Voices Found

Free Jazz and Singing

Chris Tonelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429802973
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing contributes to a wave of voice studies scholarship with the first book-length study of free jazz voice. It pieces together a history of free jazz voice that spans from sound poetry and scat in the 1950s to the more recent wave of free jazz choirs. The author traces the developments and offers a theory, derived from interviews with many of the most important singers in the history of free jazz voice, of how listeners have experienced and evaluated the often unconventional vocal sounds these vocalists employed. This theory explains that even audiences willing to enjoy harsh sounds from saxophones or guitars often resist when voices make sounds that audiences understand as not-human.

Experimental poetry and scat were combined and transformed in free jazz spaces in the 1960s and 1970s by vocalists like Yoko Ono (in solo work and her work with Ornette Coleman and John Stevens), Jeanne Lee (in her solo work and her work with Archie Shepp and Gunter Hampel), Leon Thomas (in his solo work as well as his work with Pharoah Sanders and Carlos Santana), and Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols (who devoted much of their energy to creating unaccompanied free jazz vocal music). By studying free jazz voice we can learn important lessons about what we expect from the voice and what happens when those expectations are violated. This book doesn't only trace histories of free jazz voice, it makes an attempt to understand why this story hasn't been told before, with an impressive breadth of scope in terms of the artists covered, drawing on research from the US, Canada, Wales, Scotland, France, The Netherlands, and Japan.

PART I

Sources

1

Interdisciplinary Women and Experimental Voice

I do not “sing to pass the time I have left to live.” I spent this time singing urgently to live. To find my way of singing, at first I screamed and yelled from the depths of my body, from pain. I made myself dizzy but it was there I found pleasure and peace for the first time in physical, intellectual, and moral form. To listen, be heard, and be in harmony in an environment that accepts you and that you understand, that’s what I tasted … I chose the voice and improvisation … The result is a strange song, composed of various sounds based on different forces … Guttural sounds, lyrical sounds, multiphonics, explosive sounds, murmurs, hissings, sounds expressed through extreme tension, sounds that resonate in the body, harmonic sounds, spun sounds, trills, leaps between head voice and chest voice. I sing all these sounds and cultivate a form of expressive research and a musical approach that reflects righteous feelings through a beautiful instrument.

—Annick Nozati 2000¹

In a 1983 review in the French publication Jazz Magazine, Christian Aguetaï enacts a distinction between singing and the performances of Parisian vocalist Annick Nozati by writing: “In the beginning was the word. Then singing. Then Annick Nozati … who is neither storyteller nor singer.”² For Aguetaï, the notion of “singing” was distinct from what he described as the “simple” and powerful “poetry” of “Nozati and her sounds.” The passage that opens this chapter demonstrates that Nozati herself did not make the same distinction. She identifies her practice as singing, even as she goes on to describe the fundamental role played in her work by a variety of sounds others (like Aguetaï) do not consider singing. For Nozati, allowing herself to work with these particular sounds made it possible to feel she has accessed something essential. These sounds were fundamental to the shaping of her vocal practice into a form she considers moral.

In this opening chapter I proceed from Aguetaï’s impulse to recognise the practice of free jazz singers like Nozati, who improvise using sounds many listeners refuse to consider singing, as deserving of attention. At the same time, I follow Nozati’s lead. I refuse to mark these practices as non-singing. However, I acknowledge that improvisation that explores body and voice in less conventional ways—whatever that may be in distinct cultural spaces—is often treated differently from normative singing and can give rise to social processes and affective experiences sometimes distinct from those afforded by other forms of singing.

Free jazz vocalists have been largely ignored in jazz studies, voice studies, and experimental music literature. However, free jazz vocal practices have made an important contribution to the body of practices referred to by “singing,” by “jazz,” and by “experimental music.” The term “experimental music” is problematic (it is both a reification and a poor description of many of the practices under its umbrella, which often do not involve “experiment” per se), and it also bestows prestige, more often than not, as we well know, on white male composers and their works. The work of scholars like George Lewis, Ellen Waterman, Fred Moten, and Benjamin Piekut points to the roles race, gender, class, and nation play in excluding musicians and their practices from associations with the privileged category of musical experimentalism.³ They each have shown how “adventurous jazz” has been left out of dominant accounts of experimental music that work to construct the category as a “white configuration” (Piekut 2011, 4, 10). As these forms of jazz get left out of the category of experimental music, within the borders of “adventurous jazz,” vocalists are often marginalised, the voice often being considered too emotional or insufficiently abstract to exemplify the qualities that lead many to privilege “adventurous jazz” itself. Then, in one final layer of marginalisation, within the histories that take jazz voice seriously, ideologies exist that marginalise the unconventional approaches Nozati describes, which here I refer to as free jazz soundsinging.⁴ And so, three layers of exclusion exist for vocalists who work improvisationally with unconventional sounds within the contexts of “adventurous jazz.”

Each chapter in the first half of Voices Found explores a distinct source from which free jazz soundsinging emerged. These begin here with a focus on how it developed largely through the efforts of trailblazing women who crossed interdisciplinary divides to develop a practice of singing they found experientially invaluable. These women championed these methods in the face of efforts that sought (and continue to seek) to invalidate and marginalise it, despite the fact these singers felt it to be honest, healing, and moral.⁵ Their collective efforts constitute a chapter in the history of experimental music whose recognition is overdue, a chapter capable of teaching important lessons about the meanings and processes that unfold when the voice is free to conduct the “expressive research” Nozati describes.

Alongside Nozati, this chapter follows four other women—Yoko Ono, Jeanne Lee, Christine Jeffrey, and Maggie Nicols—and one man—Phil Minton—through the contexts that constrained and afforded their work. These six careers do not, of course, tell the entire story of the rise of free jazz voice or even free jazz soundsinging, but they do reflect an important theme: the role interdisciplinarity played in the development of free jazz singing and in the negotiation of how women could participate in jazz performance in a manner that felt authentic and liberatory to them. Each of the five women discussed here crossed disciplinary borders and, in doing so, challenged the limits of acceptable vocal and musical practice. Without the innovations they brought into music from sound poetry, sculpture, experimental theatre, and dance, free jazz vocal practices would be less multidimensional and less critical.⁶ This chapter examines this history and attempts to shed light on the gendered musical politics that marginalised these practices and shaped the ways these singers used their voices in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s, it became more common for free jazz singers to collaborate with one another. A broader consciousness that voice-only free jazz could stand on its own, proceeding without instrumental collaborators, arose. In this chapter, I outline developments leading to this, and I affirm that those largely responsible were female innovators whose experiences, moral compass, convictions, and interdisciplinary practices deserve wider consideration in the face of past marginalisation, dismissal, and ignorance of their work.

From Concept Art and Sound Poetry Into Soundsinging: Yoko Ono and Jeanne Lee

Yoko Ono is the most widely recognisable free jazz singer. Born in 1933 in Tokyo, Ono moved to New York in 1951 and, over the course of the next decade, began to establish herself as a major figure in contemporary music and art. In the decades that followed, exhibitions of her work as a concept, performance, and visual artist appeared in celebrated art institutions around the globe. Her musical work in the fields of art and popular music has been deeply influential, and her status as a pop culture icon from 1968 to the present is unquestionable. However, despite this recognition, writers who have chronicled her career often make short shrift of her work as an improvising vocalist. Since soundsinging itself has received so little attention, it has been difficult for many to make sense of this component of her creative practice. Equally, the striking work she has done in this area and the virulent reaction it often receives have made it difficult for them to completely ignore it. More often than not, their strategy for acknowledging this component of her creative practice involves a quick quotation of a particular passage from a review by Jill Johnston that appeared in The Village Voice on December 7, 1961, and an equally quick retreat back into other areas of her history and practice.

Johnston’s review describes Ono’s November 24, 1961 performance of her piece AOS for David Tudor at a concert of her work at Carnegie Recital Hall, and reads: “Yoko Ono, I presume it was Yoko Ono, concluded the work with amplified sighs, breathing, retching, screaming—many tones of pain and pleasure mixed with a jibberish of foreign-sounding language that was no language at all.” Writers quoting this passage have often implied it contains everything that needs to be said about Ono’s vocal work—she screams, she sighs, some sounds invoke moments when the body is in pain and others are sexually suggestive, and the word, that mark of “civilised” cultural practice, is absent, placing the meaningfulness and value of the performance into question. Though the passage is capable of conveying important aspects of Ono’s vocal work, readers of the passage may or may not extrapolate from it that here was a musical performance informed both by feminist performance art and a history of intentional poetic resistance and rejection of the word.

Before the Lettrist poets (discussed further in Chapter 2) refused the semantic in their writing in the 1940s, arguing that words can only alienate poets from the dynamics of their embodied and affective existence, this refusal was also a feature in the 1920s of the work of Dada poets like Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, and Kurt Schwitters (Bohn 2001, 260–61). By the early 1960s, there had been decades of precedent for forms of poetry not prioritising the semantic, and at that time in New York, Ono was part of the Fluxus movement, a creative community that was extending these precedents in new ways. In 1960, Jackson Mac Low, a close friend and collaborator of Ono’s, began working with a style of performance poetry that had also been used by the Dadaists, which he referred to as simultaneities.⁷ Like much of Ono’s work, Mac Low’s simultaneities thwarted the dominance of semantic meaning and foregrounded the materiality of the voice not by refusing but by obscuring semantic content. Mac Low’s simultaneities were poems intended to be read by multiple simultaneous readers who are “asked to read the verbal material at a pace and volume of their own choice” and “generate individual rhythms of articulations” (Kostelanetz 1978, 77). Some involved reading the same texts in different orders, and others involved a palimpsest of multiple different texts. Available recordings of performances of these works confirm Richard Kostelanetz’s appraisal that they were often “unrelievedly chaotic” experiences wherein meaning could be subordinated to the effect of a wall of vocal materiality that was abstract by virtue of the fact the overlapping voices often made it nearly impossible to make out the semantic content (Ibid.).⁸

In 1961, Mac Low composed a poem called “Speech.” The fact that he provided “directions for reading this poem aloud” is indication that “Speech,” like many of Mac Low’s poems, was a poem intended to be performed (Mac Low 2008, 95). “Speech” places a demand on the performer to produce unconventional vocal sound in the delivery of its second epigraph. Mac Low instructs the reader to: “Read the first epigraph and perform the second” (Ibid.). This second epigraph is a performance instruction asking the reader to reproduce a version of “The Sea Gull” by Joseph Gould. The instruction reads: “The ‘reader’ climbs onto a table or chair, flaps his arms wildly, like wings, & screams like a sea gull a good many times, as loudly, and harshly, and shrilly as possible” (Ibid.).⁹

These examples begin to show how abstract unconventional vocality was a part of poetic practice in Ono’s New York. Acceptance of abstract vocal sound as poetic content in her community may have played a role in giving Ono the confidence to employ abstract unconventional vocal sound in her own performance and musical work. By positioning this type of work as music rather than poetry, Ono was setting the stage for much of what would come later in the realm of free jazz voice.

1961 was, for Ono, a year heavily oriented towards vocality. This is reflected in a number of her compositions. 1961 was the year she composed her Voice Piece for Soprano, a piece that encouraged a basic form of vocal “excess” by inviting the performer to scream in three different ways. This piece, and others I will discuss below, belong to the category of concept art, a practice Ono worked with extensively; Ono printed concept pieces like Voice Piece for Soprano for visual display, and a reader’s encounter with the instructions and the imaginations and feelings that result can be considered a realisation of the work without any actual sound occurring. Yet at the same time, Voice Piece for Soprano and the other pieces I will mention below are indeed pieces Ono has realised through audible vocal performance. They are part of her legacy not only as a conceptual artist but as a vocalist, an improviser, and a composer for voice.

Another such work is her Cough Piece, also composed in 1961, whose instruction is: “Keep coughing a year.” Though it may be unlikely Ono has ever performed the piece for the duration the instruction suggests, she has performed and recorded a shorter version of the piece. Hanne Beate Ueland describes Ono’s 1963 recording of Cough Piece by saying: “The work consists of rhythmic coughing into an electronic ‘carpet’ of sound. At first hearing, the coughing can seem harsh and frightening, yet eventually it weaves itself into a web of sounds that lack variation: it becomes a seductive, meditative warp” (Ueland 2005, 127).

The “first of her word of mouth pieces,” Whisper Piece (1960) involves an audience passing “on a word to each other in a whisper” (Iles 1997, 17). Though this may seem to involve only conventional speech, abstract vocal materiality was central to the work; Iles writes, “according to Ono,” this piece was “about destroying the word” (Ibid.). When we whisper, the noise elements of speech, the sounds of airflow and stoppage as we create fricatives, plosives, and sibilants, are often louder than the voiced elements. When we listen to whispering, the abstract materiality o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Extended, Extra-Normal, and Everyday Voices
• Part I Sources
• Part II Theories
• Bibliography
• Index