2/25
Last week was busy. I finally got my first interview responses, from Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch—by interviewing them both in person, when they were in the area. I caught a master class they gave on “world music improvisation,” which resonated with my project. I’m realizing that expecting busy musicians to write responses to my interview questions is too much to ask, in most cases (there are exceptions)—especially since I’ll be speaking with a lot of people not native English speakers. So part of my next chunk of work, and ongoing, will be transcription. I’ll get those two interviews up on my site, then flash them out to others on the list likely to be most interested in their stuff.
Didn’t get to doing Min Xiao-Fen’s notes and questions; probably will next week. Also on the pile, Wu Man’s CDs and press kit. Jason Hwang, Jin Hi Kim, Taylor Ho Bynum...those will keep me busy for the next few weeks.
I’m also realizing that the typical interview will be unwieldy in that message-&-comment format on Basecamp, so I’ll start each one out there, to draw people in, then shift the remainder to an attachment on the post.
If any of you are still with me, peeking in on the blog once a week, staying logged in on the project site...it occurs to me that everyone could be lurking and monitoring, seeing how it unfolds, just as easily as gone for good, because if you check the right box, you can come and go through the project site without your name showing up as you do it.
I like the suspense of this situation. I’m perfectly content to play by myself in this sandbox until the project’s done; if that’s the case, it’s the same situation as with the other two books, only it’s as if I’m experiencing it in a house with a one-way glass wall I can’t see out of. All the world may be looking in, or nobody. The musicians all seem open to cooperating with me, as long as I don’t present undue demands; the colleagues will probably jump back in when I finally get to them again, or before, if interviews that pique their interest start to appear.
I can imagine why others doing similar projects would see this glass house as pointless or worse, as a way of working, but I’m in a different kind of position from the typical such person, and what I have in mind as the final product here is taking better shape in this environment than the private one. I can tell already...
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Week 7, 2/18
Spent last week taking notes on Min Xiao-Fen CDs; ready to take notes on her press-kit info, then write up her interview questions this week. Next CDs to process are two by Randy-Raine Reusch; Mei Han’s notes/interview done, and I’ll see both of them in Portland this week, and try to get interviews done, or at least started.
Heard a talk by Robin Kelley on a subject right in line with my own project, made a connection with him on the project site. Also got a CD from Ursel Schlicht, 3 from Jason Kao Hwang (also posted to him on-site), and one of Taylor Ho Bynum’s, another by Michael Dessen.
Falling into a routine of doing a close listening & note-taking on at least one CD a day. As soon as full interviews begin to pile up, I’ll feel like what’s shaping up in private will begin to show in the new way I want it to here...
Heard a talk by Robin Kelley on a subject right in line with my own project, made a connection with him on the project site. Also got a CD from Ursel Schlicht, 3 from Jason Kao Hwang (also posted to him on-site), and one of Taylor Ho Bynum’s, another by Michael Dessen.
Falling into a routine of doing a close listening & note-taking on at least one CD a day. As soon as full interviews begin to pile up, I’ll feel like what’s shaping up in private will begin to show in the new way I want it to here...
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Week 6, 2/11
Most of the work I did last week was on the fiction part of the book. It’s coming together to sync up with the music study in a very exciting way.
CDs continue to trickle in, and private emails from musicians. I’ll probably do a taped interview with Randy Raine-Reusch and Mei Han when they’re both in Portland in a couple of weeks, then transcribe it and put it up on the site. Vijay and Rudresh will probably get back to me around then too. I expect on-site interactions to start up again as soon as I have some full interview threads in place.
I’m not sure why, after an initial burst of enthusiastic responses, nothing at all happened over the next weeks. I’m content to let that be; can’t see myself worrying about it, or trying to stimulate it. Even if it continues to be so, the work I’m doing goes on as usual, and will bear its fruit as usual. Still, I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t gradually resume when it should. I can only deal with one or two musicians a week, and I don’t think I’ll be communicating with colleagues more until I’ve gone through all the musicians first.
This next week Min Xiao-Fen and Wu Man will be the focus of my research and interview constructions...
CDs continue to trickle in, and private emails from musicians. I’ll probably do a taped interview with Randy Raine-Reusch and Mei Han when they’re both in Portland in a couple of weeks, then transcribe it and put it up on the site. Vijay and Rudresh will probably get back to me around then too. I expect on-site interactions to start up again as soon as I have some full interview threads in place.
I’m not sure why, after an initial burst of enthusiastic responses, nothing at all happened over the next weeks. I’m content to let that be; can’t see myself worrying about it, or trying to stimulate it. Even if it continues to be so, the work I’m doing goes on as usual, and will bear its fruit as usual. Still, I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t gradually resume when it should. I can only deal with one or two musicians a week, and I don’t think I’ll be communicating with colleagues more until I’ve gone through all the musicians first.
This next week Min Xiao-Fen and Wu Man will be the focus of my research and interview constructions...
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Intro to Mei Han interview, 2/4
2/4/07
Intro to Mei Han’s Interview
(To see the interview post, log in to NewOldMusic project site at http://humanitiesallied.updatelog.com/login. You’ll see a list of “Latest Activity,” with this post and the interview at the top of it. Either one will take you to the thread. There you can comment now or later, as you wish. When and if you do, you’ll automatically be added to the thread. You can remove yourself from it, on the right side of its screen, any time.)
Hi Mei. I have spent much of this past week immersed in your CDs and textual materials, and am ready to talk to you about it.
It has been a very beautiful and interesting experience. It does my heart much good to encounter beauty and imagination that is new to me, and it does my mind good to see that going in a direction I understand and appreciate on the terms of my own personal history. (By that, most generally, I’m thinking of your work’s synthesis of the different musical traditions and approaches long more familiar to me as more separate. I like your way better...)
But before I get into my specific discussion questions about your work, as I do with all the interviewees for this project I would like to fill you in some more about what I’m doing with this book, and how it’s developed so far...so you can get a sense of how your work might fit into that picture.
As your work shows holistically the disciplinary processes of the scholar and musician, composer and improviser, traditionalist and innovator, nationalist and globalist...I want this book to reflect the same kind of depth, rich texture, and fully rounded unity between too-often polarized aspects of human being. I want it to capture and convey the transpersonal poetry and mystery as much as the personal-psychological-biographical, the cultural/ethnographic, and the musicology of the music. It will be more than an academic or journalistic book about music, more than a fiction novel about music, though it will be those things in the usual sense too.
As my research for it has begun to unfold in real time, it’s taken on a life of its own based on who has responded to my initial queries, and how. I take this part of the work that is beyond my control as part of the way that it will take shape. My initial responses drew my first attentions to India, Russia, and Turkey. They went a little distance, as far as I could take them just now, until I get and process more materials.
I tell you this to let you know that in my mind is beginning to form what I think of as my “jazz map”—a concept I picked up from my friend and colleague John Szwed, and used in my last book. If I were writing a history of jazz in America, my jazz map would start with New Orleans, go to Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and so on. Each place would have distinctive narratives and features, time periods, people, musical features and profiles.
In my second book, the map expanded beyond America to Europe and Russia. With this one, it expands further into India, Indonesia, China, Korea, Japan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey (to name the countries from which musicians and scholars and I have actually begun to exchange information and insights).
German bassist Peter Kowald said this to me in 1997: “It's interesting that Japanese have a word for 'know,' but they never use it. Roland Barthes' book The Empire of Science, is an interesting book for this. This is a wonderful book about Japan, which he describes as being not really about a real place in the world, but if it was it would be about Japan. Which is a very Japanese way to describe something.”
That is the sense in which my global jazz map (like this book) will be constructed—as much a mythical, Heffley-subjective China as a real one, in your case. The China that comes across in the sound of the music as it strikes my particular ears, as much as in all the historical, musicological, and personal information I hope to take in from and about you and your work.
Like you (and me), most of the musicians and scholars I’m talking to about these different cultures and traditions have roots there, but are also citizens or residents in the West, or their parents emigrated here, or they work and travel from their home base, or are Westerners who have put much of their life into those other places.
China is the biggest blank spot on the Asian parts of my jazz map. I have fleshed out Korea some with the help of Jin Hi Kim; Mongolia, through my study of Sainkho Namchylak; Japan, through a variety of musicians and dancers; and different Asian-American voices and histories through various people here. My entry point to all of them is that they’ve collaborated with the Americans and Europeans I knew or knew about first, or participated in the same general area of music that I did, in some way. My sense of and connections to those “places,” even though I still have far to go with them in this project, are more developed than those of China, in my mind.
But suddenly China is looming large, filling up my radar screen, in several coinciding ways. I am back on the Pacific Rim, where I was born and raised, after 12 years on the East Coast...and I discover you, ASZA, Randy Raine-Reusch not too far from my Portland home, going strong down the path I envisioned traveling for this book. Min Xiao-Fen and Wu Man responded as quickly and graciously to my initial queries, and we found we had mutual friends in the music world, and got off to a good start together. I take all this as a cue that China will be at the center of my plate here for awhile, starting with you.
That will serve as my lead-in to our interview. It is coming to you from the project site; you can follow the link here to post a comment to this post there, if you like. I will send you a second post soon with my interview questions; these will come from my private email to you, and we will communicate there privately until we’re done. When we are, I’ll ask your permission to post our exchange on the project site for others there to see and interact with with their own comments, if they wish.
Thanks, Mei...
MH
Intro to Mei Han’s Interview
(To see the interview post, log in to NewOldMusic project site at http://humanitiesallied.updatelog.com/login. You’ll see a list of “Latest Activity,” with this post and the interview at the top of it. Either one will take you to the thread. There you can comment now or later, as you wish. When and if you do, you’ll automatically be added to the thread. You can remove yourself from it, on the right side of its screen, any time.)
Hi Mei. I have spent much of this past week immersed in your CDs and textual materials, and am ready to talk to you about it.
It has been a very beautiful and interesting experience. It does my heart much good to encounter beauty and imagination that is new to me, and it does my mind good to see that going in a direction I understand and appreciate on the terms of my own personal history. (By that, most generally, I’m thinking of your work’s synthesis of the different musical traditions and approaches long more familiar to me as more separate. I like your way better...)
But before I get into my specific discussion questions about your work, as I do with all the interviewees for this project I would like to fill you in some more about what I’m doing with this book, and how it’s developed so far...so you can get a sense of how your work might fit into that picture.
As your work shows holistically the disciplinary processes of the scholar and musician, composer and improviser, traditionalist and innovator, nationalist and globalist...I want this book to reflect the same kind of depth, rich texture, and fully rounded unity between too-often polarized aspects of human being. I want it to capture and convey the transpersonal poetry and mystery as much as the personal-psychological-biographical, the cultural/ethnographic, and the musicology of the music. It will be more than an academic or journalistic book about music, more than a fiction novel about music, though it will be those things in the usual sense too.
As my research for it has begun to unfold in real time, it’s taken on a life of its own based on who has responded to my initial queries, and how. I take this part of the work that is beyond my control as part of the way that it will take shape. My initial responses drew my first attentions to India, Russia, and Turkey. They went a little distance, as far as I could take them just now, until I get and process more materials.
I tell you this to let you know that in my mind is beginning to form what I think of as my “jazz map”—a concept I picked up from my friend and colleague John Szwed, and used in my last book. If I were writing a history of jazz in America, my jazz map would start with New Orleans, go to Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and so on. Each place would have distinctive narratives and features, time periods, people, musical features and profiles.
In my second book, the map expanded beyond America to Europe and Russia. With this one, it expands further into India, Indonesia, China, Korea, Japan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey (to name the countries from which musicians and scholars and I have actually begun to exchange information and insights).
German bassist Peter Kowald said this to me in 1997: “It's interesting that Japanese have a word for 'know,' but they never use it. Roland Barthes' book The Empire of Science, is an interesting book for this. This is a wonderful book about Japan, which he describes as being not really about a real place in the world, but if it was it would be about Japan. Which is a very Japanese way to describe something.”
That is the sense in which my global jazz map (like this book) will be constructed—as much a mythical, Heffley-subjective China as a real one, in your case. The China that comes across in the sound of the music as it strikes my particular ears, as much as in all the historical, musicological, and personal information I hope to take in from and about you and your work.
Like you (and me), most of the musicians and scholars I’m talking to about these different cultures and traditions have roots there, but are also citizens or residents in the West, or their parents emigrated here, or they work and travel from their home base, or are Westerners who have put much of their life into those other places.
China is the biggest blank spot on the Asian parts of my jazz map. I have fleshed out Korea some with the help of Jin Hi Kim; Mongolia, through my study of Sainkho Namchylak; Japan, through a variety of musicians and dancers; and different Asian-American voices and histories through various people here. My entry point to all of them is that they’ve collaborated with the Americans and Europeans I knew or knew about first, or participated in the same general area of music that I did, in some way. My sense of and connections to those “places,” even though I still have far to go with them in this project, are more developed than those of China, in my mind.
But suddenly China is looming large, filling up my radar screen, in several coinciding ways. I am back on the Pacific Rim, where I was born and raised, after 12 years on the East Coast...and I discover you, ASZA, Randy Raine-Reusch not too far from my Portland home, going strong down the path I envisioned traveling for this book. Min Xiao-Fen and Wu Man responded as quickly and graciously to my initial queries, and we found we had mutual friends in the music world, and got off to a good start together. I take all this as a cue that China will be at the center of my plate here for awhile, starting with you.
That will serve as my lead-in to our interview. It is coming to you from the project site; you can follow the link here to post a comment to this post there, if you like. I will send you a second post soon with my interview questions; these will come from my private email to you, and we will communicate there privately until we’re done. When we are, I’ll ask your permission to post our exchange on the project site for others there to see and interact with with their own comments, if they wish.
Thanks, Mei...
MH
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