Sun, Feb. 21, 2021 ⁄ 6:00–7:30pm

Mt. Analogue Discussions #2 w/ Davu Seru & Patrick Shiroishi

DS PS

Sound and Self within the Social Landscape: Davu Seru & Patrick Shiroishi in Discussion

WHEN: Sunday, February 21 at 6:00 PM (US Central Time)
WHERE: via Zoom  https://carleton.zoom.us/j/93952480199?pwd=U0svZHB1Rkd4VkdnU1VnT1VESmVCZz09
Patrick Shiroishi and Davu Seru, mid and west coast stalwarts of expanded composition, have each in the last few years composed pieces that speak to the power and social necessity embedded in the history of improvisation, “social music,” and the continued role that abstract sound plays in our understanding of the spaces between us. Be those spaces the distance between us, or the distance between ourselves and the realization of our best selves.
In 2018 Seru premiered Dead King Mother, a piece inspired by the oft-told family tale of his Uncle Clarence and his desperate actions following the assassination of  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In early 2020 Shiroishi released Descension, an album of extended solo saxophone inspired by his family’s history in American concentration camps during WWII.
For this second session in the Mt. Analogue Discussion series, Seru and Shiroishi will delve into these two works, the intersection of familial and collective historical trauma, the systems and impulses that guide and manipulate them, and how they each utilize the tools of sound and voicing in abstraction as a means of expression and communion with intersecting histories.

About Davu Seru

Davu is an improvising musician and composer. He’s worked with numerous improvising musicians and composers throughout the United States and France and is bandleader for the ensembles Motherless Dollar and No Territory Band. For the year 2017-2018 he served as the first-ever composer-in-residence at Studio Z in Saint Paul. He’s curated concert series for over the past 20 years and has received awards from McKnight Foundation (2020 Composer Fellowship), Jerome Foundation (2017-18 Composer/Sound Artist Fellow), American Composers Forum (Minnesota Emerging Composer Award), the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (Next Step Fund) and has received commissions from the Zeitgeist Ensemble and Walker Art Center. In addition, Davu is a published author and is a visiting instructor in the Department of English at Hamline University.

He lives in Saint Paul, MN, with his partner Emily and son August.

About Patrick Shiroishi

Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist & composer based in Los Angeles.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

I’m thinking about the links between our discussion tonight concerning The Undercommons and my feelings and experiences with the world of “Great Black Music,” the tradition, culture, and pedagogy of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and its orbit.

What occurs when you move away, not in opposition, but through your own accord? Not a counter to, but “the new thing?”

Real “new things” aren’t linear progressions. While nothing is new, ever, we can achieve “something else.” They are built, mixed together, a composite of the rubble around them. Importantly, some people see rubble where buildings still stand.

So, with the words of Harney / Moten in mind, after sharing a drink with Chaun and Nate after they stopped over at the house, after I put the kids to bed, it seems only fitting to play this cut from Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, as the chorus keeps ringing in my head:

“Got to get myself away from here…

Got to get myself away from here…

Got to get myself away from here…

I gotta to make it right away!”

 

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

The Revolution in Music / The Music in Revolution

ed. by Anthony Romero & Matthew Joynt

Bag Space

Coming in early March, 2016…

To resist regulation, regimentation, and normalization is the struggle of what has come to be called free jazz, the musical and political culture which emerges in the United States in the 50s and 60s during a time of great social and political upheaval and experimentation.The immediacy and urgency of the art form provides us with, not just an experience, but a framework for thinking about collectivity, individualism, self-determination, and the many ways in which these processes and practices intersect with and enliven one another.

Make no mistakes about it, the implementation of alternative and radical politics, like those that can be found in and around the history of free jazz, at least within the United States, is difficult. Free jazz, like other social practices, is a difficult art. And it should be. NOW is no place for the passive, NOW is the time, and NOW is the place for difficult politics and difficult art.

A series of publications and audio releases, The Revolution in Music / The Music in Revolution faces this difficulty head on, summoning a constellation of ideas and regional histories that confront the relationship between free jazz and radical politics. Highlighting and advocating overlapping social and political practices, through booklets, books, records and more, the series makes current the past, and advocates for the political potentiality of the difficult.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Listening to Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble in the shop right now. I can’t begin to express how artists like Cohran, and the general orbit of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) has affected my art practice and how I approach, not just the conception of Beyond Repair, but my life in general.

In my first, and pretty much only, year of college I was fortunate enough to have Archie Shepp as a professor. I could go on all day about the many ways, artistic and political, that Archie changed my life. But for the sake of this post, I’ll say, were it not for him I might not have known about the AACM, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, or Philip Cohran, among many others.

How does an art practice change when you purposefully attempt to skirt the boundaries of formalization, of economy, of notions of excellence that often create hierarchies that devalue individual and social life? And how does such an art practice begin to, however slightly, begin to change its surroundings and associations?

The influence of the work of the many folks in league with the AACM have, among others, allowed me to see where that can take you and what it can achieve over time. You may not make a lot of money. And likely people will think you’re a bit crazy, or stubborn, but things change. People change. New worlds become visible.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞