I used to be a huge fan of Anthony Braxton back in the day. Braxton is an unapologetic free music practitioner, a brilliant composer and improviser and a disruptive influence in the world of American music, and jazz in particular.
Here is a a lovely piece from him talking about the difference in perception between white men and black men striving to express an individual voice in contemporary America. Beyond race, this also speaks to the marginalization of creative work in a world dominated by a mercantile world view:
FJ: Why is it that a white man striving for individuality is perceived as being liberal, but a Black man is termed radical or revolutionary?
ANTHONY BRAXTON: You put your finger right on it, Fred. I turn on the television set sometimes and they are talking about Silicon Valley. The guys are saying that they have these sessions where they just kind of get together and push ideas around and we’re changing these models, we’re doing this and we’re doing that. Suddenly they switch to Bill Gates or any of the visionaries who’ve become very successful. They talk about whatever they’ve come up with. Yes, it is always received on the level that it is intended in the sense that this is something that can be considered, accepted or rejected, but it is something that can be considered. For instance, when Lee Konitz in Wire magazine went to put me down, he didn’t say, “I don’t like what Braxton’s doing.” No, the first thing he made sure to do was undermine my credentials. “Oh, he isn’t qualified.” “Oh, he made a technical mistake.” So the question then is not what Braxton is doing, but suddenly I am operating from this deficit. This has been the game that has been played against guys like me from every sector. The Lincoln Center sector says, “Oh, well, he doesn’t play the blues.” What they are really saying is the he doesn’t have the kind of idiomatic psychology that we can see as playing ball in a way where this guy doesn’t have to be challenged, not to mention, what we have here is a profound myth understanding in my opinion of the whole blues tradition. I trace these understandings to Mr. Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch.
via www.jazzweekly.com | Interviews.
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Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.
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Hard on the heels of Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley’s new book Walk Out Walk On comes a commissioned single from my mates Tim Merry and Marc Durkee by the same name. Tim and Marc have beenmaking poems and music for the past five years or so about the work we all do in the world. THis is a great sounding track, and covers what it is we do in a beautiful and inspiring way.
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As a traditional musician schooled primarily in the Celtic tradition, I am fond of traditional themes and devices for communicating messages. On our home island right now there is a sometimes fierce debate occurring about the future of the Crown lands, that involves the possibility of creating a national park. Today I was thinking about the complexities of the debate, and how it has seemed to me that those leading the opposition to the park are speaking on the one hand out of a concern for protecting something dear about our Island, but it has felt a little off to me. Like a father who won’t let his daughter grow up. That, it turns out is a a very old story, and so I made a little song today about our place, telling a little story that captures I think how I feel about the park, and the partnerships that we would enter into to make it possible.
the short answer is that, given everything, the option of establishing a national park on Bowen excites me. While I have been carefully weighing the pros and cons, and while I could happily live with either option, I am increasingly finding many of the articulated reasons for voting no to such a future to be riddled with pessimism, fear and clingy attachment. For me, a park offers Bowen a chance to be creative, interesting, beautiful and innovative in the way we move forward in the future. And so, here is the song:
Come gather round you islanders, a story I will tell
About a gorgeous maiden within whose midst we dwell
Whose beauty and whose presence was coveted as well
By her negative and ever doting father.
“I raised you from a baby,” he was wont to say.
“I saved you when an evil man came to steal you away,
I preserved the beauty that is yours for you to wear today
And I’d do the same again in an instant.”
Now the maiden had her suitors, who came from far and near
And every one her father met left her home with fear.
They sought her hand in marriage but left her place in tears
And her father only ever issued no.
One day as she sat watching the latest suitor leave.
Her heart began to fail and her breath began to heave
She felt herself imprisoned and she began to grieve
For the fading of the promise of her beauty.
She went to search the country for a partner for her life
A stable man who loved her, and who would take her for his wife
Who would stay beside her through the victories and strife.
And she found him and she brought him back to father.
With deep suspicion in his heart he looked him up and down
He accused him of an evil plot to usurp his crown
He met the maiden’s one true love with a stony frown
And he issued forth a stern and solid no.
Now the maiden didn’t stand for this and she looked him in the eye.
Said she “it’s time you stood aside and hold your strident cries
This suitor will be with me long after you have died.
And I know I’ll finally come to life beside him.”
Her father had no answer for this surprising turn
He showed so little interest in what she’d come to learn
His anger boiled over and he became more stern
And demand that she prove to him she loved him.
She sat down by her father and took him by the hand
She broke it to him gently so he would understand
His overbearing attitude and selfish reprimands
No longer had a claim upon her choices
For if the maiden were to stay within her father’s range
Her future would be grim indeed for as the world changed
She would stay forever in her father’s gilded cage
And her life would wither down to nothing.
Islanders you’ve strongly heard the tales others tell
You’ve seen the paranoia of the coming living hell
But surely you must know that a maiden can live well
If her partner helps her build a life of beauty.
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From “Smart Flesh” the new album from Rhoda Island band The Low Anthem comes a beautiful collection of tunes, led by Ghost Woman Blues.