SOUNDTRACK: STEVE COLEMAN-“Ritual” (Field Recordings, April 27, 2012).
This Field Recording was filmed at the Newport Jazz Festival [Steve Coleman And The Invention Of New Languages] is one of the few where the artist speaks over the music.
Coleman talks about the tradition of making vocal sounds with music. He says that Jen Shyu was a classical singer before she started singing with them. She is Taiwanese-American and after working with them making sounds (not necessarily words), sometimes she sings snippets of any of the languages she speaks, and sometimes not.
The Asian-American singer Jen Shyu speaks several languages, among them English, Spanish, Portuguese and various East Asian tongues from China, Taiwan and East Timor. But then she started performing with saxophonist Steve Coleman. None of her native tongues would serve for his knotty tunes; “doo-bop-a-da” scat singing wasn’t going to cut it, either. So she had to devise her own sound and fury — perhaps signifying nothing formally, but full of intense personal feeling.
This short piece is trumpet and sax and Jen’s voice and they all seem to be doing their own thing, but it all melds nicely.
Steve Coleman has long been known as an inventor of language — a composer who draws equally from rigorous examination of music theory, esoteric natural science and myth, and Charlie Parker. But you don’t have to speak his language to be entranced by it. There’s flow, and pulse, and delightful chord changes. And, yes, it’s a little disorienting, which seems like part of the point.
Coleman’s vision was on display when his band Five Elements played the Newport Jazz Festival last year. But we wanted to know more. So we brought him, Shyu and trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson into the ruins of Fort Adams for a more intimate, stripped-down look at his music. We also asked him for a translation into the English language: “If anything, that’s what this music is… It’s a lot of different influences, coming from different places — plus, whatever’s coming from inside you, which is the main thing.”
It’s pretty cool to hear what you know is nonsense but still feel it embued with meaning.
[READ: April 10, 2016] “Alone”
I have read a lot of stories by Yiyun Li and I have consistently enjoyed them all. What I especially like about them is that while none of them are ever “exciting,” (since they are all about small human dramas), none off them are ever boring and none are ever quite the same)..
Most of the stories are an encounter between one to four people and they have something in common (or not) which brings them together. It’s the commonalities that vary so greatly in each story–and those commonalities are virtually never the “interesting” or “dramatic” part of the story.
This story begins with Suchen, a young woman, sitting in a cafe. The waitress has just asked her how she is dealing with the smoke. There is no smoke so she just nods. The man sitting next to her leans over and fills in that there have been wildfires in the north.
There is an older couple sitting at the table next to her as well. She imagines what it would be like to be with someone you trusted until you were that age. For the time being anyhow, that won’t be her as she and her husband Lei have recently separated–on pretty much mutual terms although Lei is the one who started the proceedings. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 