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                     Or; A Case Study

I have never been to Georgia. The closest I’ve ever gotten to Georgia is probably Devon, geographically, and listening to the Dungeon Family, conceptually.

Marion Brown never went to Africa; his work (art, music, instruments…) are manifestations of things of something he’s never seen. ‘I’m transcribing from one time and place to another … through listening to their music and reading, I’ve become a part of their environment’.[1]

The formative stage of an artist requires particular environments of outside inspiration. Brown calls to Atlanta, Georgia.[2] When I was growing up … I went to church every Sunday. I never really played black spirituals but I translate them into my music. Little bits of melody become footnotes to past.[3] If one engages in the unknown – exposes oneself to otherness – everything becomes ‘part of [your] style’.[4] 

So here I attempt to transcribe, to philosophise. I am aware – as well as Brown was – that my studies here are only a claim, a reaching toward, knowledge, an authority of understanding. But then it’s all a discussion, a display – a performance required of and engaged in by all – in an effort to get paid, or pass a course: to impress who you need to impress to get by.

I don’t philosophise about art at all. I don’t know what the artist’s job is. The only people who think they know what his job is are the people who study artists. Whatever it is, no one wants to pay him for it … My duty? The revolution? Write this down, now, write it all down. Say that I understand the whole thing and I keep working[5]

So what was the environment around Brown’s ‘formative stage’?

When I was growing up … I was always small, you know, and my dog was very big. I became an extension of my dog’s strength (laughing now). When I saw a group of girls coming, I’d run and hide and sic Vanilla on them. Before they got real scared, I’d jump out and rescue them- yes. Now my music is an extension of my strength. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I don’t know. I like to admit that I don’t understand – that leaves me room to improve[6]

Anecdotes like this typify Brown’s discussions of music. Whether he is an extension of his music or his music is an extension of himself is not so important, his experiential matrix is explored sonically. Take Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. The faun of the title is Brown himself, a younger, more whimsical and foolish iteration. It is a record about youth, reflecting both Brown’s childhood in the titular track and his son’s games in ‘Djinji’s Corner’.[7] ‘Afternoon…’ itself, says Brown, is a ‘first person experience, as is a dream, told collectively’.[8] If they were not already obvious, the connections to Mallarmé’s icon of symbolism ‘L'après-midi d'un faune’ – in which a young faun encounters several nymphs in an oneiric state – are elaborated. Without really trying, one can draw parallels between Brown’s youth and the poem. Brown’s own experiences of saving girls from his dog, relating the story to a dream, and then passing it on collectively are certainly analogous to Mallarmé’s faun coming to terms with his own sensuous awakening in an attempt to woo potentially imaginary nymphs. Further, Brown’s labelling of the work as a ‘tone poem’ could again easily connect to the symbolist/imagist nature of Mallarmé, as well as the renowned symphonic poem adaptation of the poem by Debussy (Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune).[9] We could effortlessly draw the dots between all three works as an evocation of Brown recalling his own sensual realisation as a young man, as well as questioning the validity of empirical experience in memory as reliable or exaggerated – perhaps even as fictitious as Mallarmé’s faun’s nymphs.

Views

Such a reading of Brown’s work – as a kaleidoscopic musical rendering of Brown’s influences and reflections on his childhood – would be valid were it not for a few peculiar additions. Afternoon of a Georgia Faun is a fascinating artefact for another reason: two years after its release Brown wrote and edited a companion piece Afternoon of a Georgia Faun: Views and Reviews that has gone largely unstudied since. It contains Brown’s auto-critical remarks on the record as well as input from several contemporaneous critics and collaborative musicians. Naturally, the first-hand explication of ‘Afternoon…’ deepens and shifts our reading.

It is easy to assume, for example, that Brown was an admirer of both Debussy and Mallarmé and deliberately evoked their work in the title of the record. Brown, however, is blunt: ‘I named it for myself. It was accidental. My faun merely revisits his home, where he grew up as a boy … I had nothing at all in my mind in any way to classical mythology’ or Debussy or Mallarmé.[10] This does not mean he was not familiar with either previous works, however, and he openly notes that ‘Mallarmé’s poem did not affect me as much as Debussy’s tone poem did’.[11] Nonetheless, Brown’s exposure to these works were requirements of his schooling system, he read and listened ‘not because [he] wanted to. It was an assignment.’ and ‘forgot it immediately after school’.[12]

An intriguing politics of naming is clearly at play here, then. There seems a blatant dichotomy between the semantic field that the title evokes and what Brown claims was its inspiration. ‘Afternoon…’ is very clearly a subjective experience realised through collective experiences. To Brown, music is the result of two things, ‘memory, the mother of the muses’ and technique, the ability to kenaesthetically realise those memories.[13] It is a total experience, combining ‘unity of body, mind, time, place, action etc….’.[14] ‘In memory lie the seeds of improvisation: in technique, the means in which to cultivate the memory’.[15] In advocating an entirely individual realisation, Brown again resorts to classical imagery. Are we to accept, then, that ‘Afternoon…’s titling was accidental, knowing that Brown does – just a few years later – openly connect his work to classical mythology?

‘Afternoon…’ is not just Brown’s work. ‘Although I am responsible for initiating the music, I take no credit for the results, whatever they may be, it goes to the musicians collectively.[16] These musical adventures of Self are strongly collective, singular and synchronous, ‘how it sounds is a result of where the participants were in August 1970’.[17] Interaction between participants is a Self expressing emotional memory, influencing each other. While this does not yet help us address the politics of naming, it does suggest to us something else: the role of the listener in the generation of Self and musical meaning. Brown himself textually shouts: ‘most of all ---- [thanks] TO THOSE WHO LISTEN!’[18]

Taken independently, the listener is the most important factor of the improvisation.

You’re perfectly welcome to see [connections to classical mythology] there because we all have a tendency to read things we think and feel into the work of other artists. You identify, or sympathise with them and in some cases, people become extensions of what they think and feel a particular’s works and life are … in spite of that, the listener can’t share the particular experiences that the one who creates the work has[19]

For the central factor in interpretation (intellectually or erotically) is ‘you’. That is, whichever Self engages in the piece at any one time. A performer in performance is ‘you’, the first-time listener is ‘you’, the fiftieth-time listener is ‘you’. If I were to listen to ‘Afternoon…’ now I would be a different ‘you’ to myself if I were to listen to it tomorrow. Self is always-already developing and changing in relation to its experiential contexts, moods, emotions, feelings, situation (physically and otherwise). Brown’s focus on the sane sociology of memory as the seeds of improvisation is egalitarian. Meaning and response is mediated only through the Self and the Self’s emotional memory. More broadly, ‘history chooses what I teach’.[20] That Self in responding, however, is being influenced by all other Selves involved – this is what I will have been arguing relentlessly throughout this paper. That is, ‘what you hear is not what a musician actually feels’, but that feeling filtered through Self.[21] Community. ‘It is what you have to work with rather than what you do as work that is significant’.[22]

But, still, what of the cognitive dichotomy that I feel within the classical imagery? Our understanding requires one final piece: Brown’s creation of his own instruments, which he ‘conceive[s] the sound first, and name them afterwards, after I have heard them back’.[23] The politics of naming, which I have drawn on several times now, is retroactive. Brown knew he wanted to create a piece of music about his hometown and synaesthetic recollections of his childhood, but would not have known its title until after its recording.[24] It would have been only after the fact that Brown understood ‘Afternoon…’ as containing – for his Self – an emergence of consciousness and, for John Turner, a treatment of the theme of classical myth.[25]

The key is Brown’s statement that ‘you don’t need the story’ to involve Self within improvisation.[26] There is no requirement to understand the psychogeography of Brown’s childhood to engage in ‘Afternoon…’. I have never been to Georgia. Thus we can understand ‘Afternoon…’s naming as a provocation. A deliberation evocation of narratives and themes that Brown claims are absent. It is a challenge to ‘you’ to relate the piece to your own Self memory and synchronous Self, an editorial decision by an extremely well-read individual to place ‘you’ at the centre of a semantic and erotic matrix. Listeners are defied to associate and disassociate from their institutional knowledge bases simultaneously, to challenge whatever epistemic or pedagogical interpellation has occurred thus far to their Self – to define Self independently.[27] When Brown discusses his education in Views…, he talks of compulsory exposure to the canon and ‘Western art forms’, at the expense of everything else.[28]

Brown subtly rails against the classical tradition, which ‘reaches its highest level at the hands of the composer’.[29] The title says that one cannot engage in the poem in the same way as Brown if one approaches it from the classical tradition, thus ‘you’ and Self in response is paramount, not the agency or authority of the performers. In calling the work ‘Afternoon of a Georgia Faun’, Brown demonstrates the stretching of Community into infinity – every listener from every context adds to that Community, through their developing Self. These new Selves cannot and will not influence prior or distant Selves, but that is not important, ‘you’ create your own Self and own meaning through Self exploration. It is a direct and bold juxtaposition of Brown’s interests: the personal experience and the public outcome.[30]

On a Hill

Lapis, ivory, and jade-

These were her treasure.

Earth, what can she wear now,

lying so still?

Star-grass and anemone

And soft green mosses

Shall be her dowry when

Spring climbs the hill[31]

Reviews

Now we are able to understand the editorial power of Views…, as released by Brown. Reviews, the latter half of the text proves especially cogent here. It opens with a long – dare I say symbolist? –poem by Steven James. Typically, needless to say, not a traditional means of review or criticism in Western epistemic systems. James’ poem is the exact type of art that I can never claim to be able to explain, merely give my impression of. In the more ‘orthodox’ reviews, too, Brown’s sentiments are echoed. ‘Afternoon…’ is

Music for those seeking new knowledge about the world and oneself in particular … these are my images [of response] … Marion’s music is about his life. Hopefully it is about yours[32]

All I can offer are my responses … like Zen meditation, it resolves in silence[33]

Impressionistic musical poetry[34]

This final excerpt, from Uekusa, illustrates Brown’s editorial strengths and sleight of hand. Earlier, Brown proclaims that his liking and understanding of poetry is related only to how it sounds, not its semantic weight.[35] ‘I have never really understood poetry’.[36] The inclusion of Uekusa’s associative connection with impressionist poetry (going full circle to Mallarmé, Brown’s non-inspiring inspiration) highlights the exact ontic and epistemic gap that Brown is trying to dismantle. Uekusa appeals to forms appropriate to him and, in attempting to apply them to ‘Afternoon…’ itself, enacts that lack in Self understanding that Brown wishes to challenge.

The later reviews entrench this challenge. Alan Gerber seems fairly indifferent to Afternoon…, placing it within recent ‘trends’ of contemporary jazz.[37] For Gerber, Brown’s recent work has been disappointing, something Gerber relates to his praise of Brown’s lucidity in interviews and ‘the high quality’ of his earlier recordings.[38] Brown editorial coaxes out these tensions in aesthetic. Gerber seems convinced of a progressive teleology within what he labels contemporary jazz, aligning Brown’s innovations with the previous work of Milton Graves, for instance.[39] Talk of trends, and disappointment, expectation, returning to form – the implications are clear: Gerber bases his review on a fixed notion of Self. For how else could one return to form, a previous Self? Indeed, Gerber’s assertion that his writing is ‘just a listener’s point of view’ does not support our idea of a requisite Self engagement with the work, and is dismantled a sentence later: ‘one should have asked the musicians’.[40] Or: meaning was fixed, Afternoon… derived from a zeitgeist within larger progress, there is no way retroactively meaning or intent can be derived, we have missed the opportunity. Here lies the kernel of Gerber’s indifference: he accepts that he will not be able to say anything of much validity or weight because he was not there. Contrary to Brown’s goals, Gerber’s Self did not engage in the work; rather, more accurately, Gerber does not believe his Self engaged in the work. Why would Brown include a review so widely missing the mark in Views…? After all, as Badiou explains in Being and Event, an occurrence can only be an Event for those who frame it as such and thereby recognise themselves within it. Event includes its own nomination.[41] Putting the deliberate challenging of traditional critical engagement aside, I propose one sentence of Gerber’s: ‘They are rather less convincing than ‘Afternoon…’.[42] No matter what Gerber avers, he does engage with the record. How else can one explain his dual convictions that effect is fixed, yet affect fluid? We can once again turn to Badiou – who fittingly himself changed his position on this concept. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou posits that Event determines an entire situation’s ‘symptomal tension’: Event affects all participants in a historical situation, including those who reject it.[43] An Event always occurs within a world (of improvised Community of listener and performer) and its emergence affects the entirety of that world. That is, it is a journey into a cul-de-sac to assume subjectivities rely on the manipulation of modalities of how Self relates to Event.[44]

It is in the final two reviews in the collection, however, that Brown slam-dunks his point.[45] Gunther Buhles: ‘Before you put Afternoon of a Georgia Faun on the turntable, you should listen to Debussy’s Prelude a l’après-midi d’un Faune’.[46] Despite accepting that Afternoon… ‘shows no direct influence by Debussy’, Buhles roots his criticism – and subsequently infers heavily into Brown – in the Western canon. Buhles compares Corea to Satie, Hancock and Hanna to French Impressionism. As we have already seen, this is another path that is antithetical to Brown’s aesthetic.

Alan Offstein’s lengthy idiosyncratic review closes the collection by returning it to the theoretical. Offstein’s central conceit is one of ‘intellectual recognition’ within Afternoon…, knowing that ‘there is no right or wrong way’ of receiving the work.[47] ‘Listeners have to come to grips with the very real fact that Afternoon of a Georgia Faun attaches no over importance to IDEA’.[48] Emotion and intellect are separated, crucially here when ‘everything preceding the feeling is intellectual and unnecessary’.[49] It is my contention that Brown most strongly agreed with Offstein, who places Brown’s approach into context against the Enlightenment tradition. For Offstein, the work exists for Self through Self, ‘egoless art collectivised music’.[50] Afternoon… is also placed in conversation with Brown’s earlier work and Brown’s contemporaries:

I’ve noticed that as long as the free improvisation musicians transcend any petty egotism, their mutual empathy produces a combined expression, a product far greater and more intense than anything could be achieved by a single mind[51]

Offstein’s evocation of the ‘IDEA’ cannot but summon Hegel’s aesthetics.

The aesthetic deals with the sensuous show of the Idea; but there is something here transcending sensuous show, in that the latter is finite, the former infinite. If the Idea is shown, it is not shown adequately in aesthetic form[52]

In Hegelian aesthetics, the Idea is what art reaches towards but it is also its limit. That is, art becomes a vessel a meaning, a promise of semantic fulfilment which, when fulfilled, dissipates. It is an aesthetics of integration. Our position, as we will have seen, however, along with Brown’s assumes an excess of meaning, a resisting of integration. An ever-singular work-event that expands through the ever-changing Self. A Hegelian position relies upon an Absolute Spirit and is always within the present, not concerned with future or past.[53] Our and Brown’s view, as Offstein well understands, and as we will have seen, is Gadamerian: meaning is limitless and elaborated through Self in singular exposure to work-event, always-already reliant on the contingent circumstances in which the work was seen (before and again and again…).[54] All of this explanation is discursive, however, merely here to highlight Offstein’s separation between Brown and the Western Enlightenment tradition. Offstein rightly places Self at the centre of his interpretive web; Afternoon… is free from the rhetoric found in Archie Shepp and free from the didacticism found in Coltrane – Self is the key.[55] Consequentially, Offstein is pluri-versal, as one must be when prioritising Self – no one experience or exposure to different epistemological forms is superior or ever more or less valid than another:

Classical music, which is Western, does not adequately express the consciousness of Black cultures. Jazz, which is American, does not adequately express the consciousness of East Indians. Therefore, it cannot be said that one is better than the other, or more anything. Just different[56]

Aside from all these specific elaborations, one point remains central: every response is valid because every response is a dialogue of Self. Brown’s self-deprecating humour tells us all we need to know:

thanks to Down Beat for not reviewing [Afternoon…] on the basis of what I hope is the outlook: ‘if you can’t say something good, don’t say nothing!’[57]

Moreover, the form of ‘Djinji’s Corner’ itself is an enacted understanding of Community and Self. Each musician performing has a ‘station’ consisting of their primary, secondary, miscellaneous and other sound-producing instruments. We can take a station as synecdochal for Self. ‘Each station is different because each musician is a different person; if, by chance, they play the same instrument, what and how they play will be different’.[58] Self has its own ‘home’. Throughout the piece, each performer visits each ‘home’, every station, developing a theme played at previous stations. This repeats until each musician has explored each station and then continues ‘for as long as music is desired’.[59] Parallels are unambiguous: each musician explores their actual Self through the stations of other Selves, each station representing Self. Our figurative notion of Community and Self is actualised physically.

Community is then expanded by ‘non-musical’ assistants, who add to the Event without filtering Self through technical musical training. They are ‘musicians whose competence may be of a different kind’.[60] Such involvement ‘adds meaningful dimensions to a musical experience otherwise limited by the limited knowledge of relative experiences’.[61] Brown’s improvisations are thus wholly ‘non-Western’, universal and collective.[62] There is an equality based solely on human experience and not elitist education or knowledge of certain forms. Professionals – positions defined through exclusivity – and those who ‘fool around’ ‘can share musical experiences’.[63] This position Brown explicitly connects to an African tradition – ‘whence we came!’ - through Professor J.H. Nketia’s African Music in Ghana and Hugh Tracey’s NGOMA.[64] In our applied terminology, Brown advocates a cultural merging built on pluri-versal inter-epistemology.[65] ‘Djinji’s Corner’ is, after all, a ‘third person group experience, told in the musical third person of collective improvisation’; a fitting companion piece, a ‘second movement’, to the first person experience told collectively in ‘Afternoon…’.[66]

Jazz should be played in stadiums, on baseball fields, in the street…Children love the new music… Children have the imagination you need for the music we play; you can do what you like with it[67]

this is the sense that one gets through much of Brown’s recorded legacy – a sense of possibility, of openness, a sense that music is fully capable of expressing personal, emotional, social and cultural needs; fully capable of working through & reconciling complex issues of geography, tradition, & collectivity; fully capable of addressing the relations between the abstract and the particular, between the oral, the visual and the conceptual.[68]