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music-research-strategies · 7 years

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Characteristics of Bone: A Memorie

https://amerarcana.wordpress.com/

...bone represents the very source of life, both human and animal. To reduce oneself to the skeleton condition is equivalent to re-entering the womb of this primordial life, that is, to a complete renewal, a mystical rebirth.

-Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

The characteristics of bone describes the music of Glenn Spearman (tenor saxophone) and Marco Eneidi (alto saxophone). They have moved beyond bone now, yet bone is eternal. Civilization can never defeat bone. For the sake of the memory of Glenn and Marco, I will skip the rigmarole of making an acrostic of their names, and whatnot. You need only to find recordings and listen: listen to their material. You need to run it down from before the beginning for yourself, and after. Many others are more qualified than I to give detailed accounts of the lives of Glenn Spearman and Marco Eneidi. It was only dumb luck and poverty that led me across their paths in the first place.

I was homeless San Francisco in 1993 just a few months after coming from San Diego. I came up Highway 5 to attend the state university. I had even sold my drum kit to barely afford the essentials. This is when I discovered the infamous San Francisco burrito and the salsa verde, which my buddies still refer to as “the drug.” El Castillito made them huge, by San Diego standards, and the wasn’t far from my place on 26th and Alabama. My job at the recycling center at school didn’t pay but once a month. I had to starve in between checks. Not dire by any account. I loved it. I was a Creative Writing student after all. I’d starve and smoke and nibble and drink wine. Within a month of living in in the city, sunrise to sunrise. I was pushed out of a ratty apartment in no time. I discovered Food Not Bombs and Homes Not Jails through the Epicenter Zone, a Punk community center. They had a switchboard hot-line service for those in need. No one really had cell phones or the internet. I made my way to a Homes Not Jails meeting. They had left over free soup from Food Not Bombs. A dude I met there let me crash in his attic. Jeremy Graham. We talked about what I thought was music and I what I thought was literature. He is a lawyer now and still comes to my shows 23 years later. Jeremy gave me a tape of John Coltrane’s last album “Expressions”, Frank Wright’s “One for John” album (with Bobby Few and Noah Howard), and Glenn Spearman’s Double Trio.

“...(Cecil) Taylor drafted (Glenn) Spearman for a big band…(t)hat led to a few gigs with Cecil’s other bands, a seven-piece group which played for dancers, and a six-piece Cecil Taylor Unit including (Raphe) Malik, Jimmy Lyons, William Parker and Rashid Bakr ‘That’s where I got my advanced degree in music,’ says Glenn.”

Bassist Lisle Ellis has been a great conduit for me, and the other young pups I ran around with. Lisle was a later addition the Glenn Spearman’s Double Trio. He was the only one as far as I knew. I saw them perform as much as possible. Great musicians, bunch of dudes: William Winant (percussion), Donald Robinson (drum kit), Chris Brown (piano), Larry Ochs (saxophones), Lisle on bass and Glenn. I still don’t really know the other guys well. Lisle linked me to pedagogies and practices of the Creative Music Studio in New York around the mid-70’s, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor and beyond. Plus, he remains super accessible. He ran a workshop out of his apartment in the Upper Haight in San Francisco. Had us doing all kinds of exercises. He introduced to me violinist India Cooke which led to trio project, ESP, with bassist Kimara Dixon (a dude, now in Atlanta). She was teaching me to listen demonstrating loads of patience. Lisle joined us once on stage at Beanbender’s in Berkeley. India, Glenn, Chris and, maybe, Willie, back then, were on the faculty at Mills College. Larry was/is a part of ROVA Saxophone Quartet as the “O.” He performed the “Bedouin Hornbook,” back in the day. Donald fixed cars and drove the smallest car. It only fit a driver and drums. It was a Le Car or old school Honda Civic or something. Simply legendary.

India and Glenn were my Black Arts Movement - West. I uncovered Ishmael Reed and Marvin X a bit later, after music. Many Black artists, intellectuals and Creative Musicians passed through the San Francisco Bays’ industry of thought, but I wasn’t really hip to it at the time. I was a struggling student and political activist. I staunchly rejected MTV and Hollywood because Chuck D, KRS ONE and Bad Brains told me to, thankfully. I switched majors from Writing to History to Philosophy & Religion and kept yo-yoing in and out of school. I kept up political education and service-based activism. Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Fred Wei-Han Ho and the Asian Improv Arts crew were quite explicitly positioned the music in an international, multi-ethnic nexus of resistance strategies and cultural progress. Rest in power, Fred. His book Sounding Off!: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution. There remains a lack of radical analysis and language amongst my community of Creative Musicians. Jason McGill and I interviewed back when Royal Hartigan gave him a residency at San Jose State. We heard Free Jazz as get-free-or-die-motherfucker! Years later Fred warned me about my academic language and intellectual tendencies. Fred was an action man. I mean, you just gotta talk to people and build. I find myself now digging through the past relationships and realities I simply missed in the ol’ Bay Area Creative Music scene.

Unlike most cities, homeless persons, street persons, are quite visible up and down certain streets at all hours in San Francisco. I saw my fair share working with organizations affiliated with the Coalition On Homelessness. People have many reasons for escape, I can’t judge. What got me was that I recognized myself in the blatherings and bangings of some ecstatic urchin, high as fuck, banging away on buckets and pans for change, or for no reason at all. I stopped and stared not knowing if I was seeing my future self. A child of an alcoholic, though never an excessive user of any such thing, I only sought something behind the music I craved and worked through. Chasing Creative Music made me feel how that tripped out dude looked. People on the day to day are truly Improvisers: improvising a meal, a living, a laugh, so-called sanity. Navigating these streets and institutions will sure put you on a different plane. Just like how solitary confinement creates insanity. The complexity of the Double Trio saved my life. People say that kind of thing sometimes, and when it’s true it’s true. ROVA also turned me out. Composer, all around musician and bassist for Earth, Don McGreevy recently reminded me of all legacies of complexity, wonder and mastery that we inherited from this continuum of Creative Music. The bar is quite high.

I was hungry for that essential transmission from improvisors with teeth. Experiencing the Double Trio was a kind of an initiation. My crew of musical and personal allies were transitioning into Creative Music enthusiasts at the same time. We imbibed all that we could. Performances spaces took on a sacred and profane quality. I only spoke to Glenn once or twice. I interviewed him on the phone after he quit doing chemo. He said he only wanted to self-medicate and finish his work peacefully. I trust that he did.

Last I saw Marco, it was in February 2015. We ran across each other in Vienna, Austria on a Tuesday night. I was hunting for him. Black Spirituals, my band from Oakland, CA, performed while on tour with the iconic drone Metal unit Earth, from Seattle. We found ourselves in the fortunate circumstances of having our meals, booze, venue and sleeping accommodations all under same roof, or rooves in this case. European venues do it good that way. Drink up and load out in the morning, like a human being. I befriended a Viennese chap, an artist or philosopher unlucky in love, who joined me in a cab at midnight. We cut through the immaculate city in search of Marco. We found him, gray-faced and dogged, preparing to go home. He had been running the New Neu York/Vienna Institute of Improvised Music. Dude looked exhausted as he greeted his former apprentice, sort of looking past me. He was looking for his bed, no doubt. The poor bastard exchanged a few words and promptly left after informing us how avoid the entry fee at the venue door. He disappeared into the night, into history, and, all too soon, into the awaiting arms of the ancestors. I guess I thought he’d be a buoyant Henry Miller with a tart over one shoulder, tobacco smoke pouring out over too many words, a fifth in his breast pocket, and rubber soles under his heals. I think I just wanted to see his horn-playing stance one last time. That night, though, I performed improvisations with no-non-sense, badass musicians and threw back a few with Hans Farb from Festival Konfrontationen in Nicklesdorf. He knows all my Free Jazz family intimately. He is like an uncle I never knew was out there.

Several years before, during one of Marco’s orbits from Vienna to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was able to host him. I booked a gig at Omiiroo Gallery in Downtown Oakland. It was my duty to spotlight him, feed him, give him a $100 bucks, and the stage. My man Githinji set it up. He taught me how to make Kenyan black-eyed peas for the occasion. “Gotta use coconut milk, brottar.” I arranged for additional catering from the Afghan spot down the street. And since the gallery didn’t have a proper bathroom, I made further arrangements with the Afghans to keep everybody comfortable. My band at the time was called Mutual Aid Project, a free jazz collective. We had undergone and performed the very first iterations of Decolonizing the Imagination together. Nick Obando (alto saxophone), Tracy Hui (guitar) & I performed composed analyses and democratic spaces to confront the tenets of colonization that brought our peoples to this land and still persist in our everyday lives. Rarely work with such deep cats. However, they were rightfully annoyed with me because I opted to perform solely with Marco. The next night, I must say, we opened for him at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco with Jamaaladeen Tacuma (electric bass), Lisa Mezzacappa (acoustic bass) and Vijay Anderson (drums). That gig with Marco was mine. My brother was shooting video, sort of. Some hot, young thing was sitting in the front row. My pops and his lovely wife brought their friends up from Oxnard and down from Napa-tasting. See, it was my dad’s birthday. I felt like an apprentice when I first pulled Marco’s coat and now I was a journeyman. We did two sets. I never released it. It’s just a thing I had to do.

In early 2000’s, I worked with Marco as his sometime drummer. He was the kind of guy who lived in a van in NYC, so I heard, and schlepped his axe everywhere. Someone actually stopped me from doing that myself when I lived in DC. Back

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music-research-strategies · 7 years

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Marshall Trammell on Music Research Strategies

http://soundamerican.org/sa_archive/sa15/sa15-marshall-trammell.html

Originally published in Nate Wooley’s Sound American “Propaganda Issue” April, 2016

Photo Credit: Agatha Urbaniak (Brighton, UK)

PART 1

Bradford, Roper, and Wong perform on a loom of interpersonal rituals and dialogic relationships at San Francisco State University in March of 2016. This band, Purple Gums, is a marked territory. The brassy trio (cornet, tuba, and saxophone, respectively) performed for a master class in the Creative Arts building for about 25folks in a medium-sized band room. For this performance, percussionist Vijay Anderson played with the usually drummerless trio. Minutes into the in-class performance, [William] Roper authoritatively erupts a spoken phrase through his mini-tuba: “Assume the position!” A bolt shivers our bones. He continues, invoking an aspect of life in this country. Purple Gums knows what this means. It’s imprinted upon the psyche of generations. Purple Gums refers to themselves as representative of a circular history: a story that’s not yet past. [Cornetist Bobby] Bradford tells us the excess of melanin in the skin causes relative coloration in the gums, and of the racial slurs attributed to it within and outside of the black community. He gives a sermon on the usage and appropriate inflection of the term motherfucker.

The band has had a 14-year interval between hits.

Why did they choose that moment to reconvene?

Purple Gums expresses an oppositional consciousness. Direct transmission of strategic methodology of pissedness and resistance technologies volley across the bandstand; seeing signs in culture (semiotics), analyzing these signs (deconstruction), synthesizing related forms (meta-ideologizing), erecting new principles of action (differential movement), and deploying egalitarian practices (democratics). Chela Sandoval’s seminal work Methodologies of the Oppressed exists for the purpose of generating dissidence and “revealing the rhetorical structure by which the languages of supremacy are uttered, rationalized—and ruptured.”

I entered the room with these lenses on. Gums speaks for themselves:

Purple Gums views music as narrative. A tune starts, by the time it ends, territory has been crossed, a story has been told. Most of the time the band lays down a backdrop for the audience to spin out their own creations within their heads. But on occasion, any one of the band's members will step to the mic and spin a yarn for you. Like the music, these stories are created extemporaneously—knowing the carnival ride you've stepped onto doesn't guarantee that you'll recognize the ride you step off of.

The nature of the signified totality of the presence of this group is that of their agency to produce musical sounds reflective of location/dislocation, dialogic inferences, traditions in/out of music, cultural signifiers, arbitrariness, and any, every part of their engagement.

This and related events were part of ImprovisAsians!, an annual performing arts and community-building event sponsored by Asian Improv aRts (AIR). The goals since 1987:

1) To make it possible for artists to create innovative works rooted in the diasporic experiences of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage.

2) To engage a next generation of community members in the arts through arts education.

3) To enable sustainability for artists and arts organizations in a challenging economic environment.

4) To facilitate creative collaborations that bring together major institutions, artists, and multigenerational audiences and participants.

The introduction—this introduction—into the subject matter of messages or propaganda or poetics of politics in art/music production is a reflexive process.

When I came to San Francisco 25 years ago as a student/street activist, I literally tripped over people like [saxophonist] Francis Wong, whose worldview and political consciousness shifted in response to the beating death of Vincent Chin near Detroit, Michigan, in June of 1982. Chrysler autoworkers—incensed about recent layoffs attributed to the boom in the Japanese car market—beat Chin to death with baseball bats outside of a bar at his bachelor party. The murderers received lenient fines and three years’ probation, and the state was satisfied. Asian Improv aRts was founded five years later by Wong and others. A bell can’t be unrung.

On the ride home from the class and performance, Vijay Anderson, an AIM devotee, shakes his head remembering how melodic Francis and Bobby are together. I think that overall harmony of difficult material is a binding substance for examination here.

Listen to Black Spirituals

PART 2

“the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes”

Constructivist motto

Russia, 1917

La Paz Middle School is located in Salinas, California, a historic town in Monterey County near the Central Coast of California named for its salty marshes and fertile agriculture. Reflective of the population of the town, La Paz has a high Latino concentration, presumably descendants of generations of farm laborers. Just weeks before I delivered a two-day arts practicum on the visual culture of the Underground Railroad, a 16=year-old was murdered by the police fairly close to the school. The history curriculum is a complement to instructor Jason Flores’s constructivist education framework (ultimately based on the work of Jean Piaget). The classroom centers on meaning-making by exposing the tenets, on which the social construction of everything in the classroom is based. As a facilitator, Flores serves to remove obstacles to learning by cultivating cognitive development through a series of observable, didactic activities. Students, as makers-of-meaning themselves, engage in the democratic learning environment as they construct representations of history individually and collectively.

I taught four classes of La Paz Panthers waist-high in the stories of Frederick Douglass, Civil War battles, and coded Black Spirituals. I engaged these young investigators to synthesize their own expertise and acquired knowledge through a socio-historical, tactical arts practicum centered on the intervention of the Underground Railroad quilt codes. “Re-Imagining UGRR Quilt Codes” illustrates connections and dynamics between the Civil War–era Underground Railroad to currently existing underground railroad dynamics and the relevance in their lives today. A conductor is clearly more understood as a coyote in the parlance of La Paz students; a station is a safe house.

Using the tools of perception, production, and reflection, these students demonstrated they had shared an interpersonal relationship with history beyond that of a solely fact-based curriculum.

1) Perception: students study works of tactical media in historic relevance to emancipatory practices

2) Production: students use basic skills and principles of the art form and put their ideas into visual form

3) Reflection: students assess their work according to personal goals and standards of excellence in the field

In art, Constructivism has origins in the 1917 Russian Revolution, where artists built meaningful objects reflective of the resources used for construction. It was an art form rich with materials for producing a new culture through assigning art to a practical, socially useful role in everyday life. For good or bad, they rejected “autonomous art” and the idea of the individual artist in favor of collective movements, like Bauhaus or De Stijl. As a theory of knowledge in education, Constructivism demonstrates an interaction between experiences and idea development. In classrooms, the convergence of social and practical elements in learning advances discourse and an interpersonal, cultural connection to the learning experience.

The improvisational nature of the Underground Railroad is aligned with the collective and individual experiences of slaves and fugitives. “The struggles waged against domination and enslavement in everyday life took a varied of forms,” according to Saidiya V. Hartman. She continues:

Exploiting the limits of the permissible, creating transient zones of freedom, and re-elaborating innocent amusements were central features of everyday practice. Practice is, to use Michel de Certeau’s phrase, ‘a way of operating’ defined by the ‘the non-autonomy of its field of action, internal manipulation of the established order, and ephemeral victories.’

The dual invocation of the slave as property and person was an effort [that] wed reciprocity and submission, intimacy and domination, and the legitimacy of violence and the necessity of protection. By the same token, the law’s selective recognition of slave humanity nullified the captive’s ability to give consent or act as agent, and, at the same time, acknowledge the intentionality and agency of the slave but only as it assumes the form of criminality.

These nuances did not go unnoticed at La Paz. The young Panthers constructed reimagined coded quilt blocks, both mimicking the old ones and simultaneously inventing new ones. The students demonstrated their understanding of the need for safe houses, for a code, for a conductor, or coyote, to weave a network of mutual aid synthesizing technologies of the methodologies of oppressed persons. They taught me codes for safety in their everyday lives. Students exhibited a strong motivation to learn and a confidence in their potential for completing the project. We created nearly 100 new quilt blocks reflecting on both history and personal experiences and knowledge. These reflections of competence and belief in one’s potential to solve new problems are derived from first-hand experience of mastering problems in the past, and are much more powerful than any external acknowledgment and motivation.

PART 3

"A book neither begins nor ends; at most it merely feigns doing so."

-Le Livre, Mallarme

Above is a graphic from my 2006 graduate thesis (RPI) mimicking Jean-Jacques Nattiez’ semiological, symbolic mapping of Wagner’s controversial Bayreuth Festival production of The Ring (1976).

Simultaneously inspired by [Gilles] Deleuze’s analyses of Leibniz and the Baroque, the map fails to address the Improviser’s choice to approach their instruments, not as jazz machines or rock ’n’ roll machines, but as improvising-machines. An appropriate correction might be to adjust #13 to read simply: Performance. However, I still find comfort in my bold appropriation. The waveform is code emblematic of the persistence of cognition. It represents a translation across media and lineage. It represents a path of identity formation as a significant, recognizable, and navigable event.

Referring to Kantian aesthetics of beauty in his book Economimesis, [Jacques] Derrida writes, "One must not imitate nature; but nature, assigning its rules to genius, folds itself, returns to itself, reflects itself through art.” “Kant,” he continues, “specifies that the only thing one ought to call art is the production of freedom by means of freedom [Hervorbringung durch Freiheit].” Pretty righteous words; to be clear, neither author is speaking of freedom from chains. They speak of an absolute freedom of expression: an art signifying pure ideas. Mimesis can roughly be defined as a representation of reality transmitted through empathetic means; economimesis is regarded, quite simply, as a process that exemplifies that appropriation.

It was Jacques Lacan who taught us that humans acquire identity through the acquisition of language process. Ideologies ingrained in that exchange are likewise absorbed. And it is his student, Slavoj Zižek who emphasizes that the effects of ideology are pervasive, powerful, and a nearly inescapable aspect of our world. Zižek further emphasizes a “creative refusal” of ideology sparked by a profound political change in the S/self, such as the 1917 Russian revolt against capitalism. We can say that oppositional consciousness, a term from Third World feminist praxis, was acquired through discursive processes.

Listen to Marshall Trammell

PART 4

"His was an historical music. He began himself before he played with Fletcher Henderson, playing alternate piano in the orchestra when Fletcher conducted. In recent years he even brought Fletcher and Duke back with a sweetness and contemporary restatement that was thrilling.

Ra was so far out because he had the true self-consciousness of the Afro American intellectual artist revolutionary. He knows our historic ideology and socio-political consciousness was freedom. It is an aesthetic and social dynamic. We think it is good and beautiful!"

—Amiri Baraka, foreword

This Planet is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra

In 1999, the “Improvising Across Borders” symposium at the University of California at San Diego introduced me to the subject. Pianist Dana Reason had organized the conference at which George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Douglas Ewart, Eddie Prévost, LaDonna Smith, JD Parran, Hafez Modirzadeh, and many more were present. I recently found a quote from LaDonna Smith on her experience:

One purpose of the Symposium was to explore one of the most previously slighted, but critically important fundamentals in music creativity and its true role in the shaping of musical traditions, styles, and current direction.

Pauline Oliveros gave a talk on Quantum Improvisation:

Quantum computing is a revolutionary method of computing based on quantum physics that uses the abilities of particles such as electrons to exist in more than one state at the same time. Quantum computation can operate simultaneously on a combination of seemingly incompatible inputs. By analogy or metaphor quantum Improvisation could mean a leap into new and ambiguous consciousness opening a new variety of choices.

At the same symposium, pianist and composer Vijay Iyer gave a memorable presentation on “African American Improvised Music and Embodied Cognition,” in which he analyzed Thelonious Monk’s music with the help of a multimedia display complete with transcriptions and minute details that delight me to this day. This moment greatly informed my thinking on analyzing music, as well as elucidated a process that I had unwittingly undertaken. Iyer’s presentation described and analyzed the way Monk’s fingers moved upon the keyboard with precision: the matrix of complexities pouring through expressive nodes in the body. As citizen-subjects, we often find ourselves to be subject to dominant ideological elements similarly quilted into our identities and woven into our imaginations. Robin D.G. Kelly’s book on Monk gives us a wealth of insight into the total social fact (Mauss) of the man, entreating us, as fans of his magic, to peer into this “bond between giver and gift.” We cannot ignore the conditions of cruelty and subjugation to admire the diamonds that such pressure creates. Iyer’s analysis of Monk’s embodied expression demands that Monk’s emulators reach beyond the sounds that come through one’s home speakers.

George Lewis’s essay “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” was weighed on my mind during this period in my development. I remember that John Cage’s body of work is known and accepted for his innovations and privilege, and Charlie Parker’s body of work is known and accepted for his innovations and remarkable lack of, and struggle for, privilege. Generations emulated Parker’s research and sound, along with other black musicians of that era; compelled by the representation of those artists’ lives in their music. I’ve wondered if their interest is in the actual conditions of their lives, or so it seems to me, the forces-in-motion that perpetuate those conditions. The oft quoted social theorist bell hooks writes, “Throughout African American history, performance has been crucial in the struggle for liberation.” She refers, of course, to minstrelsy. Moreover, Saidiya V. Hartman talks explicitly in her book about the auction block as a site of forced enjoyment, where slaves were made to dance and whoop it up at the crack of the whip

Locating:

I still see/practice “free music” and “creative music” as resistance music. I trace my interest in participating in music back to an exposure to Bob Marley, Parliament, and Earth, Wind & Fire as a youth. However, I am an Improviser. “Improvising Across Borders” addressed borders real and imagined, and made them all permeable. I was certainly in the right place at the right time! I had involved myself with this music as an extension of my political education, practices, and deep curiosity about how this form of resistance would change my sense of self, self-consciousness, and actions. I remember daring to raise my hand at that symposium saying that I thought there was going to be some kind discussion about the actual border: you know, the one between us and Mexico. There wasn’t meant to be one, although there is room enough for that to be my work.

Eleven years ago, the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) launched La Sexta from Laconcondon Jungle. This was the Sixth Declaration from the Zapatistas deep in the jungles of their autonomous zones surrounded by Southern Mexico, and the largest listening party the world has ever seen. Masked Zapatistas collected stories, complaints, recollections, evidence, and other data from the machinations of capitalism and status quo politics throughout the length and breadth of the country. The kick off in San Cristobal began with a peaceful occupation of the zocalo, or town square, by thousands of Zapatista and hundreds of press. Three musical acts took the stage, setting the tone. They played songs people knew. I imagined a performance by the World Saxophone Quartet in the zocalo in San Cristobal de las Casasin the State of Chiapas that New Year's Eve in 2005. What a gig?!? That stage was built with much more that wood and nails. I imagined WSQ, with all its members over time, ascending to the stage miraculously playing “The Hard Blues” together as the system of music to jump off such a project in the States, and I knew I had to be in a band worthy of that stage.

About the Artist:

Marshall Trammell is an African American percussionist born July 21, 1972 in Oceanside, CA and raised in Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawaii. Upon exposure to the Glenn Spearman Double Trio and ROVA's conduction systems, he has been a contributing member of the Bay Area Creative Music scene his arrival in San Francisco in 1993. Influences include Donald Robinson, Eddie Blackwell, Louis Moholo, Milford Graves & Papa Joe Jones are present in his performance on the drum set, while a deep exposure to Cuban, Haitian and West African linear drum systems shift his focus away from conventions in Jazz and Free Jazz.

Mr Trammell is a Soloist, Curator and Chief Investigator at Music Research Strategies. He curates "Decolonizing the Imagination: Arts Practicum & Democratics" and conducts "Black Fighting Formations," a conduction system based visual culture and cooperative economics of the Underground Railroad. Mr. Trammell has performed with such luminaries as Roscoe Mitchell, India Cooke, John Tchicai, Dylan Carlson & Saul Williams. He is a recoding artist as a member of the electro-acoustic duo Black Spirituals (SIGE Records) which performs internationally with Zachary James Watkins.

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music-research-strategies · 7 years

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Mama Wanda Sabir's talk show.

Live life through art. A black arts event source.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/…/08/11/wandas-picks-radio-show

1. Speak to Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, directors of Whose Streets, which opens nationwide today, Aug. 11, 2017.

2. Marshall Trammell, Archivussionist, joins us to talk about a new project at Prelinger Library, 301 8th Street at Folsom, Rm. 215, in SOMA District of San Francisco 4-9 p.m. Tomorrow the workshop continues at Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck at 1:30 p.m. with a performance at 7:30 p.m. with South African multi-instrumentalist Mogauwane Mahloele.

http://wandaspicks.com/

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music-research-strategies · 7 years

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Negro Digest, Sept/Oct 1968.

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music-research-strategies · 7 years

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INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL

Written by Herself: Jacobs, Harriet A. (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897; edited: Child, Lydia Maria Francis, 1802-1880.

The book documents Jacobs' life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children. Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narrative by using the techniques of sentimental novels "to address race and gender issues." She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced on plantations as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children when their children might be sold away.

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music-research-strategies · 7 years

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a meta-ideologizing event

interiors of opposition @ prelinger library - 301 8th, SF

august 10 & 11, 2017 from 4p to 9pm - 10 hours.

#warrior ethos fugitive survival strategies solidarity economic decolonial practices Indexical Moment/Um Library Underground Interiors Of Opp

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Improvisatory Nature of Fugitivity - closed, workshops addressing the guerilla strategies and tactical media of the Underground Railroad as technologies of resistance in our everyday lives today.

http://mrtrammell.wixsite.com/researchstrategies

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music-research-strategies · 7 years

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Improvisatory Nature of Fugitivity - Workshop Series

Music Research Strategies presents the Improvisatory Nature of Fugitivity, a closed workshop series as part of the Indexical Moment/um residency at Prelinger Library. The workshop addresses the guerilla strategies and tactical media of the Underground Railroad as technologies of resistance in our everyday lives today.

Narratives of Fugitivity: European invasion of the Americas, Narratives of Fugitivity, Reading slave narratives, & Improvisatory nature of fugitivity.

The Art of Conduction: Underground Railroad roles, Solidarity economic network of the UGRR, Sites of Opposition & Re-enactment exercises.

Tactical Media: Technologies of the Oppressed, Quilt block codes, Reimagining/Reinserting tactical media of UGRR, & Weaponizing Conduction

For more exact dates and times and answer a few questions about the workshop, please complete the survey and poll below:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bbuyMdvBggxCEzBKjP5JTBor-Hk4TuZY7EJvNRwv-9Q/edit?usp=sharing

If you have any problems accessing or have any questions, please contact me at [email protected] or (209) 358-3758 (landline).

#indexical moment/um musicresearchstrategies marshall trammell #simultaneous multi-dimensionality #improvisatory nature of fugitivity #prelinger library

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BLACK FIGHTING FORMATIONS: Simultaneous Multi-Dimensionality Part 1

(graphics version here)

“We all are Americans. But the thing is, to the extent that national oppression has been lifted on all of us - that’s not true. Now if they can raise up people, just like that could raise up Chiang Kai-Shek or somebody, who's’ a straight-out comprador, no connection to you at all - they can come out of the ghetto, they can come out of the suburbs, but they have no connection to the people whom they feign to represent. We've always had those folks. But now it's building up into a class. You can actually see that we have a comprador class, a comprador bourgeoisie, a comprador petty bourgeoisie - people who represent imperialism. They might look like us, they might look like whatever they want to look like. They can be anything.” “Home Rules: An Interview with Amiri Baraka: by Van Gosse “Radical History Review: Transnational Black Studies,” Fall 2003.

ALKEBULAN

The history of Black people, of African people, is an ancient one. Meticulous has been the work of Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop. (“Cheikh” was his title, as in elder, noble, or knight, in the British since. Remember that the knights of Europe took their inspiration and skills from the Moorish sheiks.) Cheikh Anta Diop, born in 1923, was meticulous in his explication of the Negro origins of the formations of civilization in Alkebulan, or the Land of the Blacks, in the original indigenous Arabic language. Here is great video on Dr. Diop’s expertise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl7FKb4NPiI

The African Origin of Civilization: Myth Or Reality is not only a document that I believe everyone should own, as well as comparable literature, but it is the grounding reference necessary for my discussion on Music, black fighting formations, and the interpretations of signs I designate as simultaneous multi-dimensionality. In the Preface to my dog-eared version, Cheikh Diop writes, a year to the month after my birth, that he “felt that Africa should mobilize all its energy to help the movement turn the tide of repression.” Starting his research in 1946, he, for the English translation in 1973, declares that what interests him most in the meaning of his work is to “see the formation of teams, not of passive readers, but of honest, bold research workers allergic to complacency and busy substantiating and exploring ideas expressed in (this) our work. He, then, weaponizes a body of knowledge with ten bullet points of historical armament to protect the treasure of Africa’s past, present & future and broadcast revolutionary action. He declared:

Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization.

Anthropologically and culturally speaking, the Semitic world was born during protohistoric times form the mixture of white-skinned and black-skinned people in western Asia.

The triumph of monogenetic (or, descendent of a single origin) thesis of humanity compels one to admit that all races descended from the Black race.

(1) The necessity to demonstrate possibility of writing a history of Black Africa free of mere chronology of events; and, (2) define the laws governing the evolution of African sociopolitical structures, in order to explain the direction that historical evolution has taken in Black Africa, therefore, to try to dominate and master that historical process by knowledge, rather than submit to it.

The necessity to define the image of a modern Africa reconciled with its past and preparing for its future.

That once the perspective accepted by official science have been reversed the history of humanity will become clear and the history of Africa can be written. (O)nly a loyal, determined struggle to destroy cultural aggression and bring out the truth, whatever it may be, is revolutionary and consonant with real progress; it is the only approach which opens on the universal. Humanitarian declarations are not called for and add nothing to real progress.

(In 1955, the time of publishing) How does it happen that all modern Black literature has remained minor, in the sense that no Negro African author artist, to my knowledge, has yet posed the problem of man’s fate, the major theme in human letters?

In The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity, (he and his colleagues) tried to pinpoint the features common to Negro African civilization. (I have just obtained this book and am tempted to read it through before for finishing this essay, instead I will offer but a glimpse. The work argues that “the profound cultural unity of Africa is the history of African matriarchy….The result is a blueprint for a comprehensive African social history.” I have seen this book priced from $850 to $2000. I have electronic copy of this book, available upon request.)

In the second part of Nations Nègres et Culture, we demonstrated that African languages could express philosophic and scientific thought (mathematics, physics, and so forth) and that African culture will not be taken seriously until their utilization in education becomes a reality. (In Nations Nègres , Dr Diop translates a page of Einstein's Theory of Relativity in to Wolof, the principal language of Senegal.)

I am delighted to learn that one idea proposed in Afrique Noire Precoloniale - the possibilities of pre-Colombian relations between Africa and America - has been taken up by an American scholar(s).

European Fighting Formations: An Origin of Bullshit!

“Origin of Negro Slavery,” Capitalism & Slavery by Eric Williams

“When in 1492 Columbus, representing the Spanish monarchy, discovered the New Word, he set in train the long and bitter international rivalry over colonial possession from which, after four and a half centuries, no solution has yet been found. Portugal, which had initiated the movement of international expansion, claimed the new territories on the ground that they fell within the scope of a papal bull (charter) of 1455 authorizing her to reduce to servitude all infidel peoples. The two powers, to avoid,controversy, sought arbitration and, as Catholics, turned to the Pope - a natural and logical step in an age when the universal claims of the Papacy were still unchallenged by individuals and governments. After carefully sifting the rival claims, the Pope issued in 1493 a series of papal bulls which established a line of demarcation between the colonial possession of the two states: the EAst went to Portugal and the West to Spain. The partition, however, failed to satisfy Portuguese aspirations and the in the subsequent year the contending parties reached a more satisfactory compromise in the Treaty of Tordesillas, which rectified the papal judgement to permit Portuguese ownership of Brazil.”

Underground Railroad Terminology

The fugitive slave escape network of pre-Civil War times existed for many years before people began calling it the Underground Railroad. By the year 1804, long before any railroads were built in America, there were people in the Philadelphia area as well as in other parts of the North who were actively helping fugitive slaves escape from their Southern masters. By the 1830s , when railroads began to appear in the United States, the complex system for helping fugitive slaves was so well developed the unhappy slave owners talked bou thow slave disappeared as if they had taken a ride on an underground railroad (the railroad bing the newest technical marvel of the day).

Those helping slaves escape to freedom quickly adopted the term as their own and began referring themselves and the roles they played in helping slaves escape by using railroad terms such as:

Station - any place where a fugitive slave could spend the night, find a meal, or get instructions, advice, and help for the next part of the journey.

Station Master - anyone who ran a station, often called a safe house.

Ticket Agent - the person who made first contact with a fugitive and brought him into the system.

Conductor - could refer to someone who organized a link of the Underground Railroad or to someone who accompanied an escaped slave or group of escapees along a stretch of the escape route.

Passengers - the fugitive slave who bought a ride on the Underground Railroad.

Tracks - trails and routes followed by escaping slaves.

An underground is only possible if (1) there is a segment of the population that sympathizes with those who want to flee and, among that group, a few who are willing to risk their property and lives to help others find freedom; (2) the general population must have a degree of freedom that makes it possible to evade the law with some hope of success; and, (3) those who will be passengers must either have avoided capture, or have succeeded in escaping from capture.

Visual Culture of the Underground Railroad

Tactical media refers to the use arts practices and temporary forms of cultural and political intervention, such as culture jamming and guerrilla communication. Historians believe quilts were made visible by station masters or other alles by being hung out to “dry.” The images themselves have were apart of the visual culture of everyday life and, thus, inconspicuous. Ticket agents, conductors, or passenger-turned-conductors would often sneak back “behind enemy lines” to educate would-be passengers on the visual nomenclature of this self-emancipatory project. They might carry something with looks like this image to your right.

Monkey Wrench: Prepare the tools you’ll need for the long journey, including mental and spiritual tools.

Wagon Wheel: Load the wagon or prepare to board the wagon to begin the escape.

Bear’s Paw: Take a mountain trail, out of view. Follow the path made by bear tracks; they can lead you to water and food.

Crossroads: Refers to Cleveland, Ohio, a destination offering several routes to freedom. It also signifies reaching a point where a person’s life will change, so one must be willing to go on.

Log Cabin: A secret symbol that could be drawn on the ground indicating that a person is safe to talk to. It also advises seeking shelter.

Shoo Fly: Possibly identifies a friendly guide who is nearby and can help.

Bow Tied: Dress in disguise, or put on a change of clothes. Fugitives could be easily identified by their tattered attire by slave catchers.

Flying Geese: Points to a direction to follow, such as where geese would fly during spring migration.

Drunkard’s Path: Create a zigzag path, do not walk in a straight line, to avoid pursuers in the area.

Tumbling Boxes: A symbol indicating it was time for slaves to pack up and go, that a conductor was in the area.

Star: Follow the North Star. Worked in conjunction with the popular song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” a reference to the Big Dipper constellation.

To quote quilt historian Xenia Cord, "Quilt research and quilt history often rely heavily on the oral anecdotes and oral memories of quilters, stories that link women with common interests to a body of shared information. This information, strongly buttressed by written memoirs, documented sources, pictures, tangible artifacts, and previously published research allows the historian to contribute to the body of knowledge that is American quilt history."

Thank you for reading. Part 2 is forthcoming.

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