Music Review: Pauline Oliveros/Roscoe Mitchell/John Tilbury/Wadada Leo Smith - "Nessuno"

Track Listing:

1. Part I......................30:51
2. Part II.....................39.45
3. Part III (Encore).....5:25

Personnel:

• Pauline Oliveros: Roland V accordion
• Roscoe Mitchell: alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, flute
• John Tilbury: piano
• Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet

Jazz, at the end of the day, comes down to rhythm. From Dixieland marches to avant-garde throwdowns, the common denominator remains the propulsive rhythm of of the bass and drums. Much is made of the dizzying harmonies and spontaneous melodies, but beneath the chord charts lies the same swinging beat that unites the blues to funk and hip hop.

Imagine, however, a jazz performance without a rhythm section. No bass or drums to keep the beat and even the piano mulls for a time between each laconic strike. All pretense of dance and shuffle fades away, leaving behind pure brooding mood. At that point, would such a performance even be considered jazz?

It's hard to say, but Nessuno makes a compelling case regardless. Uniting for a one-off performance at the Angelica Festival in Italy in 2011, the supergroup brings to the table all the strengths of their respective backgrounds to create a unique work of art.

Much of the music's unusual character can be attributed to the late accordionist Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros didn't come out of jazz, but rather the classical and tape music scenes of the west coast. In the 1960s, she co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center alongside other such luminaries as Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley. For several years before her passing in late 2016, she had expanded her reach into the realm of world music and jazz. Over her career she has perfected a live set-up for her accordion, an instrument which, under her command, transforms into a powerful soundscape generator.

There's no lack of jazz pedigree on this record, however. At the same time Oliveros was revolutionizing classical and electronic music in the sixties, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and reed-player Roscoe Mitchell were charting new territories in jazz. After Ornette Coleman freed up the medium in 1959 with The Shape of Jazz to Come, young players all across the country and the world were eager to stake a claim in the New Thing and embark into new realms of sonic possibility. Smith and Mitchell, among many others, took part in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the legendary free jazz collective. Mitchell himself is a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a musical group now approaching its fiftieth year of existence. Smith has been having a renaissance for the past few years, first becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2013, then being named Best New Music by Pitchfork last year for his collaboration with pianist Vijay Ayer on the album A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke.

Such improbable collaborations between wildly different artists often (quite rightly) draw suspicion and disdain, but here such a fear would be unfounded. Although improvising almost everything on the expansive tracks, all four musicians seemed to share a similar vision going into the live performance: a brooding soundscape recalling a haunted house in which inanimate objects fly around and smash into each other on their own accord. Tilbury's careful piano playing builds the spare framework through which the spectral horns sail. Oliveros' ruminates and stews with her digitally modified accordion, droning like a busted organ forgotten in a church basement. Now and then one of the horn players will embark on a rousing solo, but for the most part the players are content to blend into the eerie atmosphere.

As to whether it's jazz, each listener can make that call for themselves. For my part, jazz has always had a willingness to do away with received pieties and seek out the daring and new. If that defines jazz, then Nessuno succeeds admirably.

Book Review: "Direct Action" by L.A. Kauffman

Direct Action:
Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism
By L.A. Kauffman
London, UK: Verso, 2017. 236 pages, paperback.

L.A. Kauffman begins her new book asking the question that plagues every activist and revolutionary on the American left: what happened after the 1960s? Why did the movement die or where did it go? Peaks and troughs are to be expected in political activity, but it's been over forty years since the height of the anti-war movement. Surely something should have happened in the intervening four decades.

Historians have tackled this question in numerous ways. Some focus on the massive assault against organized labor under Reagan and Thatcher. Those with a more international focus point toward the fall of the Soviet Union and "globalization" of the world economy following the third-world debt crisis.

Kauffman is much more interested in the subjective factors leading to the downfall of the left. In other words, she wants to know which theoretical frameworks and lines of thought among revolutionaries lead to our current situation. Objective factors might be ultimately beyond our control but a certain amount of blame and plaudits must be placed on past activists for their actions.

As the title suggests, Direct Action digs into the development of protest politics since the beginning of the 70s. From the Anti-war movement of the sixties to the global justice movement of the 90s to Black Lives Matter of our current era, she draws a straight line across forty years of movements and dramatic actions that would otherwise look disparate and hopelessly unconnected.

She opens the book with possibly the only in-depth account of the Mayday Movement of 1971 ever written. Founded in the wake of SDS's dissolution, the May Day Movement launched an audacious plan to shut down Washington DC as a protest against the ongoing war in Vietnam. Taking to heart the Weathermen maxim of "Bring the War Home," thousands of activists attempted to block crucial choke points around the city and stop the city for a whole day. By the end of the day, over 7,000 people were locked up by the police, which makes it the largest mass arrest in US history. Though they ultimately weren't successful, the action did serve to rattle the Nixon administration at the height of its paranoia.

Despite it's impressive milestones, the events of Mayday 1971 remain by and large unremembered. Indeed, it seems rather curious for such a dramatic event to inaugurate the long term decline of the left, which has spent literally forty years in the wilderness. This isn't to say that nothing was happening; the book traces the lineage of the Mayday Movement through the anti-nukes movement and the fledgling environmentalism of the time. Along the way, she recounts the success of the anti-apartheid movement and the drafting of the Combahee River Statement, often considered the founding document of what's vaguely termed "identity politics." The most well written and compelling section of the books details the history of ACT-UP, the organization of militant AIDS activists famous for such attention getting stunts as throwing the cremains of AIDS victims on the White House lawn. Her writing on the anti-war movement of the early 2000s is spare and could have been fleshed out more, but her recounting of Occupy and Black Lives Matter are full of insight.

After cataloguing in minute detail the twists and turns of protest politics over four decades, one must ask the crucial question: "So what? What was it all for? What do we have to show for all these efforts?"

For her part, Kauffman doesn't demean or totally write-off these political movements. Even the most suspect developments, such as the consensus process that has plagued us since the Anti-nukes heyday, are given their fair hearing. Kauffman points out many of the important roles organizers and activists had in bearing the torch through the lean and mean Reagan years when all hope seemed lost. The activists and organizers come across as sympathetic and sincere and their ardor stands beyond reproach.

That said, Kauffman isn't afraid to criticize when criticism is very much deserved. Throughout the book, American individualism bleeds through almost every word spoken by organizers attempting to justify their actions. Anyone who sat through a General Assembly at an Occupy encampment or endured an anarchist spiel on the Black Bloc knows just how much American leftists love to focus on tactics to the exclusion of strategy and balanced forethought. An action, a demonstration, even an organizing meeting isn't justified by its efficacy but rather by how it made everyone who participated feel.

This comes out clearly when activists are faced with the very serious task of organization building. The problem isn't so much that no one wants to build organizations, but rather that all organizations are hobbled at the get-go by arbitrary structures that are never justified by the desired final outcome of the struggle. For example, instead of having a democratically elected leadership to an organization accountable to its membership and the movement as a whole, activists gather themselves into small grouplets based on "affinity" (read: personal friendship) and do essentially whatever they please so long as they don't directly interfere with any other affinity group. Attempts to coordinate these affinity groups have mixed results at best. Such efforts might work (emphasis on might) for one-off events, but such a system is harder to sustain the larger and longer lasting it becomes. The "anti-hierarchical" character of these organizational forms is also called into question; despite the diffuse nature of affinity groups, at the end of the day, most of the heavy lifting falls on a small group of people who aren't even elected into these roles. It's just movement bureaucracy with extra steps.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that affinity groups are never helpful or useful; sometimes political action requires a bit of law-breaking and it might be better to put the onus for those actions on smaller groups and not larger organizations. That said, what exactly are we trying to do here? Create a criminal organization? At least the mafia can turn a profit. Assuming we will need a movement of millions to overturn the prevailing order, how can we hope to integrate the masses into an organizational framework that forever aspires to an honorable criminality of a Dickens novel? Do activists want to remain plucky underdogs, or do they want to win?