Over the last year, these three music documentaries (all free on YouTube and for some reason British) either got my brain working or my ass shaking, sometimes both. In the arena of pleasure, what else really matters, y'all?
On the Edge: Improvisation in Music
The English Avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey is a trip. His playing can be hard to classify, much less listen to, but for me, free improvisation only really works when it erases and redraws the boundaries of what is possible. I have to honor his willingness to play the guitar for what it is and will never be again.
In addition to playing, Bailey produced one of the most important studies of improvisation in music around the world, a book called Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music, which became a BBC series called On the Edge: Improvisation in Music twelve years later. All four parts of that series are on YouTube.
Radical pedagogy in Chicago, Sufi music in New Delhi, Spanish flamenco, organ music, ragas, blues, Celtic singing, Appalachian freak folk... so distilled yet so complex. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 are here.
Music Nation: Jungle Fever
Great doc on the rise of jungle music in Britain. Notably few women and non-binary people are interviewed in this doc, a persistent bummer about so many electronic music scenes, but nonetheless, will make you proper skank out, innit. Despite that disparity, one gets the sense that a lot of clubs are more segregated now than they were during this moment of innovation.
Anyone who's been in a club when jungle comes on has experienced the nauseous push and pull of both slow and fast rhythms at the same time: I was touched to learn that the slathering of 2x-speed hip hop drum breaks with laid-back reggae bass lines produces that effect: overeager ravers hopped up on who-knows-what would freak out to the drums, while stoners and easygoers would dip to the bass.
Less than six minutes in: a surprising, incredibly moving a cappella moment, if you can believe it.
Everybody In The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992
Artist Jeremy Deller builds a doc out of a lecture he delivered to a high school politics class on the history of British dance music. The format helps him deliver that history accessibly — it's encouraging to see a diverse body of young people warm up to such raw music from what was in many ways a different world.
It's an organized examination of how a cultural moment can arise from the particulars of a place: the clash of urban and rural ways of life (but not the clash you're imagining)... collective action taking on nationalist identity (labor's miner's strike vs. conservative anti-welfare activists)... Europe meeting America on the dance floor (over the import-export transom of Germany, Chicago, Detroit, and later Manchester, London, New York, and roving British countryside sound systems).
Incredible public TV footage of Black Detroiters losing their minds dancing to Kraftwerk in the early 80s.
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A bonus for those seeking a little anti-Britain counterprogramming to balance the above: tune into the stylings of tamboo bamboo, a form of Trinidadian rhythm-making (yes, with tunable sticks of bamboo) invented after drums with skins were banned in the 1880s. (We love to see music undermine the oppressor!!) Tamboo bamboo preceded the also-revolutionary steelpan but was later combined with metal instruments in ensemble to brilliant effect.
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Happy listening, scrappers :)
love,
alex
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PS: My email client has been sputtering out lately: if you've responded to these emails, and I haven't responded to you, please reply to this one or write me directly at tatusian at gmail dot com or alextatusian at cox dot net. Apologies.
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