‘Yes, we’re free to do
anything and, as well, free to be ignored’
Malcolm Goldstein[i]
Introduction
In his article ‘Tracing Out an
Anglo-Bohemia: Musicmaking and Myth in Montreal,’ Geoff Stahl (2001) explores
the ways in which Montreal functions within Canadian (as well, though to an
obviously lesser degree, international) cultural discourse. And how this
position, and its concomitant structures, have allowed for the creation of, as
well as helped maintain and develop, an English-speaking artistic community that
understands itself according to a bohemian, counter-cultural identity. Defined
by a municipal history of politic—stretching back most notably to 1849 when a
mob burned down the Parliamentary buildings in what was then the capital of an
8-year old united province of Canada (Foster 1951)—cultural hybridity, artistic
experimentation, moral decadence and economic decline, this identity, Stahl
argues, has found expression in (among other things) an Anglophone music scene
whose participants conceive of it, and themselves, as ‘independent.’ That is,
as individuals in opposition to corporate control—with Toronto functioning
metonymically as the city to where the money has fled but that lacks Montreal’s
cultural vitality.[ii] Although
inevitably informed by its location within a majority French-speaking province,
Stahl quite rightly points to the influence of the French-English cultural and
language divide as of profound importance to the constitution of this Anglo-bohemian
musical identity given the deep-rooted distinctions that exist between most
Montreal Anglophone and Francophone musicians, their respective audiences and,
in many cases, performance spaces.
However, among partisans of at least
one Montreal musical scene what is most commonly referred to as ‘free
improvisation’ or, in Québécois French, musique
actuelle, this linguistic, cultural divide is much less significant. Made
up of both Anglophones and Francophones, as well as some Allophones (a term
seemingly unique to Quebec referring to those whose first language is neither
English or French), this scene’s identity is significantly informed by a
self-consciousness of its cultural diversity in opposition to the greater
uniformity of other Montreal music scenes. An appreciation for such cultural
diversity, combined with considerations of this scene’s relative vitality and
strength, motivates this paper. From interviews with a number of those involved
in the scene, attendance at numerous performances associated with it and close
analysis of documentary evidence (in print as well as audio and video
recordings of related events), I hope to explain how the extremely non-commercial,
and largely improvised kind of music that is associated with the label musique actuelle, and its common English
equivalent “free improvisation,” as well as the identities with which it is
associated, took root, survived and, arguably, continue to thrive as a
distinct, and internationally renowned music scene.
Part I: Setting the Scene
As sociologist Patricia Lamarre
points out, ‘Montreal is an unusual city in the North American context and is
significantly different from other cosmopolitan centers in Canada, such as
Toronto and Vancouver…[It] is the only major metropolitan center in Canada to
function predominantly in a language other than English; this on a continent where
English dominates massively’ (2007: 111). So even though, according to the 2006
Canadian census, only 13.45% of the population of metropolitan Montreal now claims
English as their mother tongue (Statistics Canada 2006),[iii] the importance of its
historical presence, in conjunction with its dominance throughout the rest of
Canada and the United States, gives it a far greater importance within the city
than its present numbers might otherwise indicate.
Indeed, it would be difficult to
overstate the importance of Montreal’s bilingualism to its cultural
constitution. Within Montreal, the question as to the use of French or English
colours (or, depending on one’s perspective, haunts) nearly all interactions
with strangers on account of the initial uncertainty as to which language the
other prefers to, or can, speak.[iv] It is
also a source of perpetual discord among some Anglophones and Francophones who
feel aggrieved by the perceived intolerance or closed-mindedness of members of
the other community. These perceptions are aggravated by the past 40 or so year
history of divisive events: the FLQ/October Crisis (1969-1970), the 1980 and
1995 referendums on the separation of Quebec from Canada, the 1982 patriation
of the Canadian constitution without the agreement of then Quebec premier René
Lévesque, and the late 1980s to early 1990s Canada-wide debates over the Meech
Lake and Charlottetown Accords. And it is this long history of language and
cultural hybridity that distinguishes Montreal most profoundly from newer
Canadian multicultural metropolises such as Toronto and Vancouver. Though both
of these latter cities have been profoundly changed by the influx of
non-English speaking immigrants to Canada that have made them their home over
the last 50 or so years (Troper 2000), they retain a cultural unilingualism
that is wholly foreign to Montreal’s core linguistic and cultural diversity, a
mixture that has been of integral importance to the development and support of its
free-improvisation music scene.
John Heward, who has lived in
Montreal most of his life and now plays drums in a variety of free improvisation
ensembles, traces the vitality of this music in Montreal to the city’s vibrant
nightlife in the 1940s and ‘50s, through the politically turbulent and
artistically experimental 1960s, the birth of musique actuelle in the 1970s and early 80s among
sovereignist-leaning Francophones, and a long period of relatively underground
genre-blending experimentation and exploration in the 1990s that culminated in
the opening of the Casa del Popolo, a now iconic Montreal venue specializing in
experimental music, in 2000.[v] Heward
also points to the few months spent by Sun Ra and his Arkestra in Montreal from
the fall of 1960 to early 1961 as, if not directly influential on later
Montreal musicians, at least an early, auspicious sign of the city’s openness
to free improvisation (Szwed 1997: 179-81).
As one of the founders of musique actuelle and its associated
record label Ambiance Magnétique,[vi] flautist,
saxophonist and composer Jean Derome has had a profound effect on the evolution
of improvisationally-based music in Montreal.[vii] In an interview he pointed
to the first Festival Internationale de
Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in 1983 as the origin of musique actualle on account of the
organizers need for a label for the type of music they wished to present.[viii]
Musique
actuelle
is a name that we gave to a community of musicians. To me it doesn’t mean much
in itself...I was content not to use a name at all because when you don’t have a
name it’s nice as one isn’t trapped by institutions. But it was the foundation
of the Festival de Musique Actuelle de
Victoriaville that announced the name publicly as it hadn’t had much of a
use before that...For me it describes a point of encounter between all the
avant-garde: modern jazz, free improvisation, what some call ‘art rock’—rock
that is non-commercial and artistic—and also contemporary music. It’s a fertile
and interesting meeting point for people with common interests.[ix]
Vitally
important to its correct understanding in English is the translation of ‘actuelle’
not as ‘actual’ (for what would ‘actual music’ even mean? Some variety opposed
to non-actual music?), but instead as
‘new’ or ‘current.’[x] Other
names I have heard from those involved in the Montreal scene to describe this
kind of music are ‘new’ and ‘creative’ although these are problematic in their
implicit characterization of other music as not-new
and non-creative. As Derome points
out, however, applying some name is seemingly unavoidable given the need to
promote and market music even—or perhaps especially—of a highly experimental kind.
For Derome, one of the most
remarkable characteristics of the contemporary Montreal free improvisation
scene is how musically and culturally diversified it is in comparison to the
resolutely francophone, politically left-leaning, sovereignist (i.e. desiring
for Quebec to separate from Canada) group of musicians (e.g. René Lucier,
Pierre Cartier, Robert Lepage, Joane Hétu) with whom he primarily performed
from the 1970s through 1990s. ‘Many musicians who have moved here from
elsewhere have told me that it was because of the group of us musicians around Ambiance Magnétique that they came here.
I appreciate that.’ Although he continues to play in groups made up primarily
of other Francophones, he has found himself performing more and more with
non-Francophones in recent years. He, along with all the other musicians I
interviewed, stressed the importance of such cultural cross-fertilization of musicians
and performance spaces as of integral importance to their own understandings of
the Montreal free improvisation scene.
Part II: Meanings of freedom
Before going any further a
discussion of the qualifier of “free” in “free improvisation” is necessary. For
‘freedom’ is a concept loaded with ideological significance within the hegemony
of an internationally dominant liberal, capitalist regime that extolls the
worth of individual freedom above nearly all else.[xi] Through its invocation of
freedom, the label ‘free improvisation’ acts as a mechanism of interpellation—calling
into existence the subjective identities and positions that fulfill the demands
of the relevant Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), whose function it is to
foster a sense of individual distinction and self-motivated creative expression
as a controlled, and ultimately neutered, outlet to anti-authoritarian
impulses. So conceived, such expressions of purported individuality serve to
affirm and help propagate the
consumerism that is of integral importance to the functioning of the very
capitalist system that is, in most cases, the very target of the expression’s
purported rebellion and/or resistance (Frank 1998; Heath and Potter 2004). On
this account, ‘free improvisation’ describes not a radically free musical
practice (and its attendant social engagements) in perpetual challenge to the
established order (artistic or political), but rather a musical community that
has been effectively marginalized precisely
because of its participants’
self-understanding as autonomous, free individuals unencumbered by the
cultural-ideological conditioning that produces those who make more
conventional, commercially-minded music.
The workings of this musical label’s invocation of freedom thus
bear no small relation to Michel Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis.’ Against
the view that understands sex as the object of growing repression beginning in
the 17th century, culminating in 19th century Victorian
prudery and then finally liberated (at least partially) in the latter half of
the 20th century with the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, Foucault
argues, rather, that sex has been transformed into a discursive regime of power
that has been integral to the production of the modern subject as a constantly
self-interrogating self (1990: 23-24). ‘For us, it is in the confession that
truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of
an individual secret. But this time it is truth that serves as the medium for
sex and its manifestations’ (1990: 61). Through the positioning of sex as
something personal and secretive, but simultaneously of increasing importance
to the well-being of society and at the center of a constantly proliferating discourse
of self-examination and confession, power comes to be invested in, and realized
through, both the minutiae of individual bodily responses and the broader complexes
of the society in which they exist (1990: 146).
Crucially for Foucault is why this
narrative of sexual repression has been so compelling for so many despite, he
points out, there having been a ‘veritable discursive explosion’ over the last
three centuries pertaining to sex (1990: 17). His answer is that conceiving of
sex in terms of repression works to the advantage of those who speak of it
since they are thus granted the status of deliberate transgressors and truth
tellers and thereby accrue the corresponding benefits of such a romanticized and
ostensibly anti-normative yet liberatory position.
What sustains our eagerness to speak in terms of repression
is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter
truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and
manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of
knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden
of earthly delights’ (1990: 6-7).
By
speaking about or, in the case of music, playing that which is supposedly taboo,
individuals position themselves as courageous truth-tellers defying society’s
irrational and unjust proscriptions; artists on the edge of the avant-garde
forging ahead for new truths in opposition to society’s inherent conservatism.
Indeed, Foucault asks whether ‘the critical
discourse that addresses itself to repression...is not in fact part of the same
historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by
calling it ‘repression’?’ (1990: 10). That is, rather than sexual repression
(whether real or imaginary) and its various critiques existing in opposition to
each other—the latter true, the former false—Foucault suggests that they are
part of the same ‘discursive fact’ produced by relations of power; that they
are, in fact, mutually dependent. Although likely conceived as a break from
what has come before and motivated by altruistic, liberatory desires, Foucault
argues that the critique of purported sexual repression actually shows many
continuities with far older processes as but a ‘more devious and discreet form
of power’ (1990: 11). This is because, Charles Taylor points out, the critique
is not conceived of as resulting from the workings of power, but instead ‘as
science, or fulfillment, even “liberation”’, which ostensibly stand outside of
power and are thus capable of escaping from its strictures (1985: 152). But since
such seemingly independent points of resistance are themselves the products of power,
they function as its perfect disguise precisely on account of their status as
seemingly self-evident truths. Therefore, according to Foucault, a complete escape
from power is impossible; at best, one can realize small-scale, localized
resistances to it in order, merely, to upset a present regime of ‘truth’ in
favor of its substitution for another that is, however, in no way morally
superior to what came before. They are simply different.
Although not a perfect comparison,
given its lack of immediate association with pleasure to the same degree as
sex, the notion of freedom invoked within the Montreal free improvisation
community has more than a little in common with the understanding of sex
described by Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis.’ Here also there is a narrative
of repression, of doing that which is forbidden—or at least not approved by any
institution of any broader political, commercial or cultural significance—and
thereby ‘speaking’ (or, in this case, perhaps rather ‘playing’ or ‘performing’)
truth to power.[xii] And there is undoubtedly some validity to the
preceding Foucaultian analysis of free improvisation, for it would be naïve to
posit its complete exceptionality from the devious workings of power laid out
so provocatively by Foucault.
However, such an understanding of freedom in terms of Foucault’s
theoretical position is not without problems. Particularly difficult to accept
is his complete devaluing of subjective agency and concomitant separation of
power from that of some notion of truth, and of freedom from its repressive
effects. Not all external impositions are
usefully thought of, or even coherently conceived, as the consequence of power
and repression.[xiii] And without
a conception of freedom and truth as external to power, as not merely
ideological masks to hide its all-encompassing functioning, power becomes so
ubiquitous as to lose any meaning. One can only speak of power with any degree
of efficacy in terms of some countervailing force (e.g. truth, freedom) that
opposes it.[xiv]
And it is preciely the history of the genre of free
improvisation that renders the appropriateness of such Nietzschean-like value
neutrality highly questionable (Merquior 1985; Nietzsche 2003). This is because
one of the primary antecedents of this form of ‘free improvisation’ is the so-called
“free jazz” movement that began in the late 1950s (with, perhaps most
prominently, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman), and then proliferated through
the 1960s primarily among African-American musicians as a musical expression of
(among other things) the-then burgeoning civil rights movement.[xv] ‘Freedom’
in this context was often times overtly political, an expression of defiance
and demand for liberation from a centuries old tyranny that, especially in the
southern United States, routinely used the full weight of (to again reference
Althusser) the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs; i.e. the police and
unofficially the Ku Klux Klan) to enforce its dictates.[xvi] To adopt Foucault’s
position wholesale would be to undermine any moral basis for such demands for
liberation and thus to leave one with no ethical basis to critique what is in favor of what could be.
So though the label ‘free jazz’ is
still sometimes invoked by some contemporary musicians, especially in those
forms of improvisation that George Lewis has referred to as Afrological, ‘jazz’ is now often
replaced by ‘improvisation’ due to the considerable pedigree and contemporary
influence of improvisationally-based music from a European art-music, or what
Lewis calls a Eurological, background.
For though these, in Lewis’ words, ‘historically emergent rather than
ethnically essential,’ varieties of improvisation were in the past sometimes
quite antagonistic towards each other (especially the Eurological critiquing
the Afrological), in Montreal at least they now seem to have comparable
influence on the overall contemporary free improvisation music scene (1996, 93).
But this convergence should not distract from an awareness of the history of
very unequal relations between these two improvisatory traditions. As Lewis
points out, the rise in awareness among Europeans and white Americans of the
heritage of musical improvisation among African-Americans brought about the
former’s attempt, ‘to come to grips with some of the implications of musical
improvisation. This confrontation, however, took place amid an ongoing
narrative of dismissal, on the part of many of these composers, of the tenets of
African-American improvisatory forms.’ The partisans of the real-time music
making that began to be incorporated into the Western art music tradition
post-WWII, led most notably by John Cage, therefore
almost invariably theorized as emanating almost exclusively
from a generally venerated stream of European cultural, social, and
intellectual history—the ‘Western tradition.’ In such texts, an attempted
erasure or denial of the impact of African-American forms on the real-time work
of European and Euro-American composers is commonly asserted (Lewis 1996: 92).
Using John
Cage and Charlie Parker as respective paragons of the Eurological and
Afrological, Lewis argues for a fundamental distinction between these two
improvisatory traditions. For whereas Cage, through the use of aleatoric (i.e.
chance) procedures, hoped to break out of what he considered the staid,
subjective-derived musical patterns of the past in order to create music that
was truly new, Parker, and many other jazz musicians of the bebop era and after
(especially African-American ones), saw their improvisational practice as
expressly about the ‘assertion of
self-determination’ in opposition to the legalized discrimination of Jim Crow
injustice and the broader history of political and economic injustice (Lewis
1996: 95). The former attempts to kill the ego; the latter, in stark contrast,
to affirm its irreducible value.
For Frank Kofsky, such assertions of
the self in opposition to oppression were precisely what was at work in the
practice of free jazz musicians of the 1960s, whose music, he believed, represented
a revolution in music aimed explicitly at overthrowing the racism, capitalism
and imperialism that, was endemic in white America. It was a musical
counterpart to Malcolm X’s revolutionary exhortations. The ‘avant-garde
movement in jazz is a musical representation of the ghetto’s vote of “no
confidence” in Western civilization and the American dream – that Negro
avant-garde intransigents, in other words, are saying through their horns… “Up
your ass, feeble-minded ofays!’’’ (1970: 131). On Kofsky’s account, not only
does free jazz have little to do with Western art music (even its most
avant-garde varieties), but it is resolutely antagonistic towards it and its ‘art
for art’s sake’ principle that is, in fact, but a post-facto rationalization of
its own political impotence or acquiescence to the status quo.
Kofsky’s Marxist-inspired musical
radicalism, however, seems curiously out of place in the context of Montreal’s
free improvisation scene.[xvii]
Lori Freedman, for example, one of the most prominent, and internationally
renowned members of the free improvisation community in Montreal, studied
classical clarinet performance at the University of Toronto and considers
herself much more at home within that tradition than that of jazz though she
performs regularly with musicians with a strong modern jazz background.[xviii] And
Malcolm Goldstein, another of the scene’s most prominent members, studied violin
and composition at Colombia University, knew John Cage and has been one of the
most consistent interpreters of his work since the 1960s, although he is also
strongly influenced by Ornette Coleman’s work.[xix] There are also many musicians
with a primarily jazz background (e.g. Jason Sharp, Sam Shalabi) and others
whose primary experience is with rock or punk music. A number of those I
interviewed informed me that one of the most valuable distinguishing
characteristics of the Montreal free improvisation scene is its constitution
by, and accommodation of, an unusually wide range of musical backgrounds and
styles. Saxophonist Matana Roberts (a resident of New York City who often performs
in Montreal) expressed her experience of the Montreal free improvisation scene
to me very much in these terms.
What I...like about my
Montreal shows is the cross-section of people I can get in an audience. I don’t like playing my music for
purely jazz/improv fans. In fact, I hate that. I find
them to be a...bit set in what music is
supposed to be and I’d rather play my music for broad
audiences. Montreal makes me happy in
that I can get a crazy cross-section of folks in one
room...Montreal is interesting in that it
seems improvisers here are coming more out of a gypsy
tradition of dealing with sound. And
there’s also a very punk rock DIY vibe to it that makes it
very inspiring for me at times because I
feel in contrast to NYC musicians, Montreal improvisers
tend to invest more of themselves into
the art form. The Montreal improviser challenges the constrictions of space,
time and musical construction in
ways that I think at times can make the listener uncomfortable, but again I think
points to a very homegrown language of dealing with sound.[xx]
As a label
of identity, ‘free improvisation’ seems to transcend the various different
genres and scenes that Roberts refers, to provide a common identifier, and
therefore ideological ground, for a marginalized musical scene that lacks the
luxury of acute distinctions due to its lack of economic capital. Because there
is so little financial gain to be realized from performing music of a
free-improvisation variety, those wishing to perform it cannot afford to define
themselves in evermore specific ways as happened beginning in the late 1960s
with the proliferation of rock hybrids (folk-rock, hard-rock, psychedelic-rock,
progressive-rock, punk-rock, etc.) and since the 1980s with an even more rapid
proliferation of genre distinctions in electronic music.[xxi] As Pierre Bourdieu’s points
out in his theorization of the field of cultural production (1993: 29-73), this
relative absence of sub-genre distinctions cannot be separated from strategies
aimed at the attainment, retention and growth of symbolic and cultural capital:
the fame, notoriety and other benefits that come from the denial of commercial
pressures or the desire for popular acclaim. In this ‘economic world reversed’
the diversity of the musicians’ backgrounds bears a homologous relation to the
diversity that ostensibly marks its difference from other, more stylistically
unified, musical scenes.
Part III: Freedom in tension
Many of those I interviewed
expressed the importance within the scene of individual expression and the need
to be true to one’s self; the absolute priority of this self conceived of as prior to any social engagement was
therefore unsurprisingly rarely questioned.[xxii] Guitarist and composer
Sam Shalabi, however, while extolling the openness and genuine acceptance of
new ideas and forms of expression by musicians and audience members in Montreal
(especially compared to other urban centers in North America) expressed his
frustration with the very idea of a free improvisation scene.
As Ornette Coleman said,
style is the death of creativity…The fallacy that say experimental
music, improvised music is really that,
is improvised or experimental all the time is nonsense...You go see a group of
improvisers it’s not like it’s ground zero improvisation. You’re taking stuff
from the history of improvised music, the licks you’ve been practicing that
week, or whatever; it’s all in there. And so, the notion that it isn’t a style,
that it doesn’t have a tendency to become stylized as much as a rockabilly band
or a Pink Floyd tribute band. To me there’s not a lot of difference between the
bulk of improvised music and that. More and more it’s about maintaining the tradition
without really questioning what you’re doing in your own time and place and how
you can make that interesting.[xxiii]
Though one
of the more well-known musicians within the Montreal free improvisation scene
and highly appreciative of the freedom it allows in comparison to that of any
other he knows about throughout North America, Shalabi, of all my interviewees,
most pointedly expressed this kind of opposition to the seemingly inevitable
codification of musical style.
Howard Becker, in this regard, argues
that artistic conventions, rather than expressing a lack of creative ability,
are in fact productive of it, while
also necessary for audience member’s capacity to engage with art works (2008:
30). This echoes Foucault’s argument that power, rather than purely repressive,
is in fact productive of identities, language, bodily states and so forth. This
is most obviously the case, as Becker also argues, in facilitating
communication and ‘efficient coordination’ between artists engaged in
collective action and those who support them in their endeavors (2008: 30).
Without these, lacking any assumptions as to what should occur, the likely result
of opening such a vastness of possible actions is extreme paralysis for
performers in having no standardized structures to depend upon. One might even
wonder, given the inevitable internalization within the body of the repetitive
practices involved in learning to play an instrument, whether such a total freedom
is in fact possible—at least without the aid of methods of intense personal
defamiliarization, for example that which, many have argued, result from the
use of psychedelic drugs (Nicotra 2008; Banco 2008). But even this seems
unlikely since, as Foucault notes, ‘disciplinary coercion establishes in the
body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased
domination’ (1984: 182).[xxiv]
There is, then, a seemingly
irremediable tension inherent to the Montreal free improvisation scene and of
the wider genre that it is an example of. Although it extols the untrammeled,
entirely self-directed freedom of musical expression, to differentiate it from
other musical genres its participants for the most part limit themselves to musical characteristics (resolute atonality,
lack of any clear metrical pulse, foregrounding of ‘extended’ instrumental
techniques and so forth) that clearly mark it as distinct from music ostensibly
compromised by commercial, and therefore heteronomous, considerations. On one
hand, a number of my informants expressed the positive nature of the limited
financial rewards for the music they played in that it facilitated a sense of
community and lack of competition among Montreal free improvisation musicians
and a concomitant freedom for genuine artistic experimentation. Sam Shalabi,
for example, told me:
I think if you’re doing experimental music, and there isn’t
a sense that you’re actually experimenting or in opposition to something at all
levels...socially, politically, aesthetically...then there’s something weird
about it. So if you’re able to get a giant grant to stage a show of really
experimental, bizarre music...and ten people show up and you don’t care because
you’ve already gotten your money then I think that affects what you do...It
creates a closed environment where the people who do the art are doing it, it creates
a loop, it influences what you do...an environment where there’s a lot of backslapping,
where people aren’t really critical of what you’re doing because they’re in on
it as well. They’re getting money to do the same thing, you’re getting money,
they come to see your show and everybody’s getting money and as long as it
stays in this closed environment then everything’s fine...You know the quality
suffers because of that...If you’re doing ‘experimental art’ or music and you’re
funded for everything you do, it’s not experimental anymore, it’s sanctioned by
the most un-experimental institution in the world: the state.[xxv]
At the
same, however, the lack of institutional support for the free improvisation
scene from local universities, conservatories, media and prominent well-funded
festivals such as the Montreal International Festival du Jazz was a commonly
expressed lament, which many saw as politically reactionary and artistically
stifling in preventing musicians from dedicating themselves whole-heartily to
the creation of what they argued was important, new, creative music (Smith
2001).[xxvi] For
example, none of the daily newspapers in Montreal (The Gazette, La Presse, Le Journal de Montréal, Le Devoir) regularly report on free improvisation performances, nor even, for the most
part, do the ‘alternative’ arts & entertainment weeklies The Montreal Mirror, The Hour and Le Voir.[xxvii]
According to several of my informants, the publicly funded Canadian Broadcast
Corporation’s Radio 2 station was in the past quite supportive of free
improvisation in providing various opportunities for it to be played on the
air, thus giving them a much welcomed source of income from performance
royalties.[xxviii] But
beginning in 2007 the format of Radio 2 changed to emphasize more popular and
commercially successful music (often of an ‘adult-contemporary’ variety) and is
now almost completely devoid of anything resembling free improvisation.[xxix] And the
fact that the administration of the McGill University Faculty of Music
cancelled the contemporary improvisation ensemble taught by Lori Freedman for
2009-2010 because of budget cutbacks, despite its relatively meager cost of $60
a week,[xxx] while
doing little to promote it during its seven years in existence (it was never
included in the university calendar or online course listings and was
advertised purely through word of mouth and posters put up by Freedman and
course participants) was, for a number of my informants, highly indicative of a
disturbing lack of acceptance for a form of musical expression for which there
is significant interest within Montreal and, moreover, among McGill University music
students.
This lack of institutional support
was amply demonstrated in late January of 2004 when Steve Lacy, arguably the
most influential soprano saxophonist of the last 50 years, was invited by the
McGill University-based Project on Improvisation (PI), led by Associate Professor
of Philosophy Eric Lewis, to Montreal to give a lecture on improvisation and
his life-long practice of, and participation with, it, as well as to lead a
group of musicians through two open rehearsals and a subsequent performance. It
was a notable event for a number of reasons. First, unbeknownst to all but a
few at the time, Lacy was quite sick with inoperable cancer (he died less than
six month later in June of 2004). Second, it brought together a number of the
key figures of the Montreal free improvisation community together to play with
him—John Heward, Lori Freedman, Rainer Wiens, Jean Derome and Nicolas
Calloia—along with two individuals from outside of Montreal, Joe Giardullo and
Gordon Allen. Third, it exposed the profound rift that exists between many of
those in the traditional jazz establishment—represented most famously by
trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and writer Stanley Crouch (Elworth 1995; Hersch
2001)—for whom jazz’s technical evolution effectively ended in 1959, and those
who have continued in the modal and free jazz styles that played such a vital
role in the development of jazz throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.
For although Lacy’s jazz pedigree was of the highest
degree—having played with Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Duke
Ellington and having crucially influenced John Coltrane’s use of the soprano
saxophone—the jazz area of the McGill University Faculty of Music was extremely
reluctant to make a space available for the accompanying lecture and
rehearsals. A room was ultimately provided but, to their surprise, it was too
small to fit everyone who wanted to attend, including many of their own
students.[xxxi] The
performance itself was held off campus and, from all accounts, was an enormous
success with a large, appreciative audience.[xxxii] For trumpeter Gordon
Allen, then a resident of Toronto, the event made such an impression on him
that he subsequently moved to Montreal largely on account of his experience
playing with Lacy and thereby becoming aware of the existence of such an
appreciative and understanding audience for improvisationally-based music in
Montreal. He has since become one of the scene’s most important performers and
organizers helping to run a performance venue dedicated to its music, L’Envers
(though now closed), and a weekly series at a café, Le Cagibi, both in Montreal’s
Mile-End district.[xxxiii] I think that my discussion of this event
therefore marks an appropriate ending point for this paper in that it exemplifies
the promises and difficulties, the tensions and agreements that constitute the
identity of this unique music scene.
Conclusion
In this paper I have drawn together
a wide variety of disparate perspectives in order to suggest appropriate ways
to understand what constitutes the Montreal free improvisation music scene as
well as explains its relative vitality. Although freedom, self-expression, the
desire to succeed as a professional musician and to build a strong community
are all important qualities to those participants with whom I engaged, the
question as to how to reconcile their divergent tendencies remained at the
forefront of a great deal of their considerations. Situated on the outer-edges
of the art world, the musicians who make up this scene both resent their
exclusion from many of the financially-lucrative and culturally-legitimizing
institutions that surround them in Montreal while simultaneously celebrating
their liberation from the demands and prohibitions that such institutions
inevitably require for their support and legitimization.
In pointing this out I by no means wish to suggest that
those involved in this scene are in anyway strange or hypocritical in their
partiality to contradictory impulses. Rather, the balance between these
differing demands is a paradox common to self-described modern or avant-garde
artists and an unavoidable one as long as they desire, as did nearly all the
musicians I talked to, both the legitimation of what they do as art untainted
by commercial demands and the success that enables them to support themselves
professionally within a capitalist economic system.[xxxiv]
Constituted to such a vital degree by the cultural and linguistic diversity of
Montreal, however, this musical scene offers a unique window into the workings
of musicians and spectators in a constant struggle of trying to achieve a
balance between these divergent, paradoxical aspirations.
[i] In discussion with
the author, November 28, 2009.
[ii] Will Straw (1993:
169) points out that “Imagined or real distinctions between Toronto and
Montreal have long served as the deep structure of a Canadian moral geography”.
[iii] I determined this percentage by adding
together those who declared English as their singular mother tongue (425,635)
with those for whom it was one of two or more mother tongues (English and
French: 26,855; English and non-official language: 15,225; English, French and
non-official language: 4,950) to a total of 472,665. I then divided this by the
number of single responses in Montreal (3,514,485) and then multiplied by 100.
[iv] This has led to the ubiquitous yet
controversial, often remarked upon and made fun of greeting in Montreal:
‘bonjour/hello!’
[v] John Heward in discussion with the author,
November 28, 2009.
[vi] Information on the label can found at http://www.ambiancesmagnetiques.com/ (accessed Dec. 2, 2012).
[vii] For the most detailed discussion of his
musical career as well as a discography see the article on him in The Canadian Encyclopedia/The Encyclopedia
of Music in Canada: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=U1ARTU0000936
(accessed Dec. 2, 2012).
[viii] Victoriaville is a small city
approximately 170 km east of Montreal. For information on the festival see http://fimav.qc.ca/en/edition/home/ (accessed Sept. 13, 2014).
[ix] Jean Derome in discussion with Hélène
Laurin and the author, January 19, 2010. Translated from French also by the
author.
[x] The meaning is perhaps most evident in its
relation to ‘actualité’—that is, current events or news.
[xi] At least freedom of the ‘negative’ kind as
discussed in Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (2000).
[xii] “But there may be
another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship
between sex and power in terms on repression: something that one might call the
speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition,
nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has
the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language
places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets
established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom” (Foucault 1990: 6).
[xiii] “[S]omething is only
an imposition on me against a
background of desires, interests, purposes, that I have. It is only an
imposition if it makes some dent in these, if it frustrates them, prevents them
from fulfillment, or perhaps even from formulation. If some external situation
or agency wreaks some change in me which in now way lies athwart some such
desire/purpose/aspiration/ interest, then there is no call to speak of an
exercise of power/domination. Take the phenomenon of imprinting. In human life,
it also exists after a fashion. We generally come to like the foods which have
assuaged our hunger, those we are fed as children in our culture. Is this an
index of the ‘domination’ of our culture over us? The word would lose all
useful profile, would have no more distinctiveness, if we let it roam this
wide” (Taylor 1985: 174-75).
[xiv] “Mask, falsehood
[i.e. what power does] makes no sense without a corresponding notion of truth.
The truth here is subversive of power: it is on the side of the lifting of
impositions…The Foucaultiam notion of power not only requires for its sense the
correlative notions of truth and liberation, but even the standard link between
them, which makes truth the condition of liberation” (Taylor 1985: 176-77).
Indeed, it is hard to reconcile Foucault’s totalizing anti-subjectivism and
neo-Nietzschean value-neutrality with his long concern for the reform of the
conditions in which prisoners are held. See, for example, Foucault and Simon
(1991), “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview.”
[xv] Free
Jazz being the title of Coleman’s 1960 album, as well as of its album-long
track.
[xvi] Max Roach’s album We Insist! – Freedom Now! Suite, also from 1960, is one of the most
explicit examples of this kind of musical-political expression.
[xvii] And as Mark Gridley
points out, even in the context of the 1960s, Kofsky’s attempt to explicitly
connect the practices of free jazz musicians and radical politics is
problematic given the explicit denials of a number of such musicians, such as
Albert Ayler and Marion Brown, that their music was in any way political (2007:
144-46).
[xviii] Lori Freedman in discussion with the
author, November 30, 2009.
[xix] Malcolm Goldstein in discussion with the
author, November 21, 2009. ‘I had heard Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz LP recording around 1960 when it was first available. I
was overwhelmed with what, to me at that time, seemed like chaos, but a
glorious chaos fertile with the creative soul of music making…Later, in 1986,
Ornette would compose violin music, ‘Trinity’, for me’ (Goldstein 2008: 10-11).
[xx] Matana Roberts, e-mail message to author,
December 3, 2009.
[xxi] Ishkur’s
Guide to Electronic Music, http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ (accessed Dec. 2, 2012) is a highly detailed, if somewhat
irreverent, exploration of the history and identities of the plethora of genres
and sub-genres of electronic music.
[xxii] Arguably this viewpoint ultimately stems
from Immanuel Kant’s subjectivist, bourgeois account of morality as necessarily
constituted by autonomous, i.e. entirely self-legislating, universalizable
actions (1998).
[xxiii] Sam Shalabi in discussion with the author,
November 30, 2009.
[xxiv] Anders Ericsson has
shown (2002) that any sustained practice, such as for music or sports, leads to
the ‘deliberate modification of bodily systems and individual cells’ in order
to adapt to its goals.
[xxv] Sam Shalabi in discussion with the author,
November 30, 2009.
[xxvi] As Julie Dawn Smith explains in her
dissertation on women improvising musicians, the political economy of free
improvisation—as with new, experimental music in general—is characterized by a
pronounced lack of financial rewards or even much possibility of making a
career playing it (2001: 14-18). As some of my informants pointed out, however,
being excluded from any serious chance of reaping much of any substantial
financial reward from their music, or even obtaining the symbolic capital that
is the marker of avant-garde art’s attainment of cultural consecration, does
have certain advantages in reducing feelings of competition between musicians
and thereby bringing about greater cooperation. To paraphrase one of my
sources: why worry about trying to outdo other musicians when the rewards are
so meager? Intriguingly, the continuing exclusion of even the eldest and most
respected of these avant-garde artists to attain the symbolic capital that
comes from cultural consecration seems to problematize Bourdieu’s history of
the field of cultural production that for him is defined primarily in terms of
generations. For even those who I interviewed who have been involved in the
production of free improvisational music for decades (Malcolm Goldstein and
Jean Derome most notably) have been granted little in the way of symbolic
capital within the cultural or educational institutions of Montreal.
[xxvii] The Mirror and Hour have since ceased publishing.
[xxviii] Malcolm Goldstein and Jean Derome in
discussion with the author, November 28, 2009 and January 26, 2010
respectively.
[xxix] For details of announcements as to CBC
Radio 2 changes see ‘CBC Radio to broaden Radio 2, add arts magazine,’ http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/cbc-radio-to-broaden-radio-two-add-arts-magazine-1.668998
(accessed September 14, 2014) and ‘CBC Radio 2 to revamp daytime
programming,’ http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/cbc-radio-2-to-revamp-daytime-programming-1.720872 (accessed September 14, 2014).
[xxx] Lori Freedman in discussion with the
author, November 21, 2009.
[xxxi] Professor Eric Lewis in discussion with
the author, November 20, 2009.
[xxxii] With the kind permission of Professor
Lewis I was able to watch the video recording that was made of the lecture,
rehearsals and performance. Due to on-going negotiations with the Lacy estate
the video held in the Project on Improvisation archives is the only one in
existence.
[xxxiii] Gordon Allen in discussion with the
author, November 30, 2009.
[xxxiv] I use “avant-garde”
here because many musicians within the Montreal free improvisation scene
commonly use it to describe what their artistic practice. However, following
Peter Bürger (1984), I question its applicability in many cases because of the
continued propagation of the modernist division between high and low art and
celebration of artistic autonomy, which, Bürger argues, were precisely what the
members of the historical avant-garde (futurism, dadaism, surrealism) saw
themselves as resolutely opposing.
