Freedom in the Air is a powerful suite for quartet, improvised to accompany a projection
of iconic, historic photographs (by James
Karales and others) of events in the American Civil Rights movement.
A group led by trumpeter Barry Long, and including saxophonist David
Pope, bassist Joshua Davis and percussionist Phil Haynes,
performed the music at the Campus Theatre of Bucknell University in Lewisburg,
Pennsylvania, on 23 February 2012; the performance was recorded on video, which
can be viewed online through the
university's website. The compact disc or download is available for purchase
from bandcamp.com. It's a great recording, well worth buying.
The
music is ekphrastic; sounds are keyed to visuals, sometimes providing auditory
allegories – as in the fifth section, “Fifteen Minutes in Birmingham,” when the
racial violence depicted in the photographs draws discordant, harsh responses
from the players – but more often acting as reactive contemplation, a kind of
aural commentary. For musical source material, Long draws on spirituals and
protest songs, many of them from African-American religious and social
traditions from the southern states, many of them performed by participants in
the marches and protests to which the images bear historical witness. (Two
pieces come from elsewhere than the American public domain, but both are deeply
enmeshed in the civil rights soundscape: John
Coltrane’s “Reverend King” – posthumously issued on his
album Cosmic Music – and the song that provides the suite's title, “Freedom
in the Air” by Bernice
Johnson Reagon.) Watching the video, you can see how attentive to and how
focused on these images the members of the quartet remain, throughout the
performance. The photos act not so much as score but as timbral palette,
setting the tone.
Without
the visuals, the music still works incredibly well, but as a meditative rather
than a contemplative tone-poem. Things open with Long solo on flugelhorn,
intoning Reagon’s melody as an autumnal taps, framing what follows from the
quartet in a largely elegiac register. The music on the whole is consistently
measured and self-aware, rarely venturing beyond a medium tempo, but it’s
also deeply evocative, entrancing, awash in genuine pathos. I have been trying
for a few days to think of an analogue for this group's sound, and the closest
I can come is, perhaps, Paul Motian’s
trios with Charles
Brackeen (whose firm, deliberate tenor saxophone tone David Pope sometimes
seems to echo). Phil Haynes’s drumming can occasionally be subtly unruly, gently
but firmly disrupting easy agreements. Collectively, the quartet tends to
refuse sentimentality or nostalgia in favour of a lyrically incisive and
open-eared historicism, giving difficult episodes in a shared national past
a present-tense relevance, a contemporaneity. Improvisation creates a set of
contingent segues between what’s been done and what still happens, and invites
us to consider, to reconsider, how negotiating these cultural challenges can
vitally matter to us even now, especially now.
The
manoeuvres between the contemplative and the meditative, between the reactive
and the expressive, that this performance undertakes can be better addressed, I
think, by looking at the video, and paying attention to the intensity of the
musicians’ focus – how they themselves look at the on-screen images. Three of the four
members of the quartet are academics, and two hold doctorates: I mention this
fact to suggest that, if this music is to be understood as scholarship, there
is no sense of clinical detachment or analytic objectivity here. The historical
engagements they undertake are, instead, consistently creative, vital and
moving. It’s also worth noting – although it's a bit presumptuous on my part –
that none of the musicians appears to have a visibly African-American heritage;
given that they are playing through such thoroughly racially-inflected terrain,
they might tend to be positioned as outsiders or onlookers. But Long’s point in
presenting this music, I'd say, is to suggest that we are all – regardless of
where we might think we come from or how we look – implicated in this cultural history, and
that we need not only to be self-aware of that enmeshment, but also to actively
negotiate our social subjectivities, building communities not necessarily
through unproblematic identifications – such as similarities of appearance or
background – but through our encounters with difference, with our own inherent
differences. Barry Long’s music makes one such set of encounters sing. The
video ends with a minute-long spontaneous silence that the CD can’t include,
but it’s also one of the most powerful musical moments in the performance: a
space of thoughtful, respectful exchange onto which this fleetingly profound
music opens, helps us open.
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