Printed for p.sarram from The Wire - August 2018 (Issue 414) at exacteditions.com.

Copyright © 2018
Printed for p.sarram from The Wire - August 2018 (Issue 414) at exacteditions.com. Copyright © 2018
Printed for p.sarram from The Wire - August 2018 (Issue 414) at exacteditions.com. Copyright © 2018
Printed for p.sarram from The Wire - August 2018 (Issue 414) at exacteditions.com. Copyright © 2018
Printed for p.sarram from The Wire - August 2018 (Issue 414) at exacteditions.com. Copyright © 2018
Printed for p.sarram from The Wire - August 2018 (Issue 414) at exacteditions.com. Copyright © 2018
Forever And Never The Same
David Toop
The Wire Issue 414 August 2018

The history of minimal music has been distorted by racist received wisdom that
discriminates between white simplicity and black primitivism. David Toop sketches a story
of black minimalism that runs through Pentecostal preachers, finetuned funk ensembles,
and the music of the people
Here’s Tyler, The Creator, dressed with snap and flair, gorgeous colours, “Golf boys, it’s
them golf boys”, styling his own line of Golf Wang, Golf Le Fleur, even Golf Pride T-shirts,
tops and bottoms, turning white pride and blackface to the service of LGBT and black
pride, and now here’s something from the Michael Ochs photo archive, circa 1950, Nat
‘King’ Cole dressed impeccably as ever in a double breasted, white buttoned
cardigan/blazer hybrid, big smile, golf club jauntily resting on his right shoulder. Given the
shoddy, hypocritical way he was treated during his heyday it’s a surprise that nobody
arrested him for carrying an offensive weapon or snuck up behind him to hang a bundle of
Dick Whittington’s possessions from the crooked end.
But wait, what’s this, Nat presenting a trophy to a black golfer, Charlie Sifford. Of course,
all three men in the photograph are black, which suggests the white people stayed away.
About to putt his ball on the first hole, it was Charlie Sifford who discovered, during the
1952 Phoenix Open, that the cup was full of human shit. We might think of a line from the
theme song to Douglas Sirk’s Imitation Of Life – “Without this, our lives are merely, an
imitation of life” – apparently sung by Nat, though in truth the vocalist was Earl Grant, also
known for his minimalist Hammond Organ exotica, tracks like “Trade Winds”
that replicated the tropical bird songs of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman with organ
effects.
In her blog, Welcome To My Simple Life, Yolanda V Acree quotes a comment from Joshua
Becker’s site, Becoming Minimalist. Becker is a good looking white guy who has done very
well out of his philosophy. Basically: simplify. Ten ways minimalism will change your life,
his website advises, and who am I to argue? The thing that caught Yolanda’s eye was
from Jon, who suggested that discarding outward signs of status and identity if you were
African-American risked forfeiting respect and any kind of foothold in an unequal society.
“Therefore,” Jon concluded, “is minimalism, much like golf, a white man’s philosophy?”
Something similar could be asked about all that jungle exotica of the 1950s and early 60s,
or ambient music or, come to that, minimal music. Are we really so backward that this
question still smacks us in the face, even though music is supposedly so far ahead of golf
in such matters that it swings in a parallel dimension? All of these genres, if that’s what
they are, share a common characteristic: through sound they articulate fantasies of lives
unlike the life that is actually lived. For that reason they are both powerful and dangerous.
Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s book The Sonic Color Line identifies tropes of purity, “the
vibrational transmission of whiteness’s alleged connection to spirit and intellect”, the least
bodily, tempered sentiment. Listen for a moment to Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” from the video
album version of Lemonade. Underwater, she speaks of cheating and betrayal, under her
words a repeated sound which may be the reversed-world auditory ghost of Andy Williams
(a golf guy, for sure) – “... Fasted for 60 days, wore white, abstained from mirrors,
abstained from sex, slowly did not speak another word/In that time my hair I grew past my
ankles/I slept on a mat on the floor/I swallowed a sword/I levitated, went to the basement,
confessed my sins and was baptised in a river, got on my knees and said amen…”.
Moving from that pure shriven state of renouncement glowing white to a righteous rage
that is anything but tempered, she moves speedily along a darkening trajectory that
includes Bible pages soaked in menstrual blood (thus setting off all the conspiracy crazies,
the Satan snipers and Horus hunters), the unbound voice recalling a recording by Alan
Lomax, an Alabama baptizing scene in which the Reverend WA Donaldson baptizes his
15 year old daughter. After buying this record in the early 1970s a vivid image fixed itself in
my mind – the setting is at the river – but then an account by Shirley Collins, present in
1959 for the bodily, untempered sentiment of this event, describes a scene more saturated
in the symbolism of rebirth, two deacons pulling at an iron ring on a trap door set in the
floor of the church, revealing a sunken baptism pool. “By now,” she writes, “the Pastor and
two deacons were standing knee-deep in the water, and they helped her down. She
jumped up and down, half-laughing, half-crying, shouting and screaming ‘Thank you
Jesus!’ over and over again.” This scream is repeated nine times before the recording
fades. She was completely submerged by her father, then, like Beyoncé, “she came out
really shouting”.
“Without ever consciously expressing the sentiment,” Stoever writes, “white Americans
often feel entitled to respect for their sensibilities, sensitivities, and tastes, and to their
implicit, sometimes violent, control over the soundscape of an ostensibly ‘free’, ‘open’, and
‘public’ space.” She cites the example of a white man named Michael Dunn marking his
aural territory within a Florida petrol station in 2012: “Dunn didn’t want to hear hiphop at
the pumps, so he walked to the jeep where Davis and his friends were listening to music
and demanded they turn it down. When the teenagers refused, Dunn shot into their car
and fled.” Jordan Davis, all of 17, was shot dead.
So minimalism. Less is definitely more than you bargained for. Ask a random bunch of
academics, composers, whatever, to identify the originary source of the big M and more
than a few will call up John Cage’s 4'33", the piece that we all know was inspired by
Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings, because in their nothingness they reflected and
collected the moving shadows of the world beyond themselves. Subsequent history could
have been different had Cage chosen to be inspired by Rauschenberg’s black paintings of
1951–53 instead, embedded not with shadows but newsprint and gravel. Those sounds
heard during Cage’s silences; are they shadows or newsprint? Rauschenberg’s intention
was for these two series – black and white – to be considered in relation to each other. As
Stephanie Rosenthal wrote in the catalogue essay for Black Paintings, an exhibition she
curated for the Haus der Kunst in Munich: “[The white paintings] register as cool and aloof
when juxtaposed with the black paintings, which appear variegated, warm and literally
earthy.”
Alongside and against these readings of black and white (in which nothing is black and
white) we should counterpose Fred Moten’s essay, The Case Of Blackness, who
assembles in the writing what he calls an “audiovisual ensemble” of Ad Reinhardt and
Cecil Taylor, Albert Ammons and Piet Mondrian, quoting and commenting extensively from
a 1967 conversation between Reinhardt and Taylor in which Taylor was moved in
exasperation to address Reinhardt’s insistence on black as a non-colour, an absence of
colour: “Don’t you understand that every culture has its own mores, its way of doing things,
and that’s why different art forms exist?”
Correct me if I’m wrong but Cage never spoke about Africa or African diaspora arts, other
than when he was denigrating jazz as a music of habit(s). One of the stories he liked to
recount concerned his class in Oriental Music at the New School of Social Research,
playing a record of a Buddhist service (presumably Japanese), that began with “a short
microtonal chant with sliding tones, then soon settled into a single loud reiterated
percussive beat”. The two polarised reactions – “Take it off, I can’t bear it any longer” and
“Why’d you take it off? I was just getting interested?” – pointed Cage in the direction of an
allegedly Zen idea, that if something is boring, keep doing it and eventually it gets
interesting (like a habit, for example?).
Buddhist controversialist Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche had a different idea about this, that
boredom in a Japanese monastery is supposed to be boring. According to him, all the
repetitive gestures and practices typical of this life are twisted by American students into
an aesthetic of simplicity, a work of art. “The black cushion is supposed to suggest no
colour,” he wrote, “complete boredom. But for Americans it inspires a mentality of militant
blackness, straightforwardness.”
One of the attendees at Cage’s New School course in 1958 was Richard Maxfield. The
following year he taught his own class in electronic music at the school, La Monte Young
as his acolyte/teaching assistant and George Maciunas among the attendees. Maxfield
committed suicide in 1969, hence his ongoing obscurity, but his importance to specific
scenes in which minimalist acts were foregrounded as the work-in-itself – La Monte
Young, Terry Riley, Terry Jennings, Yoko Ono, Henry Flynt and George Maciunas –
becomes evident as soon as you investigate their stories. Within this milieu Maxfield was
the first to use tape loops; in 1960 he manipulated, filtered, repeated and pitch-shifted
loops to make a piece called Amazing Grace. It also happened to incorporate as material
the voice of a revivalist preacher named James G Brodie, not necessarily African-
American but almost certainly so, to judge from the small fragments of intelligible voice
that emerge from the murk of a tape composition that could use some restoration and
remastering.
Maxfield returned to this idea in 1966 with another short, chaotic loop piece called For
Sonny Wilson, dedicated to “Sonny Wilson, the world’s greatest wonder preacher”. From
Maxfield, via direct influence or some sort of mysterious osmotic process, came the
unexamined trope of the black voice in early white minimalism (EWM) and, by extension,
the musics of black America, Bali, India, Ghana and Japan that provided in every case the
stimulus to thinking about notated composition and performance in ways that were not
new but for young music students shattered the prevailing European orthodoxies of so-
called higher learning. They were, so to speak, raw materials.
“Unhearing James Brown as monotony is a survival of the belief that black
minimalism is a form of incapacity whereas white minimalism is connected to spirit
and intellect”
Raw in the troubling sense of being ‘captured’ as field recording, or sound object
manipulable according to laws set down in the hearing world of European musique
concrète, in which a sound can allegedly be isolated from its ecology. Raw in the troubling
sense of being harmonically, bodily and emotionally untempered, intense with rampant
energy and vibration.
By EWM I’m referring, of course, to the ‘reduced canon’: Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La
Monte Young and Philip Glass. In 1964 Reich recorded a black Pentecostal preacher –
Brother Walter – in Union Square, San Francisco. Walter was preaching about the Biblical
flood and Reich’s piece – It’s Gonna Rain – made in early 1965, was based on the phase
movements of two tape loops extracting that phrase and the sound of a pigeon’s wings
from the original recording. As someone calling himself Ebony Prince comments on
YouTube: “That ni**a cold invented sampling.”
Which is only partially true but it should give us pause, this presence of black voices and
black music lifted out of context, transposed into a world of entirely different values in
which the majority of its listeners will be entirely ignorant of the originary source and its
own tradition of minimalism. Speaking to Parabola journal in 1988, Steve Reich described
the environment of his listening between 1962–65: Father AM Jones’s book Studies In
African Music, hearing The John Coltrane Quartet play live and then what he calls the
early rock scene, Martha & The Vandellas, Bob Dylan and “Junior Walker was playing
“Shotgun” with a repeating bassline throughout the whole tune with no change”. Junior
Walker & The All Stars also showed up in one of Terry Riley’s early experiments with tape
loops, Bird Of Paradise, “Shotgun” warped and twisted out of recognition by tape
manipulation techniques no doubt learned from Richard Maxfield.
At this moment I am listening to a famous recording made by Michel Vuylsteke in Burundi,
1967, two young girls singing a greeting called akazéhé. One of them rapidly alternates
chest voice and head voice, like a sound poet repeating and subtly varying her enunciation
of this word, in truth so much softer, more aspirated than its transcription suggests; the
other repeats short phrases in a voice frail as dry reeds, the polyphony of the two so
interwoven as to be mesmeric and confounding.
“Elemental Soul or Mindless Monotony?” a Melody Maker writer asked in his 1971 review
of James Brown’s “Hot Pants”. In June of the previous year another writer dismissed “I
Want To Take You Higher”
by Sly & The Family Stone in four words, repeated three times with one misplaced comma:
“Sock it to me, sock, it to me, sock it to me”. Obviously he had yet to hear the silent 0'00"
title track of There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Prejudice against repetition and variation as musical
form has a long history. Here is an account of a vodun ceremony performed in Congo
Square in 1825: “I recognized an old negro by the name of Zozo, well-known in New
Orleans as a vender of palmetto and sassafras roots... he was astride of a cylinder made
of thin cypress staves hooped with brass and headed by a sheepskin. With two sticks he
droned away a monotonous ra-ta-ta, ra-ta-ta, while on his left sat a negro on a low stool,
who with two sheep shank bones and a negress with the leg-bones of a buzzard or turkey,
beat an accompaniment on the sides of the cylinder.”
These are raw materials of reduced circumstance. In WT Lhamon Jr’s remarkable book
Raising Cain: Blackface Performance From Jim Crow To Hip Hop, the practice of paying
slaves, either with money, fish or eels, to dance at Catherine Market, close to Chatham
Square (by happy coincidence the name of Philip Glass’s record company) is examined in
great detail. “The dancing for eels,” he writes, “was a performance of eclecticism that
modelled later performance in the Atlantic world.” Thomas F De Voe’s The Market Book,
published in 1862, describes this dancing, a “shakedown” in which some dancers would
turn around and “shy-off” from their designated spot on the board or “shingle” to which they
were confined. Lhamon questions this confinement, suggesting instead that
transgressions of the shingle’s boundaries may have been a deliberate enticement
through which the patron, perhaps a joking butcher, would be drawn into African-American
customary practice: “This shingle scene shows black performers early toying with the way
patrons think they control black gestures,” he writes.
The unhearing (or “severe and partial hearing” as Fred Moten says in another context) of
James Brown as monotony or of Sly Stone as nothing more than cliche is a toxic survival
of this complacent belief that black minimalism can be controlled through self-delusion as
a form of low incapacity whereas white minimalism, even when clearly derived from radical
black music is, as Jennifer Lynn Stoever wrote, somehow miraculously connected to the
higher places of spirit and intellect. “Hot Pants” may not have been Brown’s greatest
recording – it was one of his biggest hits, however, and 18 years later was buried within
other samples as the basis of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” – but the interlocking
minimalism of ‘Sharp Cheese’ Martin and Robert Coleman on guitars, Fred Thomas on
bass and John ‘Jabo’ Starks on drums was far beyond the abilities of any white group of
the time. Listen to the lyrics of a 1968 recording, “Licking Stick – Licking Stick”: “People
standing, standing in a trance/Sister out in the back yard, doin’ her outta sight dance”.
What are they saying? That this is trance music, music in which a woman can shy off from
her designated spot on the shingle, “doing the latest thing”. Maybe there is some memory
in there of Brown’s harsh and lonely childhood, whippings he didn’t deserve from his father
or a “vicious man” named Jack Scott who strung him up naked and beat him with a belt to
near unconsciousness. Maybe, but the words are also explosions, rhythmic allusions to
nowness, energy and culture, the imagery fitting the form, licking stick, a means to make
you move.
As Brown related in his autobiography: “It was another one-chord song like “I Can’t Stand
Myself”. But it had even more of a funk groove. It was a rhythm section tune, a licking
stick... My music said where I stood.” At the time Brown was the target of criticism for his
politics and patriotism, his rags to capitalism trajectory, but the music proclaimed itself of
the body, of community and history, of infinite subtlety within the rigour of stasis, of a
higher purpose. Listen to Jimmy Nolen’s guitar part, the precision of a three part phrase on
an E-flat ninth chord (the first part a fast slide up and back from E ninth): duyeuhdakadah-
dukukdukdukuduk. Nolen was a T-Bone Walker disciple in the 1950s, playing uptown
blues with jazz chords, tunes like “Strollin’ With Nolen”, over time refining the style into
what was known as chank or scratch guitar. It remained uncompromising black minimalism
out of which has flowed an unending stream, from Bootsy’s Rubber Band to Miles Davis’s
“Honky Tonk” to Chic to RP Boo’s “Daddy’s Home” to A$AP Rocky’s “Fukk Sleep” (with
FKA Twigs) and Tyler, The Creator’s “Who Dat Boy” and “Pothole” to Beyoncé’s
“Formation”.
Recently I read a tribute to Julius Eastman, written by bassist Susan Stenger, and was
moved by her account of his tenderness. Bootsy, he nicknamed her, after she took up the
bass. There, in a word, is a parallel history that will never reach those accounts of
minimalism that focus on white control of the soundscape, a limiting to personalities that
rejects the entangled, discursive nature of complex multiple histories.
In 1959, during the trip in which Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins recorded the collection
speech and lining hymn of Reverend RC Crenshaw many years later sampled by Beyoncé
for “Freedom”, this unlikely duo came by chance to Como, Mississippi, a site of
tumbledown shacks, mangy hound dogs and hens, children hiding behind their mothers’
skirts, where they found three brothers, Ed, Lonnie and GD Young. Lonnie played cane
whistle, called a fiste; Ed played bass drum and GD played snare drum. Lomax’s account,
in The Land Where The Blues Began, is intoxicatingly poetic if wildly speculative. “The
sweet African sound washed across the yard,” he writes. The Young brothers began with a
tune called “Oree”, “…no words,” he continues, “just an occasional low-pitched howl from
Lonnie, answering the high call of the fife.” Beautifully, he describes the women dancing,
shadows rising up like a big bird in the orange light of the kerosene lamp. For Lomax, this
relationship between improvisation, the interplay of the musicians and dancers and their
relationship to earth, the ground, the shingle, was a sacred ideal. From his somewhat
myopic, rigid political position as an execrator of all commercial music, he takes the trouble
to contrast this rhythmic collective with counting beats with the fingers, dancing with only
the legs and feet: “The results of taking the non-African road and trying to play hot rhythms
with the extremities are manifold, ingenuous sometimes, and often offensive. They are
called everything from hard rock to funk, from minimalism to Einstein On The Beach.”
Shirley Collins, offensively reduced by Lomax in this same passage to “the lovely English
folksinger who was along for the trip” has her own account in America Over The Water,
more balanced, less florid yet equally overcome by the strange minimalism flourishing in a
poor Mississippi settlement. “I was completely spellbound watching this man reduce
himself in size,” she wrote, “the women clapping him on. When he was level with the earth,
the women bent down and drummed the ground with their hands. He swept his hand over
the dust then brushed it across his forehead, leaving a white mark. As he slowly uncoiled
and regained his full height, I turned to look at Alan to convey my wonder at what I’d seen.
Like me, he had tears in his eyes.”
As Lomax acknowledges, albeit reluctantly, this music was not purely African. It grew from
the entanglement of what Paul Oliver called African retentions with fife and drum
orchestras of the European military in America, going back to early 17th century militia
units in New England and the Middle colonies, where all slaves were forced into military
training. Thomas Jefferson’s slaves formed a fife and drum band for the War of
Independence; a black fife and drum corps played for a Confederate regiment during the
Civil War. According to David Evans, the authority on this research, this is a complex
history of hybridisation and divergence. The minimalism of the music is not monotony, but
repetition and variation founded in ancestral African forms, minstrelsy, popular music of
the 1920s and the disciplined aurality of battle. So what have we learned? Reductionism
names a process applicable to a broad range of practices – Mieko Shiomi and Taku
Sugimoto, Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker, João Gilberto’s “Undiú”, Laurie Spiegel’s
Drums and Pauline Oliveros with The Deep Listening Band, Hamilton Bohannan’s “Let’s
Start The Dance” and Soft Machine’s “We Did It Again”, Jlin’s “Ra” and Tapper Zukie’s
“Man Ah Warrior” – yet to reduce any such tendency in music to the career paths of a few
individuals, let alone a small group of white men, is morally, historically and politically
indefensible. Minimalism ain’t so simple as it sounds.
Speculative notes towards a diasporic mixtape: black minimalism
Farley Funkin’ Keith “Funkin’ With The Drums”, Sonny Terry “Fox Chase”, Alice Coltrane
“Battle At Armageddon”, Bongo Joe “Transistor Radio”, Thelonious Monk “Epistrophy”,
The Fearless Four “Rockin’ It”, James Brown “Ain’t It Funky Now”, Baby Dodds “Spooky
Drums No 1”, Sly & The Family Stone “In Time”, Mr Fingers “Washing Machine”, John Lee
Hooker “Walkin’ The Boogie” (double-tracked version), Edwin Birdsong “Rapper Dapper
Snapper”, Bo Diddley “Bo’s Guitar”, Ed & Lonnie Young “Hen Duck”, Sun Ra “Rocket
Number Nine”, Fela Anikulapo Kuti “Shakara”, Prince “Kiss”, Missy Elliott “Get Ur Freak
On”, Fatback Band “Wicky Wacky”, Shabazz Palaces “Dèesse Du Sang”, Miles Davis
“Mademoiselle Mabry”, Grace Jones “Private Life”, Napoleon Strickland “My Babe”, Al
Green “Love Ritual”, One String Sam “I Need A Hundred Dollars”, Company Flow “Friend
Vs Friend”, Phuture “Acid Trax”, De La Soul “Transmitting Live From Mars”, Donny
Hathaway “Vegetable Wagon”, Jimmy Yancey “Melancholy Blues”, Dorothy Ashby “The
Moving Finger”, The Meters “Look-ka Py Py”, Duke Ellington/Coleman Hawkins “Mood
Indigo”, Getatchew Mekurya “Antchi Hoye”, Parliament “Flash Light”, Goodie Mob “Cell
Therapy”, Herbie Hancock “Butterfly”, Barbara Mason “Another Man”, J Dilla “Time: The
Donut Of The Heart”, Drexciya “Bubblemetropolis”, JB Lenoir “I Sing Um The Way I Feel”,
Maze “Twilight”, Timmy
Thomas “Funky Me”, Bobby Hutcherson “Prints Tie”, Aux 88 “Direct Drive”, Syreeta “Tiki
Tiki Donga”, Junior Walker & The All Stars “Shotgun”, Lyn Collins “Think”, Lee Perry “The
Rightful Organiser”, The JB’s “Same Beat”, John Coltrane “After The Rain”, King Tubby
“Dub Fi Gwan”, Coleman Hawkins “Picasso”, Konono No 1 “Kule Kule”, Shirley Horn “Blue
In Green”, Mbuti Pipe Ensemble “Luma Pipes”, Critical Rhythm “Fall Into A Trance”, ESG
“Moody”, The Isley Brothers “Fight The Power”, Jomanda “Make My Body Rock”, Love
Unlimited Orchestra “Strange Games And Things”, Method Man “PLO Style”, Model 500
“Night Drive”, Nitro Deluxe “Let’s Get Brutal”, Mantronix “Bassline”, Reese “Just Want
Another Chance”, T La Rock “It’s Yours”, Reese & Santonio “The Sound”, African
Headcharge “Primitive”, Baby Face Leroy “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”, Dave & Ansell Collins
“Double Barrel”, DJ Screw “Drank”, Don Cherry/Ed Blackwell “Smiling Faces, Going
Places”, Fantasy Three “Biters Dub”, Junior Kimbrough “Burn In Hell”, Kasai AllStars
“Kabuangoyi”, Madlib “Pyramids (Change)”, Masanka Sankayi “Le Laboureur”, Robert
Pete Williams “Grown So Ugly”, Sensational “Thick Marker”, Frank Ocean “Nikes”,
Bootsy’s Rubber Band “Vanish In Our Sleep”, Isaac Hayes “Ike’s Mood”, King Stitt “Dance
Beat”, Shuggie Otis “XL-30”, Jay Dee “You’ve Changed”, The Success All Stars “Doctor
Satan All Stars”, Mandrill “Fencewalk”