The years following World War II were a time of sudden, rapid and astonishing development. In the sound laboratories of Germany and France, Pierre Schaeffer and Herbert Eimert were laying the foundations for musique concrète and electronic music respectively.
Alongside his indispensable assistant Pierre Henry, with whom he co-founded the Groupe De Recherche De Musique concrète, Schaeffer worked with what Michel Chion described as a “desperate rationalism” to develop the new index of possibilities that had been brought about with the invention of magnetic tape – he was presented with his first tape recorder in 1951. Now, at last, collage, which Picasso had introduced into the fabric of modern art almost 40 years earlier, was to be a working component of music. John Cage had prefigured this back in 1939, with his prescient work for turntables, as had Schaeffer himself at the Office de Radiffusion Télévision Francaise. However, with magnetic tape, it was now theoretically possible, in the realms of sound, to make anything out of anything. The scope for raw materials was now infinite, and the options as to how you worked on that material, with the studio now as much an editing suite as a place where music was merely recorded, were greatly expanded also. “We have at our disposal the generality of sounds”, wrote Schaeffer, “at least in principle, without having to produce them. All we have to do is push the button on a tape recorder.” Sounds could be wrenched from their original context, looped, sped up, repeated, slowed down, juxtaposed, faded, and overlaid. The opening “Ahoy!” of Symphony Pour Un Homme Seul, is a ghostly clarion call from a future past, a megaphone blast into the ear trumpet of hidebound musical conventions. Although much of Schaeffer’s work is the diced and reassembled product of conventional instruments, he extracts from these sounds unearthly and disembodied qualities, and weaving them together with spools and scissors, he creates dreamlike, disorienting compositional tapestries in which the familiar is rendered only semi-familiar. They are as exciting and frightening as the times; technology continues apace but has created a world in which man, for the moment at least, has lost his bearings. In a work like Orphée, the sense of descent is palpable, the phrase “Paradis” quickening like a pulse, then decelerating, declining, into the underworld.
Meanwhile, in Cologne, in 1951, Herbert Eimert had persuaded his employers at Cologne Radio to create a studio specialising in electronic music. This would be the centre for a whole generation of composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Henri Pousseur. Eimert was a controversial figure in the field of musicology, who had already written on serial music, which he believed not to be the “invention” of Arnold Schoenberg but something that was already in the compositional air. A fierce believer that music should be an exact science, a logical, rather than natural process, he played down the role of the composer, and what he believed to be the exaggerated role of personal psychology and expressionism in music, laying stress instead on the composition itself and the way in which it was received.
A quarrel at once erupted between the French pioneers in musique concrète, music made from “natural” sounds, and the Cologne composers, who, by contrast, played “pure” electronic music, the equivalent of the oils in a palette rather than clipped up bits of newspaper or similar “found items”. Indeed, the composer Meyer-Eppler believed that, with electronic music, the composer would be similar to a visual artist, in that he would compose directly to tape, with the results then laid before the general public, like an artist exhibiting his canvasses, without the need for the mediation of conductor or composer. The same, of course, could be said of Schaeffer and co – however, there was a belief in Cologne that electronically generated music represented the more “authentic” and higher quality option. They regarded themselves as in the hermetic tradition of serialism, taking their cue from Webern, and looking towards making a “total” serial music, now that electronics had reduced to atoms the former limits of interval and tone imposed by traditional orchestration.
The writer MJ Grant cites a novel by Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, as exerting a profound influence over the serialist/electronic composers, particularly Stockhausen. It speaks of a community who dedicate themselves to the pursuit of the title, in which the highest development of the human spirit is supposedly manifested. However, this life of pure meditation requires a complete detachment from the outside world. In the wake of World War II, Stockhausen was very taken with the cleansing and redeeming effects that could come from some “new spiritual order” and this reportedly impelled him to abandon his earlier, literary ambitions in favour of music. The attainment of some pure absolute appeared, for a while, to be within the grasp of electronic music, and seemed to be an attractive model for a way of living – a rational idealism, buffered from the fallen state of everyday reality, untroubled by expressionist, emotional trauma. However, it didn’t take long for this stand-off between the advocates of a music based on a higher purity and one based on the “fallen” everyday to let up. Stockhausen realised by the early 50s that in the fallible context of everyday human existence, absolute ideals would always remain beyond reach, or would be soiled the moment you laid hands on them. By the mid-50s, in works like Gesang Der Jünglinge, he was making his own forays into musique concrète. As for Pierre Schaeffer, in later life he, too, relented and worked with electronically generated sounds. The quarrel, such as it was, seems a little quaint now, conducted in the embers of post-war Franco-German enmity. However, it indicated the logical utopianism in which, despite the depths to which humanity had just sunk, ideas about music making and its role in human existence were couched by its most “extreme” practitioners, fundamental ideas about man and matter. They didn’t make this music out of sheer, maniacal wantonness, or to prod a stick in the midriff of bourgeois convention, to manufacture outrage, or simply to create novelty for novelty’s sake. The studio pioneers in Cologne and Paris were conscientiously and meticulously laying the foundations for what today constitutes the vast majority of modern music, mainstream or otherwise, pop or academic, from Kylie Minogue to Can, from Ricardo Villalobos to the Mnemonists, from Kraftwerk through to hiphop auteurs like Jay Dee aka Dilla. They weren’t merely “paving the way”, however – though some of their works have the feel of blueprint about them, others are masterpieces in their own right, more than just mere statements about the processes by which they were made and the forms they took. This was the dawn of music’s own nuclear age, momentous and deserving of awe.
And nobody cared.
I use the word “nobody” in its demographic, rather than literal sense, of course. However, all of this cultural investigation and innovation had the misfortune to be taking place in ruined, discredited, old Europe. The locus of modern culture, meanwhile, had shifted to the United States. As we have already seen, the likes of Varèse and Marcel Duchamp had long since made the transatlantic shift, while Dali had already seduced Hollywood. However, the artistic flight from Europe now saw the likes of Max Ernst, Andre Breton lead a whole raft of artists and thinkers whose lives were endangered by the Nazis and their concomitant hatred of “degenerate” art. Not everybody made it – Robert Desnos, for example, died in a concentration camp, while there was a modicum of traffic in the other direction – the American photographer and Surrealist Man Ray, for example, settled permanently in Paris after the war. However, those who made the boat trip to New York and had a taste of Manhattan and the patronage of the Guggenheims and their like showed no immediate inclination to return to Europe – especially, because it turned out that Paris showed no general civic inclination to welcome back its artistic sons and daughters from American exile.
It turned out that the city was a great deal more bourgeois and conservative, a good deal less gay, than had generally been supposed – it seemed it had played host only with great reluctance to the great art movements of the pre-war era.
Whereas the war had taken a terrible economic toll in Europe, American had emerged from it with its position as an economic superpower greatly strengthened. Manhattan in particular would add to the country’s general spoils a newfound status as the world capital of modern culture. Jazz, meanwhile, was continuing its rapid, evolutionary arc with the innovations of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the bebop generation. Figures like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were now household names, despite lingering racial antipathy. Meanwhile, rock and roll, fermenting on the peripheries of rhythm and blues, was about to explode into being, the irresistible upshot of youth’s growing sense of its own freedom, identity and spending capacity. In the words of Billy Wilder, the rise of TV gave something cinema to look down on, but was an increasing part of the everyday cultural wallpaper. America was unleashing the inner energies pre-echoed by Varèse – the smartest, dumbest country in the world, the most exquisitely metropolitan and crudely reactionary, the place to be, unless they didn’t happen to like your kind, and even then, still, maybe, the place to be. (There was, of course, a post-war jazz exodus from America to Europe, a flight from domestic racism, but only a few really stuck it – most of the major jazz players remained in America.) It was in this broad, quotidian context in which the likes of Schaeffer and Stockhausen toiled. No headlines in Le Figaro for them, no place in the cultural timeline – rather, they stood on the edge of an ever widening gulf between the musical avant garde and the material everyday, on the margins of an altogether new media environment.
It was in this context, also, that abstract expressionism, the first great movement of the second half of the 20th-century, thrived, and Jackson Pollock came to the fore. Though it would be an exaggeration to suggest that his works were greeted with total and instantaneous comprehension by the general public, at the same time he was not marginalised – indeed, he became a celebrity of sorts when, in 1949, he was profiled by Life magazine. He lent himself to that magazine’s visual brief both as an artist and a would-be icon. His manly, laconic air was distinctly all-American. Beret-less and lacking in the flouncey, extravagant manners of the European artist-caricature, he came across not as a theoretician but as a strong and silent creature of pure artistic impulse, as lived up to in Ed Harris’s depiction of him in Pollock, the film based on the artist’s life. Pollock the artist is, of course, deserving of the lavish curiosity and tolerance conferred on his work, in which the viewer is invited to discern deeper patterns of meaning and expression beneath the apparent random and untutored chaos of its surfaces. Pollock the icon, perversely, benefits not just from his hard drinking but his death in an automobile accident at around the same time that James Dean died in similar circumstances, as if both were speeding along the same, fateful fast lane of modernity, leaving a fiery exhaust trail in their wake.
Charlie Parker, too, died in 1955, aged just 34 but with a lifetime of enormous appetites for all the good and bad things in life, bearing the broken body of an elderly, dissipated man. Parker was conscious of the works of Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse, both of whom were based in America during his lifetime, and both of whom he attempted to approach, the latter in the capacity of a pupil. Parker was a victim of the excesses of jazz’s “street” life, who sadly inspired a raft of younger musicians not just in the digital intricacies of bebop but in the supposed artistic benefits of heroin (“to play like Bird, you gotta do like Bird,” ran the depressing refrain). However, he also represents the point at which jazz makes the transition from the music of the street and the clubs, the feeder of popular music’s watered down lexicon, into the academies. Parker was depressed both by the rise of rock and roll, its musical conservatism (“I got no kick against modern jazz ‘cept the play that stuff too darn fast,” went Chuck Berry’s immortal phrase) and the fact that so many of his straitened bebop contemporaries gave up their more serious pursuits in order to take their places in their shiny jackets in the back line of rhythm and blues bands.
After Parker came The Modern Jazz Quartet, whose impeccable appearance and earnestly tapered, vibraphone-soaked take on bebop represented a pointed rejection of the squalor, seediness and addiction with which so many people associated the jazz scene. The MJQ were not urban, the modern euphemism for African-American, but urbane. The next evolutionary stride in jazz came with Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz in 1959, around the same time as Stockhausen’s Kontakte, a continuous piece of largely improvised playing, whose complex rhythms and fine disregard for the conventions of harmony and chord progression signalled that jazz had reached its own “Schoenbergian” moment. Coleman’s “harmolodic” innovation was greeted with bemusement and derision, not just by critics but also by fellow jazz musicians, notably Miles Davis.
The 1950s were a time of consolidation for contemporary classical music in Europe, in France and Italy in particular, with works by composers such as Boulez, Berio, Dallapiccola, Nono and Barraque exploring and expanding upon the principles of serial music and the practice of electronic and concrète music. Add to that list Gyorgy Ligeti and the former Greek resistance fighter Iannis Xenakis, a trained architect who brought that discipline to his own music making. However, as Hans Stuckenschmidt wrote in Twentieth Century Music, “As compositions and styles increasingly deviated from convention and tradition, and as composers pursued ever more some particular principle of style or technique, so the chances of music being comprehended dwindled. The message was still despatched but it was no longer addressed. At worst, it was a bottle thrown into the sea, its destination unknown.” These composers did not go short of commissions, from opera houses and universities, while radio stations in Europe did their conscientious best to support the new music, albeit broadcasting it at a time when most of its listeners were tucked up safely in bed. There were generous sponsors, too, such as the American millionaire Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. However, the chilly, whistling winds of public indifference could not be ignored – while contemporary European composers did not go hungry, they did go largely unheard.
It is not these Europeans with whom post-war avant garde music is considered synonymous in today’s collective consciousness – they tend to be lumped together as a pack of remorselessly, wilfully opaque atonalists. Rather, it is John Cage. Having studied under Schoenberg, Cage came into his own in 1938 with his works for “prepared piano”, in which he introduced foreign bodies such as mallets between the strings of the instrument. A year later, he produced his famous work for turntable, a distant ancestor to hiphop. His works incorporate i-Ching and Dada-derived ideas of chance, indeterminacy (though not improvisation, which was anathema to him). Thinking of Cage, Boulez grumbled in one essay about composers using orientalism as a mask for deficiencies in compositional technique. However, Cage’s appeal and charisma transcended music. In a highly capable primer on Abstract Art, Cage is the only musician, Schoenberg apart, whom the author, Anna Moszynska considers to be worthy of mention. (She mistakenly dubs his infamous 1954 piece “4 Minutes and 33 Seconds Of Silence”, which would be to miss the point that the piece is about the impossibility of silence).
Cage was not the sort of musician in whose textures you could luxuriate but a conceptualist, whose still, Zen-like works lent themselves perfectly to post-war developments in theatre and art. The way he drained, “unpersoned”, “unmusicked” his music was reminiscent of the minimalist tendencies of artists like Yves Klein. He maintained strong links with fellow American artist Robert Rauschenberg, while his performances, in which, for example, radios play simultaneously on different stations in the concert hall, were reminiscent of the neo-Dada happenings which were a feature of the American landscape around the turn of the 60s.
A reproachful voice from the old, European past, Hans Richter, sounded out against the “neo-Dadaist” tendencies of American art at this time, which also went under the banners of neo-Realism and pop art. Lambasting it for its existential vacuity and “infantilism”, he accused the new generation of artists of commodifying the “readymades” of Duchamp, which, he felt, should have been the last, not the first word. However, the American-based Duchamp was now considered a father figure, something he himself resented. “When I discovered ‘ready-mades’ I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them.”
The nature of this beauty was a sort of fetishising materialism, however, felt Richter, and the symptom of an overfed but spiritually undernourished civilisation. He cites one modern artist, Daniel Spoerri, who in Kishka’s Breakfast nails the remains of his girlfriend’s hearty breakfast tray to a chair, an assemblage which takes its place in New York’s Museum Of Modern Art. This, he contrasts with Russian artist Ivan Puni (aka Jean Pougny)’s 1918 piece Plate, part oil painting, part assemblage, which features an empty plate as its central object. “In Russia, in 1918, they were in the middle of a revolution and one potato a day was a lot,” writes Richter. “The empty plate was a challenge (to something or someone); the solid breakfast is a satisfaction of something or someone.”
These were times when the bourgeoisie, once the object of modern art’s scorn, were now among its most enthusiastic benefactors. Nowadays, wrote Brian O’Doherty in The New York Times in 1963, the bourgeois reacted to modern art “not with shock, but with pleasure, and by opening its purse.” While modern music struggled on, hand to mouth, living off subsidies, modern art was increasingly embraced as a manifestation of the metropolitan super confidence of post-war America in particular, part of the same thrust as Elvis Presley and Coca Cola, spiralling onward and upwards like the Guggenheim museum.
Even the new minimal art was being avidly bought. In 1959, the artist Yves Klein, in a move that was both conceptually immaculate and a canny bit of business, sold zones of his “Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” - i.e. nothing, in exchange for gold. The minimalist artists of this period aspired to a condition which, as Cage ruefully demonstrated, was beyond music – that of silence. It was meant as a disapproving silence, a withdrawal from the noise of a hyperactive, materialistic society.
However, minimalism has become the great, ironic conceit of the rich – the pretence of a lack of possessions. Walk down any impoverished Third World street, by contrast, and you’ll be struck by the maximalism of poverty – the laundry hanging across the pavement, the boiling pots, and the laden mules en route to market, the traders’ wares spilling over the pavements, the noisy, sputtering vehicles, the stuff, everywhere. These are people without the means suavely to conceal their dependence on the clutter of goods, utensils and transport which, in their case, barely sustains them. Minimalism has become the signifier, in music as well as in art, of capitalism’s pretensions to spirituality – some discreetly enabled, airy form of super-being, in which “space” rather than vulgar stuff is the thing.
By 1958, Edgard Varèse’s dreams of access to electronic music and sound laboratories had at last been realised. He had already composed Deserts, featuring interpolations of musique concrète, based on factory sounds and percussions, like muffled intimations of the outside world as distantly heard from deep in the lonely interior of the soul. Now, he found himself commissioned to compose a piece for the Le Corbusier-designed Philips pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. Using tape alone, Poème Électronique, which was broadcast over 400 speakers, is a sequence of pure electronic sounds and modified, spliced recordings of human voices, machines, cathedral bells, pianos and percussion, whose polyphonic assemblage takes you on a slow-moving swoop around and under its great arcs, through an unlit space, in which mysterious, disembodied sounds evoke feelings of awe, fascination and foreboding. Live, the various components would travel along their own “sound routes” from the speakers, adding a dimension of mobility akin to stereo panning. A series of images, including those of mushroom clouds and Charlie Chaplin, were projected onto the walls of the building’s interior, though these had no direct relationship to Varèse’s work. However, although Corbusier’s building (later demolished) received a great many visitors, most of them were confused by both the architecture and Varèse’s music. Howard Taubman of the New York Times remarked that “the sounds that accompany these images are as bizarre as the building.” Although Poème Électronique is a surviving monument of musique concrète, its interface with the general public only served to emphasize the difficulty of persuading them to receive in sound form ideas whose visual equivalent they had relatively little difficulty in embracing.
Still, there were exceptions. In 1958, the American composer and sound engineer Raymond Scott was busy composing jingles and ditties in his own “Manhattan Research Inc”, a sound lab dedicated to designing and manufacturing “electronic music devices and systems”. Having already made a reputation for, among other things, forming the first racially integrated radio band and composing music for Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny cartoons, Scott would go on to devise, among other things, a prototype for the sequencer. Some of his pieces such as “The Bass Line Generator” were of a serious, experimental bent but it’s his jingles and accompaniments to advertising ditties such as “Lightworks”, “General Motors: Futurama”, “Bendix 1: The Tomorrow People” and “Baltimore Gas & Electric Co” which are still more remarkable, in their juxtaposition of inane, commercial entreaties and innovative electronics which still “sparkle and gleam” to this day, to misquote the lady in the “Lightworks” jingle. Scott later worked with Bob Moog and was even hired by Berry Gordy to work in Motown’s electronic music and research department, though none of the recordings he made during that time have ever materialised. Scott was a rare and fleeting example indeed of a successful interface between avant garde music, capitalism and the general public. However, he was only rediscovered two years prior to his death in 1994, having suffered a stroke and with his royalty stream having long since dried up, when a collection of his long-unavailable work was reissued.
Despite the distaste of Richter and Duchamp, the Neo-Dada ideas in the air in the early 60s, found formal expression in the Fluxus movement. The Lithuanian-born artist George Maciumus gave birth to the movement, with an exhibition of works in Germany in 1962. The artists involved came from a range of disciplines, including art, music and literature, and hailed from America, Europe and Asia. In contrast to abstract expressionism, which was trumpeted with unseemly patriotism in some quarters as the first Great American art movement, Fluxus prided itself on its crossing of national boundaries. For all that, it does feel American-centred, if one considers New York as the receiving centre at this time of the immigration of new ideas. Although it had in common with Dada an idealism, and a desire to bring art and life together and subvert the haute pretensions of the gallery, Fluxus, whose loose coalition were theoretically bound by 12 key ideas, considered itself a constructive, rather than nihilistic force.
The childlike and playful tendencies of Fluxus have been well emphasised, and certainly it is hard not to harbour mildly homicidal feelings on reading some of the tracts written in this infantilist vein, such as Dick Higgins’s A Child’s History Of Fluxus. Yoko Ono, meanwhile, is capable of exciting similar antipathy for what could be regarded as her loft apartment whimsy. However, one of her schemes rather nicely epitomises the deceptively simple, ingenious, playful and ultimately idealistic spirit of Fluxus – a chess board in which all the pieces are white, so that as the game progresses, the players forget which of the pieces are their own and the adversarial aspect of the game dissolves.
Fluxus represents a high point in the concurrence between art and music. Maciumus had been inspired by the aleatory ideas expounded in the music of John Cage, while one of the key Fluxus tenets was “musicality”. This is to say that, much as a piece of music by Beethoven could be orchestrated and reproduced by persons other than the composer, so, say, a piece of art by, say, George Brecht, could be similarly recreated by following the “score”, or set of instructions as to how to realise it, set down by Brecht himself. This notion struck at the core of some of art’s most sacred tenets – the collectability of the original, the “Do Not Touch” principle. It also meant that, as in music, a given artwork would alter according to who was interpreting it, and when.
Fluxus provided a framework, or perhaps a prism, through which could be understood not just the work of artists such as Joseph Beuys but also composers and musicians such as Tony Conrad, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, the influence of whose unnerving drone music burrowed right into the marrow of The Velvet Underground. Initially, Maciumus showed Breton-like tendencies in his attempting to dictate who, or who was not a part of Fluxus, despite its supposed inclusivity. However, he allowed his grip to relent in later years. Perhaps as a consequence of this, it is unclear as to when, or whether, Fluxus eventually fizzled out. Among its adherents, there is some debate as to whether it has “Unfluxed” or whether it has even yet been born, the world today seeming so far from beginning to take up its tenets. A rather sorrowful open letter testifies to this sense of confusion and also disappointment. Written by one Allen Bukoff, it is entitled “Dear Fluxus” and is addressed to “first and second generation Fluxus among others, Eric Andersen, Henry Flynt, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Nam June Paik, Geoff Hendricks and Larry Miller.” It begins with Bukoff announcing his departure from the movement, before adding poignantly that most of those artists he lists are unaware that he actually exists, despite his having been an active Fluxus member for many years, operating several websites in the new wilderness of the internet. It’s a testimony to a general failure to sustain ideals, a cri de coeur from the enthusiast left behind, and a testament to the inevitable condition of self-absorption, rather than social commitment, into which ascended artists also decline. It would be glib, however, to suggest that the ideas of Fluxus have long been assimilated, especially when expressed musically. A few years ago, at the prestigious Meltdown festival on London’s South Bank, I saw Tony Conrad, sometime Fluxus associate, perform a piece that essentially consisted of an extended violin solo, oscillating traumatically like a fairground attraction caught in an irreversible lock groove. On and on he oscillated, for 20 or so minutes. When he finally drew to a halt, the auditorium of discerning music lovers was silent, except for one voice, crying out more in sorrow than in anger, “You’re mad.”
Running in parallel to these developments were the advances of jazz into the New of the 60s. John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Sharrock, Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton were among a new generation at once dismantling the conventions of the jazz idiom at a rapidly exponential rate but also, in many cases (Albert Ayler in particular) recoiled back to the primal rage and lamentation of the blues, as if to suggest that, since the beginnings of African-American music, nothing had fundamentally changed for black people, with their civil rights still not secure, and the pastoral scenes of the gallant South still disfigured by bigotry. The tuxedoed Modern Jazz Quartet had made their bid for the legitimacy and respectability of the concert hall rather than the nightclub. This transition had become necessary as jazz’s avant garde increasingly failed to serve either its own needs or those of the paying customers in its traditional nightclub setting – it demanded the sort of attention routinely afforded to classical music, the same venues, and the same privileges. However, this would be a long time coming. In the early 60s, there was an institutional denial that, despite its dizzying development and increasingly adventurous orchestration, jazz could be considered on a par with classical music. Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton often found it impossible to get hired classical players to take their arrangements seriously – they were sniggered at with racist condescension as they presented their scores to symphony musicians steeped complacently steeped in the white, European tradition. For “difficult” white avant garde composers, it was, well, difficult, to get an airing for their work. For black composers, it was impossible. Said Chris White, a bass player who worked gigs with Cecil Taylor remarked, “Cecil was forced to work in places where he shouldn’t have had to work. And it wasn’t because nobody recognised his genius, it’s because Black genius isn’t recognised – period, in this country.”
Players like Coltrane and Albert Ayler were trying to blow down different doors. The impulse, however, was the same – the emancipation of black people as anticipated, dreamt of, signified, in the emancipation of jazz from its traditional strictures. Coltrane’s freewheeling, torrential style, emanating from a body long cleansed of the booze and heroin that had threatened to lay waste to it, reached its apotheosis on the album Ascension, in which he truly takes the music to the mountain top. Distributing equal amounts of solo time to a brace of junior saxophonists, Coltrane demonstrated the democratic principles of a new music, moving ever closer to an ideal of pure freedom. Among his acolytes was Archie Shepp, who was fond of saying, “we are not angry men. We are enraged.” This summarised the political charge and molten fury which informed the new generation of players. Albert Ayler, who played with a particularly hard reed, was less fluid and ethereal than Coltrane – the noises that emerge from his horn seem to be hewn with a physical difficulty only he is equal to – earthy, honking, chunking blasts, the spirit made flesh and phlegm. There was little need for polemic – themes of struggle, emancipation, evolution, refusing to stand still, or embedded in the very warp and wail of the music. To find cross references for the sort of groundbreaking in which the jazz revolutionaries were engaged, you could look to literature; stand-up comedy, even sports in the form of Muhammad Ali and the athlete Tommie Smith. However, there was no similar black presence in the world of the visual arts, with the solitary exception of the young African-American artist Robert Thompson, who died aged 29 of an overdose in 1966.
The “new jazz” of the Sixties was regarded by many with bewilderment; even fellow musicians regarded Ornette Coleman as “crazy”, as if mental instability, rather than his desire to dismantle and reinfuse the jazz idiom, explained his decision to play, while other critics lambasted the music for being esoteric, far removed from the concerns of the people whose cause it supposedly sought to espouse, who simply did not listen to it. While it’s impossible to disregard some truth in this observation, it denies the fact that black music’s thrust, from Armstrong to Coleman, Hendrix to George Clinton, from hiphop through to dubstep, has always been futuristic, and as such a reflection of black experience. On the one hand, black music is constantly obliged to stay one step ahead of its white imitators (and in so doing, provides a perpetual supply for said imitators). However, it’s also because the black dream is largely one of tomorrow, not yesterday or even today, which aren’t generally times on which black people would particularly want to dwell. Of course, there is reference to the wellsprings of the past but not (at least, until very recently) the nostalgic conservatism that dominates so much white listening and music making. What reason have African-Americans to hark back fondly to the good old 60s, the way so many whites do?
One artist who typifies this impulse more abundantly than any other is Sun Ra. Born Herman Blount in Alabama in 1913, Ra could never have entertained any illusions as to what esteem society held him in. Initially a member of Fletcher Henderson’s big band, he also became interested in Black Nationalism. However, as he formed his own, unfashionably and oftentimes unfeasibly large ensemble the Arkestra, he began to construct his own personal creed and mythology, based on the ancient past of Egyptology and the remote future of space travel. He carefully erased all traces of his early, earthly past. Reborn in early middle age, in the 1950s, he now claimed to have come from Saturn.
To be a member of the Arkestra was effectively to take a vow of abstinence and poverty. Players like saxophonist John Gilmore were good enough to have forged titanic solo careers of their own, but chose not to, out of lifelong devotion to Ra. Stylistically, the band veered between relatively conventional, at times almost quaint bebop-informed big band jazz, theatrical, ritualistic bouts of percussion-driven chanting and zig-zag forays into the outer reaches of new jazz noise, with Ra meandering off on clavichord and electric keyboards.
With their garish, spangly headjoy and robes of many colours, Ra and the Arkestra were, with a handful of honourable exceptions, greeted with bewilderment and amusement by jazz onlookers and enthusiasts at large, if they were greeted at all – Norman Mailer once accidentally stumbled into one of Ra’s gigs when in Chicago in the 1950s, and while he credited the Arkestra’s piercing “space music” for clearing up his head cold, later described their music as “strangely horrible”. Ra is one of a number of key figures simply overlooked in Ken Burns’s 2000 PBS series Jazz – impossible to incorporate into that series’ earnest, all-American narrative. Many of his fellow African-American musicians regarded him as an embarrassment, playing up to some exaggerated idea of “blackness” for the delectation of white cognoscenti. Betty Carter snorted that his interplanetary fixations were “bullshit” and challenged him to come up to Harlem and try it on with that stuff. That he chose to use synthesisers was considered an affront to fundamental acoustic jazz principles, too. The path Ra travelled was lonely indeed – it took a singular constitution for him to endure the brickbats, the perpetual economic parlousness and humanity’s obdurate resistance to the astral evangelising of “Space Is The Place”.
It’s easy to write off Sun Ra as a creature of pure eccentricity. Listen to a track like “Cosmic Explorer”, a prolonged Ra synthesiser solo that on the face of it sounds like an army of vacuum cleaners hurtling with epileptic frenzy through orbit, and it is easy to imagine that here is a man exhibiting all the signs of mental breakdown, that this is no more than the electronically transcribed hollering of the old bum on the street corner, the epitome of noise-as-madness. But the path Ra travelled wasn’t just a lonely but a logical one. His personal creed and philosophy are best considered as a mythos, a necessary fiction. Everything else about him was altogether serious and quite real. The “Space” to which Ra alluded was a mental solace, for African-Americans in particular but for all earthlings living in the shadow of doom in a perilous nuclear age.
Music is far more effective at “visualising”, at creating better places, than art. To take just one example from Sun Ra’s vast oeuvre – “I’ll Wait For You”, from the album Strange Celestial Road. After a halting opening and a wavering, slightly dishevelled vocal section, in which the Arkestra singers trill wistfully of a world of “abstract dreams”, “many lights years in space”, where the lucky Arkestra dwell in blissful anticipation of the arrival of the rest of humanity. Ra’s keyboards soar and swoop, swallow-like and luminous, above the Arkestra’s instrumental scrabble of vibes, wah wah and undulating percussion below, before taking off in its own right, accompanied by faithful sax lieutenants John Gilmore and Pat Patrick. Ra’s keyboards, charting the same courses in spatial infinity as Stockhausen’s Kontakte, wheel and sparkle, slalom through meteor storms, achieve moments of thermonuclear intensity, navigate their way through wormholes and arc through the colourful, gaseous swirls of Hubble telescopic imagery, traverse light years in the mind, and go indeed to places no other music has ventured, staking out, for those curious enough to take the journey, a headzone in which there might be more to life, to human existence, then what has hitherto been decreed by tradition.
If rendered in the form of a painting, “I’ll Wait For You” would look corny, the trite, topographic stuff of Yes album sleeves or old, budget sci-fi paperbacks. But this is not a reflection on Ra’s aesthetic triteness but on the inherent, comparative capabilities of music and the visual arts to fulfil a particular, and vital function – namely to transport, to get us out of this place, not merely as a means of escape but in the hope of some evolution – even if that means, in the imagination at least, leaving planet earth.