Music Monday: Placing the Music

One of the threads that runs through the “music Monday” segment of this blog is that context matters when we listen to music. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy music without any context or that some kind of historical context matters more than contexts that are more personal to us. Instead, I like to think that music not only has the capacity to bring together dense networks of contexts but also, often, relies on these contexts to expand the experience of listening to music and draw us into music in different and sometimes revelatory ways.

This weekend, I read little gaggle of articles sent along to me by Kostis Kourelis on jazz festivals as heritage events in the International Journal of Heritage Studies. Interestingly, these articles mainly focused on jazz festivals held outside the US and therefore apart from the traditional origins of jazz music. At the same time, European and Australian jazz festivals have developed their own heritage both as recurrent events and as places where the complex contexts of cultural exchange, race, class, and musical influences intersect. 

This weekend, I’ve been listening to drummer Tom Skinner’s Voices of Bishara which features an impressive cast of London jazz artists including Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings who are favorites on this blog.

The album has an interesting origin story. Apparently it was partly inspired by Abdul Wadud’s solo cello album titled By Myself (1978) which Skinner listened to “repeatedly” during the COVID lock down.

This album was also inspired by an event at the innovative London restaurant, listening bar, and music venue called Brilliant Corners. Brilliant Corners features a pretty crazy sound system anchored by a a quartet of refurbished Klipsch horns and they run events called “Play Twice” where the audience listens to a classic album and then musicians perform a response. On one particular night, they played Tony Williams’s Life Time (1964) which produced such an inspired response that Skinner decided to write an entire album around it.

The result is Voice of Bishara, which embodies not only the avant-garde sensibilities embodied in Abdul Wadud’s By Myself, but the deep rhythmic awareness Tony Williams’s Life Time. That said, the album isn’t a live set or even a traditional “live” jazz recording, but a deeply remixed album where Skinner deliberately cuts and layers performances to create compelling soundscapes. 

At the same time, this album communicates something of our COVID inflected age. It’s hard to avoid the sense that Skinner’s repeated listening to Abdul Wadud’s By Myself represents both the kind of indulgence possible during COVID lockdowns, but also embodies the kind of distilled experiences encountered during the darkest and most isolated times of COVID that we’re only still coming to terms with artistically and individually. (I can’t stop thinking about Joe McPhee’s Route 84 Quarantine Blues; to get the sense of that album check this out).

The difference is that Voices of Bishara isn’t a quarantine album in the spirit of Jason Moran’s The Sound Will Tell You (2021), but an album that carries the context of COVID quarantine in its DNA while also traces the very latest developments in London jazz localized for one night at least what must have been a  remarkable musical experience in a London listening bar. 

Finally, I can’t stop comparing it in my head to Shabaka Hutchings’ Afrikan Culture (2022) which embraced a more reflective sound that seemed to emphasize textures and moods over melodies and harmonies. While I recognize that there were as many experiences in COVID lockdown as COVID lockdowns, I feel like Hutchings recording captured something of the unnatural quiet that I experienced in those days when the world stopped moving forward so relentlessly and instead became a series of textures and moods that invited (or maybe even required) more quiet, persistent, and repeated encounters.