Carl VanVechten’s Kodachrome Photos of Harlem

Check this out these beautiful photos posted by The New Yorker

 

the sound scene – pauline oliveros and doug van nort at the new museum

One of my friends recently joked that even when I go out to do something for “fun,” it inevitably links back to my dissertation, and I’m afraid she was right. Friday night I went to hear octogenerian accordianist and experimental musician Pauline Oliveros play with electronic music artist Doug Van Nort and the improvising machine, FILTER, at the New Museum.  Although I had heard of Oliveros and Deep Listening, I had not heard of Van Nort, who is considerably younger and part the sound art movement that has slowly been emerging in the contemporary art and music scene.  It’s hard to say that what Van Nort was doing was music.  It was more like the manipulation of a sound environment.  Utilizing surround sound, he played and manipulated sampled sounds and unique digitally generated sounds.  They scratched and hissed and warbled.  At times when I closed my eyes, the sounds transitioned between the overpowering and invasive sounds of helicopters coming into land, and large otherworldly swamp bugs.  The sounds moved across the room—traveling away from us and outward, expanding the range of the sonic environment seemingly beyond the walls of the room.  T- said that listening to that kind of electronic music is like pornography, and I think I know what he means.  It gets into your animal core—it enters every orifice.  The woman sitting in front of me clearly felt it too invasive to bear and repeatedly plugged her ears and put her head between her legs.  But in a way, the experience was not so foreign.  In an age when we’re used to seeing movies in HD and surround sound and IMAX, we keep reaching for ever more immersive artistic environments, and both Van Nort and Oliveros are experts at manipulating our sense of sonic space.

The concert also got me thinking about my recent outing to watch a projection of Don Giovanni in HD outside on the Lincoln Center courtyard, where I felt that not only was it better watching opera this way because of the close ups on the lips and the movement of the singers, but the sound was even better than inside the hall.  Crisper, more articulate, and of course, louder.  With the din of the city washing into a beautiful white noise behind us, the street scenes of the opera seemed to come alive.

It had not occurred to me to think so intently about my aural architecture (as Barry Blesser likes to call it) until writing this chapter about stereo spaces in the poetry of Baraka and Hughes.  And though the chapter itself is near driving me crazy, the side effects are pretty surreal.

What’s live about the *live* album

(what follows is a snippet from chapter 3, which is still very much a work in progress… a rough-cut, if you will… because sometimes in the midst of writing one forgets to write)

In the era of the stereo LP, so-called “live” recordings were increasingly popular, but the notion of what it means to be live has been, and continues to be, a hotly debated topic.  For both Baraka and Hughes, their stereophonic aesthetics express themselves in the tension between poetry, recording, and performance.  Part of this has to do with stereo itself, which insists upon sound within a particular spatialized environment.  In his book Liveness, Philip Auslander has argued that the notion of the ‘live’ performance only exists in opposition to the recorded; that is, live is defined by what recording is not.  However, this assessment does not address the great popularity and ubiquity of the “live” recording (and what is or is not live about it). With the development of tape technology and improved microphones and mic’ing techniques, it became much easier to record in ‘live’ settings, and the advent of the LP meant that recordings were no longer limited to three-and-a-half minutes, which translated to recordings that could capture the longer spontaneous improvisations of performance. But stereo enabled live recordings to capture some of the energy and sounds of the performance space itself, which I would argue is part of the reason live recordings became so popular.  They were truly transportative, as though opening an audible portal anywhere one could access the recording.  On James Brown’s legendary Live at the Apollo (1963), for example, the performance is supercharged by the waves of shouts and screams that come from the audience and reverberate in the large Harlem theater. The most famous track on the album “Lost Someone” is a prime example of the this: full of repetitions and James Brown’s yowling, guttural screams, there really isn’t much to the track, but 7:15 minutes in, he calls to the audience, “I wanna hear you scream!” and they do; then 10:15 minutes in, he says, “I feel so good I wanna scream!”  Baraka harnesses some of these elements that we feel on the James Brown album on It’s Nation Time, and in doing so is able to create aspects of the “live” on what is otherwise a studio album.

As Baraka makes apparent in his liner notes for John Coltrane’s Coltrane Live at Birdland (1964), the distinction between the live and the studio recording is perhaps not as clear as people think, and live is more of a feeling or experience than anything.  After all, though the album is called Live at Birdland, only about half the tracks were actually recorded “live” and the rest were recorded in the studio.  This presents something of a problem for Baraka as he tries to compose the liner notes, and as a result he is torn between trying to write about the experience of hearing Coltrane at Birdland, and the meaning of the other tracks.   Regarding the numbers recorded at Birdland, he writes an extremely long run-on sentence that never resolves itself, but, in its way, tries to account for the lack we might perceive on the recording as a result of not hearing it live:

And while some of the nonmusical hysteria has vanished from the recording, that is, after riding a subway through New York’s bowels, and that subway full of all the things any man should expect to find in something’s bowels, and then coming up the stairs to the street and walking slowly, head down, through the traffic and failure that does shape this place, and then entering ‘The Jazz Corner of The World,’ a temple erected in praise of what God (?), and then finally amidst that noise and glare to hear a man destroy all of it, completely, like Sodom, with just the first few notes from his horn, your ‘critical’ sense can be erased completely, and that experience can place you somewhere a long way off from anything ugly.  Still, what was of musical value that I heard that night does remain, and the emotions . . . some of them completely new . . . that I experience at each ‘objective’ rehearing of this music are as valuable as anything else I know about.  And all of this is on this record, and the studio pieces, “Alabama” and “Your Lady” are among the strongest efforts on the album. (in Black Music 64-65)

Baraka’s description here points to a couple of things: one, that there is an embedded assumption that something is ‘lost’ in the process of recording; two, that this is something that he must account for as well as push against.  With the live recording, it is the job of the liner notes to re-fashion some of that “nonmusical hysteria,” as he calls it.  What is interesting is that the result of trying to qualify the recording leads Baraka into a run-on/incomplete sentence that begins with a brief description that morphs and evolves and takes the reader on a little journey to Birdland.  It’s not unlike a bop solo.  He has to remind himself to get back to the point (“Still”), and even then he is confronted with an incomplete thought, which is underscored by the use of ellipses.  He has a difficult time dealing with the album, which he calls an “artifact”; but ultimately he concludes that,

All the music on this album is live, whether it was recorded above the drunks and clowns at Birdland, or in the studio.  There is a daringly human quality to John Coltrane’s music that makes itself felt, wherever he records.  If you can hear, this music will make you think of a lot of weird and wonderful things.  You might even become one of them. (67)

The implication of this assertion is that the only way to truly access liveness is to listen. Though he dances around the idea of giving a visual-sensory description of the nightclub (and evades it), ultimately, liveness has nothing to do with the recorded vs. the performed, or the nightclub vs. the studio, but with the a-liveness of the music and the individual who produces it.  It’s the need to get up and dance when he listens to Elvin Jones’s drumming on the recording.  It’s the “frightening emotional portrait of some place,” and the way that you feel when you listen.

What the live album does most effectively is perform the listening.  That is, we can hear the audience, and their presence is very much a part of what we hear.  Their screams.  The clink of their glasses.  The interaction between the musicians.  Not unlike the frame of the ghostly listeners that Alan Lomax includes in Mister Jelly Roll, the live album (and by extension, the liner notes that attempt to capture some of the experience of being there and listening to the music) help to situate the listener. As a result, Baraka’s own recordings toy with the idea that they can be ‘events’ in and of themselves, and seem to want to break the frame of the record and encourage performance.

Goodbye Newport Blues 1960

I’m a fan of Wolfgang’s Vault — a huge online collection of live concert recordings drawn primarily from the personal archive of producer and concert promoter Bill Graham, most of which is available free as streaming audio.  I’m always surprised by what I find there…  today it was ‘Goodbye Newport Blues.’

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Langston Hughes began writing Ask Your Mama following the riots that brought the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival to an early close.  Here is link to listen to that final concert, where Hughes narrated a history of the blues with the help of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Sammy Price, and many others.  His anecdotes about W.C. Handy and the St. Louis Blues are especially noteworthy.  Tracks 45 to the end are also interesting, not just for the unique jam session with so many blues all-stars, but also the somber announcement that the festival was being suspended because of a bunch of “pseudo-beatniks” who ruined things for everybody.

Goodbye Newport Blues – Newport Jazz Festival 1960

Unfortunately, the blues lyric that Hughes composed for performance that day is not included on the Wolfgang recordings.  You can listen to it on Rhapsody streaming on the album released by Geffen, Muddy Waters at Newport 1960.  See “Goodbye Newport Blues” (sung by Waters’ half brother Otis Spann).

an eye to see through this hear: a call to action

I think I may have found a place to begin this new chapter on Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka–a call to action, spoken in Baraka’s own voice:

Listen to Baraka read “Against Bourgeois Art” 1978

The recording begins in medias res, no doubt because he admonished the audience for not recording him, and because of it, we feel the urgency.  He says:

“Is there somebody here to record this?
…
Is there someone here to get this down?
Can I get a, like they say, witness?
An eye that can see through this hear?”
–Amiri Baraka, “Against Bourgeois Art”

Railing against the Pollocks and DeKoonigs and Warhols for art that is awash in bright colors, but does not portray the real battle of color happening in the street, Baraka cries out for a witness–someone to literally record him and his voice and put him down on the record as an artistic response and critique.  And because he asked for it, now we can listen to him speak to us on PennSound, a repository for recordings of poets reading their own work housed by the University of Pennsylvania.  His call was answered.  He’s on the record.

This recording and these words seem a fitting place to begin a chapter that will explore how the poetry of Hughes and Baraka was responding to the advent of the LP and stereo sound, because it is a poem that in performance calls out for action.  It suggests to us the power of the recording, not just to disseminate the voices that are not being heard, but to shape how we hear.

—

There is another version of this poem recorded with music by Air (Henry Threadgill, Steve McCall, Fred Hopkins), but it does not have the same renegade urgency of the earlier recording.  With the mellow walking bass line, flute, and soft shuffling drums, it feels a little too cool:

It’s a different performance altogether and has moments of bop scatology and drama, and seems self-conscious of the fact that it is being recorded and broadcast on the radio, so for this reason I’m more interested in the earlier version, but the two versions do open up different possibilities of listening and meaning.

musical machines

Sometimes when I’m reading, I come across a bit of prose that stops me in my tracks:

“…these vertiginous, gelatinous marvels, whose unfolding is like the quick and dirty lives of cells…”

These words emerged as a description of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, which, not surprisingly, can be found on YouTube.

Of the many fortuitous aspects of my upbringing, one is that I grew up with an antique player piano in the house. As my friend BM- once remarked when we were in high school and singing carols, the player piano might well be the first instance of digital music. I had never thought of it that way, but he was right. It’s a marvel to sit in front of it, pedal the pedals, and watch the little dots go by. Those little dots fill the room with music. It had never occurred to me that someone might write music specifically for the player piano that would be particular to the machine’s possibilities and near impossible for any person to play, but it appears that Nancarrow did just that. The visual element of it is maybe even more interesting than the music it produces. It is indeed ‘vertiginous’ and ‘gelatinous’ in its animation (I admit, those words inspired me to go find the video in the first place).

I came across this little jewel because I’ve been re-reading Evan Eisenberg‘s The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (1987, 2005) and am convinced that I did not give it a fair chance the first time around.  I pushed it aside as mere journalistic fluff and not a serious study of recordings and sound. I was wrong. The writing reminds be of Rebecca Solnit in the best sort of way, because though broad in scope and not heavily footnoted, Eisenberg’s book does a very good job of bringing together a lot of the disparate aspects of sound recording and how it has changed the ways we listen and encounter music.  As a reader, I love these kinds of encyclopaedic books where each detail opens the possibility for new exploration and revelation.

Dipping into the audio-visual sublime that is YouTube, I was reminded of another mechanical improvising machine with its ping pongs: The Absolut Machine

And then my friend B- reminded me again of the Uberorgan we saw at the Getty a few years back

I could keep going on and on.  These things, of course, will not be in my dissertation, but I continue to marvel at them.

Listening, take 3: Swings that Sing

The last few weeks in New York have been absolutely stunning and suddenly all a person wants to do is be outside in the middle of it all.  The city is full of sweet-scented blossoms, but also a number of sounds that announce the arrival of spring.  Yet it’s not just the birds that start singing in the middle of the night that alert us of the new season.  Sitting in Riverside Park with my friend B-, who was in town visiting for just a few days, we could hear the squeak of the swings as children propelled giddily to and fro.  In just the right moment, the swings sung: I remember you.  Just a few notes of that Johnny Mercer tune were enough to bring the whole song forth in my mind.  It’s a funny thing, these audio allusions (illusions?), because they strike me in the strangest of places, like the newer subway trains that hum the first few notes of “Somewhere” from West Side Story as they power up and leave the station.  Sometimes when I’m walking around the city, I find myself picking up on the unnamed little melodies and humming them to myself, as though there might be a song in there.

Listening to the singing swings, B-, who is a cognitive psychologist, noted that there have been psychological studies that look at various kinds of sonic illusions.  Diana Deutsch of UC San Diego, for instance, has written on the Speech-to-Song Illusion – a phenomena which causes listeners to hear fragments of speech as melodies when they are abstracted from their context and repeated.  Such studies attempt to point out the longer connection presumed between music and the development of speech in humans, but thus far there is not a clear neuro-scientific explanation for why this happens.  Listening to Deutsch’s speech melodies, it made me wonder whether the pitches I heard were actually there to be heard, or whether they were something like overtones?  Why, once I hear the melody, is there no way to erase it?  Sound artists and musicians have exploited this illusion too, perhaps the most notable being Steve Reich in his piece Different Trains.  We might even think of that scene in My Fair Lady when Henry Higgins musicalizes the phrase: how kind of you to let me come.

In each of these instances, it is the repetition of certain sounds and snippets of speech that make the melodies audible, but I think it is also a phenomena that is augmented by recorded sounds.  Reich plays upon the recorded voices that announce the comings and goings of trains precisely because they are sounds whose repetition is exact and mechanical.  And who in New York City cannot imitate the sing-song announcer who warns at each stop to: “stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

It seems fitting that the swings would sing I Remember You – Spring is always such a bitter-sweet season to me, and a visit with an old friend deserves a wistful song, for when we speak again it will likely be mediated by a telephone, and in calling aren’t we always saying, I remember you?

Listening, take 2: Music that listens to itself

Inevitably, in the process of writing a dissertation, you will reach a point where you come across an idea so big that you have to go read a French theorist.  I don’t know why this happens, but every graduate student does it at some point, and in my experience, such readings often leave me with more questions than answers.  In my quest for theories of listening, I came to Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, aptly titled Listening (2007, the French title is À L’écoute).  Among the many circular arguments he makes, he contends: “Listening is musical when it is music that listens to itself” (68).  But how on earth can music listen to itself, I ask?  Can the act of listening itself be musical?  There is a sense in which Nancy seems like he’s on to something, but what does it really mean?

As I mulled over Nancy’s claim, I began to plumb my own experiences a bit more because, on its own, the idea of listening to one’s listening, or music listening to itself is simply too abstract to be useful.  Though I am usually hesitant to call myself a musician, I am enough of one to know that the best musicians are ones with great ears.  Having great ears is especially important in jazz and other kinds of improvisatory music in which the direction and shape of the music is completely dependent on the listening between musicians.  Technical facility is great, but if you cannot hear the music, forget it.

This reality became especially clear to me recently while I was singing with my friend J- and his friend C-.  J- is an incredibly gifted and generous pianist, and I love playing with him because he really knows how to play with singers; which is to say, he knows how to listen to singers.  He can somehow always sense when I need a bit more support and knows what I need to hear to get the next note.  Oftentimes we just play standards, but this particular evening I had brought a new song that I’d composed and wanted to work out.  I had a melody with lyrics, a few chords, and a vague idea of how it should feel, but little else.  First I sang the melody while they listened.  Then J- started to work the chords and find a groove while I listened.  C- joined on violin.  Then I found my way in—stretching the lyrics to their new home.  It’s hard to say what exactly happens in the moment of making music in this way because after you play for a while, the music starts to find its own direction without you worrying about it too much.  It’s like having your hands on the ouija board.  Lyrics shifted and moved to places I had not anticipated they would go, and there were moments when I could anticipate rhythmically where we were headed and change my phrasing to match.  It can seem like magic, but in fact, it is just listening—listening while playing, and listening to each other’s listening.

Playing and listening in this way can be a little messy sometimes because, lord knows, there are times when you get wrapped up in what you’re trying to do and forget to listen, or you lose your place, or someone else stops listening to you, or fails to hear what you’re trying to do.  But even those messy moments can be productive, and when the listening is working and everyone is tuned in, it can be really marvelous.  People like to talk about this interaction among musicians as a conversation because of the communication it implies.  However, there are a lot of ways in which music is not like a conversation at all because it requires simultaneity: you must listen while playing, and play while listening—you’re not always taking turns.  But when people start talking over one another in a conversation (imagine a group of friends arguing in a bar), it often implies a failure of communication.

This notion of listening becomes even more complicated when a musician accompanies himself, as Jelly Roll Morton does on all those recordings he made with Alan Lomax.  When you think about Jelly Roll, you can begin to imagine what it might mean to listen to one’s listening because he is essentially two members of his own band, and the coordination involved between his hands and his voice requires that he self-reflexively listen to himself.  Now hold on, you might be saying.  That’s a bit ridiculous…  listening to oneself listening.  People accompany themselves all the time, right?  Well, have you tried to play and sing at the same time.  It’s hard!  It takes practice.  And to do it well requires a bit more than simple coordination.

There is something of a literary corollary for this.  In one of her Lectures, Gertrude Stein speaks about how she came to write they way that she did and how she started listening to people talking. “Nothing makes any difference,” she says, “as long as some one is listening while they are talking” and “If the same person does the talking and the listening why so much the better…”  Like so much of Stein, this claim has befuddled and enchanted me for years, and now I am beginning to wonder if what she had in mind was something like a musical listening.  For, it is inevitable that when you are writing dialogue between different characters (or reading dialogue, for that matter), you end up doing both the talking and the listening, just as a matter of course.  It’s not the same thing as playing music in a band, or even accompanying oneself, but there’s a connection there.

I am still not entirely certain that I really understand Jean-Luc Nancy, but I feel like I may be one step closer to understanding what a musical listening might be.  And if I could get my mind around what that is, then perhaps there is a way to understand how literature translates this move.

On a related note, there was a great Radiolab episode last year that explored a very similar topic from a neuroscientific perspective, “The 4-Track Mind.”  In it, they test a ragtime player and a conductor to see how many symphonies they can hold in their head at once.  Hmm…  now that I think of it, maybe this Radiolab episode deserves its own blog post at some point, since it is very much about recordings.

Listening, take 1: Chet Baker Sings (to me)

(As I dissertate, I have come to realize how very little theory exists about listening… what it is, what we are doing when we listen, etc.  In order to develop my own framework, I have started journaling about my own listening.  This is my first attempt.)

I have been trying to remember the first time I really heard a recording. That is to say, remember being fully engulfed by the sound, mesmerized, and surprised. I think I was a sophomore or junior in high school and my parents had taken my brother and me up to San Francisco for the day. It was the late nineties and we had stopped at the Sony Metreon, which was at that time the height of high tech. But what I liked most was that they had a record store where you could scan any cd and listen to it instantly in enormous plush headphones. As usual, I was wandering around the jazz section and picked up an album with an appealing red blue and green cover that was in the recommended West Coast Jazz section and, without even paying attention, scanned the album. It would turn out that album was Chet Baker Sings, only I was not paying close enough attention. I had several cd’s in hand and was not sure which would come on first. A mellow alto, it would seem, warmed my ears through the headphones. What a strange and wonderful voice, I thought. Is this a woman, or a man? I stood there with my eyes closed… “I saw you last night and got that old feeling…” he purred. The air proceeding the trumpet’s tentative sound. The brokenhearted quality of his voice. There I was. Addicted.

My dad walked by and startled me, asking me what I was listening to, and I so I made him put on the headphones and asked him to tell me whether he thought it was a man or a woman. I cannot remember which he guessed, but he asked me if I’d like him to buy the album for me. He did, and thus began my love affair with Chet Baker.

A year or so earlier, my dad had bought me a stereo for my bedroom. I had argued that I really didn’t need my own stereo since they had one down in the family room, but he said that I might like to listen to the radio or listen to records without anyone else bothering me, and so he not only bought me a stereo, but at some point went to the record store and bought a stack of the top pop albums that year. I think he was worried that my brother and I weren’t listening to the music of ‘our generation,’ and that one day we would regret this. He probably had no idea who the Backstreet Boys were. After our trip to the Sony Metreon, I came home and put the Chet Baker album in the stereo, lay down on my bed staring up at the high ceilings, and listened. For the first time, I understood the pleasure of having my own stereo. With the door closed and the world of high school and family far far away, I could simply be and listen. I memorized every lyric and every lick.

I do not know how many times I have played Chet Baker Sings over the years, but I think that this was the first time that I really listened to a record. This is not to say that I didn’t listen to music before, or that I did not have a close connection to other recordings. But there was something about listening to Chet Baker in particular that made the recording (not just the music) so seductive. The androgyny of his voice, the mysterious quality that made him seem at once both man and woman, and that sense of surprise I felt when I looked down at the album cover to see this young man—it was like a kind of audio-optical-illusion. For a teenage girl only beginning to understand the strangely gendered dynamics of romantic relationships, Chet Baker’s gender-neutral sounding love songs were some kind of unattainable fantasy. Of course, at this point in my life I knew nothing about Chet Baker and so he could be anyone I wanted him to be.

I have always loved voices like this. It was around the same time, I realized that Tracy Chapman was a woman and not a man. For an entire year, my dance teacher had played “Give me one reason” every morning as our warm up song and I had always thought that it was sung by a man. I like records that surprise me in this way. Chet Baker just happened to be the first to make me realize how a recording could get deep inside you and force all kinds of questions. He was the first to make me aware of my listening as listening. He transformed my listening from a something that happened to me, to a something that I was doing. Lying there on my bed, I let myself go back and forth between the idea that he was a woman, and then a man. It became something I could control if I listened in just the right way and with the right imaginative frame. It was wondrous!

Sound Board

In an effort to collect a wide range of sound-related resources, I’ve started a pinterest board.  I’ve never used pinterest before, but like the idea of it very much.  Of course, as a visual forum, its ability to capture sounds leaves something to be desired…  if only you could hover over a link and have it sing to you!  For now, I’ll continue pinning and you can check out my finds here: http://pinterest.com/jetea/sound-board/