German composer Walter Zimmermann once likened American experimental musicians to desert plants. He was not being condescending. On the contrary, he was expressing a deep appreciation of the new music originating from this side of the Atlantic. In 1975, Zimmermann flew across the ocean to meet and interview 23 composers. The resulting material was transcribed and published in a book which Amy C. Beal, in New Music, New Allies, calls “a milestone in codifying the American experimental tradition.”

Indeed, Zimmermann’s long out-of-print Desert Plants helped canonize the leading figures of the post war experimental music scene. The book, which was published in 1976 by the Aesthetic Research Center of Canada, provided a unique insight into the challenges faced by artists in North America.

Desert Plants includes interviews with Morton Feldman, Christian Wolfe, John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Joan La Barbara, Charles Morrow, La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, and David Rosenboom to name but a few.

Zimmermann writes:

“I found out what they have in common besides being different.

The ways of SUBSISTENCE.

How to survive under hard conditions and the resulting beauty and vigour of this existence, which is one precondition for the necessary revolutionary changes.”

Desert Plants continues to be available thanks to the generosity of its author and contributors. The various chapters of the book remain available online for those of you interested in revisiting the works and ideas of seminal experimental music composers.

A printable PDF of the book can also be obtained by contacting the author directly (photos and scores – unfortunately – not included due to copyrights reasons). Follow this link and scroll down to Desert Plants for details.

“A network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it, if the codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them. Although the new order is not contained in the structure of the old, it is nonetheless not a product of chance. It is created by the substitution of new differences for the old differences. Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes. For despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination. The absence of meaning is in this case the presence of all meanings, absolute ambiguity, a construction outside meaning. The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning. It makes possible the creation of a new order on another level or organization, of a new code in another network.”

- Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Prospective 21e siècle releases generally stand out in record bins thanks to the series’ distinctive (and reflective) metallic cover designs. But the music pressed onto these vinyl records is also deserving of attention.

“Prospective” albums served as a vehicle for the dissemination of experimental electronic music. Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari, Edgard Varèse, John Cage and many others contributed material to the series (most of it performed by Les Percussions de Strasbourg). Yet only one composer – Pierre Henry – features prominently in the Prospective 21e siècle catalog.

A number of ground-breaking electroacoustic works by Henry were released on vinyl as parts of the series. This includes Variations pour une porte et un soupir, Le Voyage, Apocalypse de Jean and Mise en musique du corticalart. The latter is a particularly original and perplexing piece of electronic music.

Mise en musique du corticalart documents Pierre Henry’s exploration of the sonic possibilities contained within the cerebral cortex. On this album, the composer becomes the source material of a very peculiar improvisational exercise.

The sound masses heard on this LP were recorded live at the Musée d’Art moderne de Paris between February 15 and February 21, 1971. This corticalart music was made possible by the use of electrodes designed and positioned to detect signals/waves originating from the outermost layer of the composer’s brain. Seven electronic generators were put at Henry’s disposal during the performances. He used the equipment to  amplify and process the sounds thus made audible.

Needless to say, this “art du cortex” occupies a very narrow zone between intuitive art and cerebral music.

“électro-genèse”

Unfortunately, Mise en musique du corticalart has never been officially reissued (Creel Pone did release a limited CDr back in 2005).

More Pierre Henry here: Réminiscence apocryphe

The above Electronic Music by Canadian Composers compilation was released in 1975 on the small-independently-run Melbourne record label. Melbourne’s parent company, Rodeo Records, made its name producing and releasing albums by country and folk music artists. Rodeo established its Melbourne division in the mid-1960s but close to ten years elapsed before the label began releasing compilations dedicated to electronic music.

Volume 2 must have generated a certain amount of interest because it was reissued in 1980 as parts of the label’s New Music Series. The compilation features compositions by Michel Longtin, Peter Huse, Reinhard Berg and Don Druick. The latter’s “Cellophane Wrapper” is a particularly enthralling piece of psychoactive electronic music:

“Cellophane Wrapper” was composed at the Simon Fraser University Studio. It was mastered on a four-track Ampex and involved the use of a custom white noise unit, buchla enveloper, variable speed looper, and moog bode ring modulator. The music is concerned with the exploration of nonsymetric intensity contours which peak at a point one-third the distance from the beginning. (Liner notes – Electronic Music by Canadian Composers Vol. 2)

Druick, a Montreal-born multidisciplinary artist, spent the first part of his prolific career composing and performing various types of musical works – that is before he turned to performance and visual arts as well as writing. Between 1960 and 1973, Druick completed four film scores, one of which was selected by Melbourne for inclusion on its Electronic Music by Canadian Composers compilation.

The composition featured here serves as a soundtrack to a short film by Canadian experimental filmmaker David Rimmer. Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper is one of many exemplary experimental works made in Canada since the 1960s.

“cellophane wrapper”

The late 1960s and early 1970s produced more than a few interesting meetings between jazz and electronic music. From Sun Ra to Archie Shepp and Miles Davis, jazz expended into new territories situated beyond the contours of bebop, hard bop and post-bop. It is not an overstatement to say that Sing Me a Song of Songmy (1971), Freddie Hubbard and Ilhan Mimaroglu’s “fantasy for electromagnetic tape,” represents one of the most potent manifestations of this new music.

Hubbard, an established band leader in his own right, spent most of the sixties working in New York City alongside innovative artists such as Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman. The jazz trumpeter moved between the positions of leader and sideman with ease and proficiency. A prolific musician, he released dozens of albums – some of which were more commercial than others – during a career that spanned half a century.

On this 1971 release, Hubbard benefited from the vision of Mimaroglu, a Turkish-born electronic musician and a producer at Atlantic Records. Mimaroglu performed most of the work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Using the equipment at his disposal, he infused a considerable amount of musique concrète, tape-based music and electronic sounds into Hubbard’s jazz piece. Mimaroglu was consequently accorded composition, arrangement and production credits on the album.

Sing Me a Song of Songmy is a 41-minute jazz opus augmented with tape collages, string orchestras, recitations and electronic interventions. It is a powerful musical statement with strong political undertones. It is meant to resonate loud and clear. Section titles such as “Threnody for Sharon Tate”, “This is Combat I know” and “What a Good Time for a Kent State” (and poems such as Lullaby for a Child in War as well as Before the Bombs Struck the Dark Breasts) help situate this collaborative effort within its post-1968 context.

This is one record that should not be overlooked.

“sing me a song of songmy”

The sixties were a time of change and turmoil when everything seemed possible. In Paris, art and politics merged into a potent critique of the establishment. Free Jazz – before and after May 68 – echoed the voice of the discontented. But the music also offered a means of articulating an alternative to reactionary social orders.

The Parisian art scene welcomed jazz vanguards and offered plenty of opportunities for improvised collaborations. It benefited from the zeal and energy of critics, musicians and independent record label owners who encouraged Free Jazz artists from the US to migrate eastward across the Atlantic. Archie Shepp, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray and many others found in Paris an enthused and receptive audience.

François Tusques, one of the leading figures of French Free Jazz, played a key role in preparing Europe for the sound of American experimental jazz. Tusques was born in Paris on the eve of World War Two. Because of his nomadic childhood, he was never able to receive formal musical training. Tusques taught himself to play the piano and quickly established his reputation as an innovative musician. In 1965, he contributed to the birth of a French experimental jazz scene by releasing the aptly titled Free Jazz.

Tusques once remarked that he learned to play his instrument by listening attentively to drummers. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that he chose to team up with Murray when the latter arrived in Paris in 1968. Murray’s singular drumming style provided the perfect barrage of sound for Tusques’ insistent piano work.

In 1971, Tusques and Murray recorded Intercommunal Music for the French record label Shandar. The two musicians were accompanied by Alan Silva, Beb Guerin, Steve Potts, Alan Shorter, Bob Reid and Louis Armfield. Several hours of studio time had been booked but thirty-some minutes was all that was needed to record this masterpiece of improvised jazz (I should add that Murray and Silva arrived considerably late for the session).

This is politically charged music performed with urgency and conviction.

“intercommunal music”

This National Film Board of Canada production was supposed to be a short documentary film about winter but Groulx – eager to bridge the chasm between documentary and fiction films – skillfully appropriated the project and created one of the most important feature length films ever made in Quebec. Not surprisingly, Le chat dans le sac was awarded First Prize at the 1964 Canadian Film Festival held in Montreal.

The film revolves around the doomed relationship of two people. Claude (a young French Canadian journalist) and Barbara (an Anglophone aspiring actress of Jewish origins) “vivent les derniers jours de leur intimité.” Claude is preoccupied with the socio-economic and political fate of his people. He needs to find himself before he can determine what course of action he must follow. Barbara cannot accompany him on this quest. Bill Marshall, in Quebec National Cinema, notes that the film “steers some sort of path for the (interpellated, nation-recognizing) spectator, primarily through its attempt to privilege the discourse of Claude over that of Barbara.” Indeed, Le chat dans le sac – in both form and content – contributes to discourses about Quebec identity and nation-building.

During the 1950s and 1960s, a number of Quebec artists drew (questionable) parallels between their situation and that of African Americans.

Le cri du QUÉBEC est analogue à celui de la négritude. d’où cette accointance avec le jazz. le cri que je lance en public est jazzistique dans l’intention et dans le fait. il est la transe de mon être. il comporte une décantation des rythmes folkloriques. la gigue. le rigodon. par nostalgie du future de la race. comme le jazz à l’origine. mon poème est un chant de révolte. un cri d’esclave. c’est le cri jaillissant du tréfonds de l’individu québécois aliéné (Raoul Luoar Yaugud Duguay)

In Le chat dans le sac, jazz is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities. But Coltrane’s music is also partly used as a means of validating Claude’s quest for self-affirmation.

Considering the nationalistic undertones of the film, it is interesting to note that the Coltrane quartet session took place on the day Quebecers celebrate La Fête de la Saint-Jean (Quebec’s National Holiday). Was this a mere coincidence?

————————————–
Recorded June 24, 1964 (Studio Rudy Van Gelder)

Personnel:
- John Coltrane (tenor saxophone)
- McCoy Tyner (piano)
- Jimmy Garrison (bass)
- Elvin Jones (drums)

Songs performed:
- “Naima” *
- “Village Blues” *
- “Out of This World” *

* Studio and live versions of the above compositions appear on several albums – Giant Steps (1960), Coltrane Jazz (1961), Coltrane (1962) and Live! At The Village Vanguard (1961) to name but a few.
————————————–

Ra may have been (…) a self-made myth, but the contours of the myth were shaped by a kind of symbiotic dialogue, an inter-textual relationship, with the main narrative threads of African American history. This myth was not the work of a madman or a con man, but one of the most brilliant and comprehensive acts of self-representation in black culture.” – Graham Lock (in Blutopia)

Sun Ra, the uncontested leader of The Solar Myth Arkestra, was born Herman Poole Blount. The space jazz pioneer was 38 when he changed his name and fully embraced the possibilities of political self-affirmation. Using music, Sun Ra dedicated a lifetime to promoting his grand project of betterment for humanity.

Le Sony’r Ra (Sun Ra’s legal name) was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He relocated to Chicago in the 1940s where he acquired notoriety as a capable and prolific musician. The time Sun Ra spent performing in Illinois’ largest city had a profound impact on his art and political vision.

Throughout the 1950s, he radicalized his approach to music and performance. Sun Ra and his Arkestra traveled to Montreal in the summer of 1961 but unforeseen circumstances forced the ensemble to return south of the border earlier than anticipated. Sun Ra and his musicians eventually settled in New York City. It is there that The Magic City and the ensemble’s liberating jazz fully came to life.

The Magic City was first released on vinyl in 1966 by Sun Ra’s own Saturn label. The album was then reissued in two formats – LP and Stereo 8 – by Impulse records. The album’s title track was recorded during rehearsals that took place late in 1965. It has been suggested that the sessions were edited to fit on one side of an LP. It is worth noting that “The Magic City” occupies the greater part of three of an 8-track cartridge’s four programs.

The album’s title is a direct reference to Sun Ra’s birthplace in Alabama but it also serves as a means or appropriating and repositioning the past within a vision of the future. The Magic City is a metaphor for the transformations made possible by the redrawing of boundaries and the removal of identity constraints. It forms parts of Sun Ra’s grand project. John Szwed, in The Wire Primers, insists that “there had been other great attempts at collective improvisation (…) but none had the seamless quality of The Magic City; nor its secret formalism.

The excerpt below was converted from 8-track tape to digital audio. The version of “The Magic City” available here is enriched by occasional audio-bleed (adjacent tracks can be heard on the left hand side – this is known as double-tracking).

…challenging, but not necessarily unpleasant for the ear.

“the magic city”

Stereo 8 (Impulse Records A 8027-9243) – Track Listing:
Program A: The Magic City (part 1)
Program B: The Magic City (part 2)
Program C: The Magic City (part 3) – The Shadow World (part 1)
Program D: The Shadow World (part 2) – Abstract Eye – Abstract “I”

LP – Track Listing:
Side A: The Magic City
Side B: The Shadow World – Abstract Eye – Abstract “I”

DEDICATED TO THAT GREAT COSMIC UNSEEN  (World Galaxy liner notes)

On January 12, 2007, Alice Coltrane was reunited in death with her late husband John Coltrane. The two had been married for less than two years when he passed away in 1967. During the four decades that followed, Alice released a stream of stunning albums, many of which paid tribute to the visionary spirit of the jazz saxophonist.

Alice played piano for the Terry Gibbs quartet when she met John in 1963. She quit performing for a couple of years and eventually secured a place for herself within John Coltrane’s group. The band was then undergoing a musical transformation. John’s playing had become infused with spiritual urgency. This was a time of experimentation and it is within that context that Alice began to explore the sonic possibilities of the harp.

Alice’s first solo effort was released in 1968. The album was meant as a tribute to her late husband. But it is with World Galaxy – recorded in autumn of 1971 – that she most eloquently celebrated the richness of his legacy. The session produced five songs: three original compositions and new interpretations of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and “A Love Supreme.”

World Galaxy opens with a poignant rendition of “My Favorite Things.” The band’s performance is augmented with a string section which helps elevate this John Coltrane signature piece to new heights. The fragile arrangements hold together superbly well. This is music from beyond this world.

Alice’s music often served as a vehicle for spiritual pursuits. She believed that her husband’s music served similar purposes.

A higher principle is involved here. Some of his (Coltrane’s) latest work aren’t musical compositions. I mean they weren’t based entirely on music. A lot if it has to do with mathematics, some on rhythmic structure and the power of repetition, some of elementals. He always felt that sound was the first manifestation in creation before music. I would like to play music according to ideals set forth by John and continue to let a cosmic principle, or the aspect of spirituality, be the underlying reality behind the music as he did (Quoted in Bill Cole’s John Coltrane).

Alice’s sixth solo effort closes with “A Love Supreme.” This last song is based on the landmark four-part suite John Coltrane released in 1965. On this album, the saxophonist performed a devotional poem (using his saxophone instead of words). On World Galaxy, Alice substitutes a poem of her own which is read out by her spiritual leader Swami Satchidananda.

Let that Love Supreme reign over the universe
Om shanti
Shanti
Shanti
Hariom

No discontinuations allowed on this Stereo 8 version of World Galaxy. This is profoundly beautiful music and it is meant to flow with a graceful intensity.

World Galaxy is but one of many splendid albums Alice Coltrane left behind before departing for another world. It is music for the great cosmic unseen.

“Program A: My Favorite Things / Galaxy Around Oludumare”

Stereo 8 (Impulse Records V 8027-9218) – Track Listing:
Program A: My Favorite Things – Galaxy Around Oludumare
Program B: Galaxy Around Satchidananda
Program C: Galaxy in Turiya
Program D: A Love Supreme

LP – Track Listing:
Side A: My Favorite Things – Galaxy Around Oludumare – Galaxy in Turiya
Side B: Galaxy Around Satchidananda – A Love Supreme

Ornette Coleman