Post by darkstar on Jan 20, 2006 13:27:30 GMT
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Offbeat Offbeat Archives
A Beat-driven collaboration
By alexander varty
Publish Date: 19-Jan-2006
Beat as in beatific, beat as in smacked down, beat as in tired or junk-sick—the Beat Generation writers were aptly named, for their efforts encompassed every state of being from hobo to holy. But there’s another sense of beat that’s applicable, too: beat as in rhythm. Poetry and music have always walked hand in hand, but Jack Kerouac and his circle made that connection especially explicit. Think of Kerouac’s Charlie Parker–inspired outbursts, William Burroughs’s Lester Young–style cool, or the cantorial undertones in Allen Ginsberg’s fervent Howl: just as beats drive music, music drove the Beats.
And of all the Beat poets, the most musical must be Michael McClure. As early as 1956, he was writing lines inspired by the asymmetrical phrases of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk and the orderly passions of Joseph Haydn. A decade later he plunged into electronic opera with synth pioneer Morton Subotnick; just last week he was working on new songs with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. And even when he’s not conspiring with musicians, he’s still a sonic innovator, as I find out when I reach him at his Oakland, California, home.
Ten minutes into our conversation, McClure quotes his own “Ghost Tantra 51” to make a point about how music and his words fit together.
“I love to think of the red purple rose/In the darkness cooled by the night,” he intones, stretching cooled out into a jazzy glissando. “We are served by machines making satins of sounds/Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr/Body eats bouquets of the ear’s vista.”
From there, the poem slides into what McClure calls “beast language”, a roiling assemblage of narrs and gahrs and thahrrs. Like music itself, it’s the kind of dialect that conveys what words can’t; each blot of sound is a bud or a star.
“Michael’s a very unusual poet,” says another of his musical collaborators, pianist, singer, and pioneering minimalist Terry Riley, reached at his own Bay Area home. “He’s like a musician in the way he delivers his poetry: it has a lot to do with rhythm, the pitch of his voice, and timing. His poetry has a sonic architecture to it that’s really great in terms of musical collaboration; he’s very comfortable in that format.”
Riley and McClure are old friends but relatively recent accomplices; they’ve known each other since the early 1960s, yet it was only seven or eight years ago that they started appearing together, as they will at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Friday (January 20). Both agree that they’ve hit on something special.
“I feel that Terry and I are side by side on the stage,” McClure says. “We both simultaneously do our creation and hear the other person, and it seems to always go together.”
Riley adds that his performances with McClure are both intimate and unplanned, with the artists allowing their live chemistry to develop naturally. “What Michael and I usually shoot for are long arcs where the music and the poetry are on two different kinds of courses,” the composer and North Indian–trained vocalist explains. “In our album I Like Your Eyes Liberty, for instance, you’ll hear where sometimes he’s changing from one poem to another, but the music keeps on with its own development. So what we’re trying to achieve is a long, arcing experience in which poetry and music will merge together in different ways. It’s a little bit random in a certain sense, because we never know how we’re going to do that; every time we perform together, it’s different. There’s nothing codified in it.”
McClure agrees, but jokes that not all their spontaneity is intentional. “We’ve noticed that if Terry plans one thing, he always does another,” he says. “But what he ends up with is always above and beyond the parameters of what he intended to do. It’s wonderful, and I like that very much. I like going up on-stage and having a lot of room for spontaneity and freedom.”
In fact, Riley’s improvisational virtuosity is spilling over into McClure’s use of language??. “Sometimes Terry will take a Zen poem of mine, which he can vocalize into a raga-like sound, and then I might add to it the same poem, or other poems related to it,” the poet explains. “I might even work in a sound poem, but I’ll do it utterly and completely spontaneously. And at one point, when we were doing the record, I surprised myself: I was almost beginning to sing, which is something I don’t want to do.”
This fear of vocalizing might seem surprising, given that McClure’s phrasing is so musical, but the poet claims he’s better off when he sticks to speaking his texts.
“I just don’t have a good singing voice,” he demurs.
That may be the case, but with words that sing so well it doesn’t matter a bit.
www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=15476
Offbeat Offbeat Archives
A Beat-driven collaboration
By alexander varty
Publish Date: 19-Jan-2006
Beat as in beatific, beat as in smacked down, beat as in tired or junk-sick—the Beat Generation writers were aptly named, for their efforts encompassed every state of being from hobo to holy. But there’s another sense of beat that’s applicable, too: beat as in rhythm. Poetry and music have always walked hand in hand, but Jack Kerouac and his circle made that connection especially explicit. Think of Kerouac’s Charlie Parker–inspired outbursts, William Burroughs’s Lester Young–style cool, or the cantorial undertones in Allen Ginsberg’s fervent Howl: just as beats drive music, music drove the Beats.
And of all the Beat poets, the most musical must be Michael McClure. As early as 1956, he was writing lines inspired by the asymmetrical phrases of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk and the orderly passions of Joseph Haydn. A decade later he plunged into electronic opera with synth pioneer Morton Subotnick; just last week he was working on new songs with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. And even when he’s not conspiring with musicians, he’s still a sonic innovator, as I find out when I reach him at his Oakland, California, home.
Ten minutes into our conversation, McClure quotes his own “Ghost Tantra 51” to make a point about how music and his words fit together.
“I love to think of the red purple rose/In the darkness cooled by the night,” he intones, stretching cooled out into a jazzy glissando. “We are served by machines making satins of sounds/Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr/Body eats bouquets of the ear’s vista.”
From there, the poem slides into what McClure calls “beast language”, a roiling assemblage of narrs and gahrs and thahrrs. Like music itself, it’s the kind of dialect that conveys what words can’t; each blot of sound is a bud or a star.
“Michael’s a very unusual poet,” says another of his musical collaborators, pianist, singer, and pioneering minimalist Terry Riley, reached at his own Bay Area home. “He’s like a musician in the way he delivers his poetry: it has a lot to do with rhythm, the pitch of his voice, and timing. His poetry has a sonic architecture to it that’s really great in terms of musical collaboration; he’s very comfortable in that format.”
Riley and McClure are old friends but relatively recent accomplices; they’ve known each other since the early 1960s, yet it was only seven or eight years ago that they started appearing together, as they will at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Friday (January 20). Both agree that they’ve hit on something special.
“I feel that Terry and I are side by side on the stage,” McClure says. “We both simultaneously do our creation and hear the other person, and it seems to always go together.”
Riley adds that his performances with McClure are both intimate and unplanned, with the artists allowing their live chemistry to develop naturally. “What Michael and I usually shoot for are long arcs where the music and the poetry are on two different kinds of courses,” the composer and North Indian–trained vocalist explains. “In our album I Like Your Eyes Liberty, for instance, you’ll hear where sometimes he’s changing from one poem to another, but the music keeps on with its own development. So what we’re trying to achieve is a long, arcing experience in which poetry and music will merge together in different ways. It’s a little bit random in a certain sense, because we never know how we’re going to do that; every time we perform together, it’s different. There’s nothing codified in it.”
McClure agrees, but jokes that not all their spontaneity is intentional. “We’ve noticed that if Terry plans one thing, he always does another,” he says. “But what he ends up with is always above and beyond the parameters of what he intended to do. It’s wonderful, and I like that very much. I like going up on-stage and having a lot of room for spontaneity and freedom.”
In fact, Riley’s improvisational virtuosity is spilling over into McClure’s use of language??. “Sometimes Terry will take a Zen poem of mine, which he can vocalize into a raga-like sound, and then I might add to it the same poem, or other poems related to it,” the poet explains. “I might even work in a sound poem, but I’ll do it utterly and completely spontaneously. And at one point, when we were doing the record, I surprised myself: I was almost beginning to sing, which is something I don’t want to do.”
This fear of vocalizing might seem surprising, given that McClure’s phrasing is so musical, but the poet claims he’s better off when he sticks to speaking his texts.
“I just don’t have a good singing voice,” he demurs.
That may be the case, but with words that sing so well it doesn’t matter a bit.
www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=15476