"You don't get it in front of a blackboard, man": A Milford Graves master class

Never enough Milford Graves, okay? His drumming, its presence, the sonic and physical space it inhabits, is one of my musical food groups. As I wrote last week, I'm currently on the lookout for nourishment, hungry for truth and wisdom in music. At that point, I was finding what I needed in Paul Motian (I was remiss not to link to this incredible 1986 Motian/Frisell/Lovano vid, btw), another one of my listening staples. Then I stumbled across the clip above (part one of a three-part Milford Graves master class, filmed last year at the New School, and graciously documented in full by bassist Nicolas Letman-Burtinovic) and my attention shifted. For the past few days, I've been all about this series of videos. I have some thoughts to share on this document, but the most important observation I can offer is that it's precious and essential. I urge you to watch the whole thing.



If you've ever attended a Milford Graves concert, you know that he loves to rap with the audience at different points. He always drops bits of heavy knowledge during those mini sermons, and the above is like a two-hour version. Concentrated, conversational insight. Mystery and majesty. Not capital-T Truth; just the distilled experience of one lifetime. The testimony of a fully realized artist, scientist, healer, scholar.

This master class does have an element of rant to it. Graves is, to cite one of his central principles, which he discusses at length here, anti-metronome and pro-biorhythm. He's anti-machine, pro-man; anti-rigidity, pro-fluidity. Clichéd notions, perhaps, when taken in the abstract, but when coupled with the great sweep of Graves's knowledge, his hard-won authority, seven-plus decades in the making, and with the way he plays—and, it should be said, he barely plays at all during this master class, though there is an intense musicality to the delivery; even when speaking, he's all about rhythmic soundmaking, teaching through song and dance as much as word—his insights take on great profundity. He's anti- bottom heads on drums, anti- overly fussy charts written by non-drumming bandleaders, anti- equal temperament. Anything that impedes flow is suspect.

And there's invaluable history here, both personal history and that of a time and place. Milford Graves (and many Graves devotees will know this, either from call it art, another invaluable Graves-related document, or elsewhere) is, at base, a Latin-jazz musician, a player of the timbales who focused on that instrument and its surrounding idiom to the point that, as he relates here, trap-set masters such as Art Blakey and Elvin Jones meant relatively little to him during his formative years in the early ’60s. His idols were percussionists such as Willie Bobo and Graves's friend and contemporary Bill Fitch, his bandleading models artists such as Cal Tjader. Graves led a Latin-jazz group featuring a young Chick Corea, apparently a fearsome player even at that time. He didn't touch a set of trap drums till ’63, the year before he began working with the New York Art Quartet in the idiom he's best known for, so-called free jazz.

You watch this, and you realize that a musician like this—an artist like this, a person like this—is truly beyond category. "Free jazz" seems so small compared to the worldview expressed here. Graves tells of foraging for herbs, absorbing nature, studying and practicing acupuncture, learning martial arts, playing in Africa and Japan. He's a gatherer and an aggregator, a mystic and a skeptic, a teacher and a student, pouring out notions for you to take or leave. What does it mean to really study music? How far can academia take you? (Bear in mind that Graves taught at Bennington for close to four decades, so he clearly believes in higher education, but he approaches it from a personalized, humane, experience-driven standpoint.) What is an artist's responsibility to an audience? Should you prepare a show, or take the temperature of the room and build a performance based on the environment you find yourself in? Why, fundamentally, do you do what you do?

We speak of personalities and presences as animated. If you've ever seen Milford Graves perform, you know he is that, both when playing and when speaking. But just as importantly, he is animating. You leave his presence (even virtual presence) with wider eyes, a broader gaze, a renewed awareness for all that there is out there—the scope not just of music, but of knowledge, betterment, fulfillment, understanding. There's no boundary on this kind of inspiration—it seeps into every corner of your life.

I'm currently immersed in the autodidactic study of double-kick drumming. I've recently signed on as the live drummer for a metal-oriented band I really love called Psalm Zero. I've spent 20 years as a single-kick drummer, and proudly so, but idiomatically, this music demands double kick, and so I've set out on that path. It's tough going, but rewarding—and, more importantly, fun.

And learning should be, if you have the right teacher. Milford Graves is a—not the, because there could never be just one—right teacher. In his view, you learn out of love, not out of careerism or competition or any other base reason. You make a life out of it. You cultivate confidence and humility in turn. You form strong opinions and you make them known, but you make it clear that you only speak for yourself; you never wield dogma like a billy club.

Most importantly, you share. There's a bit near the end of the third part of the talk where Graves speaks about pedagogy, and about how he made a point to actually play with every one of his students. He even goes so far as to say that a teacher who doesn't do the thing they teach alongside their students is quite literally not teaching. Teaching is giving. It's spending time. It's encouraging and helping and inspiring—literally breathing into those one instructs. It's coming to terms with the fact that while books, systems and schools of thought are great, people are greater.

No wonder you leave a Graves performance feeling so renewed, so uplifted. It's because every one is a deliberate act of inspiration. "You don't get it in front of a blackboard, man," he says at around 25:00 in part two, repeating the line several times for emphasis. Nor do you get it—nourishment, knowledge, experience, aural or otherwise—with earbuds squashed in your ears, or when mashing buttons on your iPhone, or sitting at a desk staring at a screen. You get it by being there, either by paying physical witness (I treasure my collection of Milford Graves recordings, but they're nothing compared to the thrill of seeing him live; that's true in the case of almost every great artist, but with him it's, like, mega-true; you have to feel those soundwaves on your skin) or, if you want to do the thing yourself, by putting your body somewhere, temporarily shutting out the world and getting to know it—it being your own private, physical reality and the skill/art you want to make manifest. It doesn't have to be drumming; it could be anything. But is has to be real, not virtual—experienced, not read about. Not in front of a blackboard, indeed.

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More Milford Graves on YouTube:

*Steve Coleman interviews Milford Graves at the School for Improvisational Music (2013)

*"Milford Graves and the Japanese"—concert film and documentary, from a Japanese festival organized by dancer Min Tanaka (1987)

*Milford Graves and William Parker, live at Jazzores (2010) [Graves discusses this performance during the master class]

*Milford Graves Quartet (1973) [Some sharp commentary on this vid, and Graves's work in general, via Weasel Walter]

*Milford Graves at the Vision Festival Lifetime Achievement event, via Don Mount (2013)
-NY HeArt Ensemble
-Transition Trio
-Afro-Cuban Roots

*"Speaking in Tongues"—Milford Graves documentary featuring David Murray, Stanley Crouch and others (1982)

*"A Tribute to Milford Graves"—highlights from event held at Bennington College (2012)

*Milford Graves and Japanese percussionist Toshi Tsuchitori—performance and interview (1993)

Amiri Baraka: Two works

Hope to be able to tune in to the webcast of the 2014 NEA Jazz Masters Concert, going down tonight at 7:30pm EST. I believe you'll be able to watch here. In conjunction with the festivities, Josh Jackson posted a very welcome Richard Davis conversation. I was intrigued by their frank discussion of the "angry black man" trope. At the 18:00 mark, Richard Davis self-identifies as such, but adds, "I contain that type of energy because it scares people, and they won't listen to you when you throw out anger."

To judge by the content of his various obituaries—many of which have fixated on the "Somebody Blew Up America" controversy—Amiri Baraka scared plenty of people. I hesitate to speak for him, but something tells me this was intentional. Containment wasn't his thing.

I don't know Baraka's body of work well, but a few items really speak to me, among them "Dope."



There no mistaking the message here, nor the near-hysterical rage that underlies it. It's an astonishing performance, and, for me, one of the best illustrations I can think of for the idea that poetry is oratory, dramaturgy, as well as writing. You could see these words on a page and they might draw you in. Baraka wants to grab you by the throat, though, and to do that, he has to stand up, open his mouth and spit fire.

For me, the other key Baraka work is "Black Dada Nihilismus," which he reads on the great self-titled New York Art Quartet album (recorded approximately 39 years and 10 months ago). The words are terrifying—hyper-specific yet more oblique, message-wise, than "Dope."



I haven't heard a lot of jazz/poetry that speaks to me. This is a major exception. I heard "Black Dada Nihilismus" in the car yesterday (part of a Ben Young–hosted edition of WKCR's Jazz Profiles, devoted to Baraka) and was re-struck by the tension between the ominousness, tipping over at times into outright horror ("Come up, black dada / nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats. Black dada nihilismus, choke my friends / in their bedrooms with their drinks spilling / and restless for tilting hips or dark liver / lips sucking splinters from the master's thigh") of the verse, and the composure of the delivery. "Dope" is all sardonic, jittery catharsis. But this performance of "BDN" embodies an eerie chill, as though Baraka, making a recording for the ages, wanted to make very, very sure that emotional static didn't obscure the clarity of his words.

I'm bummed that I missed Baraka with Milford Graves at last year's Vision Festival—see here—but I'm glad I was able to see him read/speak a couple times over the years. He was a riveting presence. I'll never forget witnessing Baraka choking up while discussing his relationship with fellow poet Ed Dorn (some thoughts buried within this 2007 post). That was one of those moments when I really felt the weight of the artistic lineage, the procession of the generations, the obligation survivors feel to pass on the message of their contemporaries who die too soon. It's clear from reminiscences like Ishmael Reed's and Questlove's that Baraka's legacy is just as heavy.

'call it art': The vindication of the NYAQ

The New York Art Quartet isn't a household name. Even among my fellow free-jazz enthusiasts, they're still something of a cult-favorite group. That seems a little odd, because the three principal members, saxophonist John Tchicai (R.I.P.), trombonist Roswell Rudd and drummer Milford Graves, have all made major marks in the roughly 48 years since the NYAQ first disbanded. But the fact remains: In the shorthand history of free jazz, you're talking about Ornette, Trane, Cecil, Ayler, Sun Ra, etc.

I've always thought this was a bit of a shame. I've loved the NYAQ's self-titled ESP debut for a long time; to me it's a core-collection free-jazz document. I haven't spent as much time with the follow-up, Mohawk, but it's sounded great when I've sampled it, and the 35th Reunion album is also surprisingly sturdy.

There have been stirrings in the NYAQ camp over the past couple years. First came the Cuneiform release Old Stuff, an archival set that features Tchicai and Rudd with a different rhythm section (including the great Louis Moholo), and then, more recently, the mothership landed: call it art, a new five-LP box set from Triple Point Records.

Some readers of this blog are likely familiar with Ben Young. I will say up front that he is a friend of mine and also a mentor, dating back to my early college days at WKCR. I will follow that by saying that he is absolutely exemplary scholar and advocate of jazz in general—and of free jazz specifically. You might recall the Albert Ayler box he put together for Revenant, or Dixonia, which set a benchmark for Bill Dixon research. Having only cracked open call it art, his latest project, last night, I feel comfortable saying that it's a new pinnacle in the Ben Young oeuvre, and a cause for celebration for anyone who's ever felt that the NYAQ deserves a lot more recognition than they've gotten.

What we have in this set is a trove of unreleased NYAQ recordings. Some are outtakes from the studio sessions we already know, but others are live tapes, either in a concert or radio setting. I'm only on the second LP so far, but the music is divine (and, for the record, the sound quality is excellent, rivaling that of The New York Art Quartet and Mohawk); I already feel my passion for this group reigniting in a serious way.

Speaking of passion for the NYAQ, the book that comes with the set—and though not book-length, per se, it is a book, meaty and hardbound—is a phenomenal work. I mentioned the term "advocate" above, and what we have in these liner notes is a passionately argued advocacy of the NYAQ's central (i.e., rightful) position in the development of free jazz. It is a setting straight of the record, in a sense, but more importantly, this essay is a tying-together of many different threads, an exegesis of the entire scene surrounding this group. As anyone who knows Tchicai, Rudd and Graves's histories could tell you, the NYAQ did not come together in a vacuum; it grew directly out of, e.g., Rudd's so-called School Days collaboration with Steve Lacy (the famed Monk repertory band); the New York Contemporary Five, which included Tchicai along with Archie Shepp and Don Cherry; and the Bill Dixon–Archie Shepp Quartet, which ended up roping in both Tchicai and Rudd. Young's essay takes us through the entire musical history of each NYAQ member, touching not just on the aforementioned groups but also on activities that will be news to all but the most die-hard enthusiasts of these great men. For example, I knew that Milford Graves came up playing Latin jazz, but I had no idea that he led his own group (the Milford Graves Latin Jazz Quintet) in the early ’60s which (A) included a young Chick Corea and (B) appeared at Town Hall in support of Cal Tjader and Herbie Mann. In this booklet, you'll see not only a photograph of the band, but an advertisement for the concert. The research is that deep.

It isn't just facts that we get. We get a case, as it were, an argument about what exactly it was that made the NYAQ special, revolutionary even. I love this observation: "We would want Ornette Coleman's music of the Eisenhower administration to be Free Jazz's big bang, but finally his new style was still wearing a suit that belonged to an older Jazz pattern." Nothing against Ornette, whatsoever, but this is absolutely true. When you're talking about the freedom of jazz, you're talking about the rhythmic explosion—not necessarily some incendiary meltdown, but the literal freeing up of the time, which was a post-Ornette occurrence. The Cecil Taylor–Jimmy Lyons–Sunny Murray group, captured live in those brilliant 1962 recordings, is a major next step, and as Young points out, so is the Ayler–Gary Peacock–Murray band heard on 1964's Spiritual Unity. But the NYAQ was onto something different, something subtler. This is how Young puts it:

"The NYAQ's perfection of the New Thing impulse depended on omitting Ayler's thrust. Where Ayler played strong lines to lead his band, the NYAQ floated translucent phrases into a bubbling pool that diffused attention."

What Young seems to be getting at here is that there's more than one free-jazz paradigm. We've come to know and love the so-called "energy music" designation, but we've also learned that it's been a double-edged sword in the long term, this notion of free-jazz as some sort of quasi-religious expressionism, some heroic shout to the heavens that inevitably takes at least an hour to exhaust itself. I'm not taking aim at Ayler or Trane here. I'm just taking issue with the idea that free jazz has to be very obviously cathartic to be great.

Enter the NYAQ. I'm not sure I can do better than the "bubbling pool" designation above. Their music has this sort of unsettled but also sublimely unhurried quality. It wiggles; it tests the water; it pauses; it digresses. There truly is no leader. There is a ton of space. The music can be fast or slow. The constant, though, is a sense of deep listening, of non-autopilot improvisation, of working together in a very real kind of freedom, a freedom which, crucially, encompasses the freedom not to conform to a clichéd Free Jazz orthodoxy, which, even back then, was already crystallizing. You hear musicians conversing in this music, searching, exploring what their instruments can do, and how their aesthetic personalities can interact: Graves's fragmented yet remarkably supple flow; Rudd and Tchicai's vocal-like unspoolings, thoughtful and spare. There's an amazing sense of patience and delicacy to this music that is not the same as tentativeness. It's simply a taking of time, even when the music is, so to speak, cooking. (And thanks to Graves, it does very often dance in its own abstractly buoyant way.) I know what Young means when he speaks of the NYAQ "omitting Ayler's thrust." It's thanks to this omission that this music has aged beautifully. Hearing it now, you don't hear any of that ’60s-ness that's so often spoken of, in many cases rightfully so, when, say, Ayler or late Coltrane comes up, the sense of free jazz as the soundtrack to widespread social unrest. The NYAQ weren't screaming; they were probing.

The music I have on right now is from record 1 of the set. It's a recording of Rudd's "Rosmosis," made live on 12.31.64 at Judson Hall on W. 57th St. during the Four Days in December concert series. Any student of free jazz has likely heard of this series, presented by the Jazz Composers' Guild. (The NYAQ played on the last of the four bills, along with Sun Ra; 12/28 featured bands led by Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon; 12/29 paired Paul Bley with the Jazz Composers' Guild Orchestra, led by Carla Bley and Mike Mantler; and 12/30 included the Archie Shepp Quartet and The Free Form Improvisation Ensemble.) But did any of us have any idea that this material had been recorded? It's amazing what a work of scholarship like call it art does; it brings this history—which previously seemed shadowy, mythic, unattainable—right to your door. And it isn't just the sounds; we also get reproductions of Rudd and Tchicai's scores, letters sent between the members of the group, period advertisements, stunning photographs.

I could say more about this set, but as I've indicated, I'm still very much in the process of digesting it. It was important to me to record my initial awe, though. Given the price, call it art is obviously a connoisseur's piece, but if you are one of those connoisseurs, someone for whom either the NYAQ or the early history of free jazz matters, I feel absolutely assured in informing you that you need to get your hands on this set. Ben Young's Albert Ayler box delved deeper into the life and work of a widely recognized genius; call it art, on the other hand, reclaims from relative obscurity a music that was every bit as game-changing, and—now, almost 50 years on from its making—still has the power to arrest, to induce wonder, to make you marvel at its wit, its dexterity, its inquisitiveness, its sense of play and wonder, its living optimism. This is a vindication.

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*Learn more about call it art and Triple Point Records here.

*Rudd and Graves will perform together, along with frequent NYAQ affiliate Amiri Baraka (featured prominently on call it art), at The Vision Festival on June 12, 2013.