Hi Nate,

>yes, syntax is important there too: I think of Bailey's
>development of a nonlinear style, so that consecutive notes instead of
>being as even in tone in possible are mixed up--open, fretted, harmonics.
>This means, among other things, that it's a completely reversible in
>direction! -- Direct parallels usually are unconvincing to me, though it's
>hard not to think of the similarities between one of Raworth's long poems
>& an Evan Parker solo, say....

more likely connection would be to Steve Lacy. Not just because they
performed and toured together as the Gang of Four (w/ Franco Beltrametti,
James Koller). But because Tom's media language and narrative threads
approximate more to Lacy's toying with 'conventional' melodies (look at
what he did, devastatingly, to Chanson Francais for one example) and its
juxtapositions to noise (the Lacy menagerie) and its transformations
through rhythm.

Take the beginning of 'Clean & Well Lit':

OUT OF THE PICTURE

the obsolete ammunition depot
unmissed and unreported
put it in categories
still glistened with dampness
suits seemed to be identical
throught eh window behind me
a battered cardboard box
won somewhere gambling
dim bell in his memory
was making a duplicate
to see if that needed explanation
sharply, and then, more gently
the door opened . . .'

Taking his lines for a walk much as Lacy unravels a tease of interconnected
melodies, particularly in his solos 'A New Duck' and so on.

Parker does something else more akin (perhaps) to Bruce Andrews right at
the beginning of 'Wobbling' (1981):

WHILE

were I idiom and
the portray
what on
idiot you remarking
cessed to only up
opt hope this
was soundly action
more engineer
taut that the

or how about this from the sleeve notes to Evan's 'Saxophone Solos'
(written by Paul Haines  -  obviously making the connections)

'No more anymore than handsome does do hands as cows heads resemble
milkpail are listeners tied to for whomever they may repeatedly
be mistaken. . .' in 1976

I agree with you Nate, in beginning to generate a reversible speculation.
Yes,this is a leap into the differential and deferentiating arias. ord by
word decisions / inflections much as note by note, clusters, linkage. But
certainly some poets listened to 'Free Improv' (i always was queasy about
the 'free'  -  free from what? the ansers would have left the music less
open to ignorant hostilities) from early on. This is initially the
Euro-Brit medicinal plant we're talking. About the time when Peter Riley
was contributing excellent articles to Musics Magazine on what was going on
at the London Musicians Collective i was also a regular, both in the
audience and among the performers there. Now, I can't be compete at all in
what follows, but (and if anyone is listening, knows more and can chip in
please do) Lawrence Upton (jgjgjgjgjgjgjgj . . . as long as you can say it
that's our name that he, PC Fencott and myself had - sometimes joined by
Jeremy Adler, Bill Griffiths, CoAccident, was a punkish-dada improv
performance writing trio  -  although much out of Sound -Text traditions
and with awareness of what Minton, Nicols et al were up to); Allen Fisher
(who's more recently been giving covers for AMM); Anthony Barnett (he
played percussion with the likes of John Tchichai, although a tad too
temple bells in his orientation for this tongue and it doesn't seem as if
the experience of impacted on his syntaxt substantially); Bob Cobbing
(worked closely with two founders of the London Musicians Collective  -  as
Abana  -  David Toop and Paul Burwell, and still gigs regularly with Hugh
Metcalf and Lol Coxhill)

more recently Ken Edwards (well, he might have up to it for 20 years, i'm
sure he'll enter here) has been working on compositions invoking
improvisation

David Miller has been a long term audient (plays clarinet also  -  maybe
other instruments) of this music

Then I want to be a little careful to draw a line and say that others (Roy
Fisher, Jeff Nuttall and Michael Horowitz for example) have regularly
brought poetry and Jazz into proximity  -  that's not what is under
discussion here (although it will have a bearing on syntactical strategies)
and Robert Sheppard worked with Stevie Wishhart (Robert can tell you far
more than i know about the nature of that  -  blues / folk?)

And so on. Intriguingly those from a Bloodaxe and Poetry Review persuasion
are more likely to cite Pop and Rock connections or otherwise Contemporary
music composers of the James Macmillan, Kevin Volans, John Adams variety.
I'm about o be told something i didn't know on this one  -  like Lavinia
Greenlaw models her syntax on Brian Ferneyhough  -  but i doubt it.

Curiously also, i expect that the exposure to such music making practices
as at the LMC (the name alone is an attestment) was more prominent among
London-based writers. The Cambridge poets, Peter Riley aside, might not
have bitten into this music so strongly. Of course that's changed now, Evan
has played the CCCP and Wilkinson, Hessian and Fell are regulars in and
around the Out to Lunch frame.
That's not John Wilkinson btw  -  who as i understand it is an Ornette
Coleman harmolodic enthusiast among much else. These are curious yet
hopefully partially illuminating threads to tease. Such predilections are
likely to present themselves to some extent in the writings.

I first heard Bailey in 1971-2. As an occasional sort of roadie come
partner in the spiralling 'family' community of Henry Cow (until they
played clubs i was too young to get into). Derek would come on as a sort of
interval solo act. He looked liked your uncle the plumber, playing around
with a guitar and stereo volume pedals. It seemed dry at the time, but it
made an impression. So, there he was plucking at the parameters of what was
'prog rock'. Much as Lol Coxhill and David Bedford were in Kevin Ayres's
band 'The Whole World' and so on.

Let it not be forgotten that Euro free music came out of 1968 and its
aftermath networks  -  particularly German marxist student politics (Free
Music Productions being its considerable banner). One of my abiding
memories in 1989 was of Heiner Muller standing still and silent on stage in
The Kitchen (New York), while Heiner Goebbels, Fred Frith, Charles Hayward,
Arto Lindsay, George Lewis, Johannes Bauer, Dietmar Diesner and several
others hacked up a 15 minute barrage of savage noise  -  having just that
minute been told (by an entrant from off-stage) that the Berlin Wall had
begun to come down.

loads more to say, but must stop and get on with a past deadline thing
if you're inrested I'll open out some more on this  -  what for me is
fascinating support information to approaching the writing

of course the similar trajectories could be drawn in respect of filmic,
movement-based, ect performances

love and love
cris










%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%