Brandon López, Fred Moten and Gerald Cleaver performed at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn last year. Photo: Cameron Kelly McLeod/ISSUE Project Room.
THIS MONTH, a year to the day since the release of their first album, the trio of Fred Moten (poet), Brandon López (bassist) and Gerald Cleaver (drummer) came to London for a weekend residency at Café Oto. Recorded during the Covid pandemic at GSI studios in New York and released on the Reading Group label, the band’s self-titled album exemplifies what Anthony Reed, in his book Sound workscalled “phonopoetics”, a broader term than previous indicators like “jazz poetry”.
During its blossoming from what Reed calls the “Long Black Arts Movement”, culminating in the 1960s, the phonopoem reflected the conditions of Fordism and post-Fordism, the “Long Downturn”, the energy crisis of the 1970s and the crash of 2008 across cities across the United States. And although as a fashion it is more easily identified with the era of Black Power, Barbara Simmons and Jackie McLean For Elouise Loftin and Andrew Cyrille, Jane Lee And Archie Shepp– if anything, it’s thriving more than ever today.
Three years ago, Nathaniel Mackey had an Oto residency with a band called the Creaking Breeze Ensemble. Their performance – in which Mackey read and played from a selection of vintage records as words and sounds ebbed and flowed around him – has since been released on fonograf editions. And in the middle of the Moten weekend, a morning reading at the same venue saw young black British poet James Goodwin read works inspired by British grime alongside the American multidisciplinary artist. Candace Hill Montgomery. Childhood friends with the pre-fame Ronettes, Hill-Montgomery grew up in Queens alongside young parents Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Later, she became part of the downtown art scene, a friend and collaborator like Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis and Lucy Lippard. Playback in a Video Call with Charles Mingus Low Sounds Black Saint and the Sinner (1963) in the background, Hill-Montgomery remarked that different music played in every room of the house as she grew up, an anecdote that helpfully suggests the multiple levels of her own work – which refers to everyone from Ahmad Jamal and Albert Ayler to Merzbow and Megan Thee Stallion – and phonopoetics in general.
If Hill-Montgomery’s poetry is multi-voiced with insistence and vertigo, Moten’s mode is that of the affable conversationalist. Live sometimes feels like he doesn’t read as long as while speaking, the way in which the “I” of the anecdote reaches out to its listener and to a shared experience: making suggestions, asking questions, opening up to another voice in the comings and goings of the dialogue. The poems he read on the first evening in particular were lined with names—Julius Eastman, Cecil Taylor, Nancy Wilson, Lorenzo, Moten’s son—in lists that unfolded like biblical timelines or some sort of anti- census evoking “the inventory of the magnified universal. There is a paradox here: the pleasure of recognizing these names, the Blackened sensus communis they inform, also potentially runs counter to the communizing desires that drive the trio’s music. In their recent collection All incomplete (2021), Moten and Stefano Harney include an essay on Chicago wall of respect, prompting a reflection on the need to unite the idea of the soloist and the hero. “The Soloist” they write, “is the first antechamber of a social practice; a continuous preface, a swinging door.
On the first track on the studio disc, Moten draws inspiration from the way Prince – like Count Basie and Duke Ellington and King Tubby before him and Queen Latifah after him – adopts an honorary title that undermines the hierarchies from which it derives: “Let’s work against royalty, such as a Prince formerly known as The Artist/Working Against. Yet, the singularization of the exceptional individual is viewed with collectivist skepticism. “Think I’ll change my name to Jean Toomer,” Moten remarks (on the page it’s spelled “genetic tumor”), then turns Shakespeare via Archie Shepp to “O, for a muse of fire music!” But if Shakespeare’s muse in the prologue of Henry V would like to “climb the brightest sky of invention” for saber-rattling jingoistic purposes, Moten comes from below.
As Moten reflects on the world of deindustrialization, a “house party” of abandoned buildings and unaffordable housing, Cleaver, who paid homage to his musical roots in Detroit several times— places one cymbal on top of another and spins them like hubcaps, the mechanics of metal in motion, a sort of broken down factory machine. “Damn, I love cars: it’s the American in me. I want to be buried in one so I can rise in one,” Moten proclaims: the intersection of industry, the myth of freedom, travel, and work tied to the bygone site of struggle on the workplace, outsourced and retained myths.
“In Africa,” Shepp once remarked wryly, “one man plays one drum, in America he plays five!” We’re just following the Ford model. . .” Adaptation to proletarianized conditions is central to the history of music, a history of change. By taking the kit apart and putting it back together, Cleaver responds and transforms these conditions as music always has. Inscribing history, the music also defies temporal restriction. As Cleaver remarks of a solo by the late Wayne Shorter: “It’s so deep on a definite structure. You mean infinity in this sense. Likewise, even though his playing is rooted in the materiality of the instrument, López uses the bass as a portal, an access point, going beyond himself, playing his body with his fingers. and palms like a drum or he turns it sideways to do that moans like a cuica.
Somewhere along the way, Moten utters the phrase “catastrophic joy”: catastrophe, from the Greek kata-down and stanza, turning, slowing down, López detuning a bass string until its sound is a sort of endlessly high-pitched thrill, but going up or down, reaching the boundary point or end of the line, a starting point as much as end, an open question. Now Moten reads alone: He and Cleaver start talking off the mic, the words half detected. ” We are free ? asks Moten. “No, we are just three.” “I’m up,” Cleaver announces, rising from his kit, ending the performance. Music is a language that cuts the places where language cannot go. The musicians leave the stage. It’s not an end, it’s a beginning.
