Poster Design: Subpotent I

This post is a little bit about art and a little bit of self-promotion. My new band, Subpotent, is shaping up. We are almost done with our first set and getting ready to start playing shows in Tallahassee!

To start building awareness, I designed this poster inspired by surrealist art, situationist technique, and propaganda. This design reflects the band’s aesthetic and (I think) powerfully imprints the message with the combination of strong color, bold type, and an arresting image stolen from the Dalí/Buñuel film Un Chien Andalou.

Jazz as a Social Force: Archie Shepp and Jason Moran’s “Let My People Go”

If you list the forces in 2021 working against jazz, and against an album like this one, it can feel overwhelming, depressing even. Do not despair. This is only a feeling. The truth is somewhere else, somewhere deeper.

Let us list the forces anyway.

First there is our shared understanding, taken as universal truth for at least sixty years now, that jazz is a thing for the museum set or the coffee shop, a factory of ambiance for Olive Garden or an upscale brunch. Jazz was once a living thing, this view holds, a music for crooks and drunks and junkies. Now its proponents and creators emerge from university programs, bleary-eyed from study, fingers inked by charts and ears indented by noise-canceling headphones, marching toward classrooms of their own. Don’t get me wrong, these are artists. They know every head in the fakebook. They’ve mastered their craft and many of them capitalize on this mastery to move the art in new directions. But many of them are equally at home serving as historians and conservators, pulling riffs and solos from the grimoire or Slonimsky’s Thesaurus. When you put it all together, jazz viewed from this frame of reference feels a bit like publishing monographs for the academic press. This music once moved mountains. Now it must exercise its influence through the same channels as philosophy and the social sciences: grants, endowments, public television. If you support Jazz at Lincoln Center, you may qualify for a thank you gift. Ask your operator for details. 

The old mountain-movers possess a sort of mystique, therefore, like former heads of state or old soldiers surveying the world with a thousand yard stare. Their numbers are dwindling, and with them passes a unique way of listening to the world and reacting to its vital rhythms. With jazz, popular music reached a crescendo of sophistication and creativity that took listeners to the very edge of popular sensibility and sometimes beyond. It was almost too much. It was almost as though Americans exhaled a collective sigh of relief when Little Richard took the stage. The best students of jazz will continue driving the form, and some of them will push it further, but it is almost seventy years since the heat of rock and roll displaced bebop’s cool, and the distance between here and there, now and then, feels greater than ever before.

It is mostly the session players from those heady days who remain with us now, not the stars, aging alongside the modern artwork in darkening valhallas from New York to San Francisco. If you dwell on it in this frame of mind, a jazz record can feel like a funeral procession. Perhaps this is appropriate. Born from the funeral marches of old New Orleans, jazz seems destined to return to the bayou shades. 

We live in the age of the funeral procession, but jazz is not the music for this age. Witness the first moments of the video for “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” A duo is a uniquely intimate mode of collaboration. Especially in an improvisational medium, each partner in the duo must understand the other’s moves, must know their very mind. In this light, the distance between Shepp and Moran in the opening moments of the video feels like a yawning gulf. If the moment hits you right, the gulf between the artists on that dimly lit stage feels like the chasm separating us from all of the friends and loved ones we’ve lost this year. It feels like the passage of time, the inevitability of entropy and change. Thank God for the horn that moves us past that moment, into the now. 

If you think of this album as a sort of fastness, a place made warm and safe through a powerful magic combining equal parts spirit, talent, collaboration, and history, you can hear the music repelling these forces like a force-field. Let My People Go is not a funeral march. It is not a testament to the passage of a generation or the decline of all things. It is, instead, a remarkable antidote to the depressing array of negative forces that send us into fits of melancholy at the beginning of YouTube videos or set us off on doom-scroling odysseys into the far corners of night. Let My People Go is a force for good. 

The album opens on “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” a spare rendition of the moving Negro spiritual rendered all the more powerful by this remarkable duo. Jason Moran’s expansive intro sets a fitting stage for Shepp’s piercing exploration of the melody. Shepp and Moran play in proximity to one another but rarely together, probing the song’s musical themes like murmuring voices in the darkness, seeking one another, seeking consonance. This is the power and the promise of a masterful duo. Each artist has the space to stretch out, but the restraint to fill the voids left by their counterpart without drowning them out. Shepp and Moran achieve this careful balance on the album’s opening track.

My favorite moments on the album come on its second cut, a meditation on Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington’s 1967 standard, “Isfahan.” Where Ellington’s piece is a perfect study in restrained beauty, Shepp and Moran draw out its blue notes, seeking shelter in the spaces in between the notes of the melody as though from a quiet rainstorm. Shepp’s time spent playing alongside Coltrane shines through on “He Cares,” which opens on an expressive, birdsong intro and slowly climbs toward a moving crescendo across the next six and a half minutes. When Moran moves into the spotlight around 3:30, the piece coheres beautifully. 

“Go Down Moses,” the fourth cut, seems to examine the dialectic of tension and possibility inherent in freedom through the interplay between Shepp’s opening improvisation, set against Moran’s restless, oceanic backdrop, and Moran’s solo improvisation building up to Shepp’s expressive, vibrato singing. The duo carries us into new territory with “Wise One,” a freer, more consonant space. With “Lush Life,” the duo flies the perennial Strayhorn standard beloved by Coltrane to transcendence, and the closing track, “‘Round Midnight,” keeps them firmly in those rarefied spaces. 

“If my music doesn’t suffice, I will write you a poem, a play. I will say to you in every instance, ‘Strike the Ghetto. Let my people go.’”

Archie Shepp, “An Artist Speaks Bluntly,” Downbeat, 1965

The forces this record repels only feel overwhelming when they are framed as cultural forces, and that is only because we’ve spent the last sixty years convincing ourselves that culture is somehow both sacrosanct, on the one hand, and thoroughly shaped by immovable hegemonic forces, on the other. For music, this view conflates market forces with culture, valorizing expression through its quantification to argue that its forms are no longer valid when they fail to move units or fill seats. To put it as simply as possible: fuck that. Of culture and music we may say this instead: jazz gives the world meaning through a set of coherent rules and rituals. This way of looking at the world was supremely influential for a brief period before and after the second world war before giving way, as a popular commodity in the marketplace, to other forms of expression. It did not die when its practitioners moved to conservatories. It is not passing.

It is the crushing inevitability of commodification that Let My People Go most powerfully counteracts. Shepp and Moran’s message is a cultural one, yes, but it is also a social one. It is there that we should spend some time. “Let my people go” harkens to Moses in Egypt, but it was the terrible lash of slavery that reduced millions of Africans to things, to motherless children on the auction block. From the beginning of his career in the 1960s, Shepp’s music has been centered on liberation—wailing for freedom, exalting in its possibilities, lamenting its elusiveness. In 1966, he told Downbeat that jazz was “for the liberation of all people.” “Why is that so?” he continued, “because jazz is a music itself born out of oppression, born out of the enslavement of my people.”

The pandemic is a social force. So is violence in defense of power. So is the market, with all its cruel iniquity. We may feel these forces as an overwhelming weight upon our shoulders. We may view them as insurmountable, hegemonic. To do so would be to ignore that enduring promise of jazz, however, and the complete and utter freedom it offers its adherents. Art, Shepp insists, can be a countervailing force. Listening to his work with bandmate Jason Moran on Let My People Go, I cannot help but agree. It is fitting this art should find us in a dark hour.

Syllabus: February 14th

A list of interesting things new and old that I’ve read or experienced this week. I do not endorse or even necessarily agree with anything on the other side of these links.

Articles

Adegbuyi, Fadeke. “LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe: How the professional platform makes networking weird.” Every.to. https://every.to/divinations/linkedins-alternate-universe-21780381 — Adegbuyi says what we’ve all been thinking: LinkedIn is weird.


Evans, Benedict. “Retail, Rent, and Things that Don’t Scale.” https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/2/6/things-that-dont-scale — Evans offers some interesting thoughts on the retail experience and, as a result, challenges readers to stop thinking of Amazon as a sort of indomitable dragon.

Ford, Paul. “The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office.” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/the-secret-essential-geography-of-the-office — What makes a successful essay? One thing you can do is take something commonplace, like the office, and make us see it in a new way. Consider the passage: “I think of those as ‘weeping paths,’ part of the secret map of every office. You cannot sob at your desk, so you must go on a journey, smiling at the floor, until you find a place where emotion can flow.“Litvinenko, Yuri.

“Windows’ Little Brother, Bearer of Microsoft’s Grand Ambitions.” 30pin. https://www.30pin.com/features/windows-ce-history/Perhaps you think that a history of Windows CE couldn’t possibly be interesting. Think again. This article sheds even more light on how Microsoft’s total dedication to the Windows brand between around 2002 to around 2010 seriously damaged the company’s ability to execute anything else.

Lowe, Katie. “The Rise of the Digital Gothic.” CrimeReads. https://crimereads.com/the-rise-of-the-digital-gothic/ — A thought-provoking critical perspective from an unexpected place. Perhaps, by placing us in constant contact with the many ghostly presences of capital, technology is hastening the end of the end of history.

Rizvic, Sejla. “Everybody Hates Millennials: Gen Z and the Tiktok Generation Wars.” The Walrus. https://thewalrus.ca/everybody-hates-millennials-gen-z-and-the-tiktok-generation-wars/ — Just to be clear, generational discourse is bullshit. But since we’re surrounded by people who believe in it, and then act on that belief, articles like this one are necessary. Roy, Sumana. “The Problem with the Postcolonial Syllabus.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-problem-with-the-postcolonial-syllabus — Roy asks, what’s the matter with merely taking pleasure in novels? Why must novels written by authors living in “postcolonial” settings impart some sort of moral or offer some deep criticism?

Videos

The Little Things.

Music

Death by Unga Bunga. Heavy Male Insecurity.

Various Artists. Cuba: Music and Revolution: Experiments in Latin Music, 1975-1985. https://soundsoftheuniverse.com/sjr/product/cuba-music-and-revolution

Art

Andrew Salgado. — https://www.instagram.com/andrew.salgado.art/

Roadsworth. http://www.roadsworth.com/

Takram. “Moriota Shoten.” http://www.takram.com/projects/a-single-room-with-a-single-book-morioka-shoten/ — profile of a unique bookstore in Japan which sells one book at a time. Benedict Evans discusses this store in his article above.

Books

Coupland, Douglas. Bit Rot: Stories & Essays. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016.

Cory, Cynie. Here on Rue Morgue Avenue. Tallahassee, Fla.: Hysterical Books, 2018.

See you next week! (Or, you could keep an eye out for more writing, photos, art, and other stuff here during the week)…

Syllabus: January 29th

A list of interesting things new and old that I’ve read or experienced this week. I do not endorse or even necessarily agree with anything on the other side of these links.

Articles

Broderick, Ryan. “Happy Birthday, Guy Fieri,” at Garbage Day. — Because after I had read or heard about eighty GameStop and wallstreetbets explainers this week I was thrilled to read: “It is both terrifying and liberating to look clear-eyed into the meaningless void at the heart of modern life and accept it for what it is.” This looks like a decent mailing list, actually.


Cho, Adrian. “The cloak-and-dagger tale behind this year’s most anticipated result in particle physics,” at Mel. — If the wild intro that uses the R.E.M. song about the beating of Dan Rather in 1986 as a way to start an article about particle physics doesn’t grab you, perhaps the science will. Bonus: fans of Bruno Latour and the anthropology of science will definitely nerd out on the breathless description of laboratory heroics.


Grimm, David. “Ice age Siberian hunters may have domesticated dogs 23,000 years ago,” at Science. — Fuck it, I like dogs and I wanted to include this one.


Klee, Miles. “Everything you Never Wanted to Know about the ‘Sigma Male.'” — Machines turn inputs into outputs. The internet is a machine that transforms time into ever more toxic forms of masculinity.

Video

Pahokee. Directed by Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan. 2020. A beautiful documentary on four high school students in the titular town, a small (by South Florida standards) farming community down on Lake Okeechobee. The link goes to Kanopy. If you have a library card you can probably watch the film for free and then choose a few more to watch gratis, too.


Vast of Night. Directed by Andrew Patterson. 2020. — Look, this isn’t Spielberg, but it captures a little tiny bit of the magic from Close Encounters while imparting its own awareness of space, pace, and light. It’s a memorable film on Amazon Prime.

Music

If you like the ’90s you will probably enjoy this playlist of songs from a 1996 compilation called This Is… Trip Hop. I found this CD at Goodwill and love it.

Art

Florida landscapes by Eleanor Blair at Signature Art Gallery in Tallahassee.

Aryo Toh Djojo’s “Transmission” @ Wilding Cran Gallery.

Books

Clarke, Susanna. Piranesi. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020.


Cheryl Dumesnil, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

Other

If you were struck by the ineffable urge this week to point your phone out into the cold, lonely void and project an image of Bernie Sanders sitting in a chair somewhere out there, you might like this Sitting Bernie AR Meme. Use your phone and press “AR” to enjoy yourself for a few seconds.


I was inspired by Nicely Small, a curated list of small businesses in Vancouver created by the design firm Engine Digital. Tallahassee needs something like this.

Flash Fiction: “Crazy on You”

“No matter how good you are, there will always be someone better.” Michael didn’t remember these words when he heard the song on the radio. He remembered another of his father’s expressions instead: the wordless joy on his face when he watched his son play the bass all those years ago. Dad would bring home CDs and tapes during the week while Michael stayed with mom across town. “I’ve got something I want you to play for me when we get home,” he would say on the golden hour drive over on Friday afternoon. “Can you play this one?”

Michael almost always could play them. He could fake his way through anything his dad wanted, jamming along to the hits of the sixties and seventies on a big amplifier he carried up and down the stairs. Lit by the warm glow of the kitchen shining into the living room of his Dad’s upstairs apartment, he felt unstoppable, ripping through Santana, Pink Floyd, Spirit, Motown, his father nearly crying from joy at the silken effortlessness of his fingers on the fretboard.

Michael was scrolling over Twitter in the Drive-Thru line at McDonald’s when the song, Heart’s “Crazy on You,” came on the radio. He had heard the song a hundred times before, but this time the bass line caught his ear. The flat, compressed warmth of the tone. The almost indiscernible space between one note and the next. The irrepressible motion beneath the melody. The gesture toward counterpoint. He was surprised this song wasn’t one of his Friday night songs all those years ago, and shocked by the feelings it brought to the surface.

This was ridiculous. Heart never made him feel anything at all. It wasn’t supposed to. He wasn’t sure who was supposed to feel things when they listened to Heart, but it wasn’t him. But there it was anyway. He was unsettled and saddened, stirred to a smoldering anger in some deep register he couldn’t quite understand.

Maybe it was loss. Michael had played a few shows after high school, but it never worked out. Bands fell apart. Rent had to be paid. Moving away, going to New York or Nashville, took more than he could save. The movies about starving artists don’t tell you that it takes money to live like a pauper in a new place. By the time he learned how to take care of himself, though, it was too late.

Listening now, he could hear so much in “Crazy on You” that he would have missed then. Striving to outdo the performer, he would have added flurry upon flair–runs, ghost notes, slaps, sweeps–smirking over the fretboard, but he wouldn’t have heard the music at all. Maybe now he could do it right, he thought, because responsibility both gives and takes. The steady tug of necessity drove him away from music a few years after the living room concerts, yes, but didn’t it give him the humility to step back, to listen? It was a shame, he thought, to waste talent on the young.

But would he ever stand before an audience as joyously rapt as his dad had been so many years ago?