Hello friends,
Welcome back to Speaking in Tongues, a monthly newsletter / interview series from Black Eyes that extends the thread we started with our zine of the same name. If you haven’t checked it out, you can find it here.
In this edition, we’ve got Dan Caldas’ Time Machine and a segment of our interview with Luke Stewart for our free subscribers, and, for our paid subscribers, more with Luke. [We had sent out a post that offered the prospect of live video from Philly for our paid subscribers. We’re gonna run that next month.]
Meantime, tix are still available for our winter shows:
Over Ethiopian dinner the Saturday night of our most recent practice weekend, we engaged in Dan Caldas’ Time Machine game. Basic premise? You get access to a time machine that will take you back to a given year. There, you can watch up to five bands of your choosing.
So! We figured we’d share a version with y’all. Here goes:
Dan Caldas’ Time Machine: 1973
Dan: Black Sabbath, Volume 4 Tour
By 1973, Black Sabbath had four practically perfect albums under their belt. Based on recordings I've heard, seeing them at this point would be a tornado of cosmic metal fueled by their unfortunately heavy drug use.
Rock n roll doesn't get much better.
Daniel: Terry Riley, tape looping peak
1973 is a tough year - Sun Ra & the Arkestra (and really any number of free jazz greats), the Stooges, VU and other proto punk bands, early Kraftwerk… but I went with Terry Riley performing keyboard & tape loop works. Early minimalism is some of my favorite music and Riley was in such a specific and fertile pocket. “Persian Surgery Dervishes” had been recorded a couple years earlier and he was extending that practice into such incredible music. Plus it’s like the pre-birth of techno.
Jacob: Miles Davis
A couple years ago this blog was started whose primary intention was to document each and every live show that Miles Davis and his various groups played during the “Electric Miles” period between 1969 and 1975. Starting in ‘69 with his “lost quintet” a group that bridged from his music in the ‘60s that had radically redefined acoustic jazz into the full on electric music that was to come in a few years. The “lost quintet” is also an appropriate starting point because they were one of many many many iterations of Miles’ groups in this period that never really recorded in a studio (or at least never put out a full studio album). And while a few of those studio albums are personal faves (On The Corner especially)…they were just that studio albums….edited and pieced together from long jams, often different sessions with different groups of musicians….so approaching this music in its live state presents the listener with a whole new experience of how this music was created and who was creating it (depending on the year/month/date that you dive in)…all that being said 1973 was both a high point, a transition, and a year whose groups went sorely under documented. And which point in the year do you pick? Early ‘73 saw a very similar lineup to what was documented with On The Corner (killer). A few months later you have
Pete Cosey and Lonnie Liston Smith playing together for a few months. But I think for me the lineup to have seen would be the one that solidified on a tour of Japan and then Europe in the second half of the year….Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas on guitars, Al Foster and Mtume holding down the drums/percussion and Dave Liebman on reeds, with of course Michael Henderson playing the bass. Heavy, dense, funky, spacey, futuristic head music of the highest caliber. Its not the same as having been there but spending some time with the live recordings and videos of this period is highly recommended listening!
Mike: Can
My favorite Can stuff remains on the Tago Mago release. I have no idea if they were still playing any of this in 1973 (Future Days had just been released), but I’d still love to see them here, in their prime.
Hugh: King Tubby's Hometown HiFi sound system
A lifesaving escape for me from the snobbery that pervaded (with numerous, amazing, exceptions) my grad school experience was the reggae sound systems in the community center and pubs of East Oxford. Easy access to incredible reggae records in London shops and a lively email correspondence with Jacob and Daniel about them were similarly sustaining during a tough time. I'd kill to experience King Tubby's Kingston Hometown HiFi sound system in the early 70s as the focus moved from deejay cuts of Treasure Isle Rocksteady tunes to heavier Roots rhythms. The speaker horns in the trees and the evolving sophistication of Tubby's engineering innovations would undoubtedly send me (doubly so if any dubplate of a track from the Upsetters'Cloak and Dagger LP ended up on the turntable).
Those are our thoughts. What are yours? Which five bands would you go back to 1973 to see? Hit reply and let us know. We’ll pick our favorite list. Winner gets a choice of poster from our winter shows.
With love,
Dan, Daniel, Hugh, Jacob, Mike
Luke Stewart x Black Eyes
Between solo work and his playing with Blacks’ Myths, Irreversible Entanglements, and more, Luke Stewart seems like he’s everywhere these days. We find that his music and words affect and ring with us.
Here’s a conversation between Luke and Daniel.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I saw on your website you describe yourself as working in creative music. And I was curious to hear you describe that lineage. Because on the face, it feels pretty open. So I'm curious to hear you talk about what that means to you.
Luke Stewart: Okay, great. So yeah, creative music is not an open term. It's a very specific term, harkening back to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. An organization that spawned amazing improvisers, composers, performers, et cetera, et cetera, some more well-known than others. But also who coined the name for a particular style of improvisation.
And also drawing further distinctions between improvisation and jamming - focused improvisation based on a lot of non-idiomatic considerations. But also open to anything - to anything and everything. And incorporating that into your original sound and music concept. So yeah, creative music is a proper term.
DMM: I was familiar with the AACM and that cohort of incredible artists. And it does feel like the appropriate term because jazz is often applied and it feels extremely inappropriate or not the right fit.
LS: Well, yeah, that's an ongoing debate that's been going on since before the AACM was founded. Jazz and what that is, what that means and the implications of that. And even if we take out all that stuff and just look at the reality of what is known as jazz these days, the stuff that we play is not that at all. So it is tied more so to that language of creative musicians. I think a lot of people prefer that anyway.
DMM: And do you feel like that's distinct from the realm of the composer? That's another word that has a lot of baggage to it.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, it does. And yeah, you’ve probably heard me talk about my thoughts on “the composition” and sort of the hierarchy that it imposes on, not just the music ensemble, but really on a particular worldview about what music is. And how music works. I'm interested in more so in non-hierarchical situations and really challenging the concept and also the industry structures as well that come out of that mindset of capital-C composer. Because, if you think about it, the entire music industry was built around that concept. Around, you know, “I write songs and they're mine. They're my notes. And if somebody else uses that song or plays that song, then they owe me some money, because they're my notes.”
That's kind of a larger industry debate about how composers and songwriters and people get paid in the system. But it's worth examining in terms of just how we think about music and how we can imagine, not only a different creative hierarchy, which is no hierarchy, but also we can imagine how we can exist in these structures.
[More from Luke, and video from Philly below for paid subs…]
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