Bklyn Sounds 4/18/2023 - 4/24/2023 + Julius Eastman Goes Uptown

Conflicting emotions re: Eastman's music at 92Y + Other Shows: Analog Soul + Love Injection + Toribio B2B 4 AM NYC + Gavilán Rayna Russom B2B quest?onmarq / Takuya Kuroda / KOKOKO! ...and more

I have conflicting feelings about “Radical Adornment,” a two-day, three-show program of Julius Eastman music set to be performed at the 92nd Street Y this weekend by Wild Up, a Los Angeles-based new-music ensemble that over the past few years has made a name for itself by interpreting and renewing Eastman’s work. There’s excitement and gratification at seeing this incredible, revolutionary, forgotten-by-the-establishment music being given the chance to be heard, the pushing of a seminal-but-ignored figure into a well-deserved light, albeit 33 years after his death. Yet there’s also awkwardness and concern about bringing this music into an unlikely context of how/where it is presented. So, a thoroughly modern quandary. Overthinking it? Potentially, but only if the ideas of intentionality and the problems created by centuries of cultural capitalism and exploitation of art and archive, aren’t central to what/how you think about art presentation. Because it all starts with Eastman’s music, its character and multitude of purposes, how its radical nature is less “adornment” than a central function. 

I won’t detail Eastman's entire biography here, since others have done it far far better. (See also 2015’s “Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music,” edited by Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach). The short of it is that Eastman was a gay, Black composer and multi-instrumentalist at a time when that meant he was one of one. In late-’70s /early-’80s New York, Eastman was part of the Downtown scene, collaborating with the likes of Meredith Monk and Arthur Russell (how dance-music idiots like myself first came upon his name), playing everything from jazz to disco, while also continuing to compose minimalist works with confrontational titles like “Gay Guerrilla,” “Crazy Ni**er,” “Evil Ni**er,” and “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” These were performed at universities and DIY art-music spaces, but also occasionally at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and The Kitchen, downtown’s famed multi-disciplinary arts center (which in 2018 produced “That Which is Fundamental,” a month-long festival and gallery show devoted to Eastman — co-curated by Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Dustin Hurt, and the last major program of Julius’ music in New York). (In January 2018, I hosted McClodden on my Lot Radio show, a ”Julius Eastman Session.”)  But Eastman’s work dried up, and he died in May of 1990 at the age of 49. As the myth goes, he spent many of his final years homeless, his compositions lost, addicted to drugs and HIV positive. His obituary would not be published until nine months following his death.

Read up on the decade-plus-long rediscovery of his work by increasingly more reputable (and more profitable) institutions, and this myth is central to the attractive media narrative. Thankfully, so is the music, which while popularly filed on the “contemporary classical” shelf, has a humor and tenacity, rhythm and harmony, that separate it from much of the modern canon almost as much as the race, radical worldview and circumstance of its composer does. Its power is in how well it speaks for itself, and the singularity of its genius. If “Classical Music” in its European conception is meant to be performed, Eastman’s scores, for ensembles or individual elements like voice or trumpets, are there to be interpreted. It’s not like for like - much as contemporaries such as Chatham and Branca and Monk and Russell imagined chance and circumstance as a crucial ingredient. And that circumstance was not purely creative or sonic, but also social. Even the titles tell you the importance of identity and individuality. The mighty Jace Clayton, whose 2013 Julius Eastman Memory Depot release and subsequent performances (which, in my opinion, did a lot of necessary lifting to bring Eastman’s work back into contemporary focus) once said of Julius, “Tragedy is not the exception, musicians who fail are not the exception, the difficulties of being a gay Black man are not the exception. In a way, that's the mainstream. And by putting somebody on a pedestal, you must make that sort of everyday-ness of his death and the causes that led to it, harder to see.” One of the great aspects of Eastman’s music is that he did not mask the horror of what might happen. It was out front. 

This brings us to the notion of Wild Up performing Eastman’s work at an Upper East Side institution celebrating its 150-year anniversary, whose musical program veers towards old-fashioned classical and the jazz canon, but whose bread-and-butter is middlebrow talks with highbrow individuals. (For example, Bill and Hillary Clinton are there in early May.) The 92nd Street Y is a venerable old-school New York liberal mainstay, and deserves to get the passes that such places have earned. Which is also to say that, coupled with the increased Black-washing of programming by traditionally (and overwhelmingly) white cultural spaces in light of the many diversity conversations which have take place in the public sphere, there is an awkwardness when such places chase the zeitgeist. Because it is not just decolonization of these spaces we’re talking about, but about the presentation of the work in the best place possible for it - and not just what such stuffy institutions imagine the work of modernist Black genius should be about.   

For their part, Wild Up have made their engagement with Eastman clear. “Everyone wants to talk about the tragedy of his story. But there’s something else here, which is that the work is so full of joy. The work is absolute Transcendentalism,” creative director Christopher Rountree told Bandcamp. He was speaking about “Buddha,” a durational (5-hour) piece that will close the 92Y stand on Saturday night, but he was also describing the ensemble’s approach to the breadth of the composer’s work. And fair play — even if it does feel like actively separating the joy and the sorrow is an editorial decision that distorts the unique combination creating the ineffable core. 

I dunno. I’ve already admitted to conflicting feelings about this, and part of the conflict is not simply the critique, but the desired opportunity to bask in the heavy wonder of Eastman’s music, of which joy is indeed a central tenet. The world we live in bears no easy answers. So, if you’ve read this far and are intrigued, maybe you should just go and form your own opinion of what’s appropriate — and send me a note about what it sounded like in that situation. I’ll just hope that in those circumstances Eastman’s music wasn’t made, in Jace Clayton’s wise words, “too pretty” or “too pat,” that it remained “unraveled for the present and for the future.”

“Radical Adornment: The Music of Julius Eastman” featuring Wild Up, w/ special guests Devonte Hynes and Adam Tendler. The Friday evening performance will feature “Femenine.” The Saturday afternoon work will feature “Stay On It,” “Piano 2,” and other chamber works. The Saturday evening program will feature “Buddha.” (Fri 4/21, 7:30p & Sat 4/22 2p + 7p @ 92nd Street Y 1350 Lexington Ave. Manhattan - $25-$50)  

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