Holding back the tide in a late-stage Empire

As a middle-aged, middle-class, relatively privileged (white, educated, male, heterosexual, tenured) college professor, engaged in teaching music, cultural history, and critical thinking, in a late-stage Empire whose particular addictions--specifically to leisure, material possessions, and the cheap energy which fossil fuels make possible--is rapidly destroying both subaltern societies and the planet's own ecosystem, I sometimes imagine I know what it must have felt like to be a lector or ludus literatus in one of the frontier provinces of late-stage Rome: Valentia (Wales and NW England), say, or Brittaniae (Cornwall). In such a biography, you're a very long way from the centers of power, you can feel and observe (as someone trained and teaching historical consciousness and a degree of cultural analysis) the way in which the larger society, the vast superstructure of privilege, is creaking, groaning, and breaking down. And you can observe, and experience considerable frustration regarding, the psychotic short-term greed and lust for power which leads those at the top of the economic ladder to enact ever more radical, repressive, and short-sighted activities to try to maintain control and keep the addiction fed: clear-cutting Britain to build ships, hiring barbarian mercenaries to protect the homeland, steadily hollowing-out the middle class in order to enrich the oligarchs behind the politicians, creating Praetorian guards of private contractors to guard them, squirreling away their wealth in private troves or in vast estates remote from the centers of conflict.

In a late-stage Empire, there is no middle class, there is no democracy, there is no historical vision, there is no investment in future generations or future resources--human, natural, financial. There is only the ever-accelerating drive to maintain the status quo of the wealthy, and to hold at bay, just under the surface of consciousness, the panic they feel in the very clear, but repressed realization that all the wealth, power, privilege, impunity are going to go away even so.

In such a world, what would you, as a humble teacher, civil servant, carpenter, farmer, do, knowing that the powerful have no ears and no interest for any understandings except their own? What would you tell your kids, as you look at the disintegrating world you are bequeathing to them? What would you tell your students, as you try to impart the modest skills and insight you've spent a lifetime developing to hold back the tide of collapse? It's an enterprise doomed to failure, after all: the oligarchs will behave more and more flagrantly, greedily, and destructively; the subaltern communities will more and more be goaded to attack one another; the middle class will continue to disappear; the poor servant class will expand geometrically even as their standard of living plunges; the planet will continue to degrade. And there is nothing, nothing, (or almost) nothing you can do about it.

What would you do? Well, in your small distant corner of the world, very far from the centers of power, with nearly no voice and absolutely no influence in the public discourse of the day, you might just keep doing what you do: trying to directly impact those around you in positive ways; imparting the skills of critical reading, writing, listening, speaking, and thinking that help young people learn how to cope with changing, unknown, fluid, challenging problems requiring new and unique solutions; laying down in safekeeping, like bottles of wine in a cellar, the stocks of wisdom, history, literature, art, music, science, healing, that might otherwise be destroyed like the Library of Alexandria, and you might try to look forward, past peak oil or wealth, past societal breakdown and the fall of the oligarchs, past the destruction of the imperial Cities and their way of life, past the ensuing Dark Ages...

...to a time when, possibly from the far distant provinces which were least touched by the Empire and soonest abandoned, a few peregrini, a few wandering travelers and scholars, might return toward the center, and begin to rebuild. The new society upon the ruins of the old. 

Because what else is there to do? Despair may be inevitable--but it is also irrelevant.

Dem Boyz (on the 50th anniversary of the Sullivan shows)

-Can you give me a little background on the performance itself?

Sullivan had seen the reception to the Beatles' by local London fans while at Heathrow airport in 1963 and, with the remarkable instincts of a veteran vaudevillian and talent booker, had recognized that such an intense fan reaction might actually translate from the very different English to American audiences. In the event, he was proved right.

-Why was this appearance so important?

The timing was extraordinarily good: John Kennedy had been killed in Dallas in Nov '63, an event which was both massively traumatic and also massively publicized (including the notorious on-camera murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby). At the same time, after a remarkable apotheosis of American-born rock & roll acts between about 1954 and 1959--Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and many "crossover" black artists--American pop music had to an extent entered a fallow period: Elvis was in the Army, Little Richard had (temporarily) gone back to work, Buddy & Richie Valens had been killed, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry had legal or tax problems (or both). At the same time, while this "media space" was opening up, remarkable things were happening in England with overseas transformations of American blues and R&B.

-How did this performance, or the Beatles in general, change American culture?

That's a huge question, and really impossible to answer. The Beatles represented a response to the "Baby Boom"--the post WWII boom in births and, by the early '60s, an entirely new social and marketing class called "teenagers." At the same time, they were a remarkably talented group of individuals--3 incredibly strong songwriters (John, Paul, George), 3 incredibly talented instrumentalists (Ringo, George, and Paul)--and they were remarkably self-contained. They had both the musical talent and imagination and the social/media skills--much of it innate, or learned on the tough stages of the English provinces and the north German nightclubs--to be able to respond to a worldwide media meltdown, with themselves at the eye of the storm, and still be able to respond quickly, comedically, and very, very cannily. They were a remarkable unit.

-How did the Beatles change music?

Well, they took the lessons of many American roots musics, from country, R&B, and blues; to '50s rock 'n' roll; to various Latin pop styles (cha-cha-cha, tango, beguine); elements of big-band music; the choral singing tradition of English Anglicanism, and English folk's modal scales. They wrote all their own music (and John, Paul, and George were all flat-out genius songwriters). They had worked out a way to be remarkably self-contained, both creatively (as songwriters, singers, and instrumentalists) and also financially (Brian Jones, before his accidental death, had charted the course of their success, and its careful, sequential steps) with masterful precision. They managed an oppositional stance to social norms and political conservatism with the same sardonic, parodic, and cocky sense of humor that comedy groups like the Goons and later Monty Python used to such devastating effect. They were remarkably courageous as artists--they constantly tried new things. All of these tendencies drastically "upped the bar" for what a pop group could seek and could accomplish.

-Have you seen the performance, either the first viewing, or a recording? What are your thoughts about it?

I didn't see the performance on first viewing--I was a toddler, but my family weren't particularly television watchers--but as a scholar of American music, of course I've watched recordings. I have very complex reactions, as I suspect do many who loved the group. First of all, they all seem so *young* (younger every time I watch it, as I age). The screaming teens seem like a time capsule--we would never be that charmingly naive or "over the top" in our adulation of pop stars again. But what I take away every time I watch *any* live performance recording of the Beatles--or for that matter, studio footage as well--from the 1964 Ed Sullivan appearances to the last performances on the rooftop of Apple Records in January of 1969--was what astonishing, unique, mutually compatible musicians they were. From the clubs of Hamburg or Liverpool, playing marathon 4- and 5-hour gigs with dancers tumbling into the bandstand, to live performances on Sullivan, to Shea Stadium with a tiny little Shure Vocalmaster PA in the face of 50,000 fans, to that last, elegiac performance on the rooftop at Apple, they were four of the 20th century's greatest pop musicians. And surely, surely, one of the century's greatest, most brilliant, most courageous, most influential musical ensembles.

That's what I've got.

Quick hit: the Irish Triads, and, what it takes to be an "---ologist"

Just less than no time to comment upon this here--second-last week of the semester, and when we return from Thanksgiving break we have literally THREE days of classes only, and on the Tues-Thurs schedule only ONE meeting, but here's one I've previously been struggling to articulate yet which I need to capture:

In pre-Christian Irish oral poetry, an incredibly rich and virtuosic tradition which expected the filidh to memorize hundreds of poems and literally dozens of secret/esoteric languages and poetic schema, a classic formulation was to remember like metaphors or mnemonics in groups of three: e.g., "the three villains of Ireland," or "the three symbols of dischord", etc. My current fave is: "The three folk in horrid hell of great blasts: folk who practise poetry, folk who violate their orders, mercenaries."*

Have been struggling recently to capture in words element(s) which I can articulate as essential in the development of a music scholar. One of the more challenging and fraught situations we face as professors in the Fine Arts & Humanities is figuring out how to advise students who may, or may not, have the particular combination of attributes and aptitudes to "succeed", by whatever metric, in this family of professions: "folklorist," "archivist," "ethnomusicologist," "musicologist," et al.

Not to say that there is only a single path: I have had the great fortune to have, as friends and as mentees, folks who've found a lot of different ways to thread the needle, and to parlay an interest in culture, research, critical thinking, and teaching into a survivable profession and a happy life. I continue to learn, from these colleagues, friends, and former students, all the different ways it is possible to survive and thrive in this thing of ours ("cosa nostra").

But one thing I think I have finally captured, and it separates the research scholars, or the potential research scholars, from those who could be equally successful as teachers, museum designers, radio programmers, journalists, and so on. And it gets back to what I've come to perceive as a "Professors' Triad": the "three things that make a scholar".

Nota bene: the presence of 1 or 2 of these attributes, rather than the full complement of three, should in no way be seen as perjorative: if anything, having 1 or 2 of them, and a range of other life-skills perhaps less directly related to research scholarship, may very well make for a happier, better remunerated, or mentally easier life!

But I think I believe that someone who is to survive and thrive as a research scholar needs all three of these attributes--or to develop a reasonable facsimile of them:

(1) A zest for the actual factual record and the stamina and stick-to-it-ivity to find out that record, whether obtained readily or reluctantly, and whether it manifests a clear & straightforward or a convoluted and sticky narrative. This is the craft of the researcher;

(2) The ability, or the desire to develop the ability, to articulate the narratives and factual chronologies that emerge from the record, in engaging, intriguing, and relatively undistorted fashion. You need to know the facts, and then you need the ability and the desire to be able to articulate those facts in language others can grok. This is the craft of the teacher;

(3) The ability to derive insights from the facts and their narrative. It is not enough, for a research scholar, to know what happened and have engaging ways of conveying what happened. To be an actual research scholar, to be an "ethnomusic-ologist" or a "music-ologist" or something of their ilk, you must be able to perceive patterns others have not. This is how you make an "original contribution to the scholarship": you have to be able to see things, and reasons and causes for things, that others have missed. One metric for this is that, in true and truly effective research scholarship, either you or your audience (readers)--or both, will say "My god, that's so obvious; how come no one ever saw that before?" The effective scholar will have these "eureka" moments, and will then be able to deploy (1) facts and (2) language to convey those new, potentially paradigm-shifting insights, in a fashion that is persuasive.

This is the craft of the scholar.

You can be the most meticulous investigator in the world, or the the most facile and articulate writer, or both, but in the absence of #3--the ability to see new patterns and then to articulate them in a fashion that accords with the factual evidence--you are, actually, probably not cut out to be a research scholar. A teacher, archivist, journalist, arts advocate, radio producer, etc may be a better, more viable--and probably better-rewarded!--path.

Still thinking about this. But the above (entirely unedited) rings true.

*Interestingly, the great 20th century satirist (and satiric poet) Flann O'Brien parodied the Triads in his masterpiece At Swim-Two Birds, a comic version of the po-faced and earnest mock-myths of the "Celtic Twilight/Irish Literary Renaissance". 

The "Wisdom" hashtag

Quite some time back, maybe when I first en-'twittered, I got into the habit of using hashtag sparingly and specifically, and seldom/never the hashtags that were "trending" ("yes, please, let me tag along on the daisy chain of lemming-like shiny media objects!"). More often, I used them a little more like keywords or tags--that is, as ways of identifying particular items as addressing one or another topic I knew I'd revisit and which I inferred others might possibly treat similarly. The first of that series, I think, was the #NuminousMoment hashtag--just a way for me to record and remind myself of certain mindfulness realizations, as or nearly when they occurred. A lot of time they are realizations about the natural world, weather, animals, and other close-to-the-senses moments--the sort of things that can be the kernel of poems.

But the "#<>Wisdom" hashtag is a little different. In my life, as I suspect in those of many others, certain professions--certain jobs--have taught me certain skills and provided certain insights: maybe even "rules for living." So #CarpentersWisdom, #ProfessorsWisdom, #BandleadersWisdom, #ITMWisdom ("Irish Traditional Music Wisdom"), #CooksWisdom are insights that come out of my having held those jobs: e.g., "Pay Attention" might be good practical safety advice under the heading of #CarpentersWisdom or #CooksWisdom, but it's probably also sound, if more metaphorical, when you're dealing with the moment-by-moment improvisation of the bandstand or the classroom.

At the same time, the "#<>Wisdom" hashtags do not only connote "here's the magisterial advice upon which, from my position of vastly greater and meaningful life experience, I will pontificate" (though sometimes such vanity slips through). It connotes, at least as commonly, the self-directed advice "hey, dummy, remember when you learned through painful error not to take your eye off the Skil-Saw blade? You wanna remember that accident the next time you find your attention slipping, please?"

In other words, the #<>Wisdom hashtags can connote: "here's something I learned in the trades, and which either you or I might do well to remember." But it can also connote "hey, dummy, your profession is particularly prone to this or that stupid unnecessary error" (more commonly that's the "Professors" or "Bandleaders" tag) "and maybe you oughta avoid it, huh?"

So if, in my social media stream, you see a #<>Wisdom hashtag, you can figure that it means either "hey, here's something I learned sometime that's worth remembering," e.g., "Professor's Wisdom" for others, but equally likely "here's something you yourself, Coyote, ought to know well enough to remember."

It's a not-bad way to cultivate a record of some minimal degree of mindfulness. As much as one can.

They shoulda listened to Orville Faubus from beyond the grave

If anybody in GOP leadership had any historical memory whatsoever, they coulda predicted what would happen when they legitimized fanaticism in service of their own greed: "Tactics being discussed among Republican strategists, donors, and party leaders include running attack ads against tea party candidates for Congress; overthrowing Ron Paul's libertarian acolytes dominating the Iowa and Minnesota state parties; promoting open primaries over nominating conventions, like the ones that produced Republican hardliners like Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli and shutdown-instigator Mike Lee of Utah; and countering political juggernauts Heritage Action, the Club for Growth, and FreedomWorks that target Republican incumbents who have consorted with Democrats." http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/inside-the-messy-but-moneyed-republican-plan-to-neutralize-the-tea-party-20131024

"Graduate Program Review for Faculty"

Don't ask me survey questions like this on a Thursday evening after a hard week and a glass of wine unless you want an honest answer (and I suspect you don't):

"What changes, if any, could be made to improve the quality of your graduate program(s)?"

Graduate stipends within my Unit (as set by the University) are scandalously low. Too few graduate TA lines are available. Too little financial support (especially TA positions) is afforded graduate students. Improvement in this area is essential. 

More money for outreach. More money for national & international visibility. More money for graduate student research and conference travel. We produce a phenomenally high-value product with a shockingly low level of financial support from the university as a whole.

Le mont real

Autumn Equinox, edge of the continent

Edge of the continent, after the gale blew through. Gulf Coast, just after the Autumn Equinox.

New dispatches from the Bassanda Archives

Biographical sketch & image of Alexei Andreevitch Boyar, paratrooper, folklorist, and exponent of the Bassandan pipe organ tradition, and a fragment of poetry, translated from Old Bassandan, by Professor Homer St John, from the pre-literate shamanic chant. See http://elegantsavagesorchestra.weebly.com/bassanda-correspondence.html (and scroll to the bottom).

Author Q&A is up on Illinois blog

Link

Society for Ethnomusicology - Special Interest Group: Ireland

Group moderator asked fora bio and suggestions for SIG's topical focii; here's what I said:

Chris Smith here, director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech (http://vernacularmusiccenter.org); full bio here: http://www.depts.ttu.edu/music/Faculty/ChristopherSmith.asp Play (for this music) tenor banjo, bouzouki, button accordion. Record, tour, produce, etc. Day job is Chair of Musicology at TTU. Have published practical methods (Celtic Backup), book chapters (relevant to this group: on Irish film, session culture, community arts, Renaissance-period harmonic languages in Ireland, Seamus Ennis), CDs (3-disc set with Altramar: historical performance settings of medieval Celtic repertoire), theatrical dance show ( http://dancingatthecrossroads.com ), new book on Anglo-Celtic and Afro-Caribbean interactions before the US Civil War (http://www.amazon.com/The-Creolization-American-Culture-Minstrelsy/dp/0252037766), new book project on street dance as rebellion in American popular history. I'll be presenting at Indy on a related topic. I've served as External Examiner for dissertations at UC Cork and U Limerick, and for the BA program in traditional music and dance at UL's Irish World Academy; may soon be starting similar appointment with the MA program. Teach an annual spring-semester course ("Music, Folklore, and Tradition in Irish Cultural History") at TTU, whose capstone is a 2-week Maymester "roving seminar" field-trip to Connacht; lot of friends in Galway, Clare, Limerick, and Mayo. Drive the damned mini-buses ourselves :-/

I also know a ton of Irish musicians in Indy, Terre Haute, and Bloomington, as well as the spots where sessions are likely to break out. If the SIG wants it, I'm sure I can arrange a nice session with local players at a pub not far from conference site--I have one in mind.

As far as special questions or focii for the group during the Indy meetings: 

* In my observation, there's an unnecessary (not doubt inadvertent) distance b/w ethnomusicologists and musicologists working on Irish themes in the USA versus Ireland/UK. In part this is because musicology in Ireland is relatively young--the Society for Musicology only just marked its 10th anniversary--and in part because there has been disciplinary distance. A lot of my Irish friends (Aileen can attest to this) wind up presenting more research for ICTM/etc. What could SEM-SIG "Irish" do to build bridges both here and overseas?

* Similarly, how can we enhance partnerships with (especially Stateside) scholarly societies? I am thinking here, for example, of American Council for Irish Studies, which hosts good conferences and scholarship, but in which music is very, very subsidiary to other topical focii.

* I'm biased on this next, because it impinges on my own approach, but I'd always be a proponent for enhanced integration of historical approaches to ethnomusicology on Irish topics. Fieldwork is the core experience, of course, but historical methods have a lot of insight to provide, especially in Irish Diasporic contexts. 

* Enhanced contact b/w SEM-SIG "Irish" and ITMA (Irish Traditional Music Archive) in Dublin could only be good; Nic Carolan and his staff are a remarkable resource and responsive to partnership; another way to build trans-Atlantic bridges.

* Here's a big one, and a buzz word I hear a lot these days in university administration: how can we help one another brainstorm ways to frame our Irish music & dance research as "interdisciplinary" or "employing interdisciplinary approaches." This is more a matter of advocacy and marketing than a shift of procedures; ethnomusicology inherently draws from multiple analytical methods--that is, "we already do that." But how do we FRAME our interdisciplinarity such that it helps us with tenure, promotion, institutional support, and so forth?

* Likewise, there is currently a political opening for scholarship which can be "multi-modal", especially in the visual and performing arts. That is, how can a given piece of research manifest insights AND outreach (both traditional and non-traditional) in multiple fora: peer-reviewed essays, yes, but also other kinds of projects (radio, public television, web-sites, films, social-media feeds, etc)? The more that we can help one another and (especially) mentor junior colleagues in this fashion, the more fully those colleagues will receive due recognition of the breadth, depth and impact within the international communities of artists and teachers.

* And--how do we enhance opportunity for us to not only do research on these topics, but also to integrate these topics as part of our "day jobs" teaching? How many of us teach an Irish studies/folklore/music course or courses? How can we enhance opportunities for other colleagues to do likewise?

that's what I got. Oh, and then there's this new book, and stage show....

CJS at TEDx Lubbock, on vernacular pedagogy "The Old Ways"

Disorganized, running very late, technology glitches, making it up as I went along. This is pretty much uncut CJS, slipping and sliding and trying to raise the loas.

Pome (2001) coyotebanjo.blogspot.com 9.20.13

Bouzouki

Skirl of pipes,

Chatter of mandolin,

Curlicue of istampitta and geometry of Bach,

Wail of the nyckelharpa and knotwork of the sean nos,

Smoke of the rebeticos in the hash bars of Smyrna and Athens.

It’s all there:

Flaked Etruscan frescoes, shouting horsemen under Central Asian skies, tea-houses on the Silk Road; Mughal courts and Katak sacred dancers, poets in perfumed Iberian gardens; Turkish asiks riding muddy Anatolian streets, singers lifting makams in Damascus studios; Berbers chanting verses at star-lit oases; black-porter poets puffing cigarettes in the back parlors of Gaeltacht pubs;

From crossroads dances, RTE broadcast studios,

Bronx tenements, Chicago kitchens,

                        To a river landing on the Missouri:

            It’s all there.

            For Roger Landes, in friendship. CJS 8/21/01.

Further to the previous: Mount's "Dancing on the Barn Floor"

Further to the previous: Mount's "Dancing on the Barn Floor"(1831--e.g., very early in his career: he was only 25): this would conventionally be understood as a conventionally pastoral idealization of rural experience: "lads and maids" dancing on the barn floor which, in the conventions of the time, is employed as a kind of theatrical proscenium. But, tracing some sketches from life which served as inspiration for this oil (most notably, as the book demonstrates, the remarkable pencil sketch "Comb and Brush"), it's possible to "see" elements of Afro-Caribbean / "creole" body postures and movements, especially in the dancing boy's hips, shoulders, and arms. This is the "hidden language" of the body that, among other things, the book identifies.

The Creolization of American Culture: from the Illinois U Press Author's Q&A

Q: Were there any common misconceptions of “creolization” that you examined in your research for the book?

I wouldn’t necessarily say there were “misconceptions,” so much as gaps in the record. The book certainly argues that creolization—the process by which two languages, or rhythmic vocabularies, or music & dance idioms, collide and create a shared dialect—was much more widespread in a much wider array of locations, and much earlier, than previous scholarship has perhaps understood. The argument would be that contact between disparate groups—black/white, African/European, slave/free, working-class/middle-class—would have yielded this exchange, whether participants intended or even recognized that it was happening. People heard other people’s music and they learned to move and experience sound differently, and in this new, shared dialect. I think, in fact, that this phenomenon—maybe we could call it “a creolization of bodily experience”—happens everywhere disparate populations come into close proximity with one another. I think it’s at the core of where urban culture arises.

I might suggest that one useful contribution the book provides to that sort of study is to develop a set of analytical tools (particularly rhythmic and iconographic) which let us “see” creole or Afro-Caribbean characteristics—rhythms, body postures, body movements—in tunes or scenes which, on the surface, seem to be “simply depicting” idealized Anglo-Celtic culture. The book suggests that we can identify creole motion—of the pelvis, hips, shoulders; of melodic shapes and rhythms—in the bodies of the dancers, even if they “seem” to be idyllic, pastoral shepherd boys and girls. I don’t necessarily think that Mount intended or consciously imported creole aesthetics into those body vocabularies—quite the contrary: I think that he was simply, accurately, precisely, and sympathetically providing visual reportage on the way that his neighbors and artistic models moved—and that those body vocabularies were already creole, even if the individuals he depicted didn’t consciously realize this.

The Bassanda Manifesto

[In reference to this; and this; and this, coming your way in January 2014]

The Bassanda Manifesto

Bassanda does not actually exist.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it exists only temporarily, and outside the parameters of conventional chronology or geography. The great musicologist and teacher Christopher Small argued that musicians, in the act of performance, bring into existence for the duration of that performance the ideal society in which they wish to live. So perhaps we could say that, like Debussy's Cathédrale Engloutié or the mystical Irish paradise of Tir na nog, Bassanda is a temporary, imagined experience of a place: more gentle, artful, passionate, and creative than the failing universe in which we find ourselves; a place which we bring into existence, through active will and comradely collaboration, for the duration at least of our sung, danced, spoken, written, or imagined performances. In our parallel universe, musicians drink for free, artists receive medals, dancers are bound by no laws of gravity or decorum, no animals suffer, no wars are necessary or credible. In Bassanda, children have enough to eat, women and gays and those who differ are equal partners in the experiment of human community, empires’ armies stall impotently beyond the borders, and we are free to sit in a coffee house or raki shop and together create a better world.

Who we are:

We are writers and musicians, dancers and graphic artists, historians and re-enactors, scholars and teachers, both within and beyond the Ivory Tower: we are nearly as diverse a group as is the world of Bassanda itself. But we all share two crucial convictions: first, we believe in our friends and our friends’ work, and second, we believe at some deep level that the very best stories live not in fiction but in history, or at least in those idioms that lie closest to history.

So think of us as a kind of literary folk band, whose metier is not just group musical composition, but extends also to a series of riffs upon archetypal stories and character types and modes of expression; in the General’s locution, “it's like bringing a story to rehearsal and letting everybody make up their own parts.” In the world of Bassanda, the great tales and indeed the great history are as much a product of jam-session collaboration as the songs we sing and the dances we embody. We sit in the corner of the pub, or the corners of the Internet, and laugh and talk and drink and play and dance and, together, imagine into existence our better world.

Don't think of us as a group of individuals or as individual authors. We are both more and less than that. No individual character in the world of Bassanda is a one-to-one parallel to any of the contributing authors: even the originating “General Roger Landes (US Army, ret)” and “Right Reverend Colonel R.E.C. Thompson (Army of the Confederacy, ret)” bear only a passing resemblance to any similarly-monickered characters in the mundane world.  Of course, a “Friend of Bassanda” is free to select a persona, or eponymous anagram, or formal title, or autobiographical back-story, which bears some passing or amusing resemblance to her or his own—but we don’t feel bound by the limits of “characters” anymore than Bassanda itself is bounded by a specific or “factual” geography, topography, or chronology.

Artists can be as lazy, spiteful, or petty as any more “normal” humans—so if we can imagine, in Bassanda, a place more ideal than the fallen universe to which we are exiled, then we can also imagine, in our Bassandan counterparts, more ideal, generous, and expansive ways for ourselves to be human. We may riff on canonic tales of music, dance, culture, and history (see for example “Xblt Op. 16 – The Bassandan Rite of Spring”, the fabled Bassanda cottage industry in hand-wound electric bouzouki pickups, or the wild tale of Yezget Nas1lsinez witnessing bluesman Robert Johnson’s murder in Mississippi in 1936) because, as scholars, creators, teachers, and practitioners, it amuses us to imagine just-slightly-bent variants on better-known historical characters or events—but ultimately Bassanda is a place through which we can imagine a better world.

We are historians and storytellers, authors and actors and artists. Most importantly, we are friends. If the “best stories of all are the ones found not in fiction but in history,” then, as a break from our artistic “day jobs,” we sometimes allow ourselves to play together in the sandbox of history and historical convention. The great virtue of Bassanda is that, like the common lands which pre-Industrial communities shared for grazing, gathering, and leisure—before the curse of private property and “Mine, not Thine” descended upon the peoples of the earth—it has no boundaries except those of right conduct and ethical values, shared by a community of friends.

Anyone can become a Friend of Bassanda: like all human experience of any value, it is a product of effort, imagination, and love. And the greatest of these is Love.

Welcome to our world.

Michael Thelwell's "The Harder They Come"

In the 40th anniversary year of Perry Hensell's remarkable film--the first full-length feature ever made in Jamaica, the one that launched the astonishing riches of Jamaican syncretic music upon the world, the one that captured in remarkable verite techniques the based-in-fact but still archetypal story of the singer/gunman/Robin Hood character Ivanhoe "Rhygin" Martin--I have to give a shout-out to Michael Thelwell's remarkable novelization of the film.

Usually novelizations of existing films are just another way of merchandising the electronic media: I think of the execrable Rat Patrol novelizations I engulfed avidly at age 8, or the endless stream of Star Trek / Star Wars spin-offs, or the not-very-much better redrilling of the dry holes of the Bond or Zelazny "brands" long after their originators have passed on.

But what Thelwell has done is much different, much deeper, and still one of the best portraits of the roots of ska and reggae and of Rastafarianism I've ever encountered. Still assign it in my "Musics of the African Diaspora" seminar because, even if it is "fiction", it conveys the truth of those experiences more deeply, profoundly and truthfully than any ethnography of the region I've ever read. What Thelwell did, quite consciously and intentionally, was not to "novelize" the screenplay of the film--as is the usual, mundane practice--but rather to imagine the folk-story and ghetto myths upon which such a film might have been made. It's the same kind of thing that Peter Jackson et al did with The Hobbit. The originating book is a kid's book, but his mandate (no doubt economic) was to expand it into a tale that could sustain 2 or more feature-length films. So what they did, quite intentionally (and, I think, effectively), was to imagine that the children's book which Tolkien authored was in fact a "children's version" of a much more intense folk-tale of heroic grandeur. In this respect--whether Tolkien intended this or not--Jackson and crew are also able to draw upon the depth and richness of the world that Tolkien created in the Silmarillion. He wasn't a very competent storyteller, but (as the Bassanda experiment makes clear) there is a tremendous and engaging creative energy to be accessed by imagining, or recreating, a world.

That's what Thelwell does in The Harder They Come: he provides a nuanced, detailed, and rich back-story for Ivanhoe/Rhygin as Jimmy Cliff portrayed him in the film, but also a meditation on urbanization, the loss of home, modernization in Caribbean creole contexts, the roots of Rastafari (the way in which Thelwell compresses about 100 years of evolving Jamaican syncretic religion into one parade witnessed by Ivanhoe is a tour de force), the relationship between spirituality, ganja, and crime. It's a remarkable, virtuoso novelistic performance, and it accomplishes the remarkable trick of making the film deeper, more resonant, more profound.

Big ups to Ras Michael. Respect! http://amzn.to/15v1YMT

Lead da Band

The bandleader, composer, and guitarist Frank Zappa (1940-93), one of the great touchstones of my own artistic consciousness, once write “A composer is somebody who organizes things—maybe sounds, maybe objects, maybe other stuff. Gimme some shit and I’ll organize it for you. That’s what a composer does.” As so often with Frank’s insights, it’s pithy and pungent and right down the line accurate. The job of the composer is to organize shit.

That’s also the job of the bandleader: to organize the shit that musicians do in a fashion that is unique, new, powerful, and expressive. The craft of the bandleader, particularly in the American musical traditions—in fact, the potential genius of that role, one that is largely ignored or neglected in the study of musicology because it involves organizing musical consciousnesses rather than musical objects—is putting people together. My friend & brother in music Roger Landes taught me that, with his remarkable festival-of-the-tribes called “Zoukfest”; he once said, “the whole point of having the festival is make it possible to put certain people in a room together at the same time, because you’re convinced that unique and beautiful things will happen.” Sometimes, as in the case of a festival or workshop or artists’ colony, you go to a lot of time, hassle, and expense in order to put those certain people (teachers and students, musicians and dancers, performers and audience) in a room together at the same time.

Because the craft and art of making musical, and musical events, is a time-bound phenomenon—unlike a sculpture or video or painting or installation, a music-dance-theatre event has to happen in the same chronological moment and (at least in the vernacular forms I work in) the same geographical space for both performers and audience. Yes, you can stream such events over the web, or live-cast on radio, and that at least permits audiences elsewhere to experience the event at the same time as those physically present: in Singapore, a highly secularized and regulated multi-ethnic city that also has a devout Muslim population, the Call to Prayer is broadcast over a certain radio frequency five times daily, so that the Faithful can at least hear the Call simultaneously as other others, even if in isolated physical environments; I had a Buddhist meditation teacher who said “all I need to know is that someone somewhere is sitting zazen at the same time as myself; if I know that, I know that I have a sangha, I know I’m not sitting “alone”.

But even the radio simul-cast or the web stream is imperfect and, in the case of the intimate communities of traditional music, it almost makes us sadder to know that our friends are out there somewhere in the world but can’t be here. Because vernacular/traditional events are about using music-and-dance to create community, sometimes in environments, locations, or circumstances that are far distant from the ideal, original, or remembered contexts in which the art forms began. The great gift of these forms is that they are so portable, resilient, and memorable that it is actually possible to engage in such re-creation.

But the best things happen when you arrange certain objects in relation to one another with a vision of those patterns’ expressive power, when you arrange for certain people to be together in a room because you have enough insight, experience, and sensitivity to recognize that simply arranging for that meeting will make good things happen. That’s why Bill Monroe, Muddy Waters, Art Blakey, Carla Bley, Buck Owens, Arthur Ailey, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Frank Zappa, David Baker, Kim Pineda and so many others would be artists of genius even they themselves had never played, dance, or even composed a note or motion themselves: because they had the insight, experience, sensitivity and—let’s face it—sheer bullheaded stubborn insistence upon the validity of their vision to put certain people together in a room. And then to trust that the artistic potential of that meeting, the sheer unchained creative energy that emerges when artists find new companions and new challenges. Two dancers from Louisiana. A handful of crazy hippie Baroque (and “broke”) musicians in Indiana. A mandolin player from New Zealand and another from Ireland. A bouzouki player from Alabama and another from Kansas City.

And this lot.

https://www.facebook.com/events/211334689031256/

From the "Creolization" press kit...

Q: How did your experience as a musician inform the project?

It’s funny: I look back over the very long gestation and creation of this manuscript—whose earliest inspiration I trace, in the Forward, to a conversation with my roots-music friends Chipper Thompson and Roger Landes, on the porch of a slave-built tavern in Weston Missouri in 1998—and only with hindsight do I begin to realize just how many elements of my own musical life and values have coalesced in its creation. I’ve been an avid listener and dedicated student (later teacher) in the worlds of African American musics ever since the early 1970s, the year I heard Mississippi Delta Blues in New England coffeehouses, live in small rooms. I’ve studied a very wide range of other musics, as both player and scholar, within and beyond the academy, but blues and jazz and their earliest root-ancestors have been a touchstone I’ve returned to over four decades. At the same time, the other constant in my core musical identity has been Anglo-Celtic music—particularly Irish tradition dance music, another genre I’ve studied and played ever since those same early ‘70s coffeehouse experiences. So to stumble upon the cluster of antebellum idioms—both Anglo-Celtic and Afro-Caribbean—whose encounter was the seed from which minstrelsy grew, became a way to link two sides of my own musical consciousness with my professional identity as a historian.

I also have very extensive experience at the scholarly disciplines of both musicology—the study of musical behaviors in historically distant contexts—and ethnomusicology—the study of musical behaviors in culturally or geographically distant contexts. Both those academic music disciplines provided research and analysis tools which were crucial to the Creolization project: manuscript studies, iconography, demographics, kinesthetics, art history, semiotics, reception history, sociology, ethnography, and so forth. In that sense, one element of Creolization is absolutely a kind of “historical ethnomusicology”—a challenging but ultimately very satisfying and enlightening synthesis of scholarly perspectives and methods.

At the same time—and, I think, rather atypically for someone who specializes in 19th& 20th century American roots musics—I have over 25 years experience as a practitioner of historical performance—specifically, the reconstruction and performance of medieval monophonic song. Though that world of medieval performance practice is stylistically and chronologically very distant, indeed, from the wharves, canals, and ships’ decks of the creole synthesis, historical performance did teach me to look at musical behaviors within historical contexts, and to try to reconstruct both the physical performance practices—the motions of hands and body—and the expressive environments that shaped that musical experience. Staying conscious of, and seeking the reasons behind, the musical choices that individuals made in response to specific expressive contexts—using musical content (tunes, songs, body iconography, and so forth) to reflect contextual priorities, and analyzing performance contexts to try to illuminate musical choices, was thus truly essential to this study.

So in that sense I guess I could say that—not entirely intentionally, and certainly not with any prescience or “grand plan”—I’ve been working for over forty years to develop the skill-sets and analytical tools to understand just why in the world blackface minstrelsy was the way it was, and what it has to tell us—about that time, and our time.

AYEH, JAMDUNG. SEE IT DEH, BOOK DONE. SELAH!