This is an episode that started as a meditation on waiting, and became an episode about the distillation of time and the experience of time passing: its expansions and contractions. Our lodestars in this sense will be two great proponents of free jazz: the musician/researcher/educator/gardener/martial artist Milford Graves and the writer/educator/poet/filmmaker Amiri Baraka. We’ll be looking at time as irregular, subjective—its passage expressed elastically. Mostly, we’ll be looking at patience and its ritualisation. We’ll search for strategies in music to be in time, and so perhaps to account for its passage not in terms one’s own subjective experience of it, but in terms of existing within its inevitability.
Hang in there, friends.
- As ever, Something Like’s jingle is provided by my brilliant friend and collaborator Roger 3000, who has an adorable new track out on bandcamp now.
- You can listen to Amiri Baraka’s complete 1985 lectures at Naropa University here.
- You can watch Milford Graves: Full Mantis here.
Tracklist
Playlist
Milford Graves, Milford Graves: Full Mantis, dir. By Jake Meginsky, Neil Cloaca Young, 2018
Ka Baird, Isentropic, Bespires, May 2020
Barbara Golden / Melody Sumner Carnahan, My Pleasure, The Time is Now, 1997
White Light, We Sat Together, White Light, 1982
Loris S. Sarid, Orrizontale Verticale, Music for Tomato Plants, 2020
Celia Hollander, Spared Time, Recent Futures, 2020
AM 4, And She Answered: Mi-La, …And She Answered, 1989
Anadol, 78 ((yetmiş sekiz) Yılının En Uzun Dakikası, Uzun Havalar, 2019
Patricia Brennan, Improvisation VI, Maquishti, 2021
Amiri Baraka, On Class, Speech, Rhythm, Sound, and Music, Naropa University, 1985
Sarah Davachi, Accord of Voice I, Laurus, 2020
Neil Young, I’ve Been Waiting for You, Sugar Mountain – Live at Canterbury House, 1968
His Name is Alive, Tape Slow, A Silver Thread (Home Recordings 1989 – 1990), 2021
Bitsy Knox & Roger 3000, Walking, OM COLD BLOOD, 2018
Gavin Bryars, Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, The Sinking of the Titanic / Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, 1975