What is the sound of being ghosted after going through a job interview? According to the prog-rock band KADAWA, it’s the crisp, complex rhythms, slashing riffs, and soaring major key guitar solo of “We’ll Get Back to You” off their album, Post-Graduation Fees.
Take something larger and not focussed on an individual’s experience: What is the sound of what the money and energy being put into AI is doing to our economy, society, and environment? According to saxophonist Jon Irabagon on his new album Server Farm, its vibrant large ensemble jazz, with skillful orchestrations, quick shifts in mood, and improvisations that edge into free playing—all wrapped up with a turgid, hermetic vocal track, “Spy.”
This is message music with a problem—it’s impossible to hear these messages in the music, the notes and how they are organized don’t express any of the arguments behind them. Perhaps you think I’m being literal, and I am because the musicians are being literal, they’re telling me what it is I’m supposed to be hearing, and then they don’t deliver any of it.
I’m not trying to pick on these musicians, or even say these are bad records because as just notes a lot of the music works well. But they are asserting that they are making politically and socially relevant and communicative protest music, when what they are literally doing is making often solid instrumental music, slapping a slogan (title) or an explanation that needs to be read, and then saying “my work here is done.”
No, your work is just beginning. Kudos for placing yourself and your music in society, and even more so for wanting to promote humanist values. We’re at a ripe, critical moment in time for this—shit is fucked up, and bullshit—it’s good to be taking up that responsibility. Now, recognize that making relevant and effective political music is really, really hard, because the music needs to be good and the politics need to be clear and also effective.
This has been on my mind not just because I live in American society but that I’ve been writing about this general topic for other publications. For example, I recently wrote about the extraordinary Bob Ostertag. He’s done many things in his life, including spending about a decade reporting on the ground from the murderous civil wars in Central America during the Reagan years, and he’s also made some of the most incredible political music of the contemporary era. One of his pieces is a burning example of how the medium can be the message, and how it’s the music, not the title or the slogan, that makes it work.
In 1991 he put out an album titled Sooner or Later. What do those three words mean to you, politically? Probably little, most likely nothing at all. If you listen to it without knowing the source and process, you’ll immediately feel like it means something very urgent, an insistence that a great wrong has been done by the powerful against the powerless and that you should pay attention. You hear a shovel hitting dirt, insects buzzing around, the voice of an obviously distraught child speaking Spanish. Then you hear Ostertag’s process of turning those sounds into a musical work, one that keeps grabbing you by the throat even as it outlines a formal structure in time.
That’s the politics. There’s neither description nor prescription, it doesn’t lecture or identify itself with any group or cause. Sooner or Later is just a field recording of a child burying his father, who was murdered by the El Salvador National Guard. The politics are the child, raging and weeping the whole time. Ostertag made this work as music, and the means and subject can’t help but capture the obscenity and outrage of this small piece of history. The art of it means we listen, what it means speaks for itself.
The great works of political music present the unmistakable sensation that something is wrong and that something music be done about it. They open the mind and heart to possibilities then inject the energy to take action. They can be serious like Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, or allusive like Fred Rzewski’s Coming Together, or mocking like Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus”—except for the last, there’s nothing close to a political idea in those titles—but to work they have to open a window to something the listener might now know, and then open a door and invite them to step through to take some action. If the music works, the title is mostly irrelevant.
When you don’t lecture or explain, when you show in a way that gives the audience everything they need, you can deliver a political message in even unexpected places. One of the most political jazz moments of the last decade is a needle-drop in episode 7 of the first season of Severance. “Defiant Jazz” is the episode title, and it’s also the title on a 45 that one of the office workers selects for a brief corporation-provided party, and it’s an edit of Joe McPhee’s “Shakey Jake.” The spirit is inside the music, that’s who McPhee is as an artist and the track comes from his classic, anthemic album Nation Time. The point comes through too, the complex experience of this music in a corporate environment, one that is both controlling people and inadvertently inspiring rebellion.
Free jazz in the 1960s is rightfully seen as an expression of political rebellion, but what gets overlooked is that mainstream jazz from the same era was the same, and by being mainstream had heavier and sharper politics. John Coltrane made the heartbreaking “Alabama,” but there’s an edge to most every Blue Note album from the decade that comes through the playing of musicians who were part of society. They were surrounded by history, but the Civil Rights Movement, war, assassination, and more, and of course that emotional life came through their improvisations.
Things are different now. The manufacture and elevation of poptimism is so pervasive and monolithic, with adult critics promoting teen-oriented pop, that there’s room for only the thinnest kind of protest music wrapped around self-promotion and brand marketing. For all of Chappelle Roan’s virtues, she’s not going to make a new “Ohio.” And there’s just not that many jazz musicians of the Millennial and younger generations that are capturing the frustrations and agitations of our times in their playing.
I hear this most through two saxophonists, James Brandon Lewis and Isiah Collier. Lewis has a new album, Apple Cores, in a trio with Josh Werner on guitar and bass and Lewis’ long-time drummer, Chad Taylor. There is an unsettled sound in his every note, the feeling that he’s striving for some further place, some better place, not just in and for himself but for the world around. Collier’s The Ancients is the debut from the trio of himself, bassist William Parker, and drummer William Hooker, three stalwarts of the freer side of jazz. And this album has roots in those early, revolutionary years, six decades ago, not the least of which is the pure fire that Collier brings to everything. Like Lewis, his sound is always trying to reach something, aspiring not to describe the moment but to move everything to a better place.
There’s not a political word in sight. Lewis has track titles like “Prince Eugene” and “D.C. Got Pocket,” while the live album from Collier is divided up into anodyne titles that give the date and place of performance. But titles for music like this are just placeholders for the message of the music, which is defiance, and possibilities.
Have a good title, that says something about today? Good. Now, Don’t stop there. Start. And keep going.
Author
George Grella wrote the book on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. He write other stuff too. killyridols.substack.com/
