Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, PJ Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann. Among other topics, he discusses recording formats; the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry; and, with Terri Kapsalis, the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to "other" music and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.
Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, PJ Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann. Among other topics, he discusses recording formats; the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry; and, with Terri Kapsalis, the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to "other" music and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.
Preface: Tympanum of the Other Frog xv
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1
One. On The Road, Into The Cul-De-Sac
Joe Harriott and Bernie McGann: Flying without Ornette 15
Michael Hurley: Jocko's Lament 21
Mayo Thompson: Genre of One 33
John Stevens: Unpopular Populists 36
Peter Brötzmann Tentet: Freeways 40
Steve Lacy: Sojourner Saxophone 49
David Grubbs: Postcards from the Edge 57
Voice Crack: From Nothing to Everything 67
Two. Exigeneses Of Creative Music
Milford Graves: Pulseology 71
Out of Nowhere: Deleuze, Gräwe, Cadence 79
Carla Bley and Steve Swallow: Feeding Quarters to the Nonstop
Mental Jukebox 85
Misha Mengelberg: No Simple Calculations for Life 93
Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink: Natural Inbuilt
Contrapuncto 109
Form Follows Faction? Ethnicity and Creative Music 116
Anthony Braxton: Ism vs. Is 123
Anthony Braxton: Bildungsmusik—Thoughts on Composition 171
129
Paul Lowens: Lo Our Lo 132
Clark Coolidge: The Improvised Line 136
Nathaniel Mackey: Steep Incumbencies 142
Sun Ra: From the Windy City to the Omniverse—Chicago Life as a
Street Priest of D.I.Y. Jazz 153
Fred Anderson: The House That Fred Built 162
Three. Ululations And Other Vocal Stimulants
Sun Ra: Queer Voice 169
Jaap Blonk: Uncommon Tongue 170
PJ Harvey: Mother's Tongue 179
Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound (coauthored with
Terri Kapsalis) 182
Liz Phair and Lou Barlow: On Music, Sex, TV, and Beyond
194
Liz Phair and Kim Gordon: Exile in Galville? 205
Koko Taylor: The Blue Queen Cooks 212
Brion Gysin and Steve Lacy: Nothing Is True, Everything Is
Permuted 217
Four. The Horn Section
Ornette Coleman: Doing Is Believing 233
Roscoe Mitchell: Citizen of Sound 244
Fred Anderson and Von Freeman: Tenacity 250
George Lewis: Interactive Imagination 258
Mats Gustafsson: MG at Half-C 264
Ken Vandermark: Six Dispatches from the Memory Bank 270
Ken Vandermark and Joe McPhee: Mutual Admiration Society
278
Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker: Bring Something to the Table
285
Five. Track Marks
Oncology of the Record Album 297
Discaholic or Vinyl Freak? Mats Gustafsson Interrogates John
Corbett 301
Twenty-Seven Enthusiasms: A Spontaneous Listening Session
308
A Very Visual Kind of Music: The Cartoon Soundtrack beyond the
Screen 313
R. L. Burnside and Jon Spencer: Fattening Frogs for Snake
Drive 322
Before and After Punk: The Comp as Teaching Tool 331
Raymond Scott: Cradle of Electronica 336
Six. Melodic Line and Tone Color
Peter Brötzmann: Graphic Equalizer 343
Albert Oehlen: Bionic Painting 347
Albert Oehlen: Mangy—A Conversation and a Playlist 352
Christopher Wool: Impropositions—Improvisation, Dub Painting
359
Christopher Wool: Into the Woods—Six Meditations on the
Interdisciplinary 366
Sun Ra: An Afro-Space-Jazz Imaginary—The Printed Record of El
Saturn 371
Seven. The Texture Of Refusal
Helmut Lachenmann: Hellhörig, or the Intricacies of
Perceptiveness 379
Guillermo Gregorio: Madi Music 387
Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others 391
Afterword: A Concise History of Music 417
Grooving On: Selected Listening 423
Credits 443
Index 447
John Corbett is a music critic, record producer, and curator. He is the author of Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein, also published by Duke University Press. His writing has appeared in Downbeat, The Wire, the Chicago Reader, and numerous other publications. He is the co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, an art gallery in Chicago.
"Corbett has just published a terrific new anthology of his writing
called Microgroove, the long-delayed follow-up to his 1994 book
Extended Play. . . . There's a lot of great stuff in the new
book—which went through multiple iterations over the years,
scrapped and revisited several times—but in his introduction to a
piece called 'Twenty-Seven Enthusiasms: A Spontaneous Listening
Session,' Corbett expresses a major part of what makes his work so
special. 'Show-and-tell was always my favorite part of school,' he
writes, eventually explaining that 'you accumulate things not to
own them, but to share them.' It's what he's done as a writer, a
music presenter, and, in recent years, a gallerist, at Corbett vs.
Dempsey."
*Chicago Reader*
"One of the more interesting features of Microgroove is the
inclusion of multiple pieces on some of the artists. This allows
Corbett to consider them from different angles or over time,
providing a fuller picture of their art in the process. That,
combined with the eclectic scope of Corbett’s interests, makes of
Microgroove a rich, multifaceted survey of some of the more
challenging artists of the last two decades."
*Avant Music News*
"The far-ranging scope of the 53 essays and interviews collected in
these nearly 500 pages, dating from 1993 to just last year, reminds
us that even within music’s commercially neglected fringes complex
gradations of sub-genre exist, separating the hardcore avant-garde
devotee from one who thinks they’re down because they own a copy of
Space Is the Place. ... But first and foremost [Corbett] is a
devotee of challenging and outré sounds, and his essays are most
compelling when he dives headfirst into his chronicles with a fan’s
enthusiasm and verve. ...These pieces beautifully balance serious
musical scholarship and critical analysis with the kind of
collar-grabbing, “give-this-a-listen” excitement that draws us all
to music in the first place."
*JazzTimes*
"Corbett, like the best kind of record store crate digger,
pinpoints the association between acknowledged innovators and the
achievements of lesser-known figures. . .. [T]he book’s key
achievement is how Corbett’s psychiatrist-like probing questions
elicit the most definitive and/or instructive statements about
their art from certain musicians."
*MusicWorks*
"John Corbett is a smart guy who really, really loves music, and
his intelligence and enthusiasm come through in every one of the
essays and articles in this volume of his collected writings....
Anyone interested in what was happening on the cutting edge of
music during the years these articles appeared needs to read this
anthology of John Corbett’s writing."
*ARSC Journal*
"[E]ssential ... a must for fans of out music."
*Bomb*
"John Corbett's singular critical voice is wildly alive in his
latest book, a compendium of previous writings, sober reflections,
clever visuals, idiosyncratic interviews, and post-genre insights
into the thriving ecology of knowledge that is the contemporary
music scene. At once this is a book that takes its place alongside
other distinctive voices in the pell-mell topography of recent
musical criticism, from Greg Tate and Lester Bangs to Nat Hentoff
and Nate Chinen, and the work of an itinerant witness bearing
testimony marked by a vast respect and love for improvised
musicking and musical diversity.... Microgroove is an eloquent,
readable, playful testimony to the otherness of music as an
allegory for creative freedom and as a generative social practice
that refuses limitations."
*Journal of Popular Music Studies*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
