Source: ListN Up.

Opera News has called Anthony Davis “A National Treasure” for his pioneering work in opera. His most recent opera, The Central Park Five, with a libretto by Richard Wesley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2020. He has also been on the cutting edge of improvised music and jazz for over four decades. A graduate of Yale University in 1975, Mr. Davis is currently a Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

His music often sounds as if it was assembled rather than composed, due to his makeshift strategies for working with tape loops (he would string them around his apartment, over furniture and around the microphone stand) and what he did with his voice. When he made use of lyrics in his work, it was always material that could be bent, dissolved, or destroyed entirely. Often, he preferred wordless chants and strange incantations. That’s maybe what makes his sound so otherworldly, suggests Quentin Rollet, a close friend and a veteran improviser who’s played saxophone for Nurse With Wound and The Red Krayola. “You think you’re somewhere else. But you can’t find anything to hold onto, because it doesn’t look like anything you know.”

Source: The Wire.

Nantes based Éditions Lenka Lente are about to publish a new series of essays dedicated to the late US soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Writer Guillaume Tarche asks 41 contributors – including Lacy’s collaborator and wife Irene Aebi, Alvin Curran, Jorrit Dijkstra, Seymour Wright, and many more – to share their individual experiences of Lacy, reflecting on his sound and legacy.

Source: LIVING LIFE FEARLESS.

Sometime in 2014, Robert Wyatt, with more than 40 years in music decided to officially retire from creating it. Maybe he just got tired. Maybe it was his poor health. Maybe both. He himself said that it was his age and greater interest in politics. “There is a pride in stopping, I don’t want the music to go off.”

But, whatever the reason is, he leaves behind a musical legacy that seems to have the strongest impression on musicians themselves — particularly in his native Britain. Even considering that he didn’t have a lot of singles breaking onto the British charts. Maybe it was exactly his left-oriented politics and his very direct presentation of political views, through music or otherwise.

Source: The Quietus.

In an exclusive extract from his book Beefheart: Through The Eyes Of Magic, band member John ‘Drumbo’ French recalls the making of Trout Mask Replica

Source: The Wire.

Here was an apparent paradox of the man. He had lived nearly his entire life in big cities, beginning with Monroe, northern Louisiana, and Oakland, California. As a youngster, he had been eager to fully embrace the potentialities and temptations offered within and outside the limits of the “black ghetto”. But he was carrying the backwoods all along, as both an emotional compass and a source of inner strength.

It could be argued that this paradox extended to a large share of the music known as free jazz. Generally thought of within a conceptual framework designed to account for various Western avant garde art movements, free jazz had, from Ornette Coleman on, always been a distant offshoot of the life and culture originating in what clarinetist John Carter has termed “The Fields period in American history”. It was at least as much so as it was a product of the urban, sophisticated settings with which previous stages of jazz modernity are commonly associated and where it itself blossomed.

Source: Daily Maverick.

In 1978, Brian Eno released Ambient Music 1: Music for Airports, the first in his series of four albums titled Ambient Music. Eno had already achieved stature as a musician (Roxy Music), producer (of U2, Talking Heads) and theorist of music. And he had made a startlingly innovative album, No Pussyfooting, with guitarist Robert Fripp of King Crimson, as well as Discreet Music, both of which can be seen as instances of ambient music before the genre received its name.

Source: Louder.

If you thought all Hawkwind’s freaky stuff belonged to the early 70s – that astro time-trip of Silver Machine, space rock and ‘exotic dancer’ Stacia – then think again. Likewise, if you thought, casual listener, that Hawkwind were a spent force once Lemmy had been slung in the clink for a spot of drugs bother on the Canadian border in 1975, or when founder member Nik Turner was dumped 18 months later, then you’re wrong.

Punk-era Hawkwind, which also budged aside for noteworthy offshoot The Hawklords, coughed up a trove of unusual and unexpected goodies. And some very real madness. It was a time of upheaval, of sackings and counter-sackings, of strangeness, quark and gun-raids. Of bust-ups, bitterness and Ginger Baker.