MISCmedia for 2/25/00
Toward an Improv Nation

OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It's part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).

YESTERDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and the aforementioned Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle's periodical guide to avant-improv and other "creative" music.

Writing about their experiences during the anti-WTO protests, Hughes and Rea posited that global business and the governments it owns are just the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of "hierarchical power relations."

They then present the type of avant, free-improv, and experimental music praised in The Tentacle as exemplifying a different model for social relations--one based on equality, shared pride, spontenaity, and free expression.

Hughes and Rea could have listed some other potential sociocultural lessons from avant-improv:

• Working for the love and pride of it, not just for the paycheck.

• A lifelong commitment to one's work. (Improvisors might "compose on the spot," but they devote every gig and practice toward finding neat things to do at the next gig.)

• Taking control of the means of one's own production. (Some "creative" musicians book their own gigs, run their own concert series and record labels, or even design and build their own instruments.)

• Taking the long-term view. (While the terms "avant garde" and "experimental" imply something new and groundbreaking, these musicians readily acknowledge their debt to innumerable forebearers, living and deceased.)

• Taking the ground-level view. (You're not going to become a Rock Star and you don't want to. What you want is to make something that's really important to those who do hear it.)

• A different kind of thinking-globally and acting-locally. (These gals 'n' guys may tour in China, sell most of their CDs in Europe, and take musical inspiration from everybody from Harry Partch and Arnold Schoenberg to the Throat Singers of Tuva. But everywhere they go, they play directly to the people in whatever room they're in, without "mainstreaming" their work or depending on marketing hype.)

But can the "creative music" aesthetic really work as a metaphor or object lesson for larger society?

Probably not. But that's at least part of the whole point.

MONDAY: The last of this for now, I promise.

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