Out From Outside – Preparing to Play with John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, & Milford Graves

  • Date: February 17, 2022
  • Time: 11:30 am—1:00 pm
  • Location: Paul Robeson Gallery Workshop B
  • Speakers

“To speak of this music is to speak for it, and that really means to speak as part of it. Not to identify with it but to join its ensemble. To become part of its gathering-work.” —Fumi Okiji, “Oriki For Don Cherry; To Be Part of a Gathering-Work” The proposed panel offers a rigorous celebration of another way of being together that is offered in the social aesthetics of free jazz and its improvisatory protocols. Collectively, as Out From Outside, our ensemblic imperative is animated by a shared desire to increase our susceptibility to the music. Thinking serves music, here. If suggesting an aim inherently implies an appeal to completeness, Out From Outside is aimless. Or, more precisely, our abeyance of closure embraces constant preparation as a necessary precondition for slipping with the music as it slips from our grasp. We hear saxophonist Darius Jones’ insistence, via Fred Moten, that “Black music is inconceivable,” which is to suggest that our playful assembly looks to turn it out rather than pin it down; to amplify Black music’s inconceivability and appeal to a different formulation of time, space and being all/together. Willfully enfolded by the music, we offer three papers that dwell at the intersection of Black Studies and jazz scholarship, while designating play—the music that is played—as both an object and method of study. The first paper explores Amiri Baraka’s encounter with John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland and the specific ways in which listening to “Alabama” (tributed to the victims of the 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing) causes Baraka to decouple the beauty of Black creative expression from the terror visited upon Black life—a dually haptic and nonsensuous formulation that goes against the grain of Frantz Fanon’s configuration of the blues as a “modicum of stylized oppression.” The second paper develops a formal genealogy of Black art by connecting the film technique Arthur Jafa refers to as “Black Visual Intonation” to the music and choreography in Cecil Taylor’s staging of Adrienne Kennedy’s A Rat’s Mass in 1976, an opera that Taylor describes in the program notes as “play [that] becomes poem metamorphized by ‘Shout,’ traditional formation of Black communal gatherings.” Finally, the third paper details an encounter with the Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency exhibit in New York, arguing that the exhibit, rather than presenting a linearly enclosed chronology of Milford’s life, advances an archival site by which Black life’s improvisational acts of “play” (specifically in Free Jazz) never cease “playing,” as the various images, ephemera and sounds from Milford’s musical life improvise and re-contextualize themselves within the exhibition space—disrupting Western humanism’s rigid temporalities and enclosures to the futurity of Black play, which is always inextricable to Black life. Out From Outside began as a friendship forged at the “Unit Structures: The Art of Cecil Taylor” conference held at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College in 2019. It has since evolved into a monthly radio show, Mixcloud project, academic speaker series and study group.


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