The poet and theorist Fred Moten has long occupied a kind of liminal space on the margins of contemporary jazz music, with his 2003 exploration In the Break a signal text for anyone concerned with the black radical tradition and matters of black aesthetics.
Yet while the names of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor might drip from his pen or fall from his lips as readily as those of Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida, Shakespeare and John Donne, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant or Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey, when it comes to a more immediate engagement with the form Moten has played more of a waiting game, lingering in the shadows or content to hold forth in his own corner of the café as a few admirers have paid tribute from a temporal or taxonomic distance.
More recently however a group of socially conscious and hyper-literate free jazz practitioners have begun to embrace Moten for both his poetic works and academic texts. He has collaborated with Darius Jones, reading an original piece by way of an introduction to the alto saxophonist’s solo album Raw Demoon Alchemy, while his words have been incorporated into records by the Cape Town percussionist Asher Gamedze and the Philadelphian spoken word poet and black quantum futurist Moor Mother, whose snarling and susurrating vocals have dwelt on everything from minstrelsy to the transatlantic slave trade on solo efforts like Jazz Codes and The Great Bailout, scabrous and sometimes celebratory as she also helms the raucous collective Irreversible Entanglements.
In the spring of 2022 the poet and theorist released his first album, the debut of his trio with the drummer Gerald Cleaver and the double bassist Brandon López. Over dank plucks and deft beats or roiling drums and López’s sawing bass and runaway pizzicato, Moten divulged shared experiences with personal aplomb from the great migration which was both endured and enacted by his mother’s generation to contemporary strife as the record was captured in the immediate wake of the George Floyd protests. Then last summer the trio poured forth again on their second album for the Reading Group label, as the blacksmiths, the flowers captured the keen development of their improvisational language across two balmy nights live in Brooklyn.
While the percussionist Cleaver has managed to combine more conventional jazz fare – like the second volume of Welcome Adventure with his 577 Records collaborators Daniel Carter, Matthew Shipp and William Parker plus sessions astride Brandon Seabrook, Rob Mazurek and Eva Novoa – with a couple of electronic odes to his beloved Motor City, the younger López has emerged as one of the most daring bassists around from his partnership with Cleaver to dates with Satoko Fujii, Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey and his own solo breakthrough vilevilevilevilevilevilevilevile.
Moten is often regarded as a difficult writer, at once densely referential and emotionally candid and linguistically complex, but during a 2018 profile in The New Yorker he captured the essence of his flair both for the written language and as a jazz vocalist, saying:
I always thought that ‘the voice’ was meant to indicate a kind of genuine, authentic, absolute individuation which struck me as (a) undesirable and (b) impossible. Whereas a ‘sound’ was really within the midst of this intense engagement with everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to make a difference, so to speak, within that noise. And that difference isn’t necessarily about you as an individual, it’s much more simply about trying to augment and to differentiate what’s around you. And that’s what a sound is for me.
His readings and extemporisations could be situated within a modern vogue for spoken word jazz, which encompasses works by Marvin Tate, Matana Roberts, Joe McPhee and last year’s prismatic Cereal Music by William Parker with Ellen Christi. Yet for his own part Moten might well refer back to Cecil Taylor and his 1987 spoken word album Chinampas, where the avant-garde pianist recited his poems over a bed of small percussions, bells and timpani, a record which Moten eulogised during his In the Break essay ‘Sound in Florescence (Cecil Taylor Floating Garden)’, describing the elision of music and poetry and advising the listener to ‘let Taylor’s “musicked” speech and illegible words resonate’.
On the opening track from Revision, which marks the debut of Moten and López as a duo, the poet recites the text of ‘harriot + harriot + sound +’ from his 2016 collection The Service Porch, the third and final volume of a trilogy which also includes The Feel Trio, named after a series of late-eighties and early-nineties live collaborations between Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker, and The Little Edges.
Moten recites the poem in full then backtreads, reeling off the same sentences in reverse before picking out individual words and phrases with the same short envelope and the same plangent, rebounding and moonlit quality of López’s bass, which carries here the piquancy of a zither. The poem is worth recounting as it demonstrates Moten’s penchant for a kind of lapping and overlapping, syllabic sound poetry plus his habit of circling names like ‘normandie’ or ‘tsitsi ella jaji’ for their connotative possibilities as well as for their sonic resonances. Tsitsi Ella Jaji is a former colleague who works as an associate professor of English at Duke University and has published the book Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity and the poetry collections Mother Tongues and Beating the Graves, while from a limpid moon and the glide of ‘atlantic situations’ the phrase ‘thingly jingly nette’ almost reads like a synonym or tautology of ‘frayed means’, giving physical form to the concept of limited resources while at the same time imbuing that concept with pliability and a linguistic abundance.
The pitch and time of luters
bring atlantic situations
all the way across. the moon
thing is a water thing at
midnight and the table
burst with variation.
the beautiful riot say
I’m not like this and
walk away embrace and
dig up under normandie.
what’s a black singing body
got to do with it? look at
my shoes. the setting partly frees
the dissonance in compensation
and tsitsi ella jaji frees the rest.
frayed means are a thingly
jingly nette; you can’t help
yourself if you take too much.
The recital makes for a thrillingly intimate introduction to Revision, whose pieces are jumbled and disordered ‘#2’ through ‘#14’ with a couple of gaps. The second track ‘#5’ opens with a clangour of saucepan percussion and handclaps before Moten says ‘sometimes it just gets thrown off like that’, suggesting the improvisational discursiveness to come on what is at over thirteen-and-a-half minutes by some margin the album’s longest track.
‘Some ornithhhhh-ographic, ornithological, some orn, some orn shit, some bird shit, some bird stuff, sometimes it’s just bird like that’ he begins, gesturing towards Charlie Parker with the lilt of Björk’s nu-jazz standard ‘Possibly Maybe’ before drawing in the names of Aretha Franklin and Honi Coles, the iconic American tap dancer. ‘The universal machine is a bridge that conditionally branches’ he says as Brandon López maintains a brisk tempo through a repetition of rubbery percussive thwackings towards the bridge of his double bass, ‘and I don’t know whether to pat my foot inside the shoe or pat the whole shoe’.
López at times plucks away on a string, muffling and tampering with the resonances in a manner which will be familiar to fans of his work on vilevilevilevilevilevilevilevile, and at other moments beats on the body of his instrument as though it were a conga drum. Moten meanwhile offers the first of several citrusy interpolations of the gibberish ‘khichi khichi yaya dada’ from ‘Lady Marmalade’ and touches upon the contemporary White House with a few barbs which might be aimed at the press secretary Karoline Leavitt or more likely the MSNBC duo of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, as the poet trades wilfully too in a few choice expletives.
He seems to offer a riposte to the machinations of generative artificial intelligence when he says ‘that robot that writes with you is my recursive vibrator. look like you think we all just rubbed away. sorry, blush machine, you forgot about barbecue school motherfucker’ and scats over more handclap percussion before hemming and hawing through a series of huhs and uhms and aahs. For the listener the joy in this discursive and at times transgressive patter is enhanced by the sheer musicality of words and instrument, as the duo of Moten and López fall into a moodier and more melodious passage where the double bass sounds like a donso ngoni, the West African hunter’s harp and griot medium.
‘Make yourself not at home, all over and under the world’ the poet urges, calling upon the harmolodics of Ornette Coleman and centering the expressive possibilities of ‘a contrapuntal folding and lapping, a fantastic waving and weaving and all but aromatic, all but always threatening freedom of the wide’. And he returns to physics from ancient conceptions of aether as the fifth element to the modern principle of quantum nonlocality, positing new pathways for our conception of space and for relations between people as ‘#5’ draws to a close.
‘#3’ also draws its text from The Service Porch and the poem ‘what’s left’ which begins ‘weights are things with stories, storied with waiting, weighted bearing bearing, open burial in shatter, pall impossible to bear’ as López marries lagging and loping plucked bass to ramshackle or metronomic percussive taps, the duo surreptitiously approaching a sense of swing before the sawed drones of ‘#4’ provide a lurching and choppy bed for a recitation of ‘whatnot to the music’, which is a kind of treatise or sustained exploration regarding the mysteries and vagaries of live performance and how it resists capture or what Moten calls ‘concertization’ as he moves from wary trills and breaking falsettos to the Beach Boys, Charles Mingus, Marshall Allen and the pianist Glenn Gould.
‘My favourite things fight concertization’ he explains, before adding ‘Dana Ward says that “Fun, Fun, Fun” is the musique concrète of patricide. Concert music is the fun, fun, fun of patricide. Mingus want to kill the phantom of the opera. He want to play the cello for all it’s worth’. And in an effort to differentiate between the fullness of live performance – where every note counts and mistakes are the portals of discovery as an atmosphere of libation and revelry exerts its pull in smoke-filled rooms – and the faded remnants of a recording while also sharing in the artist’s burden as he strives to resist the rigours of concertization or notation, Moten also invokes Glenn Gould’s penchant for practising beside a vacuum cleaner of some other loud noise as he had learned that ‘the inner ear of the imagination is very much more powerful a stimulant than is any amount of outward observation’.
Moten first collaborated with López and Cleaver at the Vision Festival of 2019, when he and his fellow poet Edwin Torres vocalised and recited their texts as the bassist and percussionist laid out a burly and shapeshifting rhythm section. He described his encounter with with López and Cleaver as ‘like a fanboy experience because I love their music and listen to it so much’, and while a couple of trio albums on the Reading Group label gathered acclaim, Moten has since suggested a degree of dissatisfaction with his own performances on those two records:
I’ve had the scary experience of listening to recordings I made with Brandon and Gerald. What I noticed as a listener to the album – people have been very nice about the album and like it, you know they seem to like it, and I don’t dislike it because what they’re playing on the album is amazing – I don’t mean to be falsely modest, or it’s not like some neurotic shit, but I recognize the deficiencies of my performance on the album. It’s really, maybe, that I recognize that I’m performing. And how I recognize that goes back to my earliest experiences of and lessons in critical practice, listening to music with my mom and the community of women of which she was a part.
In the interview with David Joez Villaverde, which is part of a visiting writers series at the University of Michigan, he adds that ‘something was being offered to me and required of me, in both situations, that I needed to keep learning’ and cites the difficulty of listening to his fellow musicians and responding to them at the same time as he is busy reading his texts. Moten states that he has since turned to writing ‘scores for creative misreading’ which are ‘more graphic scores than they are poems’, full of marks and arrows so that he can desacralize his words, handle flubs and better contribute to the prevailing music.
Often across the course of Revision he will introduce his poems or interject with little sighs, as though he’s pondering something or has been struck by some curious fact or errant behaviour, using these brief exhalations or plosive moments as a prompt to speech whether he is gathering his thoughts or casting figurative barriers aside.
On the other hand ‘#6’ opens through more conventional bass accompaniment as Moten launches into an amorous croon, whose rhythms and intonations call to mind Blossom Dearie or Stephin Merritt as much as the titans of jazz and soul. He wonders ‘Supposing I should fall in love with you, do you think that you could love me too?’ before offering digressions on community, confinement and eroticism, while also motioning towards events in the West Bank and Gaza through a mention of the First Intifada and so-called ‘white’ intifada, conceived as a sustained campaign of nonviolent action against Israeli oppression which might involve peaceful protest, tax resistance or collective efforts towards self-sufficiency, exemplified by the local attempt to start a small dairy industry in the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour.
‘If I ever even try to stop singing this you can eat my heart. Until then I’ll be trying to kill you every day’ he warns on ‘#2’, where his words seem to spring up from and then get tangled up within Brandon López’s wiry washboard rattle, like a record skipping before the duo recapture their groove. Then on ‘#8’ pots and pans and López’s plucked bass gong lend an atmosphere of steeped ritual to Moten’s incantation of the concluding poem from The Service Porch, which is addressed to the multidisciplinary artist Andrea Geyer and then to Margaret Kerry, presumably a reference to the actress who served as the model for Tinker Bell as Moten discusses with epistolary intimacy questions of dimensionality and radical displacement, from the old Dutch masters to the curled baroque austerity of sheet music to ‘the most beautiful black woman who ever worked on the garbage truck’ and other shapely flows or fragrant routines.
Far from excluding the listener or somehow echoing the rarefied corridors of academia, this practice of naming and addressing brings all of us in to the conversation as Moten through his ‘shaped prose’ and judicious recitations engages resolutely in the process of carving out space. That is also the essence of the double bass whether keeping time and maintaining a harmonic point of reference for other instruments or offering a more bounding or strident counterpoint through the reverberations of its low end.
‘#10′ briefly interpolates the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Nina Simone standard ‘I Put a Spell on You’ over a devious bass tread, as Moten also snatches up phrases from All Incomplete, his 2021 book of essays with his longtime collaborator Stefano Harney whose stated hope, after the writings of Manolo Callahan and Ivan Illich, is to have forged ‘a convivial tool that helps us renew our habits of assembly’. ‘#7’ foregrounds a straining and seasick drone as Moten adopts a more velvety tone, caressing the familial while López on ‘#11’ harnesses a baroque angularity as the vocalist darts and dives across his first published text, the poetry collection Arkansas from back in 2000. That leaves ‘#9’ which closes Revision with a ‘huh’ and a ‘well, well, well’ as Moten and López like a runaway train or kettle coming to the boil almost burst with a rangy energy and bristling portentousness.
