Description
Book SynopsisMicrogroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music, as well as painting, design, dance, and poetry.
Trade Review"Corbett has just published a terrific new anthology of his writing called
Microgroove, the long-delayed follow-up to his 1994 book
Extended Play. . . . There's a lot of great stuff in the new book—which went through multiple iterations over the years, scrapped and revisited several times—but in his introduction to a piece called 'Twenty-Seven Enthusiasms: A Spontaneous Listening Session,' Corbett expresses a major part of what makes his work so special. 'Show-and-tell was always my favorite part of school,' he writes, eventually explaining that 'you accumulate things not to own them, but to share them.' It's what he's done as a writer, a music presenter, and, in recent years, a gallerist, at Corbett vs. Dempsey." -- Peter Margasak * Chicago Reader *
"One of the more interesting features of
Microgroove is the inclusion of multiple pieces on some of the artists. This allows Corbett to consider them from different angles or over time, providing a fuller picture of their art in the process. That, combined with the eclectic scope of Corbett’s interests, makes of
Microgroove a rich, multifaceted survey of some of the more challenging artists of the last two decades." -- Daniel Barbiero * Avant Music News *
"The far-ranging scope of the 53 essays and interviews collected in these nearly 500 pages, dating from 1993 to just last year, reminds us that even within music’s commercially neglected fringes complex gradations of sub-genre exist, separating the hardcore avant-garde devotee from one who thinks they’re down because they own a copy of
Space Is the Place. ... But first and foremost [Corbett] is a devotee of challenging and outré sounds, and his essays are most compelling when he dives headfirst into his chronicles with a fan’s enthusiasm and verve. ...These pieces beautifully balance serious musical scholarship and critical analysis with the kind of collar-grabbing, “give-this-a-listen” excitement that draws us all to music in the first place." -- Matt R. Lohr * JazzTimes *
"Corbett, like the best kind of record store crate digger, pinpoints the association between acknowledged innovators and the achievements of lesser-known figures. . .. [T]he book’s key achievement is how Corbett’s psychiatrist-like probing questions elicit the most definitive and/or instructive statements about their art from certain musicians." -- Ken Waxman * MusicWorks *
"John Corbett is a smart guy who really, really loves music, and his intelligence and enthusiasm come through in every one of the essays and articles in this volume of his collected writings.... Anyone interested in what was happening on the cutting edge of music during the years these articles appeared needs to read this anthology of John Corbett’s writing." -- Ed Hazell * ARSC Journal *
"John Corbett's singular critical voice is wildly alive in his latest book, a compendium of previous writings, sober reflections, clever visuals, idiosyncratic interviews, and post-genre insights into the thriving ecology of knowledge that is the contemporary music scene. At once this is a book that takes its place alongside other distinctive voices in the pell-mell topography of recent musical criticism, from Greg Tate and Lester Bangs to Nat Hentoff and Nate Chinen, and the work of an itinerant witness bearing testimony marked by a vast respect and love for improvised musicking and musical diversity....
Microgroove is an eloquent, readable, playful testimony to the otherness of music as an allegory for creative freedom and as a generative social practice that refuses limitations." -- Daniel T. Fischlin * Journal of Popular Music Studies *
Table of ContentsPreface: Tympanum of the Other Frog xv
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1
One. On The Road, Into The Cul-De-Sac
Joe Harriott and Bernie McGann: Flying without Ornette 15
Michael Hurley: Jocko's Lament 21
Mayo Thompson: Genre of One 33
John Stevens: Unpopular Populists 36
Peter Brötzmann Tentet: Freeways 40
Steve Lacy: Sojourner Saxophone 49
David Grubbs: Postcards from the Edge 57
Voice Crack: From Nothing to Everything 67
Two. Exigeneses Of Creative Music
Milford Graves: Pulseology 71
Out of Nowhere: Deleuze, Gräwe, Cadence 79
Carla Bley and Steve Swallow: Feeding Quarters to the Nonstop Mental Jukebox 85
Misha Mengelberg: No Simple Calculations for Life 93
Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink: Natural Inbuilt Contrapuncto 109
Form Follows Faction? Ethnicity and Creative Music 116
Anthony Braxton: Ism vs. Is 123
Anthony Braxton:
Bildungsmusik—Thoughts on
Composition 171 129
Paul Lowens: Lo Our Lo 132
Clark Coolidge: The Improvised Line 136
Nathaniel Mackey: Steep Incumbencies 142
Sun Ra: From the Windy City to the Omniverse—Chicago Life as a Street Priest of D.I.Y. Jazz 153
Fred Anderson: The House That Fred Built 162
Three. Ululations And Other Vocal Stimulants
Sun Ra: Queer Voice 169
Jaap Blonk: Uncommon Tongue 170
PJ Harvey: Mother's Tongue 179
Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound (coauthored with Terri Kapsalis) 182
Liz Phair and Lou Barlow: On Music, Sex, TV, and Beyond 194
Liz Phair and Kim Gordon: Exile in Galville? 205
Koko Taylor: The Blue Queen Cooks 212
Brion Gysin and Steve Lacy: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permuted 217
Four. The Horn Section
Ornette Coleman: Doing Is Believing 233
Roscoe Mitchell: Citizen of Sound 244
Fred Anderson and Von Freeman: Tenacity 250
George Lewis: Interactive Imagination 258
Mats Gustafsson: MG at Half-C 264
Ken Vandermark: Six Dispatches from the Memory Bank 270
Ken Vandermark and Joe McPhee: Mutual Admiration Society 278
Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker: Bring Something to the Table 285
Five. Track Marks
Oncology of the Record Album 297
Discaholic or Vinyl Freak? Mats Gustafsson Interrogates John Corbett 301
Twenty-Seven Enthusiasms: A Spontaneous Listening Session 308
A Very Visual Kind of Music: The Cartoon Soundtrack beyond the Screen 313
R. L. Burnside and Jon Spencer: Fattening Frogs for Snake Drive 322
Before and After Punk: The Comp as Teaching Tool 331
Raymond Scott: Cradle of Electronica 336
Six. Melodic Line and Tone Color
Peter Brötzmann: Graphic Equalizer 343
Albert Oehlen: Bionic Painting 347
Albert Oehlen: Mangy—A Conversation and a Playlist 352
Christopher Wool: Impropositions—Improvisation, Dub Painting 359
Christopher Wool: Into the Woods—Six Meditations on the Interdisciplinary 366
Sun Ra: An Afro-Space-Jazz Imaginary—The Printed Record of El Saturn 371
Seven. The Texture Of Refusal
Helmut Lachenmann:
Hellhörig, or the Intricacies of Perceptiveness 379
Guillermo Gregorio: Madi Music 387
Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others 391
Afterword: A Concise History of Music 417
Grooving On: Selected Listening 423
Credits 443
Index 447
