last changed on 10 May 01 by
Have I been blind or has this been happening all along?
Over its ten-day run, the Zeitgeist Creative Music Festival had the effect of a mellow dose of acid. It wasn't much more expensive than ten hits, but it was totally legal.
And a hell of a lot more interesting than suicide, as Amiri Baraka once wrote about the new music when it really was new, 'round about 1965. Like his former lover Diane di Prima wrote in her recent memoir of the times, on the suicide of dancer Freddie Herko, it was events like Freddie's death that forced the changes of the times. Something had to change, but maybe now we don't have to be so desperate. With the increases in corporate sponsorship of the Big Festival, (which shall here remain nameless) and 168,000 people on the festival grounds on Saturday, it's pretty clear there will be no headbending without effort of will. Listeners will have to search, musicians must create the grounds on which they make their own new music.
We sure can't go on just making art for money or we will be going around & around in that penny circus for a long time. Even though you've got to eat. As a poet, I can expect little in the way of payment myself. (Two traps for me: one is to indulge in a vague consistency, making the same poems over & over for the rest of my life. This makes me either a darling of the academy, of a little clique, or a dilletante. The other forces me out the door to get my head twisted by music or dance.) Anything but the customary. You're not betraying anyone by changing.
Like the first time you heard Rahsaan Kirk blowing two horns at once. The sound that you hear between two familiar sounds reroutes your ordinary way of thinking and feeling not only about music but also about everything around you. The furniture in your head gets rearranged overnight by a sensitive roommate. you smack your shins a couple times until you get the idea. or better, the whole room gets moved around & you have to spend several weeks finding out where everything belongs. Wear neat new grooves in the carpet. To quote guitarist Mark Fowler, "Headbending is what it's all about!"
How do I think of music? What is it to me? Another non-playing enthusiast could tell you more, or a musician who doesn't think words get in the way. I'm still a neophyte.
It was hard NOT to think of Sun Ra as the tutelary spirit of the Zeitgeist festival. A poster portraying him stood on an easel behind the bandstand for much of the 10-day run. Entirely appropriate, even given that not everything presented was Ra-inspired, because the visionary quality of his music and extramusical thought. (But are there any such things as extra-musical thoughts, when you are really thinking outside of established parameters? The restless nature of Ra's mind, that took in Fletcher Henderson, Walt Disney, and Saturn.)
But is that jazz? Tabla, pedal steel, tenor saxophone, steel pans. But is that jazz? "Have these people even played together before? That sounds like total chaos." But is that jazz? Tabla tabla tabla tabla. Dulcimer. But is that jazz? Alp horn and doudouk, instruments vastly different in size and range, from distant mountains. But is that jazz? Ra wrote a piece called "India," "vibrant thought in sound, projecting to the mind the feel of the soul of India." (I'm listening to it right now.) And is that jazz? Listening again to a tape Fowler gave me of the Improvisational Arts Council's April 29 gig at Zeitgeist, I was just struck by how beautiful it was, the strangeness inside, meditative music that both disciplines and frees your mind.
The Zeitgeist Creative Music Festival accomplished something nobody has tried to do before. But things could certainly remain the same unless the kinds of music it presented find new listeners and more opportunities to be played. Rene Broussard is taking a well-deserved break from his ministrations at Zeitgeist, but there will be more music, movies, and movement arts at the Central City theater. Soon again, tomorrow.
This page is served & maintained by &
last changed on 10 May 01 by