Drawn to the art of marginal living, between his first spurts on the conga and bongo drums as a backup musician for Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Anger and Tiny Tim and his more elaborate experiments of the late sixties, where he constructed kinetic light sculptures with Len Lye and devised performances with the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti, for seven years the artist Charlemagne Palestine served as the carillonneur of the Episcopalian Saint Thomas Church in Midtown Manhattan. Taking a uniquely clangorous approach to the unwieldy instrument, which traces back to the Low Countries and consists of at least twenty-three bronze-cast bells which are struck with clappers attached to the wooden batons of an oversized keyboard, Palestine loved the view from the lofty heights of the Saint Thomas bell tower, at some remove yet with broad access to the whole of the city, and it was there that he began to cultivate his distinctive brand of drone music replete with its partial tones and dizzying repetitions, describing the movements of the carillon as like ‘playing the entire building’.
Born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish parents, in his youth he trained as a cantor and listened to klezmer bands, the first flush of a lifelong predilection for tethering spiritual refrains to the trance-like states of his secularism. Living in Manhattan in the sixties, Palestine studied under the poet Jerome Rothenberg, who published the collection of spiritual writings Technicians of the Sacred in 1968, and the Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, whose raga stylings and focus on the precise phrasing of notes would exert a profound influence on musicians like Terry Riley, Jon Hassell and Don Cherry. Palestine found himself at the confluence of the downtown scene, inaugurated in the loft of a Chambers Street apartment by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young, which soon surfeited its roots in sustained tones and minimalism, and the loft jazz scene which sprung up almost overnight as a spiritual continuation of the free jazz ethos which had been nourished by the likes of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler. In the eighties he founded the Ethnology Cinema Project, which was dedicated to the documentation of disappearing traditional cultures from all over the world, and at documenta 8 he exhibited Godbear, a massive devotional sculpture of a three-headed teddy.
Last month Charlemagne Palestine was the honoree of the sixth annual benefit gala by Blank Forms, the New York City-based nonprofit which focuses on the presentation and preservation of experimental performance, where he was joined onstage by the Irish musician Áine O’Dwyer. Now to accompany the festivities, for the first side of his new record on Blank Forms the visionary artist and self-styled ‘avant-garde Quasimodo’ hunkers down under the high ceilings of his home studio in Belgium, returning to the carillon for an ode to his ‘divinities’, the thousands of plush toys which he has amassed and often performed or exhibited alongside stretching back some six decades. The flip side of the album issues for the first time on vinyl the inaugural Blank Forms cassette, a cathartic street recording of the maximalist composer’s 2018 eulogy for Tony Conrad, the drone music and structural film pioneer and Palestine’s longtime friend, which he performed above the hubbub of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue on the venerable bells of Saint Thomas.
Referring to the doings of tricksters and hucksters, conjurers, tightrope walkers and other assorted acrobats, the duo of Ingrid Laubrock and Cecilia Lopez mark their debut with a collection of improvised pieces for tenor and soprano saxophone, processing and electronics. Splitting the difference between medieval polyphonies and the strident percussion and synths of eighties dream pop, Laura Cannell absorbs the acoustics of Norwich Cathedral to deliver a suite of Midwinter Processionals with the crystalline intricacy and ethereal mutability of a snowflake.
Kahil El’Zabar and his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble usher in their fiftieth year with a collection of originals and timeless classics by Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner and Gene McDaniels, with the visionary percussionist and veteran bandleader saying of the civil rights and anti-war protest song:
‘Compared to What’ was my father, Clifton Blackburn Sr.’s favourite tune. On Saturdays he would play jazz all day, and later in the evening he would scat, sing rhythms and then he and I would improvise together on the grooves that he taught me. It was all ‘Compared to What’.
Serving as the introduction to Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit, which follows hard on the heels of Spirit Gatherer: Tribute to Don Cherry and marks El’Zabar’s sixth collaboration with Spiritmuse Records in the space of five years, the new album sees the now familiar trio of El’Zabar, Corey Wilkes and Alex Harding joined by James Sanders on the violin and viola and Ishmael Ali on the cello, adding new timbral dimensions to the staple swing and poised cacophony of multi-percussion and voice plus two horns.
After relocating to Poland from the United Kingdom, the composer and guitarist Alex Roth began to survey his surrounds, starting with a residency at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków as he traced the nature of his ancestry as a Detroit-born and London-bred descendant of Polish Jews. Roaming widely, he made a series of field recordings around the neglected cemeteries, forgotten monuments and former ghetto districts of southern and eastern Poland and western Ukraine, then approached two musicians who resonated on the margins of the Polish jazz scene in the form of the drummer Hubert Zemler and the clarinetist and folk trance practitioner Wacław Zimpel.
Using his field recordings as a basis for live improvisation, pandemic constraints meant that it was the spring of 2022 before the trio were able to embark upon the recording studio, by which time aspects of the initial recordings as well as Roth’s adopted environment had been absorbed into the interior. On Esz Kodesz, the Polish transliteration of a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘sacred fire’, rangy guitar and roving electronics, clarinet which whirs like a winnowing drone or soars up straight and cleaves the sky, and roiling or emphatic percussion coalesce into a three-forked excavation of the landscape, which closes with layered reeds, padded footsteps and the gentle clanging of cathedral bells.
Taking her title from a variant of the Scottish folk song about wide waters, laden ships and love which ‘waxeth cold and fades away like morning dew’, accompanied by the cavernous bowing of Bob Rutman on the steel cello, Waillee Waillee by the psaltery master and psychedelic folk outsider Dorothy Carter gets a long awaited reissue. The fourth world traveller and prolific self-publisher Ariel Kalma and the duo of Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, still reeling from the brackish waters and sour lingonberries of the Åland Islands, expand on an impromptu collision for the BBC Radio 3 experimental bastion Late Junction, as the freshly minted trio use improvisation and collage-based editing to bring together musical moments recorded sometimes decade apart. From HeadSpace the New Jersey producer JWords and Brooklyn rapper maassai unwind another trippy reflection, and Dizzy Fae returns to the fray, as the classically-trained Twin Cities artist lays it down nasty through the luscious bounce of ‘Backseat’.
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Charlemagne Palestine – ‘DINGGGDONGGGDINGGGzzzzzzz ferrrr SSSOFTTT DIVINI TIESSSSS!!!!!!!!!’
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Cecilia Lopez & Ingrid Laubrock – ‘cuerda floja’
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Dizzy Fae – ‘Backseat’
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Cut The Sky – ‘Esz Kodesz (Piaseczno)’
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Laura Cannell – ‘Echoes in the Cathedral’
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Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer – ‘Écoute Au Loin’
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Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble – ‘Compared to What’
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