Institute for Studies In American Music Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York NEWSLETTER
Volume XXXIV	No. 1 Fall 2004
Inside This Issue: The Composer, the Work, and Its Audience by Adrienne Fried Block Calypso as a World Music by Kenneth Bilby What Is a River by Noah Creshevsky Jewish American Music: Review by Evan Rapport More News from Nowhere: Review by David G. Pier Reviving the Folk: Review by Ray Allen ISAM Matters Home	More News from Nowhere Review by David G. Pier Steve Coleman photo by Michael Wilderman, JazzVisionsPhoto.com In an essay entitled "What Is Freedom?" Hannah Arendt argued that real political freedom is "the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known."^1 This notion of freedomwhile not the only pertinent oneplays an important role in modern Western valuations of improvisation. The title of The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Wesleyan University Press, 2004; $29.95) suggests an unexplored space, and several contributors discuss improvisation as a way of getting to somewhere new and unprecedentedto a terra incognita away from society's stifling conventions. However, as George Lewis points out in his essay, when many musicians talk about freedom, they are talking not just about the notion articulated by Arendt of a freedom to forget the past and create something entirely new in the moment, but also about the freedomor more precisely the powerto keep endangered histories alive. The majority of the book's sixteen essays are concerned with improvisation and power: they explore how political coalitions give people the power to improvise, and, conversely, how improvisation facilitates political coalition-building. Several articles concern groups of diverse artists who use improvisation to accommodate each other's differences. A commitment to improvisation is a commitment to adaptability which makes collaborations among strangers possible. Jason Stanyek writes that a belief in "pan-Africanism," shared by many blacks around the world, has led to adventurous collective improvisations among black musicians from disparate cultures. Dizzy Gillespie and the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo spoke different tongues and played in different musical languages, yet their belief in common African roots motivated them to combine their musical resources. To effect such a combination, they relied on their skills as improvisers. Following Stanyek's thread, Michael Dessen analyzes a more recent, similarly African-roots-inspired communion between jazz saxophonist Steve Coleman and the folkloric group AfroCuba de Matanzas. Julie Dawn Smith raises an excellent example of political coalition-building through musical improvisation. Membership in the London-based Feminist Improvising Group (FIG) was based as much on the members' gender, sexual and racial identities, and political views as it was on their musical skills and styles. Some of the improvisers lacked conventional musical skills but were, in the words of one of the founders, "politically very right and in terms of improvising picked up nice things" (p. 237). The free improvisation genrein which spontaneous adaptation and tolerance are (in theory) taken to their natural limitsallowed these women to perform together without having to worry about the usual standards of competence. Defying society's prohibition against women making ugly noises, FIG used the extreme timbres typical of free jazz to intensify the stage show's in-your-face queer sexuality and feminist shock politics. Two other articles address all-female improvising collectives. Pauline Oliveros's essay emphasizes the benefits of maintaining a safe space for women improvisers away from their male counterparts, who tend in her view to be more competitive and to insist more on technical virtuosity. Sherrie Tucker agrees with Oliveros about the potential benefits of all-women improvising communities, but also conveys her and her informants' irritations with the label "women-in-jazz." Many working women musicians would like more attention to be paid to the word "musician" and less to its modifier "woman." George Lewis's influential essay "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives" is reprinted in The Other Side of Nowhere with an afterword.^2 Lewis takes aim at writers of textbook histories of post-war experimental music for having unanimously marginalized Charlie Parker and other experimentalists associated (often against their wills) with "jazz." He places some of the blame on John Cage and his disciples, who went out of their way to dismiss jazz as hopelessly banal and mired in tradition. Lewis smells fishy history: is it merely a coincidence that Cage discovered indeterminacy immediately after the improvisational breakthroughs of Parker and his bebop colleagues? Cage pointed to European improvisational precedents of a century and a half ago, to ancient East Asian practicesin short, to any sources of influence other than the most immediate and probable ones. Lewis suggests that white composers, threatened by the new jazz's encroachments on the territory of high art, pooled their power resources to generate their own exclusive experimentalist "other side of nowhere." It is Cage's spin on jazz, backed by his white high priest image, that continues to inform the academic canons of post-war Western experimental music. It is high time to desegregate twentieth-century music history textbookswith any luck, Lewis's article will move the academic community toward this end. One of this collection's charms is its eclecticism, with offerings ranging from Michael Jarrett's uninterrupted collage of quotes from famous jazz record producers such as Milt Gabler and Michael Cuscuna, to Krin Gabbard's article on Marlon Brando's indebtedness to Gene Krupa and the white jazz hipster image, to Nathaniel Mackey's experimental fiction piece about an improviser named Penguin. The book's weaknessthe flip side, perhaps, of its enthusiastic inclusivenessis too lenient editing. Most of the pieces would have been improved by excisions of lengthy digressions. Also disappointing is the fact that, although the book includes a healthy number of musicians' voices, it presents little in-depth discussion of techniques of musical improvisation. We learn much about how various musicians feel about improvisation in general, but relatively little about what happens in their minds and bodies from moment to moment in the course of a performance. John Corbett's essay on musicians' various ways of ending free improvisations is exceptional in this regardmore articles in this vein would have been most welcome. The book is obviously pitched to an interdisciplinary audience, and the authors seem to avoid discussions that might require the reader to know something about musical forms. Unfortunately, the same authors have no reservations about launching into swaths of literary theory jargon. In spite of its excesses, The Other Side of Nowhere is worth reading and having on the shelf because it provides such a wide variety of perspectives on issues of power and freedom in jazz and other modern Western improvisational genres. —David G. Pier City University of New York, Graduate Center Notes ^1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Penguin, [1968] 1993), 151. ^2 Lewis's essay was originally published in Black Music Research Journal 16/1 (Spring 1996): 91-122.