By Derrick Smith

I’m trying to follow the stream of jazz through all its tributaries. The Third Stream is only one; as the grounding of collective culture shifts, new courses arise, in different trajectories and relationships to each other and to the ocean of original creativity.

Jazz is one strong river cascading away from this body of thought-and-action. We have The Free Falls - sweeping along all the collected fishes and branches and detritus from the shore, to bellyflop into a wild brown puddle. Some observers see this Free Fall heading only downward, while others swear that the waters flow upward, but maybe it’s all illusion.

At the Fusion of two rivers we have the Delta - the triangle which can represent a holy triad or a symbol of base sexuality inverted, whichever you prefer. The waters of the two rivers that form the Delta rarely mix evenly.

Certain extensions of the Jazz have formed still pools that are possibly stagnant - breeding waters for deadly parasitic insects and diseases which often produce a catatonic effect. But quakes and manmade projects can always reconnect these bodies of water to the source river or to its tributaries, or directly back to the Ocean itself. In this primordial, postmodern setting, “It’s All Good” is the stamp carried by all the atoms.

Water would not exist without non-water, so we come to us, the people who stand gaping on the banks with solid flesh and bodies that are composed of about 7/10...water. The water moving through The Jazz and its branches is the same water in us - it all carries the I.A.G. seal of approval at the molecular level.

Who am I in this sloshing body? I hold (but not as we speak) degrees in Journalism and Ethnomusicology, both obtained in the Year of Some Peoples’ Concept of a Lord 1997 from Indiana University. The critic’s curse, I do not play an instrument, although I love to sing and play hand percussion, but never simultaneously. I lack a fondness for Beat poetry, and perhaps relatedly, I lack a fondness for Bebop. My earliest memories of music are of Elvis Presley records: never from the middle Hollywood period, but always either the early classics like “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel”, or the later Vegas recordings that were printed on translucent blue records and picture discs.

One thing: I will never write my simple opinionated reaction to a piece of music. My “job” (I do it from love and for my stinking resume, with the blessings of Mr. Ricci) is to connect all the waters to each other and to the land, giving you a fresh map every time of a world that’s always shifting.

THE FIRST ARTICLE OF A WATERY CONSTITUTION or SUN RA WITH THE “FRINGE” ON TOP

In times of liminality, or times of change, creators and self-styled prophets often look to the stars - for “proof” of the Godhead, in search of other life-forms or the origins of the human species, and for metaphorical associations with things down here. During the Civil Rights Era, Sun Ra fashioned his philosophy of music and life around a dualistic concept of humanity’s connection with the Solar System and beyond: African civilization, and thus all humanity, can trace its origins beyond Earth, and humans at that time period, particularly African-Americans, could find sorely-needed solace, serenity, living-space, and transcendence, in that original vastness. Very near the height or nadir of the Turbulent Sixties (1967), John Coltrane meditated upon pan-cultural cosmography and ancient notions of the significance of the planets and constellations. Typical of his post-1963 music, the album that resulted from this intellectual searching traced a path of individual struggle and attainment, with all the concomitant spittle and frustration caught on tape. Released posthumously, the album was entitled Interstellar Space.

Both views of Space and the Planets - as primordial bed of life and source of renewal on one hand, and as an intricate web of metaphors on the other - appeared this pre-millenial year on two albums that extend Sun Ra’s philosophies and Coltrane’s music. Nels Cline and Gregg Bendian’s Interstellar Space Revisited: The Music of John Coltrane (Atavistic ALP 102CD) and Innerzone Orchestra’s Programmed (Astralwerks ASW 6277-2) sound entirely different, but each has its place in a jazz column, as you will see.

On the original Interstellar Space,Coltrane and drummer Rashied Ali (still alive and kicking the bass drum) sketched a portrait of the Planets that was complex in its implications. They used the basic Roman/Medieval symbology: Mars as the “battlefield of cosmic giants;” Venus as love; Jupiter representing supreme wisdom; and Saturn being the embodiment of joy. This ancient associative map of the Solar System, however, was devised by earth-bound humans gazing on what seemed like definitively-formed orbitals glowing with stately radiance. After the dawning of the Space Age, it was found that the planets of our system are unimaginably hostile and often not as stable as their graceful cycling indicates.

To Coltrane, whose philosophies drew from Hindu and Buddhist thinking, the Planets probably seemed to embody peaceful and terrible aspects, depending on the physical perspective of the observer and, much more importantly, on the observer’s concept of physical phenomena as compared with psychic phenomena and structures. In 1964 Coltrane had presented A Love Supreme as a cycle of spiritual struggle and conquest guided by an intuitive feeling of the divine. This final album-length statement is a recapitulation of that album’s theme, placed in a more profound - because more associative - framework: there is no easy discernment between microcosm and macrocosm; the planets that had once been considered gods, or at least godlike, are now heard as loci of psychic - and physical - energies within a tormented soul as large as the universe. The album is a cycling of mind and matter through a human, and superhuman, act of thought allied with action.

So at the end of this millenium (as reckoned by certain interest groups) electric guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Gregg Bendian present a re-recording of Interstellar Space, in Cline’s words, “that point where serenity and fury, consideration and abandon become one.” I’ll admit, I know next to nothing about these two, aside from Cline offering his interpretive talent to Yo Miles!, but their version of I.S. maintains a feeling similar to the original, displaced by a few decades of paradigm-shift and guitar feedback. ‘Creative approximation’ suffices to describe their approach. In place of the hints of bop that could be heard in Coltrane’s playing (cycling...) through note combinations, Cline sometimes draws some middle American blues from his own distorted attack, and where Ali was obligated to fill in the space between notes on the original album, the extensile properties of electricity allow Bendian more space to explore beat-clusters, which he works into the fabric with a gracious balance of fury and sensitivity. It may be the fact that a player breathes through a saxophone, while a guitarist strikes his instrument, that causes me to regard the original album as two men working it out, while Cline/Bendian’s creation is more metallic, thus more elemental, made by a pair of scientists who recreated planetary atmospheres under laboratory conditions.

Carl Craig’s laboratory environment is controlled enough to produce the equivalent of silence on parts of Innerzone Orchestra’s Programmed. If Cline and Bendian reproduce the turbulence of extraterrestrial landscapes, Craig guides his small studio contingent through the ether between bodies, touching down here and there but losing footing by the second half of the programme.

Sun Ra, George Clinton, and now Detroit-techno innovator Carl Craig, lie on a line of music-creators who have mythologized the primal essence of Black Music, each one operating in an uncertain time - Ra in the civil-rights era (and on into the surreal grit of the 1970s), Clinton in the Seventies aftermath of civil rights, civic disobediance, and city-wide riots, and Craig sitting in Detroit’s nutritious rubble (something from nothing, or more accurately, something good from something seemingly bad) pondering the future with a degree of paranoia but with a larger amount of utopian futurism.

Craig’s latest “reads” like an Ishmael Reed screenplay for a Ridley Scott production, with consultation from Anne Rice. The loose narrative follows Craig’s funky-clone-creating altar-ego, Blakula, from his awakening by cosmic funk and the very mention of Miles, Blakey, and Sun Ra, through his coffin-bound passage across the Atlantic to America (which cleverly recalls the Middle Passage of the slaves, who were often placed in spaces below-deck the size of tight coffins), to his attempts to spread the funk (Jes Grew, basically) throughout the U.S.A. and to distant planets.

Sadly, the only mention of this narrative is in the liner notes, leaving the task of elucidation to the music, which succeeds verily for the first several tracks but wears thin by the end of the album through bland electronic uniformity. Such promise, though. Former Sun Ra percussionist/drummer Francisco Mora stretches out the way his pedigree would predict - that is to say, with fluid, subtle, but ever-funky beats - and keyboardist Craig Taborn provides a solid re-visitation of Mwandishi-era Herbie Hancock. Taborn’s contribution is sometimes buried by inscrutable production, which contributes to the downfall of the B-side, where, lacking some of the structural (and narrative) focus of the first 7 songs, tracks are more jam-oriented, but Craig pushed back the keys in many cases, meaning all that’s left is a vague ambiance of spacy funk. No meat, and watery pudding.

This kind of thing is probably one reason for the disavowal of “produced” music by many jazz-heads, but, wait a minute, one of Programmed’s best tracks, “The Beginning of the End,” features the rapper Lacksi-Daisy-Cal tripping out in the studio with premillenial hype. His voice is a trembling cool that’s probably the best embodiment of the man-on-the-street’s reaction to Year 2000 urban blight, and his commentary-as-singing vocal places all the elements of the track, including “the strings in the back”, and a nice touch is his reaction to a looped keyboard sample during a lull in the funk: “Yo, are those pianos?” When Mora returns with the beat (and a bag of chips), the MC’s smile is audible as he exclaims, “Those are pi-ANO-s!” It’s what hip-hop should be (and is when we get deeper than the Top 40): an instrumental track that constantly progresses, an MC who can interact with the track and make his own presence felt simultaneously, and a producer who knows how to avoid killing that spontaneity and interaction.

To keep in mind when making a jazz record.