Improv Notes: January 2014
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 IMprov Notes:News of the Moment January 2014
These days, what with writing and reading, he plays less often. One recent outing was during the annual Guelph Jazz Festival in September, when he took part in a workshop at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. “We just played and moved around the space.” In a way, he might be describing the essence of improvised jazz – the topic of Lee’s doctoral thesis begun in 2011.
ORAL HISTORIES PROJECT MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS, GEORGE E. LEWIS, & ROSCOE MITCHELL The Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is a non-profit creative organization that supports and welcomes creative jazz performers, composers, and educators. The AACM was founded in Chicago, Illinois, by pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and composer/trumpeter Phil Cohran (also known for his work with the Sun Ra Arkestra). Some of the most illustrious free jazz players have been part of AACM’s nexus, including Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago: Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Don Moye, and Malachi Favors. As the AACM’s charter mandates, the AACM is dedicated “to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music.” Particularly through the 1960s and 70s, AACM members were among the most innovative in jazz/music, and recorded widely, often boldly mixing jazz, the avant-garde, improvisation, classical, and world music. Their contributions to the free jazz world are colossal. George E. Lewis, featured in the interview, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, and who is an ICASP co-investigator, wrote the most extensively documented work on the AACM: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. In his seminal work Lewis applies a cross-generation chorus of voices to explore the important communal history of the AACM. In the prologue Lewis describes how the “AACM is part of a long tradition of organizational efforts in which African American musicians took leadership roles” (x), going on to detail the more than forty years of work and composite output of the AACM in a range of methodologies, processes, and media. Lewis writes: “AACM musicians developed new and influential ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of improvisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures” (ix). These new forms and medias of playing were opportunities, afforded by the AACM, as Muhal Richard Abrams and John Shenoy Jackson assert, “to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies” (qtd. in Lewis ix). As Muhal Richard Abrams succinctly put it at the “Improvising Bodies” Colloquium in Guelph in 2010: “Improvisation is a human right.” This month’s Oral History is taken from the 2010 Guelph Jazz Festival/ ICASP colloquium, which presented this engaging panel conversation between AACM members, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and George Lewis. Judiciously moderated by Lincoln Beauchamp Jr., the AACM members discuss how the AACM came to be, as well as their respective involvement in the group. The panel converses about the impact of the AACM both musically and non-musically, as well as taking questions from the audience. The dynamic conversation affirms how important the AACM remains in providing new perspectives, new methodologies, and new artistic and cultural practices to the world of creative improvised practices. Art of Immersive Soundscapes: New book by ICASP Team Members Ellen Waterman, Pauline Minevich, and James Harley For more information, please visit the University of Regina press' page here. Quote of the Month: REST IN POWER, AMIRI BARAKA 
Amiri Baraka, a poet and playwright of incendiary rage and collective insight, who went from Beat poet to Black Nationalist and finally Marxist-Leninist, passed away on January 9th in Newark. He was 79. Among his most known works are the poetry collections The Dead Lecturer and Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1965), his plays Dutchmen and A Black Mass, and his various works on Black music, such as Blues People and Black Music. Along with Ezra Pound, Amiri Baraka remains one of the most controversial and least understood American poets. As M.L. Rosenthal wrote, “No American poet since Pound has come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action” (qtd. in Baraka Reader xxi). For Baraka, art was a weapon of revolution. Further, Baraka wrote some of the most insightful works on African American music, appropriately referring to the music as American classical music. His poetry was always musical, for as he states in Blues People, the poem must “swing—from verb to noun.” The “changing same” was his designation of the interplay between tradition and the individual talent in Afro-American music. His creative writing shows how poetry can move through blues and jazz to black chant and graphic sound. Baraka lived a very tumultuous life and his poetry and social activism reflect that. He showed many young poets—across cultures and generations—that poetry could be a call to arms, as well as a tool to adequately express lived experience. His uncompromising, engaging, and, at times, problematic voice will be missed. Check out Baraka reading from “Why’s/Wise,” here. ICASP GRA Paul Watkins releases DJ project/album, Dedications.  Dedications is an experimental jazzy hip-hop remix project born out of a love of listening to records. The album mixes, mashes, samples, spins, cuts, signifies, rhapsodizes, poetizes, layers, collages, remixes, breaks, distresses, archives, remakes, reshapes, and re-edits pieces of recorded history to create a sonic audio homage to a host of musicians and styles with a nod to the avant-garde. The full album is available as a free download here. About ICASP
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A progenitor of a genre typically referred to as body horror, Toronto-born and world-renowned auteur David Cronenberg remains one of the most audacious narrative directors working in cinema. Citing literary influences as diverse and incendiary as Vladimir Nabokov and William S. Burroughs (Cronenberg adapted Burroughs’s Naked Lunch), Cronenberg’s films continually blur the line between corporeality and psychological disorder, reality and hallucinatory nightmare. 
