Quickly, since I have waaay too much shit to do to justify blog-posting-- I think musicians could teach (young) poets a lot about incorporating, moving past, learning from their "elders." I am sick of the "kill yr idols" model of innovation. Even though punk coined the term (kill yr idols), in practice, they've really moved away from that reductive phrase; they aren't half so antagonistic about it as young poets seem to be. (The "we vs them" mentality of the poetry world is very simplistic, and I don't know that all the work justifies the arrogance.) From what I've experienced in seeing/hearing people working together on projects across the lame "age-divide," and in conversations about it with musician friends, they have a much healthier and more open sense of what it means to be in relation to their influences -- for example, Nate Young from Wolf Eyes, pictured here with Anthony Braxton. Which reminds me of the funny interview I did with Nate, John, and Aaron; I should *really* fucking publish that one day.
Cross-generational collaboration anyone?
2 comments:
Wow, great pic! This set was just put out on CD, but while I would have loved to have seen it, I'm a little wary of whether it translates to disc. I played it safe and got the Braxton/Frith disc instead (amazing).
Thurston Moore wrote up a description of the whole thing:
"victo fest - friday - braxton has intense press conference in hotel - after
spending 20
minutes on each question where he goes way off on tri-axioms and jazz history
metatheoretics. coley asks last question: "is it true you cleaned out the wolf
eyes merch
table at a swedish festival last year?" -- braxton leaps up and says wolf eyes
are the new
universe and he decided right then and there to move to stockholm and become a
cook so
he could be closer to this music. then he learns they are from michigan and his
worldview
is shifted and he realizes that there is hope for america with new angels of art
existing
here like wolf eyes. he claims his friends now refer to him as anthony "wolf
eyes" braxton.
no shit. so wolfs and hair po show up and we hit the hotel bar hard and braxton
appears
after his duo gig with fred frith and connects with wolfs and nate asks braxton
if he would
like to smoke a joint. "I would be honored to smoke marijuana with the wolf
eyes". Again,
no shit. Next day braxton is at gig (3 pm) and nate asks braxton if he wants to
jam w/ the
wolfs and braxton says yes, just let me know when and nate says play the whole
gig dude.
So after more weed blowing they hit the stage. the audience is all seated at
round tables in
a huge theatre called the Colisee. Hair police already decimated this crowd,
they were
awesome. But now we're tripping. this is too unreal. Braxton swoops in and out
of the
jams, at one point doing killer long sax tone duets w/ olson. Nate announces
stabbed in
the face. and then olson asks braxton what jam they should do next. "Black
Vomit" sez
Braxton. seriously, no shit. unbelievable sickness."
Yeah, know, I love it. The Wolf guys are very good friends of mine, so I heard the story of the jam and Braxton straight from the horse's motuh. You may be right about it not translating to disc -- much of that stuff doesn't.
John Olson's description of Braxton: "He's a weird dude." Ha!
I'm totally intrigued by the cross-genre stuff going on in muisc right now. Did yu see the aticle about the band Sun0))) in this Sunday's NYTimes magazine?
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