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viewing 1 To 13 of 13 items
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9781953691194
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"Steve Cannon's cult classic novel returns to print. Despite decades of notoriety as one of the 'filthiest books in the world,' Steve Cannon's first and only piece of longform fiction, Groove, Bang and Jive Around, has hardly been read since first being published in 1969. In the words of American poet Ishmael Reed, Cannon's debut work inspired a generation by breaking with staid literary modernism. Its publication 'signaled a resurfacing of the irreverent, underground trickster tradition of Black orature.' This erotic farce follows Annette, a teenage runaway, from the outhouse of a New Orleans juke joint to the psychedelic paradise of Oo-bla-dee -- an idyllic country possibly founded by Dizzy Gillespie -- by way of bacchanalian voodoo ritual. As Ophelia Press, its original publisher, wrote, Groove, Bang and Jive Around is an absolute necessity 'for everyone who wants to know where and how the action takes place in sex and soul.' Steve Cannon (1935-2019) moved to New York City in 1962 and joined the Umbra Workshop. He worked with and was a mentor to many artists and writers. In 1990 he founded the magazine and gallery A Gathering of the Tribes in New York City's East Village." 4.3 x 0.7 x 7 inches; 244 pages; 7.2 ounces.
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9781953691170
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"The penultimate Blank Forms anthology presents new interviews with musicians Theo Parrish, Amelia Cuni, Akio Suzuki and more. At the centerpiece of this anthology is a career-spanning 20-hour conversation conducted over four days between producer, DJ and Detroit house music legend Theo Parrish and veteran music journalist Mike Rubin. They go deep on Parrish's childhood in Chicago's South Side, sculptural training and collaborations with Moody Mann, Rick Wilhite and Omar S, and explore how the social movements of 2020 have reshaped his practice and dance music at large. This volume also includes an illustrated discussion between Dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni and sound artist/tuning theorist Marcus Pal, covering Cuni's years studying voice and dance in India, her interpretations of John Cage, and collaborations with the likes of La Monte Young and Catherine Christer Hennix -- accompanied by deeply researched essays from Cuni on Hindustani classical music. Finally, the collection features reminiscences from composer and performer Akio Suzuki on Fluxus pioneer and Taj Mahal Travelers founder Takehisa Kosugi, with newly translated writing from Kosugi." Physical Info: 1.1" H x 8.0" L x 6.0" W (1.3 lbs) 324 pages.
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9781953691163
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Restocked. "A thrilling account of life with Sun Ra's Arkestra and New York's avant-garde jazz scenes of the 1970s-90s. In this memoir, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts decades of national and international touring with the Sun Ra Arkestra and charts the rise of the New York loft jazz scene, offering a fascinating portrait of advanced music in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan from the 1970s through the 1990s, including thrilling stories about the politically important Bed-Stuy venue The East and the author's tutelage under composer and long-time Archie Shepp collaborator Cal Massey. Along the way, Abdullah covers his spiritual development as a Buddhist, battles with addiction, tribulations as a father, lessons from Sun Ra and working life as an educator and cab driver. Trumpeter and educator Ahmed Abdullah was born in Harlem in 1947. An important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, in 1972 he formed a group called Abdullah, two years before joining the Sun Ra Arkestra, with whom he played for more than 20 years. He is a founding member of the bands Melodic Art-Tet, The Group and NAM, and of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium. Abdullah is the music director at Sistas' Place in Brooklyn, and teaches music at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn." 512 pages. 6.25(w) x 8.25(h) x (d). Paperback
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9781953691156
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"The first book on the art-world legend who installed his ephemeral sculptures on the streets of New York's East Village. Curtis Cuffie (1955-2002) was an artist from Harstville, South Carolina, who found local notoriety in the 1990s for the thrilling and surprising way he adorned the streets of New York's East Village. His on-the-spot sculptures were woven into fences, hung from walls and sprawled along the Bowery and Cooper Square. Making use of whatever he could find to fashion works that were imaginative and real, Cuffie took the street for all it could provide: materials, an audience, a rhythm and a sense of the strange unexpectedness of public life. He was unhoused for stretches of his life, and his sculptures were viewed near to his outdoor quarters. Cuffie's art was often removed by city sanitation, but new work would spring up soon after. Though little of his art survives today, a trove of photographs documenting it keeps him in the present. This publication, the first on Cuffie, seeks to honor the artist and rectify his omission by going backward to recover that which has been left behind. It places Cuffie's own photographs and those of his companion Katy Able alongside pictures that photographers Margaret Morton and Tom Warren took of Cuffie and his art on the streets." 252 pages. 8.00(w) x 10.75(h) x 0.6 (d).
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9781953691118
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"The latest work from the veteran novelist called 'one hell of a writer' by James Baldwin and 'wonderfully wry' by Donald Barthelme: a timely meditation on the psychological impact of police brutality, through the lens of a day in the life of Miles Davis. Written by playwright and novelist Wesley Brown, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, mere weeks after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of the New York City Police Department outside of the Birdland jazz club. In the aftermath, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and his wife, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently cajoled into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis' temper -- fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse -- reckons with her upbringing in Christian Science and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his sports car. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker and the stilted world of the Black middle class he's left behind. Wesley Brown (born 1945) is a novelist and playwright. He is the author of novels including Darktown Strutters, Push Comes to Shove and Tragic Magic, which was reissued in 2021 to critical acclaim. He has led an active political life, having held memberships in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. In the early 1970s he spent more than a year in federal prison for refusing induction in the armed services during the Vietnam War. In this time, he drafted his first novel, which was edited by Toni Morrison. He is a professor emeritus of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he taught for 26 years. Brown lives in Lawrenceville, Georgia." Hardcover. 68 pages. 6 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches.
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9781953691101
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"A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969, and published by Baraka's New Jersey-based JIHAD productions around the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics. Over four mimeographed issues, The Cricket laid out an anticommercial ideology and took aim at the conservative jazz press, providing a space for critics, poets and journalists (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and Keorapetse Kgositsile) and musicians (including Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Mtume, Albert Ayler and Black Unity Trio) to devise new styles of music writing. The publication emerged from the heart of a political movement -- 'a proto-ideology, akin to but younger than the Garveyite movement and the separatism of Elijah Mohammed,' as Spellman writes in the book's preface -- and aimed to reunite advanced art with its community, 'to provide Black Music with a powerful historical and critical tool' and to enable avant-garde Black musicians and writers 'to finally make a way for themselves.' This publication gathers all issues of the magazine with an introduction by poet and scholar David Grundy. Contributors include: A.B. Spellman, Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Ben Caldwell, Clyde Halisi, Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti), Duncan Barber, Gaston Neal, Hilary Broadus, James Stewart, Norman Jordan, Roger Riggins, Ronnie Gross, Stanley Crouch, Albert Ayler, Askia Muhammed Toure, Donald Stone, E. Hill, Haasan Oqwiendha Fum al Hut, Ibn Pori 'det, Ishmael Reed, Joe Goncalves, Larry A. Miller (Katibu), Sonia Sanchez, Willie Kgositsile, Billy (Fundi) Abernathy, Dan Dawson and Black Unity Trio." 184 pages; 1.35 pounds; 8 x 0.7 x 10.5 inches.
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9781953691019
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"Conversations with the avant-garde's leading lights--from Suicide to Anohni -- by experimental music's go-to interviewer, guitarist and sound artist Alan Licht. For the past 30 years, Alan Licht has been a performer, programmer and chronicler of New York's art and music scenes. His dry wit, deep erudition and unique perspective -- informed by decades of experience as a touring and recording guitarist in the worlds of experimental music and underground rock -- have distinguished him as the go-to writer for profiles of adventurous artists across genres. A precocious scholar and improvisor, by the time he graduated from Vassar College in 1990 Licht had already authored important articles on minimalist composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, and recorded with luminaries such as Rashied Ali and Thurston Moore. In 1999 he became a regular contributor to the British experimental music magazine the Wire while continuing to publish in a wide array of periodicals, ranging from the artworld glossies to underground fanzines. Common Tones gathers a selection of never-before-published interviews, many conducted during the writing of Licht's groundbreaking profiles, alongside extended versions of his celebrated conversations with artists, previously untranscribed public exchanges and new dialogues held on the occasion of this collection. Even Lou Reed, a notoriously difficult interviewee, was impressed. Interviews by Alan Licht with Vito Acconci, ANOHNI, Cory Arcangel, Matthew Barney, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, the Dream Syndicate's Karl Precoda, Richard Foreman, Henry Flynt, Milford Graves, Adris Hoyos, Ken Jacobs, Jutta Koether, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, Alessandra Novaga, Tony Oursler, Lou Reed, Kelly Reichardt, The Sea and Cake, Suicide, Michael Snow, Greg Tate, Tom Verlaine, Rudy Wurlitzer and Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan. Introduction by Jay Sanders.
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9781733723503
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"This two-volume set, Poesy Matters and Other Matters, presents selected texts by the Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix. Volume one, Poesy Matters, is divided into two sections: poetry and drama, with each section also containing pieces of commentary by Hennix or her longtime collaborator Henry Flynt. Volume two, Other Matters, is divided into two sections: first, program notes and essays about a wide range of topics (including music, psychoanalysis, and mathematics), and second, a reproduction of Hennix's 1989 work The Yellow Book. The first comprehensive publication of Hennix's written work, Poesy Matters and Other Matters illustrates the singular depth and variety of her contributions to contemporary music, art, literature, and mathematics. Best known as a composer, Catherine Christer Hennix has, throughout her fifty-plus-year career, produced innovative work in the fields of not just minimal and computer music, but psychoanalytic theory, intuition mathematics, poetry, and prose as well. The texts in Poesy Matters and Other Matters reflect Hennix's diverse training as well as her long-standing personal interests in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Japanese and Middle Eastern poetic forms, resulting in a rich, diffuse collection of writings that reveal one of the avant-garde's most implacable, not to mention overlooked, creative minds."
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9781953691033
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"A vivid account of life on the margins and Tokyo's 1970s underground culture from a Japanese folk legend Tokyo in the 1970s was a magnet for young musicians, poets and painters. Among them was Kazuki Tomokawa, a prolific singer-songwriter from Japan's northern provinces, whose guttural vocals and incisive lyrics earned him the unofficial title of 'screaming philosopher.' The stories in this memoir--originally published in 2015 in Japan and now appearing as the first English translation of Tomokawa's writing -- are told with a rambler's wit and wisdom, bringing together his memorable reflections on six decades of day labor, drinking, gambling, acting, singing and writing. Figures such as Kan Mikami, Nobuyoshi Araki and Shūji Terayama drift through this down-and-out vagabond's memoir, which observes the turbulence of postwar countercultures and the explosion of Tokyo's underground film and music scenes. Also available from Blank Forms Editions are Kazuki Tomokawa's first three records: Finally, His First Album (1975), Straight From the Throat (1976) and A String of Paper Cranes Clenched Between My Teeth (1977). Kazuki Tomokawa (born 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryū Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his debut in 1974, he has released more than 30 albums. He is additionally known as a poet, painter, keirin enthusiast and inimitable drinker. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning 40 years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label. Damon Krukowski is a musician and writer based in Cambridge, MA. His most recent book is Ways of Hearing (MIT Press, 2019) and his latest album is Damon & Naomi's A Sky Record (202020, 2021). Daniel Joseph is a translator, editor and musician. He holds a master's degree from Harvard University in medieval Japanese literature, and recently contributed translations to Terminal Boredom (Verso, 2021), a collection of stories by science fiction pioneer Izumi Suzuki."
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2CD
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BF 023CD
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In the late 1960s, the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry (1936-1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943-2009) began a collaboration that imagined an alternative space for creative music, most succinctly expressed in Moki's aphorism "the stage is home and home is a stage." By 1972, they had given name to a concept that united Don's music, Moki's art, and their family life in rural Tagårp, Sweden into one holistic entity: Organic Music Theatre. Captured here is the historic first Organic Music Theatre performance from the 1972 Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon in the South of France, mastered from tapes recorded during its original live broadcast on public TV. A life-affirming, multicultural patchwork of borrowed tunes suffused with the hallowed aura of Don's extensive global travels, the performance documents the moment he publicly jettisoned his identity as a jazz musician. The five-person band -- Don and Moki Cherry, Christer Bothén, Gérard "Doudou" Gouirand, and Naná Vasconcelos -- performed in an outdoor amphitheater and were joined onstage by a dozen adults and children, including Swedish friends who tagged along for the trip and Det Lilla Circus (The Little Circus), a Danish puppet troupe based in Christiania, Copenhagen. The platform was lined with Moki's carpets and her handmade, brightly colored tapestries, depicting Indian scales and bearing the words Organic Music Theatre, dressed the stage. As the musicians played, members of Det Lilla, led by Annie Hedvard, danced, sang, and mounted an improvised puppet show on poles high up in the air. In a fairly unprecedented move, Don abandoned his signature pocket trumpet for the piano and harmonium, thereby liberating his voice as an instrument for shamanic guidance. The show opens with him beckoning the audience to clap their hands and sing the Indian theta "Dha Dhin Na, Dha Tin Na," and the set cycles through uplifting and sacred tunes of Malian, South African, Brazilian, and Native American provenance -- including pieces that would later appear on Don's albums Organic Music Society and Home Boy (Sister Out) -- all punctuated by outbursts of possessed glossolalia from the puppeteers. "Relativity Suite, Part 1" notably spotlights Bothén on donso ngoni, a Malian hunter's guitar, prior to Vasconcelos taking an extended solo on berimbau. A vortex of wah-like microtonal rattling, Vasconcelos's masterful demonstration of this single-stringed Brazilian instrument is a harbinger of his work to come as a member, with Don, of the acclaimed group Codona.
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LP
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BF 012LP
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Having already unearthed three collections of archival 1970s recordings by Catherine Christer Hennix, Blank Forms continues their annual illumination of the visionary Swedish composer's music by turning to more recent work with this first-time vinyl edition of Hennix's Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis, a 2014 piece first released as a CD in 2016. The double album captures the April 22, 2014 premiere of the composition by the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, Hennix's expanded just intonation ensemble, featuring a brass section of Amir ElSaffar, Paul Schwingenschlögl, Hilary Jeffery, Elena Kakaliagou, and Robin Hayward; live electronics by Stefan Tiedje and Marcus Pal; and voice by Amirtha Kidambi, Imam Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, and Hennix herself. Intended to reveal the origins of the blues in the Eastern musical traditions of raga and makam, Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis has its roots in Hennix's 2013 realization of an Illuminatory Sound Environment, a concept developed in 1978 by anti-artist Henry Flynt on the basis of Hennix's own The Electric Harpsichord. As Hennix explains in Other Matters, Blank Forms' 2019 collection of her writings: "Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis presents fragments of 'raga-like' frequency constellations following distinct cycles and permuting their order, creating a simultaneity of 'multi-universes.' When two such 'universes' come in proximity of each other and begin unfolding simultaneously along distinct cycles, there is a kaleidoscopic exfoliation of frequencies as one universe is becoming two, but not separated -- the effect of cosmosis is entrained, binding two or more frequency universes into proximity where their modal properties interact and blend, creating in the process entirely new microtonal constellations in an omnidirectional simultaneous cosmic order with phenomenologically 'transfinite' Poincaré cycles (cyclic returns to initial conditions). As with Hennix's best work, the organic unfolding of this quivering drone belies a precision that opens onto the infinitesimal. Over this mesmerizing ebb and flow, vocalists incant an Arabic-language devotional poem written by Hennix that features quotations in praise of Allah from the Quran. Also reproduced on the album's gatefold jacket is Hennix's elegant reduction of the sacred text, represented as the first letter of its first line gradually paired down to a single dot, which invites the contemplator to bring their inner knowledge to the composition for use as a meditation prompt. Listeners without spiritual inclinations, but who are willing to immerse themselves in the music, will find the work's serene intensity to be its own reward."
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CD
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BF 018CD
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Nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her CD, Music for Cello and Humming, features two pieces for cello and humming written specifically for Hamann by composers Sarah Hennies and Anthony Pateras alongside Hamann's own "Humming Suite" and "Study for Cello and Humming." Having arisen intuitively from Hamann's investigations into shaking, just intonation, psychoacoustic phenomena, and the voice in relation to the femme presenting body in performance, humming here also references dislocation, or ventriloquism. Although teetering on the edge of audibility, the intimate and vulnerable closed-mouth sounding enters into subtle interference with her cello, drifting into acoustical beating and bringing instability to otherwise more formal grid structures. The capacity for rupture of this volatile fragility reaches its apotheosis on Hennies' "Loss," a piece that deliberately instructs Hamann to hum beyond the limits of her voice range. Going against the grain of chamber music orthodoxy, the guaranteed failure set in motion by this instruction yields a generative sound of effort reminiscent of Xenakis's storied desire for an instrumentalist to play with the sorrow of knowing they can't do everything. With an arc suggestive of sudden life change, "Loss" casts queer epistemology onto composition, positioning failure, undoing, unbecoming, and transforming as alternative ways of knowing or being. Hennies's signature composite merging of individual components here brings oral sounds that include breathing and coughing together with humming, cello, and sine waves. Like Glenn Gould's 1982 Goldberg Variations or Pauline Oliveros's Accordion and Voice, this timbral meeting of bodily utterances with consummate musicianship imbues Hamann's humming work with a breakable, human strand, here as humbling as it is uncomfortable. Music for Cello and Humming is accompanied by an essay on both recordings by Nora Fulton. It's presented alongside the LP set, Shaking Studies (BF 017LP). Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse-based project, "Materialities of Realisation." She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O'Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada's Duets, Graham Lambkin's Community, Alvin Lucier's Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall. Edition of 500.
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CD
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BF 009CD
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Patty Waters is a visionary avant-garde vocalist and composer, best known for her groundbreaking 1960s recordings for the legendary free jazz label ESP-Disk. Captivated by the music of Billie Holiday, she sang with Bill Evans, Charlie Mingus, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock before coming to the attention of Albert Ayler, who introduced her to ESP-Disk's Bernard Stollman. The rest is history. Recorded with pianist Burton Greene, Waters' haunting 1966 debut Sings (ESPDISK 1025CD) juxtaposes a side of hushed self-composed jazz ballad miniatures with an iconoclastic take on the standard "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair". Sharing Ayler's affinity for the deconstruction of folk idioms, Waters dismantles the tune through a series of anguished wails, moans, whispers, and screams that cemented her reputation as a vocal innovator, predating the extended techniques of Yoko Ono, Joan La Barbara, and Linda Sharrock, and cited as a direct influence to Diamanda Galas and Patti Smith's own freeform vocal excursions. The mythic side-long exposition stands as one of the 20th century's most harrowing expressions of madness and grief, its incantatory mutilation of the word "black" into a full-spectrum monochrome resounding with a particular potency at a time when battles for civil rights were erupting across the country. After recording a second ESP-Disk album in 1996 (ESPDISK 1055CD/LP), Waters disappeared from the music scene, moving from New York to California to raise her son. Her Blank Forms concert on April 5th, 2018 -- with original pianist Burton Greene as well as bassist Mario Pavone and percussionist Barry Altschul, both veterans of Paul Bley's ensembles -- was Waters' first New York appearance since 2003. Dedicated to Cecil Taylor, who had passed away moments before she took the stage, Live preserves the mournful tension that was in the air that night. Her first new release on vinyl since 1966's College Tour, the record divides the session in the spirit of her debut. Side A features a set of desolate ballads, including Waters' own classic "Moon, Don't Come Up Tonight", while the B-side puts into stark relief the fact that the fight for civil rights that Waters invoked over 50 years ago is far from over. Beginning with her rendition of "Strange Fruit", a 1937 song written in protest of black lynching and American racism, the suite's form-bending contortions also features the second-ever recording of Waters' original, exceptional lyrical take on Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman."
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