Bklyn Sounds 12/6/2023—12/12/2023 + Harry Smith, Patron Saint of the Dada Strains

On the Whitney Museum's Smith exhibit, "Fragments of a Faith Forgotten" + Shows: aja monet / Norm Talley / Amirtha Kidambi + Darius Jones / Hailu Mergia + Quelle Chris + KeiyaA / Caroline Davis / +...

As is likely the case with most people’s discovery of Harry Smith, I found him through the Anthology of American Folk Music, which I feel comfortable describing as one of the single most important mixtapes of the 20th century. I first read about the Anthology in Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic, a 1997 book ostensibly about Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and retreat from spotlight following his early-career motorcycle accident, but whose narrative ends up doing a deep-dive into the collection of folk, blues, country and old-timey records that Smith compiled for the Folkways label in 1952. 

Marcus claims the Anthology not only influenced many of the rock hall-of-famers who wrote music in its wake, but that it chronicled a different country than the one that was, in the mid-’90s, flexing its exceptionalist “American century” muscles following the Cold War. Marcus called Smith’s collection — not just the music, but its dada-ist historical-liner-notes-and-collages packaging — a document of the “old, weird America.” The phrase stuck. Later in ‘97, Smithsonian Folkways reissued the Anthology, and I found myself drawn into a world I recognized but had never regarded as whole. Smith’s American history was one I could still take cultural pleasure in, many of whose characters I already knew from songs I’d been hearing and singing since I was a teen. It wasn’t the land that had by then already begun disappointing the liberty-seeking immigrant kid, but one that continued to reveal strange ideas of freedom not written into America’s official myth.

Smith, the cult hero — or more precisely, a key member of many cults — is the subject of a highly recommended show currently at the Whitney Museum, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith. As expected, the Anthology plays a central role in the exhibit. One of the windowed, 5th-floor rooms is dedicated to it: playing the music on a loop, with multiple seated stations displaying the original liner notes on monitors, while a fat stack of visual material (letters, contracts, newspaper cut-outs, lo-fi image print-outs…some with the Getty Images tags still embedded) is available as additional information and stimuli. (I could go back and spend the entire time in that room, gazing upon the river and listening.) Yet, as in real life, the Anthology is merely a useful, indicative gateway into Harry’s oeuvre. By placing it besides a mountain of Smith’s other work — his experimental films (cut-ups and animations, but also: a Warhol “screen-test”), his psychedelic-inspired paintings and drawings (some as “visual scores” to Dizzy Gillespie’s late-’40s works), his photos and recordings of Native American ceremonies (where Smith’s life-long experiences with mind-altering substances may have first began), his endless assemblages — Fragments displays how that collection of “folk music” was only the most widely embraced result of creative and collecting endeavors that were, essentially, all inter-connected. A life’s work. 

Fragments displays Smith’s young curiosity as never subsiding. It intuits how remaining outside of institutional frameworks might have kept Smith forever poor; but also how it probably saved his artistic soul, guiding the work towards ideas of importance and timelessness genuinely, mostly unimpeded by the biases of the day. (Or maybe the biases were successfully expunged from the exhibit by the curators, though I don’t think so.) Smith practiced a personal take on anthropology whose methods would now be considered dated, invasive. Yet his output also seems to have justified his aspirational motives, the desire to discover broader connections between communities, a potential of shared culture. Smith made far-flung links that could come off as larks (or mash-ups), until you see/hear the crumb-trail that Fragments lays out, bridging images, sounds, people, scenes — from the jazz beats, to contemporary punks. Often Smith *was* the crumb-trail, the patron saint of every hipster ever. Not the jackasses who acquire cultural knowledge for personal gain, but the inquisitive strangers reveling in the beauty of understanding the foreign because of the insight it provides into a world at large. 

Yeah, I recognize that I am romanticizing. And once I read Cosmic Scholar, John Szwed’s newly published Smith autobiography whose convenient arrival alongside the Whitney exhibit doesn’t seem accidental [edit: both exhibit and book arrive to celebrate Smith’s centennial], maybe some of that romanticization will wear off. But even the installation of the other show on the Whitney’s 5th floor adds to the sense that the links Smith recognized between weird old America’s cultural and spiritual ideals, and the neural pathways such connections fire up, offer a path forward. In obvious ways, that other show — an amazing mid-career retrospective of work by Los Angeles-based portraitist Henry Taylor, entitled B-Side — is a juxtaposition: living work, oversized oil paintings, mostly realist imagery. Yet the most affecting thing to me about Taylor’s paintings is the heavyweight presence of his subjects’ souls in these pictures, be they friends and neighbors, or patients (Taylor worked at a mental institution for a few years during college), or of newspaper photos. There’s a presence, in these portraits, of everyday people whose spirits make Taylor’s world worth investing in. Their souls matter deeply, the paintings say quietly - or not so quietly. So too it seems with Harry. These people — their songs and ceremonies and stories and icons, all the things they mean, and all of which Harry collected — are universally special, Smith’s work seems to proclaim. You just need a different contextual lens than the one American society usually bestows upon its citizenry, through which to dig them as such.  

(Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith @ Whitney Museum of American Art, Manhattan, thru Jan 28, 2024 — FREE under 18/$24-$30, pay what you wish on Friday evenings) 

This Week’s Shows:   

A couple of weeks back, after the annihilation of Gaza had already began, I went to see Haleh Liza Gafori, a New Yorker of Iranian descent, read her translations of Rumi poems at the Record Shop in Red Hook, and it was a moment of peace as I had not experienced in some time. Haleh recites them in Persian as well as in English, and as she put to me after, adds humanist nuance to the work that most “scholarly” translations miss. Tonight, she’ll have musical accompaniment by Shahzad Ismaily and cellist Marika Hughes. (Wed 12/6, 7:30 @ Bowery Poetry Club, Manhattan - $20)

It’s amazing to read that wordsmith aja monet’s when the poems do what they do is her album debut when it feels like New York has been living with her as our public poet for a decade. (We kinda have: the Bklyn-born monet first broke out from Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 2007, as a teen.) monet now resides in LA, and though she was on a massive bill in Central Park this summer,  this feels like her triumphant return. monet will performs with Palestinian-American oud player Clarissa Bitar, the Palestinian poet Mohammed el-Kurd, and writer (+ Jewish Voices for Peace activist) Morgan Bassichis. (Wed 12/6, 8p @ Pioneer Works, Red Hook - $30)

I tend not to write about rock bands here because I think rock forms have (mostly) run out of things to say to the world, and interesting ways to say ‘em. Bklyn’s Bodega are a favorite exception, not because their social critiques over post-punk propulsion is in any way “new” — their sound would have fit in Williamsburg two decades ago, much less late-’70s UK — but that the group’s laser-focused songwriting and dynamics are fierce. Art-school weaponry at its NYC finest. Also: Big Bliss (Wed 12/6, 8p @ TV Eye, Ridgewood - $15)