Moment's Notice
Reviews of Recent Media
The African OmniDevelopment Space Complex
Ra’maat Ubadah Hotep Ankh McConner Iheru;
introduction by Michael Carey, afterword by patrick brennan
Arteidolia Press
The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution 1968-69
Introduction by David Grundy; preface by A.B Spellman
Blank Forms Editions
Ubadah McConnor, Fareed (Harvey) McKnight © 2022 Ricky Loew, Courtesy of Fareed (Harvey) McKnight
Some live recordings impress because they present music that was made for the moment; unlike a studio session, the music was not planned or produced to be re-listened to, re-examined, by a future generation: nonetheless decades later here it is, and the mere fact of its existence makes it amazing.
Most books, on the other hand, are like studio recordings: they were conceived and brought into being as objects that would endure. The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution 1968-69, however, has some of that live-performance quality. Like a concert, or a real-time revolution, the collected issues of this little magazine, made for the moment, have been captured in such a way that, years later, we are amazed to be reminded that this even happened.
In fact, both books at hand remind us that in the 1960s, the freeing-up of forms in Black American music was inevitably, directly, and overtly tied to the greater struggle for Black American freedom in western society itself. The connection is explicit in Blank Forms Editions’ invaluable collection of the four issues of The Cricket, a magazine created by Black American writers Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and A.B. Spellman towards the end of the sixties. The magazine was notable for its sheer economy; economy not only in its production (more on that shortly) but in the writerly skill that despite the haste and untidiness evident everywhere in these pages, gives them an overwhelming power that bursts into 2022 with the shock of a Black time traveller materializing in a redneck’s living room.
The Cricket’s mandate is clear in the first sentence of the first issue: “The true voices of Black Liberation have been the Black musicians.” Throughout the four issues of its existence, the magazine put into print the voices of the musicians themselves. The first essay, by Sun Ra, includes a passage that could have been written by no one else:
All that I am is a visitation and that is the meaning of the natural alter-self. If you are dissatisfied with yourself in the scheme of things and the altar has not changed conditions, perhaps you should consider the alter. After all if anything changes, it will be through the word alter/alteration/alternative because how can you dare to speak of change if you don’t have an alternative.
Ra’s wordplay, as always, uses imagination and humor to seize and overcome painful questions around identity. It is just one of The Cricket’s many delights. There is some very early Stanley Crouch from his Los Angeles days writing on the Bradford/Carter New Art Jazz Ensemble, and Horace Tapscott; a very negative review by Mwanafunzi Katibu of Three for a Quarter, One for a Dime (“Shepp hasn’t, lost his, soul. Yet. But Devil Dogs can make this happen, think about it Archie Shepp”); the provocative musicological essay “Just Intonation and the New Black Revolutionary Music” by James T. Stewart; poetry by Sonia Sanchez; writing by Amiri Baraka, Roger Riggins, Mtume, Milford Graves, Albert Ayler ... and much more; even a short finale by Ishmael Reed.
As Spellman, the sole surviving creator, writes in his preface, “[Jazz] was, after all, the only new art music in the Western world in the twentieth century, a music so large and adaptable that it could situate itself in any culture and still retain the methods and materials from which Black Americans had made it. It was ours, we argued, and it was everywhere.” Moreover, it was important. These pages are permeated with the importance of the music, the seriousness of the issues that it embodied and enacted.
Content, however, isn’t the sole appeal of this long-overdue collection. By retaining much of the form of the original issues, the book is made an objet d’art through the publisher’s loving reproductions. Resolutely and literally underground, The Cricket was run off a Gestetner mimeograph machine in the basement of its publishers’ home. As Spellman writes, “there was no budget, not even an insufficient one – you know how that goes. But the idea was good ... with a fatter pocket, we might have gotten somewhere.”
The mimeograph machine, widely used for in-house printing by schools and institutions, was also as essential to underground movements as the Molotov cocktail; in fact, it could be just as dangerous, if you weren’t careful with its toxic and flammable ether-based chemistry. Essentially, you could type, write, or draw on a multilayered stencil which would then transfer the results to multiple copies via an inked drum. The results could be variable in density – some letters too light, others filled in, etc. One false move and whole pages could be illegible. One of the accomplishments of this reissue is that Blank Forms has preserved the look of the mimeographed originals, retaining the characters of the inevitable imperfections, but doing wonderful restoration of the 50+-year-old originals, to make sure readers can actually read it.
Blank Forms staff sourced multiple original copies from different libraries, “used Photoshop to darken things up,” artistic director Lawrence Kumpf says, and did their best to match cover and insert colours to help The Cricket make its decades-long journey from an ad hoc form (mimeograph) to the iconic status offered by offset printing between sturdy canary-yellow card stock covers. It’s one of those rare historical volumes that is not only written about its time, but seems to inhabit its guiding spirit, and perpetuate it.
The African OmniDevelopment Space Complex by Ra’maat Ubadah Hotep Ankh McConner Iheru is a more modest, slighter and more slender publication that in its own way, pays tribute just as strongly to the power of Black music, here in its most improvised form: the communal blowing session to which any and all are invited. Eighty pages long, probably no more than 14,000 words or so, this little book is basically a musical memoir by Pontiac, Michigan double bassist Ubadah Bey McConner (1939-2020). McConner writes of growing up, becoming a jazz fan inspired by a love of records, then of live performance, before he took up the double bass himself at the age of 30. In 1972, McConner started a Friday night blowing session at his Pontiac home to which any and all were invited.
The book is written in a tone of deliberate wide-eyed naivete, the tirelessly optimistic tone of someone who has consciously decided that they’re not going to generate any more stress, anger, and anxiety to a world that already has plenty of those things. As he tells it, every step of the way, including four years in the air force, McConner, his brother Rashid, and their music-loving friends moved continually through settings that were bright, supportive, and full of beautiful people. He had a great family, great neighbours, and played with great musicians. Even during his years at Pontiac Motors, “I networked with everyone because I was raised beyond color having mystically and spiritually connected with my white brothers.”
McConner’s weekend sessions lasted thirty years, until 2002, and were open to everyone so there is name-dropping galore, but the reader may not be familiar with many of the names. As patrick brennan notes, “Faruq Z. Bey, Donald Washington and James Carter ... [came] through regularly,” but what about Abdul Jalil Bey, Abdul Halim, Umam Saladim, Scott Pinkston, Melvin Price, Ted Russell, Fareed McKnight, Joel Letvin, and scores of other musicians who outside of the Detroit/Pontiac orbit, may not be known at all? What McConner reminds us is that most music is local, and that there everywhere there are local communities who play below the radar of what we might call the music industry per se., the music organized and sustained by the dedication of a very few people (in fact, it reminds me of the improvising series that saxophonist Eric Stach put on just down the road from Pontiac, in London, Ontario from the 1960s until recent years, which managed to involve literally hundreds of musicians in improvised music who otherwise never would have connected). There would be physical intimacy, the meetings of strangers, very good nights and very bad ones; in short, a real musical phenomenon. With in-person performance communities more and more precarious and endangered since the Covid-19 pandemic, in retrospect what McConner did seems more valuable than ever.
–David Neil Lee
(David Lee is the author of The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field. His collaboration with Paul Bley, Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz has just appeared in Italian from Ediziones Quodlibet, Rome.)
A crowdfunding campaign currently being run to raise the necessary funds to complete a new film on improvised music, A BRIGHT NOWHERE – Journeying into Improvisation invites readers’ support.
The film will cover a remarkable series of four concerts that took place in London in July 2022 to mark musician Eddie Prévost’s 80th anniversary, as well as featuring new interviews with key players talking about their approach to music-making and performance.
The concert line-ups (which are listed in full on the campaign webpage) feature a roll-call of leading improvising musicians, and the fourth concert was the last ever public performance of AMM, the legendary noise/improvised music group co-founded by Prévost in the mid-1960s.
The filmmaker is Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz, a documentary filmmaker who has a track record of producing films about improvised and experimental music, including Eddie Prévost’s Blood in 2013.
To enable the film to be completed and shared freely online, for worldwide audiences a crowdfunding campaign has been set up via IndieGoGo. At the time of writing nearly 20% of the target amount has been reached, but there is still some way to go.
We realize not everyone may able to contribute financially, but even by sharing news of the fundraising campaign by passing on the link to friends and colleagues, you would be helping our cause significantly.
For those who want to make donations, there are a range of exclusive rewards on offer including downloads of complete, mastered recordings from the four concerts, signed concert posters, and more.
Please visit the crowdfunding webpage (linked below) for more details about the film, to see stills from the footage and read statements from Eddie Prévost and the filmmaker.
A BRIGHT NOWHERE - Journeying into Improvisation