Microgroove by John Corbett

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"Microgroove" continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music, as well as painting, design, dance, and poetry.

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Content

MI
O

forays
into other music

john corbett

CR
GR
O O VE

MICROGROOVE

MICROGROOVE

forays
into other music

john corbett

duke university press
Durham & London

2015

© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on
acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Quadraat, Orator, and Officina
Sans by Graphic Composition, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corbett, John, [date]
Microgroove : forays into other music / John Corbett.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5900-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5870-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7553-1 (e-book)
1. Avant-garde (Music) 2. Music—20th century—History
and criticism. 3. Music—21st century—History and
criticism. 4. Improvisation (Music) i. Corbett, John,
[date] Extended play. Continuation of: ii. Title.
ml197.c769 2015
780.9’04—dc23
2015003795
Frontispiece: Two panels from Uncle Gaspard Joins the Bograt
Navy © Michael Hurley, reprinted with permission, all
rights reserved.
Cover art: Joe McPhee, 1970. Photograph by Ken Brunton.
Courtesy of Joe McPhee.

in memory of fred anderson,
ornette coleman, von freeman,
steve lacy, bernie mcgann,
and koko taylor

I hate music, what is it worth?
Can’t bring anyone back to this earth.
Filling the space between all of the notes,
But I’ve got nothing else, so I guess here we go.

• SUPERCHUNK, “Me and You and Jackie Mittoo”

contents

Preface: Tympanum of the Other Frog • xv
Acknowledgments • xix
Introduction • 1
One. On the Road, Into the Cul-de-Sac
Joe Harriott and Bernie McGann: Flying without Ornette • 15
Michael Hurley: Jocko’s Lament • 21
Mayo Thompson: Genre of One • 33
John Stevens: Unpopular Populists • 36
Peter Brötzmann Tentet: Freeways • 40
Steve Lacy: Sojourner Saxophone • 49
David Grubbs: Postcards from the Edge • 57
Voice Crack: From Nothing to Everything • 67
Two. Exigeneses of Creative Music
Milford Graves: Pulseology • 71
Out of Nowhere: Deleuze, Gräwe, Cadence • 79
Carla Bley and Steve Swallow: Feeding Quarters to the Nonstop Mental
Jukebox • 85
Misha Mengelberg: No Simple Calculations for Life • 93
Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink: Natural Inbuilt
Contrapuncto • 109
Form Follows Faction? Ethnicity and Creative Music • 116
Anthony Braxton: Ism vs. Is • 123
Anthony Braxton: Bildungsmusik—Thoughts on “Composition 171” • 129

Paul Lovens: Lo Our Lo • 132
Clark Coolidge: The Improvised Line • 136
Nathaniel Mackey: Steep Incumbencies • 142
Sun Ra: From the Windy City to the Omniverse—Chicago Life as a Street
Priest of diy Jazz • 153
Fred Anderson: The House That Fred Built • 162
Three. Ululations and Other Vocal Stimulants
Sun Ra: Queer Voice • 169
Jaap Blonk: Uncommon Tongue • 170
PJ Harvey: Mother’s Tongue • 179
Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound
(coauthored with Terri Kapsalis) • 182
Liz Phair and Lou Barlow: On Music, Sex, tv, and Beyond • 194
Liz Phair and Kim Gordon: Exile in Galville? • 205
Koko Taylor: The Blue Queen Cooks • 212
Brion Gysin and Steve Lacy: Nothing Is True, Everything Is
Permuted • 217
Four. The Horn Section
Ornette Coleman: Doing Is Believing • 233
Roscoe Mitchell: Citizen of Sound • 244
Fred Anderson and Von Freeman: Tenacity • 250
George Lewis: Interactive Imagination • 258
Mats Gustafsson: MG at Half-C • 264
Ken Vandermark: Six Dispatches from the Memory Bank • 270
Ken Vandermark and Joe McPhee: Mutual Admiration Society • 278
Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker: Bring Something to the Table • 285
Five. Track Marks
Oncology of the Record Album • 297
Discaholic or Vinyl Freak? Mats Gustafsson Interrogates John
Corbett • 301
Twenty-Seven Enthusiasms: A Spontaneous Listening Session • 308
xii contents

A Very Visual Kind of Music: The Cartoon Soundtrack beyond the
Screen • 313
R. L. Burnside and Jon Spencer: Fattening Frogs for Snake Drive • 322
Before and After Punk: The Comp as Teaching Tool • 331
Raymond Scott: Cradle of Electronica • 336
Six. Melodic Line and Tone Color
Peter Brötzmann: Graphic Equalizer • 343
Albert Oehlen: Bionic Painting • 347
Albert Oehlen: Mangy—A Conversation and a Playlist • 352
Christopher Wool: Impropositions—Improvisation, Dub Painting • 359
Christopher Wool: Into the Woods—Six Meditations on the
Interdisciplinary • 366
Sun Ra: An Afro-Space-Jazz Imaginary—The Printed Record of El
Saturn • 371
Seven. The Texture of Refusal
Helmut Lachenmann: Hellhörig, or the Intricacies of Perceptiveness • 379
Guillermo Gregorio: Madi Music • 387
Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others • 391
Afterword: A Concise History of Music • 417
Grooving On: Selected Listening • 423
Credits • 443
Index • 447

contents xiii

preface
Tympanum of the Other Frog

The moon was a drip on a dark hood.
Dad hit the brakes as we drove up to the water’s edge, grinding gravel, dust
rising in the dusk air. The sound of the car silenced the nightlife, but only
temporarily. Arms folded on the windowpane of the Ford ltd station wagon,
we waited for the frogs to crank back up.
I was eight years old. My family lived up the street, in a suburb of Virginia
Beach. Inlynnview Road bisected the larger waterway into two parts: a pond
that opened out onto an even larger body of water, and a smaller pond lopped
off on the other side, fed by a viaduct, surrounded by overhanging trees, a bit
swampy with algae and lily pads, but with a clean and flowing water supply
that kept it fertile, green, and full of critters. For a few years, this was my
preferred playground.
Engine off, night on the horizon, my father and I awaited the first frog, a
scout who would croak bravely into the abyss. A regular pulse, sometimes like
the pluck of a tenor banjo. Very soon others would join, first a few, tentatively,
then louder, then more, until the pond was transformed into an amphibian
amphitheater. A cacophony of belches, a vortex of peeps, several species of
itsy animals bellowing longingly into the night in hopes of finding a hookup,
depositing eggs or sperm, then paddling or hopping off into the dark having
accomplished the one-night stand, froggy style.
When the full chorus was singing, my father whispered to me that I should
pick out one particular frog and try to listen only to it. It was more difficult than
I expected, but I found that with some effort I could differentiate the sound of
a specific animal—I suppose I recognized its voice—and isolate it from the
others. Now, he said, keeping that one in mind, try to hear another one at the same
time. Struggling, I did. But the rhythm of the first one was a bit faster than the
other, so they kept coming together and then moving apart, cyclically, drawing
me away from the first one. Croak, croak, croak, croak-croak, croak-croak,

croak-croak, croak, croak, croak. Listen to the new voice in relation to the first one,
he said. I did, and the first frog became the base from which the second frog
veered, like when the blinker in the car doesn’t match the blinking of a street
sign. OK, now if you can, switch them. This was even trickier, but when I managed, it was like a door opened up in my head. Suddenly, the second frog was
the baseline, the original one was the variable. And right away, I could do this
with any of the hundreds of frogs bleating in the dark.
My dad was teaching me about polyrhythms. Setting me up for Steve Reich
and jazz. That’s already pretty mind-blowing for an eight-year-old, but there
was more. I couldn’t put a name on it, but I also understood that he was showing me something deeper, a principle. If I was able, by shifting my focus, to
change the rhythm I was hearing, then listening must be a relative activity. A
listener has to make decisions about how to listen. It’s not just a passive thing.
And in order to do that, to put yourself into the right space to be able to make
informed listening decisions, you have to pay attention.
During many nature trips, frogging or birding or fishing, my dad instilled
a sense of this fundamental respect for paying attention, using eyes as well
as ears. It probably saved my life a couple of times when I nearly stepped on
poisonous snakes, noticing them just in time. If you don’t pay attention, you
don’t notice the snakes. But attentiveness is a luxury in our lives; the focus is
so often made for us, to optimize and economize our experience. I guess it’s
one of the pleasures of watching Orson Welles, his love of the long shot and
deep focus, his avoidance of the close-up and the cutaway. There’s plenty to
notice in one of those shots, but you have to pay attention; nobody will point
at it and say, “Hey, nimrod, look over here, this is the important thing.”
Try this: go to a pond and look at the water. Stay there. Keep looking. Wait
longer. Bored? Stay there. At some point, you’ll start to notice things. Maybe
a turtle’s head will pop up, a dark area will turn out to be a lurking fish, you’ll
see the googly eyes and bulbous nose of a frog. They were there already. You
hadn’t noticed them. I did this once when I was in junior high, outside Philadelphia. There was a stream I’d been walking past regularly for a couple of
years. I stared at a clump of leaves submerged against a rock in the bed of the
stream. Zoned out in adolescent daze, but armed with my beastie attentiveness
training, I was amazed to realize that the leaves were alive and were in truth
a hellbender salamander. No doubt, that will be the only time I see one in the
wild. Glad I noticed.
The trick to being attentive is one thing: still thyself. This is the ultimate
message of the frog pond. Before you can become an active listener, before
you can explore the tapestry of croaks, you have shut down all the stuff in your
xvi

preface

head. Get over yourself. Forget all your fancy ideas, your elaborate plans. This
recognition has an ironic component—you have to be receptive, all ears, in
order to get to a place where you can choose how to hear. That’s one of the
most profound aspects of John Cage—in order to become a critical listener,
his music often suggests, you have to dispense with your ego. If you are in
the woods and all you have in your brain are thoughts and conversations and
preconceptions, over that din you’ll never notice anything new. Nothing will
surprise you; you will only continuously confirm your suspicions.
Consider the time-honored cliché of the classic western—the observant
Native American notices the broken twig, sniffs the dirt, says he’s been here, the
ground is still warm, locates the outlaw to the awe of the flat-footed honky posse.
There’s something to it. The world—natural or cultural, no matter—is there
already, waiting to be observed. In order to do so, you have to be patient and
humble and get yourself out of the way.
It’s a different frog pond these days. The prevalence of electronic gadgets
in our daily lives makes deep observation even more difficult; our attention is
ruthlessly interrupted by other messages claiming greater importance. Those
gadgets should become part of the landscape, something that we have to pay
attention to, to place among the other sounds, so that we can hear them for
what they are, and, in the long run, so that rather than reacting to them automatically, we can make decisions about how we hear them.
Imagine we’re there in the dark, back on Inlynnview Road, froggies singing, and the cell phone rings. OK, no judgment, I’ll let it ring, try to hear it in
relation to the other sounds, see what it adds to the chorus. Perhaps I won’t
choose to defer all the others to the phone’s tones, making it the baseline frog.
I’ll strip it of its singular urgency, neutralize it, just for a minute. It’s a sound,
no more or less, mingling with other sounds, not only frogs but toads too,
trilling and chirping in the warm evening air.

preface xvii

acknowledgments

This book has had four different introductions. In 1999, I began to assemble
material for a new collection as a follow-up to my book Extended Play (1994).
This period found me writing extensively for music magazines, contributing
liner notes, and essaying periodically for academic publications. There seemed
to be ample work to choose from, and the emergent document seemed to
have a shape and substance complementary to the previous book. It began to
feel like Extended Play Volume 2. I put the manuscript together, wrote an initial
introduction, sent it off to the press, got positive feedback and a contract.
Then I put it aside.
At the time I wasn’t sure why; now I know. It wasn’t ready. It needed a
scrupulous chopping. Moreover, something had started to shift and deepen
for me. I had to give it more time, work more, build it up and take things out.
Think of ceramicist Ken Price: layer upon layer, then the sanding down, accumulating in order to reveal what is underneath. About five years down the
line, I revisited and reworked it, and out in the woods of Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula, I wrote a new introduction. Then I put it aside, again. This time, it
was on the shelf for a shorter period; I went back to it again about two years
later, but at that point, in the mid-oughts, I had embarked on a new, very timeintensive adventure opening an art gallery, and I once again put the collection,
as well as its third intro, on ice.
Late in 2013, I opened up the manuscript again and found it newly exciting.
This time, I was brutally honest, extracted many earlier parts that didn’t make
the cut, and added a batch of newer chapters including a series of writings
linking music and visual art. On a writing retreat in southwest Wisconsin, I
composed the final version of the introduction and put the pieces in a definitive order.
A book that takes fifteen years to assemble is inevitably indebted to many
colleagues and associates. I would be hard-pressed to name (or remember)

all of them, but a number require acknowledgment. I’ve learned immensely
from the guidance and insight of editors at several periodicals, especially Kiki
Yablon, Philip Montoro, Jason Koransky, Ed Enright, and Aaron Cohen. Kevin
Whitehead, who lived in Chicago for some time, was and continues to be a
bright light from whom I have drawn as much illumination as possible. With
the brilliant Lloyd Sachs, Whitehead and I hosted a radio program, Writer’s Bloc,
on wnur, also very inspiring and informative for me; later the show added
two more great journalists, Art Lange and Peter Kostakis. That rich environment contributed immensely to this endeavor. I miss the Lightning Round.
Fundamental appreciation goes to all the interview subjects represented in
this volume. Several of the musicians and artists are now close friends, and
for their comradeship, constancy, and trust, as well as the way they challenge
me, I thank Peter Brötzmann, David Grubbs, Joe McPhee, Albert Oehlen, and
Christopher Wool. Mats Gustafsson is the best buddy a vinyl freak could want
(shhh, be very quiet!), an open ear whenever needed. Several artist-friends not
in the book were deeply inspiring to its completion: Josiah McElheny, Phil
Hanson, and Charline von Heyl. For twenty years of return visits to his basement, where I have learned so much, I bow to my friend Milford Graves. Over
the course of a decade starting in the ’90s, I was fortunate to work closely with
Ken Vandermark, and I thank him for many insights into the stressful world
of a working musician. In the same period, I benefited greatly from time spent
with Bruno Johnson of Okka Disk records. I wish we saw more of one another
these days; in spite of family and entrepreneurship, he too has felt the irresistible gravitational pull of the music. My alte freund Kurt Kellison, cofounder
of the Unheard Music Series, is another key inspiration for Microgroove. Many
colleagues and pals have aided me directly or indirectly, including Bruce Finkleman, Pete Toalson, Scott Black, Malachi Ritscher, Lou Mallozzi, Anthony
Elms, Susanne Ghez, Hamza Walker, Susannah Ribstein, Brian Ashby, Ben
Chaffee, Julia Hendrickson, Emily Letourneau, Nicole Sachs, Judith Kirshner,
Ihno van Hassalt, Mitch Cocanig, Mike Reed, Dave Rempis, Josh Berman,
Michael Orlove, Frank Alkyer, Rachel Weiss, Sheryl Ridenour, Adam Abraham,
Kate Dumbleton, Bob Snyder, Pam Wojcik, Rick Wojcik, Scott Nielsen, and
Leslie Buchbinder. Props to my wonderful and supportive extended family:
James, Joyce, Jack, and Jennifer Corbett; Jayne Hyland; and Tim-Bob Fitzgerald. Most recently, I have been engaged most pleasurably working alongside
Jim Dempsey, the master of analogy, whose style and humor are undergirded
by his sensitivity and intelligence.
For waiting it out with such supportive good spirit, I thank my editor at
Duke, Ken Wissoker. My dear amigos Katie Kahn and John Sparagana have
xx

acknowledgments

given me invaluable feedback on the manuscript. They are as responsive and
spontaneous as creative souls could be, and they helped nudge me to excavate
the book. Dinners with them and Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish are a staple
measure of sanity in an unclear time. Likewise, trips to Grafton, Wisconsin,
to visit Gina Litherland and Hal Rammel, trusted sources of counsel and inspiration. Most of all, my better half and editorial conscience, Terri Kapsalis, who patiently endured abandoned titles, discarded chapters, and all four
introductions—the world is falling down, hold my hand.

acknowledgments xxi

introduction

Everything starts as an encounter.
As abstract as thinking and writing and talking about music can be, it all
begins with something concrete, material. The bump of Pusha T’s My Name
Is My Name as its soundwaves enter my aural canal and meet my eardrum. The
surprise of a fateful afternoon jaunt to a neighborhood record store on which I
happen upon Michael Hurley’s Blue Navigator, marveling at the Hurley-penned
comics on its jacket. The rush of picking up Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink
from the airport in my vw bug—long, tall Han, feet on the dashboard, pummeling them with a stray drumstick. Encounters with sounds, objects, people.
The sense of encounter, a basic exchange that music engenders as a social
activity, is reflected in conversation, dialogue, argument. Think of the notion
of a “band,” “ensemble,” or “group”—social convergence is encoded into
the very words we use for fundamental musical units. I’m sure this is why I
remain committed to the question-and-answer format in much of my music
writing. Sometimes in an encounter you hit a vein, other times it yields only
a nugget, a shard, a precious memory perhaps too small to build around.
In a Parisian flea market, casual discussion with the vendor, and suddenly a
box of white label test-pressing 1970s African singles appears. A ride across
Boston interviewing Ornette Coleman from the backseat of someone else’s
car in which he shares a magical experience with Thelonious Monk. Thai food
one-on-one with Cecil Taylor talking about his favorite divas.
Now and then, an encounter backfires. In 1986, I arranged an interview
with On-U Sound guru Adrian Sherwood. His work seemed to me to be the
most advanced production around; I loved how he manipulated voices, layered
sounds, truncated melodies, toyed with dynamics, and brought an aggressive dada-esque sensibility into post-dub mixology. We met at a café during
a lunch break from my day job. He invited two guests: singer Mark Stewart
and drummer Keith LeBlanc. I was starstruck and delighted. LeBlanc was the

legendary force behind the Sugar Hill Gang, and then later was Sherwood’s
go-to for all things nonreggae. Stewart’s were the most explosive and exciting
of Sherwood-produced efforts, his William Burroughs–like vocal paranoia infused into dance music defaced by an ied. More important, Stewart had been
the singer in the Pop Group, the British post-punk band that, truth be told,
had introduced me to freely improvised music; improvisor Tristan Honsinger
ornamented their 1979 single “We Are All Prostitutes” with trademark cello
and mumbling. Gateway drug for this lifelong user.
We all sat down for a coffee. I broke out the tape recorder and kicked off
with a question about the politics of production. Sherwood knitted his brow
and explained that he didn’t prescribe politics to the artists he produced, they
could say anything they wanted. Stewart and LeBlanc stared at me. I made
another pass at the idea, but Sherwood was already put off. “Man, you gotta
come see these sneakers I found down the street,” exclaimed LeBlanc to anyone
who would listen. “They’re totally silver and white!” Stewart chimed in that he
wanted to make sure to hit all the thrift stores, that American secondhand overcoats were not to be believed. “C’mon!” they both said, and leapt up, ending the
interview before it had started. I went to see the sneakers, just out of curiosity.
Stewart sought his coats alone. That night, Mark Stewart + Maffia played an
incantatory set, the singer’s snarled rant dropping in and out intermittently
while LeBlanc and Doug Wimbush laid down an irresistible g-force beat.

•••
Out of hundreds of interviews, a few others have gone south. Aborted diner
lunch with Mayo Thompson where the conversation looped unnaturally—I
think he was just messing with me. A phone interview with organist Jimmy
Smith that turned from belligerent into buddy-buddy as soon as I mentioned
being a fan of barbeque—I swear to the god of soul-jazz. As in its precursor,
Extended Play, the bulk of Microgroove is predicated on the encounter. In Microgroove, there are a greater number of interviews, fewer academic essays. That,
in part, reflects shifts in my own orientation, a move away from an investment
in the language of poststructuralism coupled with a long engagement with
the production of cds and the presentation of live music. Having explored the
theory/practice divide, I guess I’ve come up on the practice side. Or maybe the
service side.
The twenty years since Extended Play are evenly split between music and
visual art. I had started organizing concerts in 1985, but in the period between 1996 and 2005, it was my primary occupation (never my main source
of income). For a decade I presented live music, nearly a thousand concerts
2

introduction

altogether: a weekly series and annual festival (co-organized with saxophonist
Ken Vandermark) at the Empty Bottle, Chicago; a yearlong stint as artistic
director of the Berlin Jazzfest; lots of independent production. At the same
time, with Kurt Kellison of Atavistic Records, I inaugurated the Unheard Music
Series, releasing around seventy cds of creative music, as we put it in an early
press sheet, “scouring the dustbin of history.”
Then, in 2004, Jim Dempsey and I opened an art gallery together, a move
that confounded some of my musical colleagues but one that grew directly
and organically out of the work I’d been doing in music. In 2000, with Terri
Kapsalis, I became involved in saving a large cache of Sun Ra artifacts from
oblivion, eventually donated to the University of Chicago Library and Experimental Sound Studio’s Creative Audio Archive. I’m still deeply engaged with
those materials, and, along with a concurrent stint as chair of Exhibition
Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I think this provided the
natural transition from live music to visual art. At Corbett vs. Dempsey we still
periodically present live music in the gallery, and now we have a record label;
I’ve organized musical programs at the Guggenheim in New York and the Art
Institute of Chicago, curated exhibitions of Brötzmann’s artwork and Sun Ra’s
archive. These worlds turn out to be more connected than you’d think. And
fronting the music you love is a hard habit to shake.
For many years, I subscribed to Laura Mulvey’s statement of intent, “the
destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon,” all along feeling that there was
an underlying ellipsis in this profound dictum. To disrupt the pleasurable
consumption of mainstream narrative cinema, to interrogate its secret methods, to break the comfort zone of continuity—these activities felt right, they
seemed so good. But there’s the rub: the destruction of one kind of pleasure
often creates another kind of pleasure. The joy of creative critique. The glee
of deconstruction. Much of the music I was interested in was already engaged
with something like that kind of interrogative practice. I recall my first conversation with guitarist Derek Bailey, in which he told me that he couldn’t
imagine any reason that a person would come hear him play unless they were
attracted to the sound of what he did. Wow, I thought, you’ve got to be pretty
deep down the rabbit hole to find that sound attractive. To say it’s an acquired
taste is perhaps wrong. I think it’s music that demands a different mode of
listening, and when heard attentively, seriously, and critically, it reveals a whole
system of pleasures, some predicated on the destruction of conventional musical norms, some operating in their own autonomous zone of attractions.
There are still several essays rooted in poststructuralism and deconstruction in Microgroove. More than providing specific references or terminology,
introduction 3

at a formative stage in development an immersion in poststructuralist and
critical theory and cultural studies helped shape my thinking. I feel that it
actually changed neural pathways. One does not need to write the word “text”
to approach an object of study with circumspection. In Deleuze’s widely cited
phrase, theory has given me a tool kit. Then again, so has dub reggae and
freely improvised music. So has hip-hop, which I rarely write about, and Greek
rembetika. And jazz. And vinyl. And Christopher Wool’s paintings. These are
all lenses, kits, to me equally valuable. If theory is a source, bury the source.
Let it grow anew.

•••
In the introduction to Extended Play, I waxed lyrical about the radical potential
of shuffle play. It was a new thing then. I had no idea how central it would
become to my way of listening. At the time, I could shuffle between five discs;
now I have an iPod with forty thousand tracks, and I can randomly access music
for months without repeating.
I’ve been thinking about jukeboxes lately.
Strictly in terms of musical selection, my iPod now does the job of a jukebox.
A sort of hyper-juke. I can let my little selector do all the work, keeping me
entertained for hours at a stretch, consistently teasing my brain by introducing
impromptu blindfold tests into my day. But shuffle only really works for me, I
now realize, if I pay attention to it. If it’s just background, it takes all the interest away and can homogenize even the greatest music. If I need background, I
prefer to listen to something more concentratedly programmed, like an album
or an artist or even just a genre.
On the other hand, by shifting my attention, the activity of shuffling can
take on a different significance. In recent months, I’ve taken to pretending that
my iPod is a deejay. That way I can judge its performance. Sometimes it’s in
the zone, and sometimes it loses the thread. But when I attend to the iPod as a
sort of miniature disc jockey, there’s something at stake in its juxtapositions,
transitions, good choices, and fumbles. My colleagues think I’m a bit weird,
I suspect, when I blurt out: “iPod is on fire today!” But that’s how I feel when
it abuts two things that really somehow work, but would never have seemed
like a conscious match.
I’m old fashioned by now, with my grandpa iPod. Most youngsters are
streaming, or they use algorithm-based programs like Pandora that choose
songs based on some initial personal preference data, like Amazon does—if
you like this, then you’ll probably like this. I’d rather have a means of access
that doesn’t assume what I’d want, that’s not trying to please me. Those per4

introduction

sonal preferences require a static subject, but I’m on the move, always curious;
I want to learn new things, make unexpected associations. I might be interested in something that the little algorithm would never know, might think
I’d hate. That’s why I’m a sucker for the chance aspect of shuffle. I love the
notion, attributed in philosophy to David Hume and in biology to Lamarck,
that chance is but our ignorance of causes. It suggests that there’s some reason
beyond our grasp. Maybe that’s as close as I get to metaphysics. But I like it
because it’s not the product of a corporate investigation; my interest is not
predicted exclusively according to music I’ve liked in the past and superficial
affinities it might have with music I don’t know. I want curveballs thrown into
the mix. That’s why chance is my deejay.
Looking through my singles recently, I thought about how much jukeboxes
were like that, how they were harbingers of the possibility of random play,
the idea that a machine could make cool decisions. Here you have a format,
the seven-inch single, which is a standard unit. Anything could be put on it;
wildly divergent music could be programmed using the same automaton. Two
record covers in my singles collection caught my attention, and I immediately imagined them played back-to-back on a jukebox. Here’s Red Garland
Quintet, with the beautiful graphic of a record in cross section, nifty arrow
pointing down into the groove like a stylus. Superbad hard-bop, with a topflight lineup, Blue Mitchell’s trumpet, Pepper Adams’s baritone sax, and the
Joneses (bassist Sam and drummer Elvin) on rhythm along with their leader.
It was, quite literally, music made for jukeboxes, a black-and-white picture
juke sleeve released alongside the color lp version.
Now switch radically to a beautiful, extremely rare single by the British
improvising group amm. This gem, which, like the Garland, has been reissued
on cd, features short excerpts from a forty-five-minute performance by the duo
version of the group, with Lou Gare on tenor sax and Eddie Prévost on drums.
I love the idea of a groovy jazz jukebox session interrupted by a spacious, noisy
spate of improvised music. It’s the kind of thing that my iPod might kick up,
but there’s the added thought of the actual vinyl whirling around in the juke,
the heavy tonearm slapping down on the disc, the vinyl living its ephemeral
existence, serving its life’s purpose, to make us listen, to entertain us, maybe
to make us think and feel something we haven’t thought or felt before.

•••
Why micro?
Microgroove. Smaller grooves. Grooving in small places by small assemblages with small audiences. (Makes me think of an early Pink Floyd title: “Several
introduction 5

Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving
with a Pict.”) A celebration of things content to stay small or resigned to the
fact that without changing their underlying principles or aesthetics they will
not grow all that much larger. No barrage of pr will make improvised music
a pop commodity. It is a subset of a fraction of a portion of a minoritarian
activity we call music listening, buried within the entertainment industry; the
very fact that it’s of almost no value unless you actually pay attention to it
automatically means it will never be especially popular. For that matter, an
avalanche of radio coverage could not possibly make Helmut Lachenmann’s
delicate “Dal Niente” into a hit, even in the already rarefied world of classical
music, itself a rather unpopular micro-environ. Cat Power may have covered
Michael Hurley’s songs, but that didn’t fling Hurley’s surreal lyrics and lemon
drop intonation to the top of the charts.
The music in Microgroove is not all small. PJ Harvey and Donna Summer
and Liz Phair couldn’t be classed that way. But I think, in their variances of
enormity, they can still be shoehorned into this title in a sense of finding little
meanings in big music—reading against the grain is an activity that loosens
classificatory borders, making transit from small to big and back more tenable, enjoyable even. Some of them actively engage in what Martin Scorsese
has referred to as “smuggling”—the illicit bringing of unwarranted ideas or
images into a mainstream work.
This writer certainly has his straight-up, dead center mainstream passions, even if they’re not the ones he writes about most often. The twenty
years represented in this collection reflect but hardly exhaust my interests
and preoccupations in that period. I listen to pop and rock, entertainment
music plain and simple. Lately, I’ve gone back to Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood
Mac, and Cheap Trick, discovering things in them I’d missed when I first
loved them. Albert Oehlen turned me on to neo-soul artists like Van Hunt,
Bilal, and Omar, suggesting that if the world made any sense these artists
would be on the radio, which reminds us that in the ’70s, Stevie Wonder
and Marvin Gaye were on the radio. They were huge. And incredible. When
I have found myself writing about majoritarian musics, it is often in search
of aspects at their periphery. As a reviewer rightly observed in reference to
Extended Play, I’m never particularly interested in getting to the “essence”
of a music; that would be hypocritical coming from someone who takes
pleasure, as a listener, in the details, the surfaces, the contradictions, the
texture, the edges, the forgotten or repressed or ignored or discounted or
discarded components in excess of any music’s essence. The inexhaustible
margins of audio activity.
6

introduction

•••
The specific term “microgroove” refers to a new technology introduced in 1948
and patented by cbs Laboratories that advanced the development of lp albums
by cramming more music into each square inch of disc surface, allowing the
standard twenty-minute side to take shape. In my private semiology, this is a
reminder of how much my own experience of music is filtered through recordings. I am, as is virtually every contemporary person, a child of the microgroove
revolution. This micro was the vehicle for the initial explosion of the popular
music industry, an irony that is never far from my mind.
The title Microgroove is also a link to Extended Play. Only a few months after
the microgroove technology was introduced, rca debuted the “extended play,”
or ep, the direct result of which was the emergence of the seven-inch single.
These two books are closely related, carrying some of the same themes and
some identical interview subjects. Anyone familiar with the former book will
perhaps notice that where there were individual entries on Fred Anderson and
Von Freeman (both dearly departed in the meantime) and Peter Brötzmann
and Evan Parker (now very active septuagenarians), in this book the same
musicians are found conversing with each other—an interview strategy I have
enjoyed deploying for DownBeat and other publications. Thus, I hope these
discussions can profitably be read in relation to the ones in Extended Play. Han
Bennink and Sun Ra reappear, and Mats Gustafsson, who is just a glimmer in
the introduction of the earlier volume, is now one of my closest friends and a
verified free music superstar.
I have tried to approach certain artists from different angles. Brötzmann,
for instance, appears three times here: in conversation with Parker, in a tour
diary, and also in a reflection on his work as a graphic artist. A profile of Sun
Ra’s Chicago period is augmented by a specific look at the graphic design
approach of his El Saturn label. I was a third wheel in two conversations,
separated by four years, that involved singer Liz Phair; it’s fascinating to see
the differences in tone that arise over that span, and the ones that might be
attributed to the gender of Phair’s other interlocutor, in one case Lou Barlow,
in the other Kim Gordon. Several figures are considered solo and with another musician. Ken Vandermark appears in successive chapters—a personal
reflection on nearly thirty years of knowing him, and in conversation with Joe
McPhee. Steve Lacy’s ambulatory lifestyle is the topic of a profile written a few
years before his tragic death, based on a weekend spent with him and Irene
Aebi at their apartment in Berlin; another chapter written in a less personal
manner considers Lacy’s highly collaborative nature as it manifested in his
introduction 7

work with writer Brion Gysin. My interview with Misha Mengelberg proved too
rich for the article I originally published, and I have opted to reproduce the full
conversation, contrasting it with a three-way dialogue adding his career-long
compadre Han Bennink. Two of the most important and influential contemporary painters, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, each make a pair of
appearances in Microgroove: Oehlen in question-and-answer interviews, one
free ranging, one based on a specific body of work; Wool in two essays, one
considering the musical currents in his paintings, one based on a specific set
he designed for a dance troupe and composed at the request of choreographer
Benjamin Millepied. In all these cases, I was interested in presenting multiple
points of view, to suggest how a different vantage in time, place, modality of
writing, or circumstance of interview can yield new ideas. My experience tells
me that such a notion is arguably most fruitful when dealing with rich works
and complex artists. It’s a shakier proposition to approach superficial culture
from different viewpoints.
Some new and expanded areas of orientation appear. I dedicate a full chapter to contemporary classical music, and elsewhere I explore contrasts and
continuities between music and painting, graphic arts, poetry, and fiction. If
there is a deep difference between the two compilations, it is mostly felt in the
way they are organized; while I chose to segregate the chapters according to
writing mode in Extended Play (academic, journalistic, interrogatory), here I’ve
let the literary as well as musical genres freely mingle, grouping the chapters
into rough thematic zones. This time out, I’m the deejay.
The “other” of the subtitle has two tributaries. First, from the academic
side, it’s a holdover from the 1980s, when the notion of “the other” had
achieved something of a pandemic reach into the critical community. (It became the discursive fetish that Jean Baudrillard had so pointedly observed in
the word “fetish” as it was deployed by Marxists a generation earlier.) A student
of semiotics, I wrote on otherness as it related to psychoanalysis, feminism,
Marxian critique, and subaltern studies. “Other” was a dialectical term pitted
against the dominant center of the social map—white, middle-class, male,
heterosexual, and any combination of the above. It was a useful, if much too
versatile, concept, but after a period of overapplication it has gone the way of
terms like “apparatus” and “suture”—supple, seductive terms that eventually
lose their frisson. (At one point in grad school, my friend Jalal Toufic and I
joked about writing something titled “Why (B)other?” to poke a bit of fun at
this and another insufferable theory tic: witless parentheses.)
In “other music,” the “other” comes from a less tony place as well. On
undergrad afternoons when I should have been reading Wittgenstein or
8

introduction

Barthes or Mulvey, I often went awol to Boston, where the record stores were
numerous and well stocked. One feature not exclusive to Beantown that I
especially liked was the existence of a catchall for uncategorizable music. A
white plastic separator card proclaimed: other. Not this, not that, but the
other. Something that doesn’t fit. I found myself burrowing into that inexact
section, truffling for the odd Fred Frith item or Borbetomagus rarity. A longlived store in New York City now bears the name Other Music. A fine store
with a fine handle.
The intervening two decades between these two books have given me added
confidence in one aspect of my endeavor. I believe that we will one day understand improvisation to have been a paramount contribution to culture in
the twentieth century. Maybe the central contribution. It is a feature of many
contemporary artistic practices, and its philosophical implications are yet to
be fully grasped, but there’s no doubt that improvisation has been explored
most richly in music. This, of course, is the topic for a more focused argument, one that I’m beginning to formulate. When I look at the choices I’ve
made of who to interview and write about, I am convinced that it’s because
Ornette Coleman, Milford Graves, Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, Peter
Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, Carla Bley, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, and George
Lewis are among the greatest artists of our time, their work roughly equivalent
in significance to the radical innovations of cubism or abstraction in painting.
In the company of equals, they are more equal than the rest, their obscurity in
the mass ear notwithstanding.

•••
There are record collectors whose entire focus is on the esoteric. Scarcity
and unknownness are taken to be signs of quality, perhaps confirmation of
a conspiracy in mainstream culture to hide the really great stuff. These guys
dig up some of the most astonishing things, genuine lost treasures. There’s
a whole pecking order of them, a rare record royalty. I feel an affinity for this
way of thinking, I recognize, because I distrust the popular filters through
which most cultural productions must pass in order to be registered in the
mass imagination. If history is written by the victors, sometimes the victors
have dull taste, hence the singular importance of the cratedigger. But there
has to be more than raw rarity at play. The records must reward the observer,
somehow, some way. For me, this normally means the music has to be compelling. Sounds obvious, but some collectors are not interested in the sound
of the music—if it has a weird cover, was issued privately, and fits into some
oddball category, like new age free jazz or Native American cowboy music,
introduction 9

that’s more than enough. From the standpoint of music as affirmation of the
spectacular diversity of human endeavor, no doubt it is. I recall finding an early
’70s seven-inch with a picture sleeve in a going-out-of-business Lisbon record
store by a Portuguese band called the Korean Black Eyes—five ultrahip Korean
women leaning over their guitars and saxophone, playing a version of Sly &
the Family Stone’s “Higher” that is a testament to the creative possibilities of
cross-cultural misunderstanding. I dig this kind of wild-world wacko-ness.
It can be a brilliant demonstration of the poetics of failure or the positive potential of geographic isolation. A night listening to records with ne plus ultra
cratedigger David Hollander is like a trip to another planet. With a gleeful
smile he’ll drop the needle on a delightfully inept soul track, rock back on his
heels, take a beat, and finally, with a maniac’s intensity, blurt: “Do you realize
we’re in the freaking twilight zone?!!”
On the other side of the fence, I know well-informed and critical people
who have absolute faith in the mass cultural filtration system. And lest we be
blinded by our enthusiasm for the little known, the fact is that the system has
shaped some sensationally fantastic music. In the soul realm alone, the productions of Stax, Atlantic, and Motown are among the great achievements of
Homo sapiens. Many of the hen’s teeth singles that diggers have excavated are in
truth made by people trying to replicate the best-known artists. James Brown
in particular has been mauled by several generations of near-miss imitators,
sometimes to wonderful or hilarious effect. Anyone who offhand dismisses
JB, Ray Charles, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding on the basis of their stature is
little more than a sanctimonious ideologue. Sometimes things left by the side
of the road deserve to stay there, and sometimes things that stand the test of
time are the Darwinian champs. Now and then, nothing scratches the itch like
Sam Cooke or the Drifters. But if you believe that the whole soul diva story is
covered in Aretha Franklin’s greatest hits, go get yourself some music by Betty
Harris or Jean Wells and prepare to have your mind changed.

•••
Micro. Other. It’s too crude a formulation to pit Big Bad Big-ness against
Scrappy Li’l Micro-Otherness in some imaginary timeless epic battle. There
are subtler forces at work, a mottled topography of independent and institutionalized artistic interests, intricate and submerged lines of distribution,
unevenly cast webs of information. But sometimes a well-placed reductive
dichotomy can help clarify things, and in this case it holds true enough: the
large/small divide in cultural production and consumption is a gap that must
be reckoned with.
10

introduction

Obviously, technology has altered everything about how we access and
utilize music, for better, for worse. Downloading dominates. People wear
headphones all day, every day, making listening into an asocial activity. Amateurism flourishes on YouTube, as does a vast repository of historical clips.
Head over to Ubu Web for a holy shit moment of free vanguard fun. (Gotta
hand it to a once preposterous-sounding Friedrich Kittler, who prophesied
a central bank of cultural productions linked to users by some sort of fiber
network. Introducing . . . the Interweb.) Observe the demise of magnetic tape,
the waning years of compact disc. We hear regularly about the death of the
music industry, how the online marketplace has destroyed independent record
production, how centralized the music world has become.
That’s not my experience of it. A restructuring of the major label model
does not signal the end of recorded music or the last gasp of music itself.
There are certain places where losses can be detected: I find fewer venues,
even online, where really incisive writing on music happens in the journalistic
realm. But thanks to musician-theorists like George Lewis, David Grubbs,
and Vijay Iyer, creative music is taken seriously in academic circles, enhanced
by the experience of practitioners. There are more small labels than ever, attending to all sorts of wee little musics. And the microgrooves of the past are
being incessantly mined; Dempsey and I recently spent hours in a London
store obsessively specializing in obscure rockabilly and the wildest, weirdest
r&b. In Chicago, multiple venues present improvised music on a weekly basis.
Worldwide, the audience for creative music has grown exponentially, with
folks taking regular trips down some of its culs-de-sac. Via podcast, anyone
can hear almost any kind of music they’re curious about. A whole generation
of hipster rock bands has grown up plumbing the mysteries of microgroove
via previously unimaginable research tools—listen to the way that Grizzly Bear
and Dirty Projectors integrate their innumerable influences. These are salad
years for music fanatics and omnivorous musicians.
Maybe the divide between micro and macro is falling apart. That would be a
positive development. Or maybe everything is just scaling down. Expectations
are changing. In terms of cd sales, no question, what constitutes an acceptable number has been reduced. And why not? Ten thousand people is a lot of
people. We sold about that many copies of Peter Brötzmann’s Nipples when
the Unheard Music Series reissued it. That’s plenty. I fondly recall March 10,
1996, 10:00 pm, at the Empty Bottle, when two hundred people crowded the
club to hear Joe McPhee play in Chicago for the first time. Vandermark and
I both looked around in disbelief. There will certainly never be a mass audience for McPhee’s music, it won’t top the charts, which is OK. McPhee’s
introduction 11

finely etched, unvoiced wind sculptures on pocket trumpet wouldn’t work in
a stadium setting. His music requires the sort of concentrated, close listening
that giant crowds can’t tolerate, even on some physical, squirmological level.
No matter that it’s not a household music. There are still people who would
want to listen to McPhee and other “others”—we can infer that from just this
single event and from the nine more years of concerts Ken and I presented
at the Bottle. Curious people, people who would give the work the attention
it deserves without concern for the fact that not a soul who’s friends with
anybody they know had ever heard of Joe McPhee. Open people who want to
know about the music. Ones who merely haven’t found it.
Yet.
It is to the encounter with that patiently unaware listenership, as well as
to the fortunate folks who have already discovered other music in all its manifestations, that Microgroove is dedicated.

12

introduction

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