Tracks of the Week 06.05.23

With its lilting grooves and wry lyrics on a perennial hot-button issue, when Sun Ra and his Arkestra recorded ‘Nuclear War’ in 1982 the bandleader took the cut straight to Columbia Records, thoroughly convinced that he had a hit on his hands. That summer New York City played host to the largest anti-nuclear protest to date and one of the largest single-city protests in history as a crowd of around one million people converged on Central Park and Midtown Manhattan to coincide with a United Nations special session on nuclear disarmament, while as the Cold War simmered, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would later reflect that ‘Never, perhaps, in the postwar decades was the situation in the world as explosive and hence more difficult and unfavorable as in the first half of the 1980s’. Perhaps it was a sign of the times then that Columbia rejected ‘Nuclear War’ and its brusque imagery, with the track heading up a 12-inch and featuring on the limited album A Fireside Chat with Lucifer but mostly languishing in obscurity until it was reissued by the Atavistic imprint Unheard Music Series in 2001.

Taking a self-conscious approach to the topic, with Sun Ra on electric piano and Samarai Celestial on drums the Arkestra engaged in blithe call-and-response, asking all of the pertinent questions like ‘whatcha gonna do without your ass?’ in the event of nuclear annihilation, while describing the potential outbreak of nuclear war as a ‘motherfucker, don’t you know’. Despite the receding air of resignation, the humorous piece stands as one of the most accessible in the band’s vast catalogue, less siren call than an invitation amid the wreckage to pinch those cheeks and dance. On the upcoming compilation by Red Hot, the nonprofit which combats AIDS and promotes equal access to healthcare through pop-culture collaborations, the organisation uses the iconic track by Sun Ra as both an inspiration and a call to arms. Climaxing with an extended interpretation of ‘Nuclear War’, the quintet of Keir Neuringer, Tcheser Holmes, Aquiles Navarro, Luke Stewart, and Camae Ayewa as Irreversible Entanglements offer a scorched take on the original through brassy squalls and clattering percussion, carrying us right into the fiery heart of the action with charred-black banter then out the other side as all of our trifling concerns fuse with the posterior or flicker like fading sparks and embers in the rear-view.

In the seventies the loft jazz scene which sprung up almost overnight in New York City served as a spiritual continuation of the free jazz ethos which had been nourished by the likes of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra. Outsiders, avant-garde musicians, and enthusiasts with a loose connection to the mainstream set up performance spaces in lofts and apartments, downtown storefronts and galleries, community centres, and abandoned warehouses, which bore witness to burgeoning sounds from the five boroughs and places like Chicago, California, and St. Louis plus a flurry of artists from farther afield. Some of the most famous loft jazz venues included Studio Rivbea by the saxophonist Sam Rivers and his wife Bea, Ali’s Alley by the former Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali, and Environ which had been set up by Dave Brubeck’s sons Chris and Danny and was managed by the pianist and trailblazing computer artist John Fischer. In the fall of 1978 the British saxophonist Evan Parker, who had collaborated with Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, and Alexander von Schlippenbach and was already counted among the European free jazz pioneers, had just released his acclaimed solo soprano album Monoceros and embarked on his first ever trip to the Big Apple. His performance at Environ in front of a small audience one October evening arrives imminently on the New York improvisational stalwart Relative Pitch.

A collection of recordings uncovered from the archives of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad promise to revolutionise our understanding of early electronic music. Founded with support from the New York composer David Tudor, who set up a Moog modular system and tape machine in the autumn of 1969, the studio at the design institute would remain in operation for three years as experiments in analogue synthesis, tape collage, and field recording captured a moment of self-discovery where Western drone and minimalist music segued with classical Indian forms. Those who embarked upon the studio included the musician and poet Atul Desai, the National Institute of Design teachers and technicians I.S. Mathur and S.C. Sharma, the pakhavaj percussionist Gita Sarabhai who had studied counterpoint with John Cage in New York in the forties, and the young architectural student Jinraj Joshipura. Years of research by the installation artist Paul Purgas disclosed 27 reels of archival tape, with the compilation album The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972 set to be accompanied by a collection of critical essays reflecting on the cultural and political juncture, penned by Geeta Dayal, You Nakai, Rahila Haque, and Joshipura and entitled Subcontinental Synthesis.

The harpist and electroacoustic composer Zeena Parkins has spent years exploring the music inside of lace stitching, from the impromptu scores she glued to a black poster board back in 2008 for a piece commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, to a small studio in the French commune of Magalas where a group of women seemed to mimic musical gestures as they crafted bobbin lace by hand. Inspired by its lavish detail, intricate twists and knots, patterns of repetition and interconnecting threads as well as by the power and persistence of the lacemaker’s labour, Parkins prepares to unveil a boxset of artifacts whose scores with conditions were performed by the percussionist William Winant, electronic musician James Fei, cellist Maggie Perkins, and the TILT Brass Sextet led by Chris McIntyre.

The violinist Sana Nagano and violist Leonor Falcón offer an homage to Béla Bartók on the first slice from Peach and Tomato, from South London the collagist Klein summons spectres from the furore over the repeal of Roe v. Wade, while on voice and piano, the multi-instrumentalist Delphine Dora unveils a verdant Gothic landscape with production by Andrew Chalk and poetic divination from the German romantic Novalis, another stirring point of departure from an artist whose recent works have included apophatic hymns on a Swiss organ, field recordings from the old gravel pits of an ecological park in Clermont, and elaborate montages for a troupe of collaborators whose vaporous sighs and lush embellishments seem to reconstitute the chanson.

Through torn bits, toiling consonants, tempestuous islands and teetering psychedelics, Roomful of Teeth continue to dismantle traditional notions of ensemble singing. Over production by Kenny Segal for the first time in the four years since Hiding Places, the rapper billy woods sips daiquiris and flaunts the restlessness of mundanity, caught in a dissociative state at the dawning of a new day as Maps prepares for takeoff, the story of roads taken and untaken and the long route back home. Meshell Ndegeocello enters the fifth dimension, the Borbetomagus saxophonist Don Dietrich breathes new life into his instrument alongside his cellist daughter Camille, the Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor collaborates with the Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté on an album of spiritual meditations, and from an individual interpretation of Beethoven’s violin concerto to showpieces by Fritz Kreisler, Camille Saint-Saëns, Louis Spohr, Henryk Wieniawski and Eugène Ysaÿe, the violinist María Dueñas marks her spellbinding debut on Deutsche Grammophon.

* * *

S.C. Sharma – ‘After the War’

* * *

Zeena Parkins – ‘LACE 2. Distortion-Binding Overlap’

* * *

billy woods & Kenny Segal – ‘Soft Landing’