v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Jim Marshall-Photographer A You Tube Discussion

Best Music of 2021- Julius Eastman

 

This is the minimalism that I need. Music that grows inside of you the longer you listen to it. I keep thinking about all of the music of his that was lost when his possessions were put out on the street in the 80's never to be recovered. But we have Feminine a truly great composition. Let's hope some more pieces are uncovered in the coming years.

From New York Times:

California had dropped nearly all its pandemic restrictions earlier in the day, and Wild Up, the contemporary-music collective that was rehearsing in the space that night, was a mixture of the masked and unmasked. Beers bobbed in a bucket of ice water and stood, perspiring, next to players’ chairs for swigs during pauses.

The heat gave a delirious, sweaty sheen to already delirious music: Julius Eastman’s meditative, kaleidoscopic, eventually ecstatic “Femenine,” which Wild Up plays on a revealing new recording and was preparing to perform outdoors a few days later in Orange County.

At the rehearsal, the band dipped into big chunks of the 70-minute piece. Conversation at one point turned to musical energy — how it stays up and how it falls, intentionally and not. One of the horn players raised his hand and asked about an effect he wanted to try.

“Just do it,” said Christopher Rountree, Wild Up’s founder and director, who was helping conduct some of the complicated cues. “If it’s wrong, it’s great.”

That advice gives a sense of Eastman’s risk-taking and, for better and worse, loosely defined music. His body of work includes surreal conceptual exercises; raging, pounding pieces with incendiary titles; and slowly evolving drones — as well as “Femenine,” from 1974, in which an ensemble keeps blossoming and receding, organically growing and decaying, with jeweled sweetness over the snowy white noise of ceaselessly shaking sleigh bells.

Black and gay when few experimental composers were either, Eastman was an impish, provocative fixture on the New York scene into the 1980s, but drifted into mental illness and homelessness, and died in 1990 in obscurity, just 49. What little was left of his work then was a shambles, and his music went almost entirely unplayed and unheard for years.

From Van Magazine:

In late 1981 or early 1982, the composer and vocalist Julius Eastman was evicted from his apartment in New York City. City marshals placed his belongings on the sidewalk, including all of his scores, and Eastman walked away, leaving everything behind. After years of drifting in and out of homeless shelters and bumming money from friends, he died in a hospital in Buffalo in May of 1990. The first obituary, by Kyle Gann in the Village Voice, appeared nine months later.

Today there is a renewed interest in Eastman and his work. The composer and writer Mary Jane Leach, who produced a compilation of his music called “Unjust Malaise” in 2005, has edited a new book about him, with Renée Levine Parker, called Gay Guerilla: Julius Eastman and His Music. Leach has also been collecting and preserving Eastman’s scores, maintaining an archive on her website. In mid-September, the Frozen Reeds label will release a live recording of his 1974 composition “Femenine.” Jan Williams, a percussionist and member of both the Creative Associates and the S.E.M. Ensemble who worked extensively with Eastman in the early 1970s, said this resurgence of interest is “long overdue. He was a very gifted composer but a very complex person. Sad that more of his scores are not extant.”

The release of “Femenine” provides a lost link in Eastman’s work; it’s a pivotal point between earlier compositions like “Thruway” (1970) or “Stay On It” (1973) and the later “Nigger” series (1978-79). The “Nigger” series and other pieces are good examples of the provocative humor that Eastman sometimes used. “Nigger Faggot,” “Crazy Nigger,” and “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” show how Eastman liked to provoke his audience before the concert had even began. (The Bowerbird series in Philadelphia last year censored their posters so as not to cause too much of a public outcry, though the self-censoring of the poster was an excellent marketing move in and of itself.) “Femenine” represents the beginning of the end of Eastman’s career in upstate New York. He relocated to New York City in 1976 where he continued to work for a few more years, both on his own projects and with others, such as Meredith Monk, Arthur Russell, and the New York Philharmonic under Boulez, to name just a few.

The score for “Femenine” is barely more than a sketch, a scant four and a half pages long for 72 minutes of music. There are timing indicators, some notated variations on the theme, and some written instructions along the lines of “displace” with an arrow or “move back and hold.” It almost doesn’t seem like enough to produce a piece as compelling as “Femenine.”

The work starts with a few minutes of the pulse, in this case a motorized tambourine, while the band warms up. The theme is introduced a few minutes in and is almost as simple as one can imagine: twelve repeated sixteenth notes, eighth, quarter, eighth, quarter, eighth, eighth tied to a dotted whole note. It’s just enough syncopation for the piece to sit in a deep pocket, a groove unmatched in classical music in 1974.

Like many early Eastman compositions, “Femenine” does not have a fixed instrumentation. The constant pulse is similar to the pulse in Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” which premiered two years later. Via email, Leach said, “Reich’s pieces and Julius’s pieces are similar in the way that Gregorian chant and Byzantine are—one is pretty rigid, and the other is looser…rigid vs. breathable. There is the fluidity of jazz and a swing that is missing from, especially, Reich.”

From an interview with performer Seth Parker Wood of Wild Up:

What makes Eastman’s music more relevant today as increasing attention is given to underrepresentation in classical music?

To be very honest, his music should have been more relevant and celebrated in his time, but alas, many of the same “gate keeper” systems surrounding the classical sphere are alive and well today. Eastman’s relevance is based on his authenticity and willingness to bare all of himself in his work and try out different idioms, whether they be blues sonorities, liturgical quotations, or Patti Smith-inspired bass lines. He wasn’t afraid to use popular music inflections in his work, and that type of risk-taking in our field–combined with an absolute mastery and understanding of harmony, tension and form–is what makes his music successful. He embraced genre-fluidity for the sake of expression that didn’t come off as forced, and that is why so many have flocked to him. He has inspired a new breed of artists, and his very existence shows that someone of the past renounced the cages of a system we’ve all been taught, and succeeded in doing what we are now attempting at this very moment.

However, it is not lost of me that he wasn’t the only one creating such genre-fluid music in his time, but Eastman’s entire persona is woven throughout his work, and that seems to be what the public has lauded and embraced. As overdue attention is being directed towards underrepresented creative groups and individuals, I think it’s important that the public resist boxing their outputs into something from the inherited canon. These creative’s works are their own, and are innovations based on their present and past histories. I urge those in the field and those supporting the arts to experience it through that lens, and try not to label it as a second-rate imitation.

 

Best Music of 2021- Arooj Aftab

 

Music to think. And look at life, internally. A different set of sounds for our time. Art sometimes moves differently than what is happening in popular culture. This does that. And we can be thankful for it.

From Pitchfork:

Intended as a second chapter to her debut album, Vulture Prince takes the airy minimalism and virtuosity of Bird Under Water and strips it down even further. Five of the seven songs here lack any form of percussion, propelled instead by the soft intensity of Aftab’s voice and the delicate cadence of strings and keys. Gone too is the traditional Pakistani instrumentation, replaced by a filigree of gentle violin, harp, double bass, and synths. At the center of it all is Aftab’s powerful voice, suffused in a sorrow so deep that it seeps into your bones.

As if to make this connection—and divergence—explicit, Aftab opens the album with a new interpretation of “Baghon Main,” a mahiya folk song that she first tackled on Bird Under Water. Her original rendition was cavernous in scale, a vast space washed by layers of accordion swells, drum flares, and plaintive guitar. This version is much more intimate. Harp, violin, and double bass brush lightly against each other as Aftab sings of love unfulfilled, a melancholy captured in its opening imagery of empty swings swinging in a garden breeze.

“Diya Hai,” the last song Aftab ever performed for her brother, plunges further into pathos. Over Badi Assad’s arpeggiated guitar, bolstered by the elegiac strings of the Rootstock Republic, Aftab dives into a poem by Mirza Ghalib, one of the subcontinent’s most revered Urdu and Persian poets. Ghalib’s poetry was often obsessed with suffering and loss, a reflection of not only personal tragedy but the political, social, and religious turbulence of his time. Aftab taps into a similar mystic vein of spiritual existentialism, stretching her syllables as if to make space for the overwhelming intensity of her grief.

Aftab’s voice is often compared with Abida Parveen, the transcendent Pakistani “Queen of Sufi Music.” And while that comparison is justified (Aftab herself cites Parveen as an influence), her singing on this record also bears a close similarity to the Hindustani classical vocal stylings of Sulk Station’s Tanvi Rao. It’s not just that they both eschew the taan—a specific pattern of vocal modulation common in ghazals—in favor of a disconsolate elasticity. They both share a very different vision of musical fusion, one that is also evident in the new-age musings of fellow New Yorker Priya Darshini and the Hindustani-classical-jazz-hip-hop mashup of Lahore band Jaubi. Rather than attempt to bridge Eastern and Western music, with all the ideological and historical baggage baked into the notion, they draw from an organic amalgamation of the diverse influences they can call their own. Educated at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Aftab has as much of a claim to the Western traditions of jazz and experimental electronica as to the folk and classical music of her native homeland. She mixes and matches these traditions not with the awkward, respectful hesitancy of an outsider, but with the casual intimacy of an initiate.

From RHST Today (hish School Paper):

Arooj Aftab, Pakistani composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, released her latest record, Vulture Prince some weeks back. Garnering similar critical praise, yet more apparent popularity, than her two prior albums, 2015’s Bird Under Water and 2018’s Siren Islands.

Going into this, I knew nothing. Like, literally nothing. A friend mentioned it to me in passing and I bookmarked it on my phone because I knew a smidge of Hindustani music. I, however, did not know any Ghazal, nor much about Arabic music in general, nor any understanding of Urdu, the language in which the album is sung. So set’s.

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a modern analog to the poetic expressionism and long-form, dreamy songs of the chamber-folk singer/songwriter albums of the 1960s, such as Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. That kind of music takes a lot of emotion, ability, and wonder, to write. It allows for the listener to float in and out, exploring the sounds as both a pleasant atmosphere and deeply heartfelt listening in tandem. Anyway, I feel like I’ve found that, at least in spirit, with this record.

Vulture Prince is an album highly open to description, yet above exact classification. So much could be said about this music that you could fill an entire page with adjectives, and yet not fully convey everything it has to offer. A perfect way to start would be with its cover; hazy and dusky, but melancholic and deeply mesmerizing. The atmosphere is so critical here that there’s even been a perfume oil produced to accompany the album. Its description states: “Wet earth, ripe stone fruit and a faint smokiness tell a story about the color purple and all its beautiful scents amplified by monsoon season”. Again, just as accurate a description to the music itself.

To actually talk about the music, the first track, “Baghon Main” opens you to the world. A picked instrument, harp-like, leads in; slowly, gracefully, the listener is swept away into a dreamy, dark, yet pastoral soundscape. The first thing many listeners will take note of is her voice; at times smooth and delicate, at times human and conversational, similar to bossa nova artist Nara Leão’s in the way she floats over wavelike guitar lines and subtle flutters of strings like a brisk wind blowing over a shoreline.

The instrumentation is a key point of favor for the album as well. While rooted in traditional sounds with a string and harp backing, Aftab’s compositions come to light with a variety of nontraditional instruments, such as guitar, flugelhorn, and even synthesizers. A modern, unique production style helps to add even more depth— elements are sparsely treated or reversed in a way not immediately apparent upon first listen, but providing a subtle sense of disorientation for the listener.

Also, while relatively unimportant to mention, the mixing on this—courtesy of Grammy nominee Joshua Valleau—is phenomenal: the soundstage is at once vacuous and intimate, with really subtle reverb. A great balance of clarity and purposeful obscurity.

From Composer:

Ripples of twinkling harp open Arooj Aftab’s new album Vulture Prince, setting the tone as something bright and optimistic. As the song ‘Baghon’ unfolds further and the ripples are joined by deep steps of double bass and the New York-based musician’s elegant vocals, it becomes clear that although this is something new, it’s also something familiar too.

Baghon is, in fact, a song that first appeared on Aftab’s debut album Bird Under Water in 2014. Back then, it had a longer title (‘Baghon Main Pade Jhoole’) and a different arrangement. That version was darker, more sombre; elongated accordion notes floating uneasily under sparse percussion. 

“It’s funny because this version that’s on Vulture Prince is actually the original version that I had written, but it just didn’t come together back then,” Aftab explains. She headed in a different direction but never forgot her initial idea, always feeling connected to that first draft. When working on her new record, she decided she wanted to subtly link it to her debut album and – as well as connecting them via avian-themed titles – chose to bring back the version of Baghon she’d always loved. 

Bringing together the old and the new is an inherent theme in Aftab’s work. She has described her sound in the past as “neo-Sufi”, referring to the fresh twist she puts on the music and poetry of Pakistan (where she was born), merging it with influences like jazz fusion and Ella Fitzgerald. Her records also present songs and poems by the likes of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi and Urdu poet Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, reworked with her own ideas. 

Vulture Prince's title itself has a similar bridging effect between the past and something more present. It has many different meanings for Aftab, including being a reference to the vultures that pick at the dead laid to rest at a Tower Of Silence – a traditional circular burial site. But it also represents Aftab’s ambitions for this album, her desire to merge more of her personality with the music. 

“It’s always been perceived as very serene and beautiful – and almost sacred – music,” she reasons. “I wanted to push the envelope a little bit and take ownership of how I am as a person who’s smoking cigarettes and cursing a lot, drinking whiskey, and just being in the streets.”