Welcome To Dada Strain, 22nd of May 2023
Updates & Perspective: Dada Strain Thinking in the "Real" World + New Work for WNYC-Gothamist, The Lot Radio + The Values of a Paid Dada Strain Subscription
Welcome to Dada Strain, a periodical about rhythm, improvisation and community. First off, I want to thank you for subscribing to Dada Strain, and, potentially, for reading. You could have signed up for any other music content feed in the world, but you’re here with me, and I appreciate it. As long-time readers know, the semi-regular “Welcome To” “check-ins” are an opportunity to introduce new Dada Strain subscribers to what this space is meant to be about. Especially as there have been quite a few since I last wrote one of these posts on January 1st—thank you!!!
I recognize that many Dada Strain arrivals the past few months are here because of #BklynSounds, the weekly, NYC-area events listings that have given this periodical a meter I am pretty proud of. As you may have noticed, #BklynSounds (and localization) is only one part of the Dada Strain mission. There is other work being developed in the periphery - physical work, event work, ideas work - that you’ll be first to hear about (here, or on Instagram, which is my primary mode of daily communiques - especially in IG stories). The “Welcome To”s are a chance to give updates about this related work, and how it all fits into Dada Strain’s purpose and potential, since this is a space that will always keep evolving.
Last week, I celebrated a birthday and made my latest promise to myself to keep moving forward. I truly love the work I am doing here, the feedback to it has been exceptional, and the audience for it is growing. As the world of music, media and social ideas continues to get even more jumbled - one need only look at the morass of Thursday’s Supreme Court decision in “Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith'' case to recognize the confusion - the central tenets and intentions of why culture matters continually get lost in arguments centered on capital, technology and political points of view. The vision is harder to see for the trees. Those arguments may be important to our day-to-day lives, but to continuously mistake the industry for the art-work is to choose to keep drowning. I hope Dada Strain is a life-preserver of a sort — even if some readers choose swimming the other way to reach their promised land.
In this “Welcome To”
Dada Strain Thinking in the Real World
New Work (Gothamist, The Lot Radio)
The Values of Paid Dada Strain Subscriptions (a.k.a. The Uncomfortable Marketing Bit)
And here’s some listening while you read (playlist here)
Dada Strain Thinking in the “Real” World
In February, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to hear guitarist Vernon Reid conduct Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, a group originally founded by the late Greg Tate. The event was one of the music performances surrounding the exhibit, ‘Changing Spaces,’ devoted to Manhattan’s Just Above Midtown, a revolutionary Black-arts gallery of the 1970s-80s, which embraced multi-disciplinary creativity in a way few galleries did at the time. (More on the exhibit at one of the “Recent Work” links below.) Burnt Sugar is a long-running, improvisational big band/collective, where the conductor (originally Tate, that night Reid) guides 20 or so musicians, developing the music instrument-by-instrument, arranging interplays, etc. Tate based the band’s creative approach on his studies with Butch Morris, a cornetist who evolved this style of conducted improvisation (he called it “conduction”) while an artist at Just Above Midtown in the 1980s. Where Tate once worked as an intern. It all fits.
The small sold-out crowd at MOMA was ripe, and Reid warmed up both us and the band with an orchestrated call-and-response of chanting and clapping, setting a steady back-and-forth rhythm. But also mixing it up, introducing the tone for the evening. “What we were doing just then is improvising,” Vernon said, once the room’s energy and focus was raised to a level he considered acceptable. “People think of improvising as something that only musicians do, but everyone in this room has to improvise in life every day…” I was already swimming in the Dada Strain, when he hit the coda: “...and going forward, we’re all going to have to improvise much much more.”
In essence, Vernon Reid’s introduction was a succinct explanation of a central Dada Strain tenet. The importance of improvisation as a tool for contemporary life. That it prefaced a performance built of said improvisation and of rhythm, while celebrating a classic community-arts space (Just Above Midtown) which treasured those qualities as a force for building and connecting, framed the Dada Strain ethos even more succinctly.
There’s a lot to be said about art’s importance as a guide for surviving the world we live in. It hardly seems coincidental that a creative strategy built on ad hoc, circumstance and recovery, artistic thriving which informs a society in dire happenstance, would be developed and popularized by Black Americans, who created a culture in such conditions. It’s not just improvising that produces the building blocks of community. It needs an audience to recognize the improvising, to participate by receiving it. I keep saying that hearing and acknowledging is an act of musicking, equally essential to music. Following the twists and turns of improvisation is a more advanced take on that hearing, forcing the listener out of passive acceptance of music into a deeper engagement with it. This isn’t meant as a qualitative statement: there is rare, uncommon joy to be found in all music. But there are cognitive advantages in understanding improvised sounds made intentionally, to recognize interactions between players, the decision-making, problem-solving, and even world/community-building.
When Reid invoked the need for everyone to improvise in the future, he wasn’t necessarily talking about reacting to accidents — though improvising in a time of catastrophic social and planetary change does seem a worthy skill-set to acquire right about now. What I heard him address was understanding how to navigate circumstances in agreement, together, with foresight of a desired outcome. “Utopian” may be making too fine a point with it, but he was certainly pushing improvisation as a tool of societal building. And it was no surprise that Burnt Sugar’s performance on the evening - in fairness, on most evenings - affirmed this notion. It’s mine too. I learned a lot from speaking and observing Tate, and he learned a lot from Morris, from Just Above Midtown founder Linda Goode Bryant, and from others who realized that a modern way to make music, is also something far greater.
New Work
As I wrote in the last Welcome To, I spent much of January and February working in the newsroom at WNYC-Gothamist. But regardless where I am writing nowadays, the Dada Strain gaze is one I try to include in anything I put out into the world. So all these pieces are directly related to the rhythm-improvisation-community ethos.
In early January, I did a preview of some shows that took place in a Village space that was formerly the Studio Rivbea loft, run by saxophonist Sam Rivers, which was one of the centers of the Downtown Loft Jazz Scene™, but mostly forgotten to gentrification. The feature included interviews with Patricia Nicholson (Arts for Art), bassist William Parker, poet/historian Fred Moten, and Isaiah Barr (Onyx Collective).
On the occasion of David Murray’s week at the Village Vanguard in mid-January (with a great young quartet featuring Dada Strain perennials Marta Sanchez, Luke Stewart and Kassa Overall), I profiled the legendary saxophonist as a key figure of the city’s Downtown arts culture of the 1970s-80s. It included interviews with Murray, Sanchez, and music critic Jim Macnie.
One close to my heart: I adore writing about the overlaps between visual art and music, and especially how arts institutions engage music - or, often, don’t. January presented a rare opportunity: three exhibits at major Manhattan museums where music was either a primary focus or the engine. So I wrote about the musical influences on the Theaster Gates retrospective, “Young Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum, the previously mentioned “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces” at MOMA, and the Nick Cave retrospective “Forothermore” at the Guggenheim. The interviews included Cave, Linda Goode Bryant (founder, Just Above Midtown), Naomi Beckwith (curator, Guggenheim), Gary Carrion-Murayari (curator, New Museum), Massimiliano Gioni (director, New Museum).
On the occasion of a new installation at Penn Station and a gallery show in Chelsea, I wrote a profile of the wonderful artist and public-arts thinker/facilitator, Derrick Adams, and his views on social purposes of art in common urban spaces. It features interviews with Adams, Debra Simon (independent curator).
I play on The Lot Radio at 10a EST every fourth Friday (next one is this Friday, May 26th), often with guests. Here are two recent shows I want to specifically spotlight:
One was A Tribute to Wayne Shorter (3/3/2023), a couple of days after the legendary saxophonist passed away, and featured two hours of music by recorded by Shorter, written by him, or recording she appears on, everything from the obvious jazz stuff to Doug and Jean Carn, Milton Nascimento, Joni Mitchell and Madlib.
Among my recent guests at The Lot Radio was a long-time friend and colleague, techno theorist/producer DeForrest Brown Jr. who records under the name, Speaker Music (3/31/2023). He came on to discuss his indispensable 2022 book, “Assembling a Black Counter Culture,” and then played a blistering live set. (DeForrest arrives on the broadcast around the 1:03 mark, if you wanna FFwd straight there.)
If you are interested in following all my non-Dada Strain work in real time, please consider following the Instagram and Twitter (still there for the moment). I am also becoming more engaged with Substack’s Notes function, so there as well.
The Values of a Paid Dada Strain Subscription
In mid-February, after a bunch of hemming and hawing, I instituted a paywall for Dada Strain’s Bklyn Sounds posts. The thinking being: this is a valuable service for folks interested in the rhythm-improvisation-community events around New York which I spotlight, and that $5 a month is great value for information/discovery to folks who rate the gig and related info, who seek to promote gigs - or who are simply curious and trusting of Dada Strain’s weekly picks. (This is also a good time to say “Thank You” to all the folks who’ve rolled up on me at clubs the past few months to give me a compliment about Dada Strain/#BklynSounds - I really appreciate you reading and supporting.)
But there are also other, more directly consumer- and musicker-friendly reasons to become a paid subscriber.
Since #BklynSounds has become a regular feature, subscribers have been able to get discount admission to recommended gigs at Winter Jazzfest, Roulette, Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival and local shows such as the Assembly series at Sisters. These are NOT marketing partnerships but performances I want to inform readers about that readers can then receive reduced admissions to because one of my purposes here is to get people to go see more local music. (Though I am not above creating marketing partnerships with venues and organizations I believe uphold Dada Strain’s ethical values - and if there is a marketing relationship, there will be full disclosure.)
I also hope that links to the music of local artists, or even just spotlighting them, serve as value for those potential readers and musickers feeling under-served by other media outlets, and value a specific point-of-view on music, rather than the largely algorithmic, siloed, the wrong-kind-of-poptimistic grab-bag that current music discovery has turned into. There are other in-development reasons to subscribe to Dada Strain. I am working on adding other contributors to expand the voice Dada Strain, while still sticking to the ethos. (All contributors will be paid - though how much depends on paid subscriptions.) I am also working on a couple of physical-media projects that will further some of the Dada Strain ideas, and which subscribers will hear about soon.
And now for the sad-sack portion of the pitch: Dada Strain is being developed on my own, without a full-time job, a loaded savings account, or a sugar-daddy or -momma to call upon. (Though this is the right time to give a full-hearted thank you to my partner, whose support has been beyond crucial, and whose photo work is one of Dada Strain’s secret weapons; and to friends and colleagues who support Dada Strain with paid subscriptions, recommendations, public shout-outs, and occasional critiques. I know it takes a village, and I am trying to find more residents.)
And if I haven’t already been perfectly clear: I believe it’s essential outlets like Dada Strain exist, for local and independent culture to be spoken about and not live in a vacuum. They/we can only survive if the people who find outlets such as this useful - who also want to champion art, communities and ideas that receive little space in corporate and mainstream media, and find individual feeds limiting - are there to support them. Support doesn’t always mean paid subscription, but that is the easiest way. Holler if you have other ideas.
I don’t think any of this as utopian or revolutionary. But as a single alternative. There are many others. Pluralism at its finest. There’s no formula to rhythm or improvisation or community, that’s the beauty of it - and of the human mind. That’s why I am asking you to subscribe.
Or as a West Coast inspiration recently Tweeted:
OK, if you’re still here. Thanks for reading, listening and supporting!
Happy Sun Ra Arrival Day! And I hope you have a great summer. New Bklyn Sounds tomorrow.