Kevin Sun

Imagine the Sound  (1981) is a collection of both live and in-studio performances punctuated by commentary by the artists: Paul Bley, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, and Cecil Taylor. The contrast in production style with the Ken Burns Jazz  series is stark; the interview segments in Imagine  are far more casual, with notable shots of Shepp and Bley smoking pipes and Taylor interrupting eloquent answers mid-sentence to light his cigarette, but no less illuminating and generally just more real-to-life. The majority of the film is performance footage, all of which is excellent. I remember seeing clips of Cecil Taylor performing solo from this documentary in Jazz  years ago, and these performances are hard to forget not only because of the astonishing, up-close views of Taylor's physical exchanges with the instrument, but because they take place in an all-white studio space (it looks like the loading program from The Matrix ). I won't say much about the performances ...

“Everything I’ve lived, I am. I am not afraid of European influences. The point is to use them—as Ellington did—as part of my life as an American Negro” - Cecil Taylor  I'd known for a while how certain streams of avant-garde jazz in the '60s were attacked by critics as being too "abstract" or too "European" in sensibility, but I hadn't realized that John Coltrane  (Wikimedia Commons) another attack made upon this music was that it wasn't "black enough." Barack Obama's election to the Presidency brought the conversation about essentiality and blackness onto the national stage, but it's fascinating to read about how this conversation was being had in the '60s about, of all people, African-American artists like John Coltrane who, in some ways, are seen as icons of blackness today. From Ingrid Monson's  Freedom Sounds  (2007) : ...the Muhammad Speaks  [Nation of Islam publication] reviewer saw Coltrane’s popularity as ...

Plenty of interesting factoids gleaned during the first few days of classes, e.g. , that Emily Dickinson's poems are numbered according to Dickinson scholars' estimated chronological order, which is based primarily on the variation in her handwriting. Other scholars have apparently put a wrench in this approach by suggesting ways in which the movement of the sun might have changed the lighting of the room in which Dickinson was writing, causing her to write slightly slanted this way or that at different times of day. Of course, the well known fact about Dickinson is her status as the ultimate literary recluse, which might not necessarily have been entirely a result of her own choosing: she wrote over 1000 poems in her lifetime, but was unable to publish even a dozen of them. Literary magazines and other publications often deemed her poems unpublishable, and the ones that were published were homogenized by editors to reflect contemporary cultural norms.  Starting the seme...