Idioms: Jazz & Blues
Legitimation. Appropriation. Acculturation.
Processes. Signposts. Ways.
Norma Cole in To Be At Music: Essays & Talks quotes and demonstrates in her style ...
"A rhythm which cuts and defines another rhythm must leave room for the other rhythm to be heard clearly." (John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms)Gregory Ulmer. "Choramancy: A User's Guide" in Mind Factory edited by Louis Armand identifies a melded sensibility (jewgreekcreole) and relies on jazz & blues traditions to do so ...
"The questions of how Haitian Voodoo came to the continental United States, and the question of why jazz originated in New Orleans, are in fact parts of the same question. Jazz and rock 'n' roll would evolve from Voodoo, carrying within them the metaphysical antidote that would aid many a twentieth-century Westerner from both the ravages of the mind-body split codified by Christianism, and the onslaught of technology. The twentieth century would dance as no other had, and through that dance, secrets would be passed." [Michael Ventura, "Hear That Long Snake Moan" in Shadow Dancing in the USA] Jazz is exemplary for us of "possibility," the modality of "perhaps" organising the temporality of the event. What happened in music may continue in consulting and in every other discourse and institution, as "we" become jewgreakcreole. Syllogism may become syllojazz.On the next page
The emergAgency goal is to fashion a consulting practice from the lessons of "blutopia," combining the two major impulses of African-American music: "a utopian impulse, evident in the creation of imagined places (Promised Lands), and the impulse to remember, to bear witness, which James Baldwin relates to the particular history of slavery" [Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton] "Blues" is not feeling "bad," but what you do about bad feelings.Acculturation. Appropriation. Legitimation.
And so for day 1218
14.04.2010
