Don’t Explain

ANNOUNCING…..

cris cheek
part: short life housing

This book collects seven texts written between 1981 and 1999, by UK-born, US-based poet/multimedia artist cris cheek. cheek was one of the key figures in the London poetry scene of the 1980s — the so-called “linguistically-innovative poetry” grouping later anthologized in Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke’s Floating Capital: New Poets from London. Likewise, he became central to developments in Performance Writing emerging out of variant distributed networks during the following decade. He has remained a prolific, genre-slipping figure: poet, performance artist and musician, whose activities range from the ambitious conceptual project Things Not Worth Keeping to recordings with the ensembles Slant and Garam Masala. Yet to date his publications have been relatively scarce and elusive, a situation which part: short life housing goes far to rectify.

At the heart of this book are two long sequences, previously unpublished aside from short extracts: “canning town chronicles,” a scathing set of verbal accretions that emerged from the wreckage of the Thatcher era; and “f o g s,” a series of typestracts quarried from verbal improvisations recorded during outdoor walks in densely foggy weather. Also included are several shorter pieces, including a selection of early 1980s work and “plain speaking yet,” cheek’s memorial to the novelist Kathy Acker. The poems have, in keeping with the author’s concern for the specificity of occasion and publication, been revised and visually reimagined with this volume in mind.

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For all its thickness, unanticipated moves, visual beauty, and playful language acrobatics, the poetry of part: short life housing consistently retains the edge of serious critique. There are few poets as attuned to the sounds and ambient fogs of everyday life as cris cheek, yet his record is tuned and sharply turned toward the reimagining of social knowledge. This volume is a generous move towards the full representation of cheek’s crucial project.
— Carla Harryman

Finally a good and rich span of writings from cris cheek. Here’s an artist and writer whose work has always taken up active tenancy of the languages and the streets of urban living, recording them and composing them back into the dense abstract neighbourhoods of his pieces. With this careful selection, cris cheek reminds us that he is a Londoner and as such is as inhabited by Dickens’ dark maze of industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the thatcheritic city. That’s at least two hundred years of grime, greed and energy you’ll find distilled in the cellular lines and ink splashes of this great volume.
– Caroline Bergvall

“i s   y o u r   t o n g u e   a   g l o m / w e a p o n   t h a t   s t a i n s ?” cris cheek is the Kepler of Chisenhale Dance Space. After a century of developments in poetic form best understood as a series of metaphors for transcribed speech, cheek’s poetry often actually is transcribed speech, throwing shapes on the page that pay homage to (and lay the ghosts of) all the dead metaphors. As in Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, the speech in cheek’s work functions as something like echolocation: its reflections (on him and in us) mapping out an ever more complex and multifocal shape for the public sphere, “w h e r e   o t h e r s   f e a r   t o / t / r e a d.”
— Peter Manson

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cris cheek, part: short life housing. The Gig, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9735875-5-5. 270pp, 6″ x 9″, perfectbound.

ORDERING INFORMATION (with a special deal!)

Within Canada: $22.50 — Within the US: $22.50 US
UK: £17 — Euro: €22
All prices include postage.

A special deal: for $8 Cdn / $8 US / £5 / €7, add one of the following:

• Slant, the canning town chronicles, sound&language (CD with cheek, Sianed Jones, Phillip Jeck — music based around texts collected in part: short life housing, as well as a reading of a Kinks tune…!)
• cris cheek, the church, the school, the beer (Critical Documents)
• Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada
• Maggie O’Sullivan, Palace of Reptiles
• Allen Fisher, Entanglement

Please make out cheques to “Nate Dorward”, & send to:
109 Hounslow Ave, North York, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
(email: ndorward [at-sign] ndorward [dot] com)

Latest update: well, so much for the Bowne job. They got rid of most of the workforce there a few weeks ago, including me. So, at the moment I’m trying to figure out what to do nex, whther to try to get back into freelance proofreading, editing & typesetting, or hunt for another fulltime job. I’m not entirely unhappy with this turn of events as the place was becoming an increasingly bizarre and unproductive work environment, but still the routine & the paycheques were nice…

But, the main thing is that my latest project has emerged: cris cheek’s part: short life housing. This has been a really long time coming, due to a variety of circumstances (at one point there was an entirely different incarnation of the book which I decided I simply couldn’t do without impossible expense)… nonetheless the next book is possibly the most physically beautiful book I’ve seen into print (it’s largish, with heavy paperstock & thick card covers, with one of the fancier interior designs I’ve created). & it’s a great pleasure to get a big chunk of cris’s work out into the world, since so much of his work has only appeared in small private editions or fragmentary showings in magazines. Next post will be the formal announcement…

Anne’s been really insanely busy, far more than is probably good for an 11-yr-old: she’s performing in R Murray Schafer’s new opera The Children’s Crusade. 3-hour practices virtually every day…! The good thing is that she finds it an exciting project to be involved in (it has very, uh, interactive staging… this means that the audience gets herded around rather than sitting put). It’s the opening night of the Luminato festival, so the pressure’s on…

Happy New Year, folks. My Xmas gift this year was… getting told by management that I’d be moved to the graveyard shift (10pm to 6:30am) beginning Jan 26th. Sigh.

In other news, pleased to see a few more notices for the Jim McAuley album:

• Ben Ratliff in the NY Times: nice to see that Jim gets a photo here, too.
• a nice unsigned piece here — I guess this guy (guys?) prefers to keep a low profile….
• Dan Warburton in Paris Transatlantic (an issue that also contains my rundown on a bunch of Canadian releases) — as usual with this journal, there’s no convenient way of linking to the review itself on the enormous webpage, so just use your ctrl-F “find” function to locate it…
• Mike Wood in Music Emissions: unfortunately he gets Jim’s last name wrong… I hope they fix that.
• & a positive but fairly desultory writeup here.

The new Cinematheque schedule arrived — Dreyer’s the marquee name for the winter season, which I’m looking forward to (any tips for his lesser-known films to check out, folks?). They’re also doing a feature on Joan of Arc in the cinema — Dreyer (obviously), Rivette, Preminger, Fleming, DeMille, Bresson (but they seem to have drawn the line at Besson) — plus Terence Davies, Jia Zhang-ke, Jancso, &c. It’s a shame though that this is the first season for which they’ve programmed absolutely NOTHING to interest younger viewers — they used to make a serious outreach effort, but it’s dwindled to nearly nothing. Despite the spottier offerings in the past year or so, Anne has always seen at least one or two things in every season — in recent months she was thrilled to see Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome in its all its tough, every-frame-counts glory. (She was also sorely disappointed that no-one bothered to secure a rating for Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, which meant she was not permitted to go; it’s a favourite of hers.)

Still keeping a watchful eye out for reviews of Jim’s The Ultimate Frog — here’s a recent pair:

David Adler’s review

Stef’s Free Jazz blog

Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning (in connection with the excellent Adler review) that “For Rod Poole” was actually recorded before Rod’s death — the titling is in honour (and memory) of Rod’s enthusiasm for that particular track. (If I remember rightly, Jim told me that Rod thought the track should have gone on the solo album Gongfarmer 18.) But even knowing that doesn’t diminish its enormous emotional power. Maybe it was recorded in response to some other event in Jim’s emotional or personal life, maybe just him in rainy-day mood… music often seems to develop an emotional life & history independent of the performer or the occasion of performance, anyway.

There’s a bizarre, very lo-fi video here that includes footage of Jim playing the Marxophone. The trio later in the video is George McMullen (trombone), Joel Hamilton (bass) and Alex Cline (drums).

Some early-bird print reviews for Jim McAuley’s The Ultimate Frog — I’m very happy for Jim & Jesse Zubot that it’s getting some nice press.

Vish Khanna’s review and Q&A feature in Exclaim!

Chris Bilton in Eye

A little writeup of Jim McAuley’s The Ultimate Frog by Brian Olewnick here. Brian’s more exclusively concerned with electroacoustic improv these days, so it’s nice of him to give the release a little love on his blog. (I think it helps that McAuley is not a dogmatic free improviser who avoids tonality or groove–Brian seems more interested these days in players who don’t starve their lyrical/idiomatic side…)

Yep, Jim McAuley’s new two-CD set is out, with a set of liner notes by yours truly. It’s a fantastic collection of duets with a variety of partners, including the late Leroy Jenkins, the Cline brothers (Alex & Nels), & Ken Filiano. Here’s the long version of my liner notes (I cut this in half for the disc, then used the offcuts for the press release…. waste not want not). You can hear a few samples here.

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I haven’t been able to find out much about Roy Dickinson, the author of The Ultimate Frog: An Unforgettable Story of a Strange Quest, a small book published in 1939, reprinting a story that first ran in Harper’s in 1924. It’s not so much a short story, really, as a parable about art, idealism and God, in which Old Man Sanders embarks on a quixotic quest to create a choir of four perfectly harmonious croakers, the moral being (to invert the usual maxim) that “the good is the enemy of the perfect” — that some brave souls won’t settle for the good-enough in art or in life. Sanders dies in the act of capturing the last frog, a little pickerel frog that “hit middle C as true as a good cellist”; the narrator, picking it up in hopes of completing the little choir, discovers that in the meantime the three others have hopped away, back into the swamp.

There’s surely gentle irony behind Jim McAuley’s titling this set of improvisations after such a book; after all, jazz is (as one commentator terms it) “the imperfect art,” tied to the expressive idiosyncrasies of the player’s individual personality — his “voice” — and subject to the happy or just plain unavoidable accidents of the moment. The elusiveness of McAuley’s music isn’t the sound of a Platonic ideal hopping away, but comes from a sense of a musical/human personality that keeps revealing more and more sides as you listen, with an intimacy, an emotional directness that sometimes actually puts you on the spot as a listener: freeform improv isn’t supposed to sound like this, is it? This openly expressive, this mutually implicating? (There are two or three tracks here whose drop-what-you’re-doing-now voodoo makes me think of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso”: “You must change your life.”) McAuley’s is not “private” music in the sense of being cryptic or abstract; he seems, instead, fascinated by the act of improvisation as a way of being-private-in-public, which offers a kind of welcoming ecstasy. And he’s fascinated by all those privacies (personal languages, life experiences, traditions) around him, which is why he’s a great duo partner, as can be heard in these four very different encounters with four strongly individual players.

The pieces here have been whittled down from a much larger body of material and carefully sequenced (there is a side of McAuley which hankers towards that froggy aesthetic absolute). It’s good to have a double-CD helping this time, because up to now there’s been far too little documentation of the guitarist’s artistry despite his long musical career. McAuley was born in Kansas in 1946; much to the dismay of his parents, his musical talent showed early, and as a teen he turned his attention to playing acoustic blues guitar. Classical guitar studies, folk guitar and jazz shortly entered the mix; in later years, he also took up kora, charango and oud (his music draws on many, many wells). In the late 1960s he was a member of a folk-rock group, Mouse; under contract to Capitol Records, the band moved to Los Angeles, only to fall apart before even recording their first album. Stranded, he spent a while as part of producer Don Costa’s stable of studio musicians–he’s present on albums by Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Eydie Gorme, among others–but the experience left him disenchanted, and it wasn’t long till he embarked for Europe (first Paris, then Ibiza) for an extended sojourn, concentrating on just “getting next to my guitar”. Returning to LA in the mid-1970s, he hooked up with the many fine players on the local avant-jazz scene — most crucially, the clarinettist John Carter, who was for a time his mentor. McAuley also connected with the post-Harry Partch microtonalists Erv Wilson, Ivor Darreg and Kraig Grady, an interest that much later bore fruit in the Acoustic Guitar Trio, a collaboration with Nels Cline and Rod Poole which explored just intonation, regular temperament and many other possible tunings (often simultaneously!). He kept a low profile, supporting himself with gigging and teaching, though there was one other false start towards a recording career in 1976, when he was signed to John Fahey’s Takoma Records, then dropped when the label was sold to Chrysalis. In the 1990s he led a series of disparate groups for Cline’s Alligator Lounge series — a constantly mutating project he dubbed “The Gongfarmers” (a gong farmer, if you really must know, is a medieval latrine cleaner). Despite this, McAuley’s only previous release under his own name, Gongfarmer 18 (Nine Winds), is actually a solo recording. His only other CD to date was the Acoustic Guitar Trio’s self-titled debut, released on Derek Bailey’s Incus label.

Aside from the leader himself, the musicians on these sessions probably need little in the way of introduction. McAuley originally met the late, great Leroy Jenkins (arguably the most important violinist to emerge from the 1960s jazz avant-garde) when the latter’s trio with Myra Melford and Joseph Jarman played LA in 2002. (Aside from these duet sessions, their encounter yielded an informative interview with Jenkins which was published in the poetry-and-jazz magazine Shuffle Boil.) Their performances are the closest thing on The Ultimate Frog to conventional free-improv duets — there’s no precomposed/prearranged material, they simply seized the moment and ran — but there’s certainly no cautious scrambling-around, either. On “Improvisation #12,” for instance, McAuley’s running-water stillness-in-motion prompts some of Jenkins’ most forthright, lyrical playing on the date, though there’s always an attacking edge — his articulation virtually jerks the line forward at times. It’s exhilarating and a little frightening to hear the players eventually push off into some very fraught territory indeed, through a series of countless incremental gestures and curving changes of direction.

The other three players here are key figures from the Los Angeles free jazz music scene, though Ken Filiano is now based in New York, and nowadays Nels Cline splits his schedule between avant-jazz gigs and his work as a member of Wilco. Many of these tracks involve some loose premeditation or agreed-upon exploration of a specific texture, approach or lick (including some great blues hooks); there are even a few dots-on-paper tunes. What’s most obvious is McAuley’s love of the sheer variety and depth of sound he and his partners can create — from the spellbound hush of “Bullfrogs and Fireflies” and “November Night” to the daft hullabaloo of “Froggie’s Magic Twanger,” featuring the Marxophone (a rattly zither-like gadget that used to be sold through the Sears catalogue — it’s hard to imagine producing any coherent “normal” music with it, but for improv it’s quite the thing!). The duos with Nels Cline are downright uncanny at times in the closeness of their phrasing and understanding, while the duos with bass and drums often have the contrapuntal richness of a trio (or quartet!) performance.

And then there’s the last track, a song with/for an absent partner, as the rain beats down outside. Listening to it, I can’t help coming back to the shining moment of near-transcendence in Roy Dickinson’s old story, when the frog choir is three-quarters complete:

Then we went back on the porch and listened. It sounded like real music. The philosophy of song and the woods was there. The deep note of the old bull, the higher one of the green frog, and the shrill tenor of the peeper blended in a melody like an old folk song. I began to think of the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ It was the true harmony of the almost, the perfection of the nearly perfect. There was melody in the music, as of a world striving to be articulate at some point beyond the light of the morning star.

Keats’ poem says that “Heard melodies are sweet; but those / Unheard are sweeter.” Well, maybe… but I’m just thankful for the ones I’m hearing now, right here.

Nate Dorward, 15 August 2008

Have just done a big reinstall of the site & am trying to clean up the nasty spamlinking that was added in here after it was hacked. Let’s see if this works, or if stronger measures are needed….. there’s a lot of cleanup needed on the posts, but I want to see if the spambot can still get in & mess with the posts after I remove the stuff.

In other news: the computer died. I have a new computer. I haven’t got the backup reinstalled yet, though, which means that I probably haven’t got your email address or postal address since they were all in there. & if your email or postal address changed after March 2008 (date of the last backup) it’ll be out of date. In case you’re looking to hear from me, then now’s the time to give me a shout (ndorward with an at-sign and ndorward dot com).

I seem to be doing a lot of retrenching lately. The music reviewing’s been dialled down, in part because of lack of time, in part because I’m nowadays interested in getting out of the “jazz and improv” ghetto (lately, the listening’s been mostly 1960s-1970s funk & soul), in part because I wasn’t so happy with how things were going at Cadence and Coda. I still do a little for Signal to Noise, though — it remains the print music journal I like most — & have also been doing some copyediting of it in order to keep my hand in (my regular daytime job really has less & less to do with proofreading or editing). Pete’s a great guy to work with — god knows how he keeps the whole enterprise afloat!

There’s some other good music-related news: Paris Transatlantic is returning to action: first of the new issues is here. I’ve got a writeup of a pile of Drip Audio releases & a new Guus Janssen solo disc in there.

The new book at last…

More details on this page. It’s a great relief to get this book into the world at last — it should have come out a couple of years back but got waylaid by various things in my personal life. My favourite pieces here are a pair of fine essays on Karen Mac Cormack by John Hall & Gerald Bruns, Peter Larkin’s piece on Lisa Robertson & pastoral, two pieces on Lissa Wolsak by Peter O’Leary & Susan Schultz, Ted Byrne’s piece on Susan Clark (editor of Raddle Moon & a fine poet in her own right, though her habitual accumulation & tearing-apart of book-length projects has so far left only very few available examples of her work) & Christine Stewart’s pieces on the poetics of her KSW contemporaries. Do check it out…

Ross Porter
The Essential Jazz Recordings: 101 CDs
McClelland & Stewart, 2006.
Can. $24.99/U.S. $16.95. ISBN 0-7710-7032-2

The best jazz record guides have something for all listeners. Newcomers gain a useful shopping list to help them navigate the deep waters of the jazz canon; along the way, they learn about the music’s history, its major figures and (most important) what to listen for in a jazz performance. Experienced fans get to revisit old favourites, comparing their own opinions and personal ratings with the author’s, and also learn of records that have still inexplicably escaped their notice. Ross Porter, who has worked as a jazz broadcaster for many years, first as host of CBC’s After Hours and more recently as head of Toronto’s Jazz.FM, would on the face of it seem well-placed to write such a guide. The Essential Jazz Recordings, however, is a strikingly poor effort, which manages to offer equally little to the beginner or the committed fan.

Porter’s canon is a narrow one, emphasizing jazz as tasteful mood-music; smoky-voiced vocalists and the Verve catalogue take up much of the shelf space. Fair enough: one hardly expects him to favour noisefests like Bitches Brew or Nailed, and the mellower end of the music is certainly more likely to appeal to novice listeners. Yet Porter pushes his own biases to the point of erecting a jazz counter-history as bizarre as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (set in a world where the Axis won WW2). What would jazz be like if its “essential recordings” didn’t include Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Duke Ellington’s Blanton-Webster band of 1940-41, the Teddy Wilson/Billie Holiday sides, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Charlie Christian, Birth of the Cool, Art Pepper, Gerry Mulligan, Jackie McLean, Betty Carter, the Clifford Brown/Max Roach quintet, any Miles Davis recording later than 1959, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy…? Well, if you omit all that, then I’m not sure you’re listening to “jazz” exactly. True, there are many classics on Porter’s list — Kind of Blue, Giant Steps and the rest — but they hardly mean the same thing when they’re all that’s left of an otherwise thoroughly dismantled canon. Even his welcome inclusion of Canadian artists — Oscar Peterson and Diana Krall, inevitably, but also Lenny Breau, Guido Basso and Jane Bunnett — is soured by the indefensible omission of Kenny Wheeler and Paul Bley.

So one should ignore the book’s title and treat this as Ross Porter’s Desert Island Picks — a selection of personal favourites. And in all fairness, there are some good or intriguingly quirky picks here, such as Lennie Tristano’s self-titled Atlantic recording, Sheila Jordan’s Portrait of Sheila, Steve Swallow’s Home, and Bill Frisell’s Have a Little Faith. Yet some major flaws still limit the book’s usefulness and appeal. A minimum requirement of a guidebook is accuracy; yet the book is rife with typos, misspellings and factual errors. Some are trivial – “Paul Champers on bass” – but outright howlers crop up too, as when the entry for Giant Steps states that “Coltrane blazed new sonic trails on his alto sax in songs that still sound fresh and timeless.”

The other major flaw here is that Porter really has nothing to say about his favourite records. Miscellaneous names and factoids fatten each entry, but actual discussion of the music barely gets a look-in. Here — in full — are his comments specifically about the music on Monk’s At Carnegie Hall: “The nine tracks on this CD include the superlative ‘Monk’s Mood,’ ‘Evidence,’ ‘Crepuscule with Nellie,’ and ‘Blue Monk.’ Throughout, Monk and Coltrane are daring and innovative and shadow one another effortlessly. This group, which included Shadow Wilson on drums and Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, is swinging and adventurous.” Newcomers to jazz — if they desire more than a collection of classy background music — need to learn what makes a great jazz performance; a guidebook is only helpful if it indicates what the author finds noteworthy or moving in a performance. But Porter’s writing is so perfunctory and colourless it makes some wonderful albums sound dull.

This is easily one of the weakest and most superfluous books on jazz I have encountered; just about any other currently available guide is preferable. Ben Ratliff’s New York Times Essential Library: Jazz, in particular, features a near-identical format but is vastly better-written and -informed.

Coda

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This was the nice version of this piece, believe it or not — it could have gone on listing errors & omissions for considerably longer. One curious thing about the book is the omission of many albums that used to be very popular even with people who weren’t hardcore jazz fans: for instance the book manages to omit Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea and Ahmad Jamal’s At the Pershing.

The book’s appearance was plugged by a feature interview in the Toronto Star by Ashante Infantry: this passage is blunter than anything in Porter’s book about his exclusions:

Q: What did you strive for in assembling this list?

A: I wanted CDs that people are going to listen to. A record like Louis Armstrong’s (1925) Hot Fives & Sevens is important to the development of jazz, but not something that you put in high rotation. I wanted a group of recordings that are entertaining and offer something musically — either move the genre ahead or redefine it. These albums have stood the test of time for me.