satire; that place where crude bawdiness and religiosity meet when working class folks make art.

(and a few days after i posted this, a short review of the show in the NYTimes.)

and i felt such a connection. there was even a song "Krokhmalne Gas" (which translates to Krokhmalne Street). i am fairly certain this is the name of the street where my great-great-grandmother lived! the song was beautiful. it ended with the lyric:

the street is my mother
the dust is my brother
the cobblestones--my sister

it made me think again about someday going to poland. maybe that street remains?

but then something happened in the show. they got to the song "Oy, Madagaskar!" which was poking fun at the Polish government's 'solution' to ship all their jews to madagascar. and as soon as the song was introduced, the female actress grabbed a djembe and began foolishly hitting it and chanting nonsense, and the male actor began to sing about joining the "black goyim" who run around in their underwear. my father and i shook our heads in disapproval. of course, i thought, the jewish legacy-- humor, dissent, dance, song, leftism, debauchery, and racism!? i wanted to sit there feeling unquestionably connected to my ancestors. but a blind sense of pride is not reality.

after the show, i sat in the JCC lobby. my dad struck up a conversation with the pianist from the show. before i knew it, he was beckoning me over asking me to explain why we were offended. the pianist was receptive, said "we haven't gotten bad feedback before but we're open to changing the show." but he didn't get it. and i couldn't really explain myself. why am i inarticulate precisely when someone is saying they want to hear my opinion? he tried to explain the song. it's ironic, he said, it says to the polish government 'you're stereotyping me? you're racist? we'll show you racist stereotypes!'

"it's a slippery slope..." i said. and i still felt uneasy. i don't want to be the pc-police. i understand the need for ridiculous extremes and reference to stereotype in satire. but it seemed to me that the irony was focused on the polish government, and the racist imagery of Africa was presented with humor, but not irony. the comedic imagery of this song was no different than portrayals of Africa coming out of Hollywood at the same time. is racism different coming out of the mouths of eastern-european jews? does our own oppression give us free access to belittle anyone else's oppression? and though the songs are mostly from the '30s, the production was put together now, and we cannot ignore the history and present reality of tension between blacks and jews. why be so careless? are we still trying to escape our own whiteness? deny our present reality? or maybe to say 'don't worry. this is just art.'





the last event i want to mention happened in the same night. i headed over to the BlueNote (that awful tourist-trap of a club... uh, did i say that?) to see saxophonist Matana Roberts. i have been meaning to check her out for a while. she's someone who's name just kept coming up in my life. and i kept just missing her. but recently, i found her on the web-- her website and her blog. i'm so interested in the work she's doing because, well, it relates to the work i want to do. (have you noticed that trend? i write about other things but really i'm just writing about myself. am i egotistical or just human?) she has been working on a piece called "COIN COIN" which is a suite of written and improvised music and text exploring seven generations of family history. i have recently begun a similar (yet much smaller scale) project doing some family interviewing and digging as fodder for composition. Matana's blog is related to this project, and her combination of personal anecdote, family history, political question, and musical musing was what really inspired me to start this blog.

so the show that i saw was one piece of COIN COIN about her black, southern, traveling preacher roots. it featured Jason Palmer (trumpet), Shoko Nagai (piano), Hill Greene (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), and John Garner III (operatic tenor). the group navigated composed sections, open sections with some out-er moments, bits of the blues and gospel songs, words read by Matana from an interview with her grandmother, and even a section where the whole band supported her own singing, joining in as a congregation with "ah-mm"s.

she stood, in silver heels and a wild black dress, playing her horn like Albert Ayler's sister, speaking her grandmother's words like they too were avant horn lines, and conducting the entire group, moving from 'in' to 'out', through sections of a fast-moving suite of her own conception. need i say i was a bit awestruck? and it wasn't perfect. in fact, it felt a bit like she was still workshopping the piece, examining the kinks. but her lack of need for seamlessness made me all the more enthralled.

and then i sat in. and what is important is that i felt comfortable. is there less searching and more intention in my improvising these days? more execution of an idea even if it is not the idea? (do i belive in the idea?) or am i just comfortable with this searching so that instead of feeling lost i simply feel present?

a lot to take in. and, walking to the train with a friend after the show, as i fumbled for words to explain what we had just seen, the thing i said that felt the most true was "she is so brave."