robert wood wrote:
> I know about some decent material around
> improvisation.Ben Watson has a decent biography of
> Derek Bailey, that manages to overcome Watson's
> slightly tedious polemical style.
I had wondered about the Watson book. A few people I know who have read it felt like Watson set himself up as a sort of partisan on Bailey's behalf, and (this might be exaggerated) of all the mentions of Evan Parker in the book, all of them are negative.
> Cardew has some really provocative philosophical
> essays on the idea of improv before he became a
> Maoist, but the book is really dreadful. It's not
> even particularly good Maoism. The Cardew is online
> on a free avant-garde art site, which I can't think
> of its name for the life of me.
You are thinking of _Stockhausen Serves Imperialism_, which is available at Ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/historical/cardew/cardew_stockhausen.pdf
I agree it's strident. There is however a new _Cardew Reader_ available from Matchless, from all reports I hear it's rather good.
When AMM split for the first time in the early 70s, apparently Rowe shared Cardew's rigid Maoism. That is rather ironic now considering it is Prevost who alleges some sort of betrayal of aesthetic principals against Rowe.
There is a journalist in Germany, Felix Klopotek (he wrote the article on the latest wage-round in this week's Jungle World), who writes for the journal Testcard, which one could imagine as a combination of both Punk Planet and Bad Subjects in a single journal, but with a wider rage of musical interest. The book also covers a wide range from AACM/Fred Anderson/Hamid Drake, Peter Brötzmann, AMM/Rowe, all the way to contemporary electronic improvisation. Unfortunately only in German, which seems to be the fate of a lot of writers on this music, such as Bert Noglik and the late Peter Niklas Wilson.
I often wonder how Adorno would have regarded european free improvisation. I suspect figures like Bailey and Schlippenbach would have appealed to him, since they themselves were influenced by the Vienna school and twelve-tone music. I don't know how he would regard the Cardew/AMM school. On the one hand, they are the least Jazz-like, but on the other hand, the New York school influence of Cage and Feldman on Cardew he might have denounced as some sort of creeping Heideggerian influence. :-)
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