Free jazz is having a spoken word moment. Whether it’s the result of contemporary political strife, a hangover from the enforced quietude of the pandemic, age with its scrawled pages of accumulated wisdom or something else afoot or at play, it seems like improvisational jazz and some of its bastions or associates are turning with real vigour and trenchant lyricism towards plainspokenness backed by reedy airs and waifish melodies, field recordings, electronic treatments or full-blown squalls.
The poet and theorist Fred Moten – whose work has always been infused with popular music, with his foundational text In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition juxtaposing the Western philosophical canon from Immanuel Kant through Jacques Derrida with a black radicalism espoused by Amiri Baraka but rooted in the improvisational quality of jazz and some of its leading practitioners, from Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor, while his poetry collection The Feel Trio took its name from Taylor’s ensemble with William Parker and Tony Oxley – established his own trio in 2022 with his vocals nesting alongside Brandon LĆ³pez on the double bass and Gerald Cleaver on the drums.
Moten’s words and texts have also been incorporated into recent albums by the Cape Town percussionist Asher Gamedze and the Philadelphian spoken word poet and black quantum futurist Moor Mother, whose irrepressible work both solo on the acclaimed records Jazz Codes and The Great Bailout and again as a member of Irreversible Entanglements has no doubt done much to centre the form.
Inspired by an old New York Times story about the lonely death of 72-year-old hoarder, the drummer Mike Reed assembled some of Chicago’s finest improvisers including the spoken word artist and D-Settlement leader Marvin Tate for The Separatist Party, the first volume of an intended three-part cycle which was released in the fall of 2023 as a collaboration between Astral Spirits and We Jazz Records, while after contributing a couple of libatory poems to the Ava Mendoza and Dave Sewelson collaboration Of It But Not Is It the legendary bassist William Parker embarked last year on Cereal Music with the vocalist and sound designer Ellen Christi, a kaleidoscopic and sometimes revelatory rumination which was billed as his first full album of spoken word.
At the other end of the spectrum, the indomitable saxophonist Ivo Perelman recently issued a couple of exceedingly rare vocal collaborations, working with singers for the first time since the candomblƩ rhythms and folk motifs of his breakthrough albums with his Brazilian compatriot Flora Purim, with Vox Popoli Vox Dei featuring the Czech singer and violinist Iva BittovƔ while Messa Di Voce starred Fay Victor whose freeform theatrics straddle the line between spoken word, scat singing and old school swing.
That’s not to mention the decade-long Amiri Baraka tribute project Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which is helmed by the poet and photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis and the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and has featured several lead vocalists, with their most recent album LeAutoRoiOgraphy landing on 577 Records in the summer of 2022, or Matana Roberts and her Coin Coin series whose fifth chapter told the story of a woman in their ancestral line who died following complications from an illegal abortion, or Meshell Ndegeocello’s latest opus No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin which dropped on Blue Note last year, weaving together readings of some of Baldwin’s most famous passages with spoken word poems by Staceyann Chin, or for that matter Nate Wooley’s five-part song cycle Henry House as the prolific collaborator laid down his trumpet and solicited the voices of Mat Maneri and Megan Schubert for a ‘strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman’ which I reviewed here on Culturedarm a few weeks ago.
The horn player Joe McPhee who trained himself after the great free saxophonists John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler has dabbled with spoken word jazz before, for instance back in 2003 when one of his several collaborations with the electronic pioneer Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Band centred upon readings from Unquenchable Fire by the science fiction novelist Rachel Pollack. More recently his tenor paired off with Mette Rasmussen’s alto saxophone and the mock operatics, guttural howls, bullfrog croaks and other drainpipe excursions of the Antwerp visual artist and surrealist Dennis Tyfus for Oblique Strategies on Black Truffle, whose vocal outbursts when they did occur were more in the vein of Einar Ćrn from the Sugarcubes or jazz originals like Sofia Jernberg and Victor.
Then last year McPhee put out Musings of a Bahamian Son: Poems and Other Words as the first release wholly dedicated to his writing, which he began to compile back in the seventies confluent with the steep rise of his musical career. Lyrical, scornfully political and sometimes quizzically surreal while aiming to capture the immediacy of his improvised music, the project was the result of a renewed burst of poetic activity during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, and featured one of his major collaborators in Ken Vandermark. Yet the result was sometimes quite arch, with the air of a mid-morning or drifting afternoon poetry recital as McPhee delivered twenty-seven of his poems unadorned, covering everything from overboiled chicken to gossamer flights of inspiration while paying tribute to the likes of Eric Dolphy and Peter Brƶtzmann as his own soprano saxophone and Vandermark’s clarinet and bass clarinet provided a series of interludes.
By contrast his new album I’m Just Say’n sounds like more of a collaboration, as Mats Gustafsson encircles his poetry in terse but tempestuous winds and electronic treatments while also producing the record, almost in a bid to salvage the expressional vigour of his longtime collaborator whose readings fare much better in this bolder and bluesier environment.
The relationship between the two saxophonists stretches back to the late nineties when they first played together as part of Brƶtzmann’s formidable Chicago Tentet, then swiftly carried that newfound chemistry over to She Knows . . . as McPhee began a fruitful partnership with Gustafsson’s now dormant trio The Thing, a fusion of free jazz and strains of garage or punk rock which featured Ingebrigt HĆ„ker Flaten on the double bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. In fact McPhee appeared on the latest Fire! Orchestra outpouring Echoes – a project for sometimes staggeringly large ensembles based around the core trio of Gustafsson, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin – as the track ‘I see your eye, part 2’ included his yarn about the last of the great finger wigglers, a text which he reprised to suitably squirming effect on Musings of a Bahamian Son.
After the fragmentary ‘Short Pieces’ over Gustafsson’s strangely captivating blend of creaking doors and windsock gusts, the second poem ‘When I Grow Up’ serves as a fond tribute to the Chicago biochemist and molecular biologist Ira G. Wool, whose research centred upon the function of ribosomes. A cultured allroundman who possessed an extensive collection of contemporary art, McPhee remembers Wool in jocular yet at times rhapsodic terms, saying ‘He finds humanity in a Republican or Democrat or dried rat dog. He could dance naked on a razor’s edge, spinning like a breakdancer in frictionless space’ and recalling full-blown kisses on the mouth as Gustafsson drones away on the baritone.
‘They Both Could Fly’ recalls a watchful engagement and one bumpy rendezvous with a vagrant woman against the zephyr winds of Gustafsson’s flute, while on ‘Guitar’ some of the sublimated rage which is implicit in the encounter boils over as an increasingly animated McPhee issues a stream of interjections over treated strings and chimes. The title track casts his tribute to the Brƶtzmann tentet from Musings over a broken music hall melody, as McPhee himself provides a singsong rendition of the text, before the artist offers a coiled ode to New York City whose beauty is always in the fleeting eye of the beholder, both now and then as McPhee looks back on the sunken seventies and eighties with a mixture of fondness and scorn, saying:
New York City’s big fat titties have been sucked dry again, and no one writes poems about the urine soaked hallways we have grown to know and love, but I do.
Gustafsson accompanies the piece with a slack patter of horn and drums, as McPhee surveys the scuzzy city streets and recalls old commercials for Crazy Eddie and The Wiz, surmising ‘You know, it’s true, these are the good old days, so savour the rich aroma of garbage putrefying in the mid-summer’s heat’ cherishing the moment which is ours to lose.
Over a spectral backdrop of queasy organ, ‘The Dream Book’ is dedicated to Ornette Coleman and McPhee’s longtime Trio X bassist Dominic Duval, with the poet setting the scene:
At a gathering of musicians at Ornette’s place, for a session of life lessons as would always be the case, Roy Campbell Jr. asked the great man in what key should we play, to which Mr. Coleman replied ‘The only keys I have are the keys in my pocket’
which becomes a jangling symbol or another life lesson as McPhee repeats the phrase, cutting through the evocation of harmolodic dreams. ‘Words’ compares ‘this pandemic moment’ with the AIDS crisis of the eighties and ‘Disco Death’ which hones in on Mitch McConnell also shows its age, before McPhee updates the rhythm and blues classic ‘Annie Had a Baby’ amid recoiling strings and closes I’m Just Say’n through the silvery fever and tidal slosh of ‘Lune Rouge’.
