Bklyn Sounds 7/18/2023 - 7/24/2023 + Laraaji's New York
The zither and kalimba improvisor's new age has arrived + Shows: DJ Rekha's "Basement Bhangra Bacchanal" / Steve Gunn & Friends / Suphala / Creative Music Studio benefit / "Cooler Nights" / and more
The record that I played at the Present Sounds x Dada Strain x HxH show last week which received the most inquiries, was Laraaji’s “Kalimba 2,” a recently unearthed 1978 recording that was included on Segue To Infinity, which reissues some of the new age zither master’s earliest studio work. “Kalimba 2” is a wonderful 20+ minute duet between a thumb-piano and an oversaturated zither; it’s also a lo-fi proto-techno rhythmic excursion, a fact that made the listeners at the event that much more surprised to hear who the track was by.
That’s because for many, Laraaji’s music remains a forever-cliche, all exotic radiance and alternative healing practices — the quasi-hippie side of Brian Eno’s ambient recordings (which is where Laraaji garnered his greatest musical fame) — rather than work full of rhythmic buoyancy, drone improvisation, and endless minimalism. Why don't we think of Laraaji’s work as another example of not only New York’s downtown-arts tradition, but also of how Black music pushed this history, while often being sidelined in its documentation?
Not a lot gets written about Laraaji (nee Edward Larry Gordon) as a consummate New York artist. Yet the city’s cultural evolution of the past 50 years can be gleaned through his story. Somewhat recognizable New York neighborhoods are rich, invisible characters in Laraaji’s narration of music and consciousness expansion. (A tale he recounted for me with a twinkle in his voice this past January, for a story that never ran.)
How a North Jersey-reared spiritually-oriented music prodigy left Howard University to come to the folk scene in Greenwich Village in 1966, to become a socially-conscious comic in the mold of Dick Gregory. Gordon was moderately successful at it, even starring in the 1969 Robert Downey Sr.-directed cult classic “Putney Swope,” about a Black man becoming the head of an advertising agency (“it was an adventure”). How reading Richard Hittleman’s “Guide to Yoga Meditation” in the early 1970s, just as he was starting to play music again, “demystified my own inner meditation experience” and helped teach him that “there’s a different version of the universe ready to slip into view when I stay still long enough.”
How while living in Ozone Park, Queens in 1974, he had, during meditation, “maybe the most impacting audio experience I ever had — like many layers of brass instruments weaving this glorious textural continuum — accompanied by an expansion of insight to the reality of the continuous, present moment” It is a reality and a sound that Gordon never stopped hearing. “My awareness of this moment is where everything is ONE. Like the sweetest cosmic homecoming. This transmission of deep, soul-stirring information softened my interests to become a jazz or rock and roll pianist, and it opened up my curiosity about, ‘Hey, whatever that listening experience was, how can I emulate it?’”
Soon after, Gordon went into a Queens pawn-shop to sell his guitar, but heard an inner voice he’d just learned to trust, to grab the auto-harp in the window. He listened to that voice and purchased the zither, “took the chord bars off, opened the tuning, and eventually electrified it. Fast forward, I was playing the streets of Brooklyn, not only for money, but as an experiment to see what happens when I channel improvisation music from this lucid altered state. The feedback was of validation: That this instrument and my meditative approach to it, was allowing me to come close to producing for listeners the inner experience I had with my mystical sound vision back in Queens. It was like a wake-up to my heart’s direction in music, an assignment that the cosmos handed me.”
Gordon began playing what he called “celestial vibrational music…on the sidewalks, in the parks and the plazas of New York, which got me invited to new age expos, yoga centers, holistic centers and art openings. And also to jam with other musicians who felt like their music created a space for them freely.” The most famous of these was Eno, whom Gordon met in Washington Square Park one evening in 1978. Less famously, there were people like the guitar-playing, recent Brooklyn Tech graduate named Vernon Reid, who kept running into Laraaji on Union Street in Brooklyn. Reid says that Gordon’s busking could attract a crowd. “He compelled people. It wasn't a music that was trying to convince you of anything. He was emanating a vibration — and if it resonated with you, you went with it.”
Some people connected with the music strongly enough that they took liberties. In 1979, two men working at Harlem’s famed Tree of Life bookstore, outside of which Gordon regularly played, approached him to say, “‘We’ve been listening to your music for quite some time, and we think you might want to try using another name.’” In fact, the two men had a name in mind, which they revealed to Gordon in a small ceremony in Central Park the following day: “‘They said, ‘Laraaji…it represents the movement of the sun from the celestial realms into the Earth plane, to provide inspiration and support and nurturing.’ They showed it to me on paper - LARAJI - an evolution from Larry Gordon. And I decided to add one more “a” so it would have a neurological value of seven.”
It’s interesting to listen to Laraaji’s inter-borough tales of a 1970s and ‘80s New York whose oft-cited cultural radicality has become increasingly codified in the retelling — whether as the city’s crime and neighborhood-dissolution narrative, or in the postmodern-remaking-of-art storyline. Laraaji’s music is a reflection to both, without fitting snugly into either storyline.
Laraaji does continue to play in the yoga studios and new age centers to which he once seemed abandoned. But over the past year, he’s also played DIY spaces such as the 360 Record Shop in Red Hook; upstate at the “24 Hours of Drone” event; at public records, sharing a stage with multiple generations of spiritually attuned improvisers, like Adam Rudolph, Carlos Nino, Surya Botofasina, and Photay; and even showing up at The Stone residences, as he did in March to support Immanuel Wilkins and Mikel Patrick Avery, in a wonderful flowing set that was as “post-techno” as “Kalimba 2.”
Laraaji is back at The Stone for two nights this week, supporting the great tabla and electronics player Suphala — on Wednesday (7/19) in a trio that also features Reid (reprising a wonderful March 1999 Roulette performance that was thankfully recorded), and on Saturday (7/22) in duo. His new age had nothing to do with the one he was getting boxed in.
“It’s really important to root Laraaji in the African-American experience,” said Reid, who produced Segue to Infinity for reissue, and who years after his popular success with Living Colour seems more on Laraaji’s New York path than on that of an aging rock god. “His choice to move towards a sound of peace was a very powerful thing in the context of the time. He really reinforced the music as a factor in possible transformation, witnessing and being present in the moment with whatever’s going on. For me, him and then punk and CBGB’s and Bad Brains, it’s all of a piece. So he is an essential musician, artist and creator.” New Yorker too.
(Suphala performs with Laraaji, Wed. 7/19 & Sat. 7/22, 8:30p @ The Stone @ New School, 55 W. 13th St. 4th fl. - $20)
THIS WEEK’s SHOWS:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dada Strain to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.