composed by Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors Maghostut, and Roscoe Mitchell
Anthony Braxton once said that the Chicago musicians who went to Paris en masse in 1969 did so because they were dying. He meant that literally. The Art Ensemble was a confluence of two or three different ensembles working in close proximity that meshed to form a provisional but long-lived entity that recorded upwards of eighteen albums during their two-year Paris residency. Two of them were for the French Pathé label, and both are classic, but People In Sorrow was the first and there is nothing else remotely like it in their oeuvre. Or in anyone else’s. Having lost their drummer, the four improvising composers play forty minutes of variations on one unresolving dirge-like melody with no fixed tempo that begins with barely audible tuned percussion and rises to the final seven minutes in which the same gorgeous theme is virtually shrieked by the horns over the wailing alarm of a wound-up kitchen timer that ends the piece when its spring is exhausted. The Tibetan Book of the Dead requires warning the recently deceased about the afterlife’s dangers by having loved ones shout appropriate instructions in their ears. This music warns the living the same way.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
No comments:
Post a Comment