In the fall of 2015 the drummer and composer Mike Reed came across a harrowing story in The New York Times about ‘The Lonely Death of George Bell’, a 72-year-old New Yorker who passed away sequestered inside of his Jackson Heights apartment, his body ‘crumpled up on the mottled carpet’ after lying there undiscovered for almost one week.
A hoarder, when investigators working for the Queens County public administrator entered Bell’s apartment they did so ‘clad in billowy hazmat suits and bootees’, wading through the detritus which included loose change, old photographs, a silver Relic watch and multiple packages of unused Christmas lights and unopened ironing board covers, with one of the men adding ‘Since I’ve worked here, my list of friends has gotten longer and longer. I don’t want to die alone’. As told by N. R. Kleinfeld in The New York Times, the death of George Bell proves a sad and solemn yet strangely uplifting story, which whorls outwards as his estate takes fourteen months to laboriously settle, then radiates from within as a tangible life is assembled from a few loose scraps and threads.
Mike Reed then was already dwelling on the theme of isolation long before the coronavirus pandemic distorted life’s daily routines. At the outset of 2022 he assembled some of Chicago’s finest improvisers including the D-Settlement leader, poet and spoken word artist Marvin Tate, the cornetist Ben LaMar Gay and Rob Frye, Cooper Crain and Dan Quinlivan of the Bitchin Bajas for the first instalment of a planned three-part cycle by The Separatist Party, whose name is a skewed reflection upon their shared penchant for sometimes inhabiting the buffed halls and dilapidated avenues of lonersville.
Weaving the mouth mantras of Don Cherry, the minimalism of Terry Riley and the ecstatic fire of Pharoah Sanders together with motorik beats, aspects of Ethiopian folk music and the gyrations of New Orleans rhythm and blues, Reed and his cohorts interpret ‘Rahsaan in the Serengeti’ by the Windy City saxophonist Ari Brown, issue a eulogy or fond fare-thee-well to an old school friend and her father – who by his own account would have been a member of the Temptations were it not for his propensity for alcohol – and keep things primal over inverted basslines, siren synthesizers and typewriter percussion as Tate delivers a communal exhortation, repeating with spirit the refrain ‘Your soul is a mosh pit’.
