A Big Jazz Thing
a new jazz project, improvisation and the joy and fear of something new
I have some big new creative challenges coming up in the next couple of weeks and it’s got me thinking a lot about about my own practice as a poet who tends to explore work primarily on the page before I then perform it, what it means to collaborate and fully let go, and how I can throw my poetry and my ‘poetry voice’ into a completely different context.
The Big Thing is a new collaborative project that I’m very lucky to be involved with called ‘Lotus Code’. Years in the making, it’s a gathering together of jazz musicians, visual, spoken and electronic artists from Japan and the UK. Together we’re exploring how we can play and improvise across languages, continents, traditions and artistic mediums..and make a new sound together.
The list of who’s involved still gets me: TOKU on flugelhorn and voice, Takashi Sugawa on bass, Ed Jones on Saxophones, Rebecca Nash on piano, Federico Reuben on digital technologies (Fed has made a digital ‘sister’ of my voice to mess around with, which is an uncanny trip) and the amazing visual artist Yuriko Takagi on visuals and video. Keith Michael, one of the organising brains behind the whole project, is also joining us on drums on tour. It’s a massive privilege to be writing new poetry/lyrics and be on vocals and on stage with these masters of their craft.
Everyone flew in from Tokyo and travelled from our various parts of the UK on Monday and we’ve been in the studio this week - writing, playing (and being playful) and exploring what we can each bring to the performance. Today was our final rehearsal and it felt like a coming together of so much hard work and fun. Honestly, standing there with my mic and watching these artists play, respond and listen to each other with their instruments (plural) is something close to prayer. And to be part of that - to listen and respond with my voice as another instrument in that mix - is terrifying and electric.
However, I’m not there yet. I come from a musical background and love performing as a poet, but it’s still a real challenge to navigate how to use my poetry and my voice differently; how to write new poems and lyrics and then dismantle them and find the sounds and tones and notes within them; how to hold on to and unlearn my poetry ‘style’ all at once and find what else my voice can do in the process. I don’t want to mimic or appropriate vocalists I admire, but equally I don’t yet know all that I don’t know. Thank goodness I have patient teachers. It’s made me realise that it’s been a long time since I’ve gone completely out of my creative comfort zone. I haven’t felt bruised and unsure and creatively untethered for a long time and it’s difficult and unsettling, and also exciting. I think I want and need more of this.
But of course, there are also familiar territories too. Playfulness, games, and improvising on an idea are as innate to jazz as they are to poetry. And music runs through so many of my favourite collections, just as poetry runs through my favourite albums.
Each day I’ve bought a different collection or set of poems to riff from and take inspiration. On Wednesday, for instance, it was Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus and Say Something Back by Denise Riley. The day before it was poems from Nathaniel Mackey’s ‘Mu’ series and some of Sonia Sanchez’s Haikus:
i count the morning
stars the air so sweet i turn
riverdark with sound.
[Sonia Sanchez, from Like the Singing Coming off the Drums]I’ve been also thinking about Luke Kennard and Caroline Bird’s work (can’t wait for Luke’s new collection). Their willingness to take an idea and push it through and beyond its logic. I love the games they play. Caroline’s even written a great piece recently on poetry and clowns. And I’ve been trying to get my hands on as much translated poetry by Fumiko Nakajō as I can too. Her tanka poems take my breath away. And I’ve also been reading and listening to Anthony Joseph, who’s work I love on and off the page.
As well as Anthony, music wise, I’m spending a lot of time with Ursula Rucker, Alice Coltrane, Gil-Scott-Heron and Jayne Cortez. Ursula Rucker in particular. I’ve also been listening to Michiyo Yagi on repeat since May. Go and watch some videos of her playing the 17-string bass koto and be amazed.
Beyond poetry and music, this consideration of improvisation from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari has felt like an important touchstone for the whole project. Ed Jones, one of the creators of Lotus Code, shared this extract with everyone right when we were just starting to chat and it’s just stuck:
One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud "lines of drift" with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities.1
And of course, I can’t help but bring it back to burrowing and my own sense of what improvisation and play might mean in an eco-poetic context. Jazz is wonderfully fungi-adjacent. Listening to everyone merge their sounds and grow into something unwritten, I’m reminded of mycorrhizal networks; how fungi can partner with the roots of other plants and create a web so intertwined that one species becomes indistinct from another.
Anyway, our first performance is very soon - TOMORROW in fact (Sunday 20th July) in the Purcell Room at the Southbank and I’m nervous and excited. It’s such a great space to perform, and the event is part of a double bill of music and visual art. 3pm. Come along and catch us. It’s going to be great.
Then next week (beginning 21st July) we’re touring Cornwall, with performances across three nights in St Ives (Tuesday 22nd at the St Ives Jazz Club) and Falmouth (23rd and 25th of July) and an all-day poetry and jazz workshop on improvisation and play on the 23rd. It’s going to be intense, and it’s also the longest I’ve spent away from my two young children, so I feel weird and worried about that, but I also can’t wait.
If you’re around in London or Cornwall then come along and say hi. And here’s to grafting, merging, listening and beginning to ‘bud’ a new line of drift in the work we try to do.
Other things
Finished reading James by Percival Everett and couldn’t have loved it more. I’m now reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.
I’ve been thinking about vocabulary and genocide. Not just the ways we can hide behind language (and the ways we commit violence through language) but also the need for a new vocabulary to describe ‘aid’ that is also murder and the awful physically precise targeting of the bodies and genitals of young boys from physically remote triggers. Yousef Alnono as written from Gaza about his own experience of this here and earlier this week Anthony Anaxagorou wrote a fantastic piece on purity politics and the need to ‘conduct’ ourselves according to the demands of the people facing daily atrocity, deprivation and violence rather than according to what is linguistically or socially seemly.
I’m excited to read Deryn Rees-Jones’ new collection Hôtel Amour. I’m already in love with the fact that it’s blurbed as a sequel to Erato. Went along to Camden to celebrate the launch earlier this week and came away with this lovely keepsake:
H xx
from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Im so sorry I couldn't come today, I would love to see this so much! Any other dates?
This sounds amazing - such a joy to read about creative play and fun! (and the courage it takes too) Will there be videos or recordings of the performance/s so those of us who aren't in London or Cornwall can have a listen?