A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Milford Graves
has been among the flashiest drummers in the free mode, known for
skillful inclusion of Asian and African rhythmic ingredients into his
solos. He studied Indian music extensively, including learning the tabla
from Wasantha Singh. He has unfortunately not recorded much, especially
on American labels. Graves played congas as a child, then switched to trap drums at 17 before his tabla studies with Singh. During the '60s, Graves worked with Giuseppi Logan and the New York Art Quartet. He recorded on ESP in the mid-'60s with Logan, and was an original member of the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association. Graves also played with Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba in the early '60s. His appearance in the Bill Dixon-sponsored concert series the October Revolution in Jazz helped introduce Graves to a wider audience. He did two albums of duets with pianist Don Pullen at Yale in 1966. Graves worked regularly with Albert Ayler in 1967 and 1968, performing at the 1967 Newport Festival. He also played with Hugh Glover and worked in a duo with Andrew Cyrille. During the '70s, Graves participated in a series of mid-'70s concerts called Dialogue of the Drums with Cyrille and Rashied Ali, including several shows in black neighborhoods. Graves taught at Bennington College alongside Bill Dixon in the '70s, and toured Europe and Japan. During the '80s, he played in percussion ensembles with Cyrille, Kenny Clarke, and Don Moye. Philly Joe Jones later replaced Clarke. The late '90s found Graves enjoying a revival, collaborating with younger musicians, including John Zorn, and recording albums for his Tzadik label. In 2000, the New York Art Quartet's first recording in decades, 35th Reunion, was released by DIW.
Milford Graves was into his own version of World Music long before
there was the term. His individualistic approach to the rudiments of
drumming and its rhythmic pulses were light years ahead of most
musicians. Yet he found musical colleagues and an audience for his
forays into the deep end of free jazz. A native New Yorker, and
exposed to Latin rhythms, he started out as a child on congas, then
became a teenage timbales player in a Latin band from 1959 through the
early ‘60’s, Graves switched to a trap set after seeing Elvin Jones with
Coltrane. From 1964 he was an essential member of the New Thing
movement in New York City, and backing up Amiri Baraka's Harlem poetry
readings.
Graves became a devout student of percussion on an
international level, and went on to study not only its African roots and
development, but expanded his studies on the Indian tablas with
acknowledged master Wasantha Singh. He had quite an extensive
resume in the 1960’s playing with Hugh Masakela and Miriam Makeba,
Giuseppi Logan, was a member of the Jazz Composers’ Orchestra
Association, and collaborated with avante-garde pianist Paul Bley.
Graves
recorded with pianist Don Pullen in 1966,(Graves Pullen Duo) and worked
recurrently with Albert Ayler in 1967 and 1968, performing at the 1967
Newport Festival. He went on to form a duo with drummer Andrew Cyrille,
and they also did drumming seminars with Rashied Ali.
By the 1973
Graves moved into education and taught at Bennington College. He
recorded “Meditation Among Us,” in 1977, representing his foray into
Japanese infused free jazz. He continued to perform and tour into the
‘80’s where he participated in percussion ensembles with such luminary
drummers as Kenny Clarke, Don Moye, Philly Joe Jones, and of course
Andrew Cyrille. By the turn of the new century, Graves was a
member of the New York Arts Quartet, went on to record and perform with
sax man David Murray, and started an association with alto player John
Zorn doing sessions for Zorn’s Tzadik label as: “Grand Unification,”
(1998) and “Stories,” (2000) which is an aural journey into a
personalized percussion performance. Highly recommended! He collaborated
with Zorn in 2004 for “50th Birthday Celebration, Live.”
Milford
Graves a drumming visionary who is in tune with the universal pulse of
life, and has provided a glimpse into our potential.
Inside this issue: Milford Graves: The percussionist, herbalist and educator has cut a titanic figure in free music for almost 60 years. By Alan Licht.
If somehow we forgot about the fact that he helped lead a musical
revolution in jazz in the '60's (where he led his own ensembles and
worked with Albert Ayler, Paul Bley, Don Pullen and many others),
Professor Milford Graves still would be greatly admired for his steady,
long-time dedication to the field of music therapy. A tenured teacher
at Bennington College for over a quarter of a century, he has also done
extenstive work as an acupunturist, herbalist and leader of the
non-profit organization the International Center for Medicinal an
Scientific Research. His latest release, Grand Unification on Tzadik, serves as something of an audio document of some of his work in this field.
PSF: What was your initial interest in this field even before you began any studies?
I came up with it. My tradition always dealt with music and healing but
it wasn't done in the academic sense. It was all part of tradition,
dealing with a lot of traditional drumming as related to the various
African cultures. It's always been an inclusion.
PSF: How did that come together to form the basis of your work?
It's basically from people making comments. People would say how they
felt after I performed. Then I developed a greater consciousness of how
to make some kind of methodology. When I'd play in various dancehalls
in my community (Jamaica, Queens), people would attend concerts and they
would have various kinds of ills. They would say that they felt
entirely different after the performance, whether I was doing it with an
ensemble or as a soloist. I related to peoples' physiological as well
as their psychological discomfort.
So I related what people told me to what I studied in the Western
scientific arena- basic music therapy and its psychological and
physiological effects as done within the scientific arena in this
country. As I was further investigating, I found that it was in direct
line with my own personal experiences. So I would update things and
make things fit into what I was doing. Then I would do my own
scientific investigation, such as using the physiograph, which has been
used by other people in the music therapy field.
PSF: What is that exactly?
It's a piece of medical equipment that measures heart rate,
respirations, skin response, blood pressure. At Bennington College, we
would have people connected to the machine and I would perform various
musics and observe the results. I would also take samples of blood and
urine and see if I notice any kind of change, before and after.
PSF: What have you found out with different ailments and responses in your work and research?
Some of the things are very standard, like the dynamics of loud and
soft. Sudden explosive loud sounds would cause a very strong skin
galvanic response- it would be very stresssful on the system.
At the college, we had people who had cardiac irregularities or
arrhythmias. They were diagonised as non-organic arrhythmias- people
couldn't really get any help with using medication or trying to change
their lifestyles. So I would co-ordinate some music that would be
considering 'free jazz,' entirely spontaneous and improvised. Some of
it was done live but some of it was pre-recorded. We would play these
things and we found that with one particular person, his heart rhythm
started to synchronize with what we had performed on the tape. Then we
played live and we steadied the rhythm into a regular heart rhythm and
his own heartbeat stopped being arrhythmic and then it co-ordinated with
us. That was very interesting. Some people don't believe this but I
have all the documents about it- electrocardiograms and a tape with one
track having our pre-recorded music and on the other track we actually
had this person's heart rhythm and you could see how it synch's right
in.
PSF: You said that part of your work was derived from Western studies in
music therapy. Where do you think this is lacking and where do you
think they should be concentrating their studies?
I think what has to be done is very similar to the concept of
acupuncture energetics. It's very similar to homeopathatic medicine
where you have to pay more attention to the individual.
PSF: You mean a more holistic approach?
Definitely. It calls for a greater sensitivity on the part of the music
therapist. That's not just knowing 'music'- you have to have a greater
understanding of medical sciences and disease in general. What it
calls for is that the music has to be developed with a greater sense of
flexibility. Maybe things are changing but as far as some of the
literature is concerned that I've seen, when you concentrate only on a
certain type of music, that defeats the purpose.
PSF: What do you have in mind?
If you look in a lot of medical therapy books, they have a tendancy to
lean specifically and ONLY towards Western classical music. With jazz, a
lot of people would say that it has a lot of negative things to say and
that it's actually very dangerous to use. (laughs) Especially drums
and saxophones. I think those kinds of things have to change if the
'conventional' sense of Western medical therapy is going to make any
kind of improvement.
PSF: What if you were dealing with a patient that didn't feel comfortable with jazz?
What I would do is try something else. First of all, I do consider
myself a musician. You have to look at some of the things that were
done in 'free jazz' ('free' because of the great amount of expression
that's dealt with in that music), dealing with music in general and not
limiting yourself.
PSF: Do you also involve patients in the process of creating music?
Oh yes. You have to type out the person and see what they're about.
You could do it the standard ways and see how people listen to music and
what kind of music they like and don't like. You could use standard
forms but I think the best way is through pulsology, as it's done in
traditional Unani techniques of pulse reading. You got to find
everybody's rhythm and that's done through palpating the artery or you
could take a stethoscope and listen to their rhythm over a particular
period of time. You can't just put the stethascope on for a few
seconds, you have to stay there if it takes five minutes. You put the
person in a comfortable position and you have to see what their basic
rhythm is about.
PSF: Most doctors will listen for fifteen seconds, times it by four and then have the pulse rate.
That's no good- you can't do that. Once you get versed in pulse
reading, then you can see the value. It's important to listen because
you hear the actual TONE of the heart beats. Once you know the actual
frequency of the individual beat, the actual vibration and tone quality
of each beat, you can figure out what is the particular internal melody
of that person. Once you create that melodic line that's internal in
the person, you can figure out what the inner rhythm is about. They may
think they're like something on the outside but once you get the actual
rhythm (I base a lot of it off cardiac rhythm, that's the basic
pulsation of how the blood is moving through the body), that's how I
internalize rhythm. There's been certain studies on the actual
frequency of the first heart sound, the S1, that have been done on
people with myocardial infarctions and people in prison that were about
to be electrocuted. They took the heart frequency just before that, so
there were some very interesting things taking place.
PSF: If a patient gets involved in your therapy program and finds that it's helping them, how do you follow-up with them?
I've been dealing with this over a long period of time, especially with
people that are close to me such as students and people that are
apprenticing. Something's been in the works and it's about to manifest
on a much greater level, public-wise. People will get cassette
recordings done by musicians and also they would be participating,
especially from a vocal point. These people would, instead of taking
medications, put this tape on at various times. They will have their
own personal cassette recordings to listen to. It would be all
individualized. All of the equipment for this will be available soon,
maybe the next few months. It'll be done under the organziation that
I'm the director of- the Center for Medicinal and Scientific Studies.
PSF: Where are you getting support for this?
Private donations.
PSF: Does the medical community seem supportive of this?
Yes. I do have a doctor in Boston, who's an ex-student, who got
funding. They're doing it on the children where they're going to be
using sound in the Emergency Room. This is a lot of vocal work.
PSF: Do you think the medical community needs to understand this work more?
Definitely so.
PSF: With the concerts that you do, do you think about how the music is
going to be projected towards the audience, as opposed to dealing with
individuals as patients?
I always tell musicians, whenever you perform for a large body of
people, you must hear the real grand fundamental tone that comes from
the people. You have to arrive there and go into a nice little area
where you plant yourself and you try to hear that big sound, that
harmony that everybody's making- the way they're talking, the laughter.
I get the fundamental tone of all of that. Once you get that tone, all
the things are going to fall into place because all of the people are
just the harmonics.
PSF: What do you with that information then?
What I do is I try to internalize that sound, and say 'what does that
feel like to me.' If I feel it's a positive sound, then I say 'this
thing could take me someplace else.' I can give them a much greater
whatever-they-need if I do this or I do that. If I feel hurt from
there, what I do is change that around. The thing is this- somebody
would say 'everybody's not going to respond to this.' But if you can
get a large segment of people in there just to be thinking very
positive, then the person next to them is going to feel that! You try
to get harmony in there. People always want to be in a surrounding
where they feel people are positive. If you people are smiling,
feeling great comfort, not intimidated, they can relax and feel no
stress. So everybody helps each other out.
But you as an artist... What I'm talking about is an artist has to be
really together. Spirit-wise, body-wise, mind-wise. You have to be in
the best condiiton that you can be in. Or else you're no good to
anybody. It's like a medical doctor telling you 'I can take care of
your cold' and he's sneezing and coughing all over the place.
PSF: But what about someone like Charlie Parker? He definitely wasn't together a lot of the time that he did his recordings.
I just came back from Miami- I was at the public schools down there,
trying to introduce the people to jazz. I said 'once I evolved myself
to a certain kind of level, Charlie Parker was not the answer.' That's a
bold statement to make around a lot of people who love Charlie Parker.
I've had this problem before. Musicians say 'wow, Parker was a great
musician.' I say 'I didn't say anything about his musicianship.' He
was a great horn player. But what he was expressing was something else.
Parker was expressing something a lot of times off the influence of
drugs. He wasn't getting to that part of ourselves that was going to
take us on a level that was going to get us to open up without having to
rely on pain and depressants and everything else.
What I feel through Charlie Parker's music is a need from somebody who
wants to get out of what they're into. That's a way to evolve 'I've got
this horn in my mouth and I'm doing what I want to do.' Also, with
Billie Holiday. Once you internalize yourself, it's because people
today see the standards presented for us on TV. Kids go out and do some
really ridiculous things. If we look at people around us, they're
accepting things because they think that's the normal thing to do. So I
want to say to these people 'wake up!' So, no I don't want to do what
Charlie Parker did. He's not taking me to that level that I know I'm
supposed to go. Just talking with the guys, I could say 'yeah Charlie
sounds nice.' But you got to understand where Charlie Parker was coming
from. He had a beautiful tone for what he wanted to express. But we
want to go beyond that, to the next step.
In the late sixties, I was playing up in Harlem. There was an elderly
woman there who used to be very close with Charlie Parker. She was in
the audience and my group was playing so-called 'free form jazz.' We
REALLY got very free! This woman calls us over and said 'the music that
Charlie Parker used to describe what he wanted to play, you guys just
played it! From his description, that's what he was talking about!'
That really hit me. I knew he really wanted to do something like that.
But I will accept what Charlie Parker did because that was his
EXPERIENCE.
PSF: You were talking before about how you try to project certain
feelings to an audience when you play. What have you seen from their
reactions with this?
People come over to me after. They don't just tell me 'wow, you're a
great musician.' Which is great- because I know that they didn't get it
if they tell me that. But when they tell me 'I came in here and I was
all uptight and I didn't even feel like coming to this concert, now I'm
so glad I came here. You made me feel the way I'm supposed to feel.'
They'd be smiling. You could see them open up and sparkle. That's
great.
In Florida, one of the women there where I lectured at the schools said
'your particular lectures were the best.' She looked at these high
school kids that she knew and she said 'you got them smiling when they
never smiled.' All the kids were laughing and they were doing stuff
that they didn't even know they could do. It brought out that kind of
greater imagination.
The ultimate thing that I'm trying to do, and a lot of people don't like
the music because it deals with vibrations and it's got the
stimulators, is more people thinking in a more creative way for a kind
of greater imagination. Then you have a greater amount of people trying
to solve all these problems that we have on the planet. I'm not trying
to clone people. When I hear that I've gotten people to be more
serious about what they're doing, that means that I've helped them tap
their own creativity and their own spirit and give them some kind of
hope. When people tell me that, then I know that's what's supposed to
be done. Everybody has something that can make that whole total thing
happen. The thing that can make us as a whole people- everybody's got a
part of the whole.
Milford Graves, Beyond Polymath (detail), 2017, mixed-media installation. Courtesy of the Artist’s Institute
When I stepped into the Artist’s
Institute at Hunter College in Manhattan this past fall, I didn’t know
what to expect. Milford Graves was premiering a new work titled Beyond Polymath.
I’ve studied music with Graves since 2015, seen him play drums with
various musicians, and attended gatherings at his home in Queens. At
these informal meetings he draws connections between his work in
biology, martial arts, music, and acupuncture, all while telling stories
of his experiences as a drummer in the 1960s. Beyond Polymath,
however, was unique in that it was his first work of sculpture. The
installation was a three-dimensional expression of Graves’s “biological
music” concept. The density of this sculpture struck me—its medical and
cultural symbols intertwined with brightly colored veins, their shapes
and lines creating a sense of movement between static objects. A human
skeleton was connected to four separate computer monitors, each
displaying various expressions of the human heartbeat. The effect was
simultaneously ancient and futuristic.
Graves has dedicated his life to
understanding how people vibrate, creating works that resonate within
us. This inquiry has led him to pursuits beyond any single discipline
and to settle into a number of diverse communities. Some know him as a
musician, while others regard him as a martial arts instructor or
herbalist, but he seamlessly combines all of these interests. Rather
than work within any specific idiom, Graves mines the creative process
to engineer new works out of the components common to each subject. A few days after his
lecture/recital at the Artist’s Institute, we met at his home in Queens,
where I found him deliberating on the gallbladder and what sort of
medical advice to give a friend in need.
—Aakash Mittal
Milford Graves in his studio, 2017.
Photo by Deana Lawson.
Milford Graves If
not in terrible pain, he probably has a little time to rectify his
health situation. Most people feel some pain and go right in, taking
hard pharmaceuticals or getting cut up. Then other problems settle in. Aakash Mittal There’s no going back once they cut an organ out. MG Once they do that, there ain’t no regeneration. AM: Even an easy surgery is a risk, so why put your body through that if you don’t have to? MGAndy Warhol and Tony Williams both
had gallbladder surgery and suffered massive heart attacks. There’s a
linkage between those two organs, man. This ain’t alternative medicine;
it’s straight out of cardiopathy. There’s a small blood vessel
connecting the gallbladder to the heart. I told my friend to make sure
they monitor it. AM: So you were suggesting he ask for a cardiologist? MG: Doctors get uptight when you tell
them what to do, but you have to bring things to their attention in a
very peaceful, diplomatic way. AM: Every time I come here I learn about a new connection between the heart and the rest of the world. MG
In traditional Chinese medicine they’ve been talking about this for
ages. There’s the meridian clock. Each of us has two hours of maximum
energy flow for the heart, between 11 AM and 1 PM. The gallbladder is
just the opposite, between 11 PM and 1 AM. The ancient Chinese saw
something going on, probably just from observation. They said the
kidneys control the bones. How is that possible? AM I don’t know. MG Well, there’s a hormone in the
kidney—erythropoietin. The blood goes through the kidneys, and they
monitor it, excreting out what they don’t want but returning
electrolytes and stuff back into the flow. But check this out: this
ain’t no machine. It’s a human organ that can figure out the number of
red blood cells you have! And when they’re too low it releases this
hormone, which triggers the marrow to produce more. The ancients knew
about this relationship, just not about erythropoietin. Now we learn its
molecular structure and synthesize it, then put it in a pill or
injection. But the bottom line is that you might not always have the
scientific language, but the relationships are there. So you can’t sleep
on this old stuff, man! You’ve got to go back centuries and ask what
these ancients were talking about. They were so tuned in. They talked
about their deities, and today we have church as big business. Turn on
that TV and see them preachers dressed up. They’re entertainers, and
people are dousing them with bucks! People are into their talk, feeling
them high spirits, but in the old days they really felt forces
inside. They were very open and had none of our machines. They paid
attention to their own biology and let nature speak. When we get stuck,
we should go back and ask what the heck they were talking about. AM It’s easy to forget that people were
able to exist for thousands of years without the machines we use today.
So your study of the ancients deals with energy systems? MG Their whole thought process, man! AM Having known you for the last few
years, one thing that really strikes me is that some people only know
you as an herbalist, while others only know you as a martial artist or
acupuncturist. They might not even know you play drums. Are you leading
multiple lives? MG People can be polymaths, knowing
about this and that, but they might not be able to integrate all that.
When I needed a title for my recent show at the Artist’s Institute at
Hunter College, “Beyond Polymath” popped into my head—which, to me,
means trying to see all this stuff as one happening, like the ToE
(Theory of Everything) in physics. I’m dealing with the same things,
though not, for example, light or gravity but with the sensory organs
that detect them.
I deal with the body, man! Not so much on the atomic or cosmological
level but the anatomical level. With microscopes you can look all you
want, but can you feel it? AM Meaning inside your body? MG Meaning how you react. We have
excellent detectors that can observe particles colliding. With our
machines we can observe. But what about Vodou in Haiti or further back
than that, the Dahomey and Yoruba cultures? With possession you can see
some incredible things—people crawling along then suddenly jumping up,
doing unbelievable movements and chanting. All bubbled up through this
apparatus of vocalization and drumming. AM I was just in Haiti this past summer,
hanging out with a Vodou drummer who showed me some rhythms. From a
distance the rhythms seemed simple.
I thought, I’m a musician and can learn this. But when it was my turn to
play them I was blown away by the complexity of the time feel. Once I
was able to play the rhythm, I was really struck by the trance-like
effect and its deep symbolism. The drums themselves could only be made
from the wood of a tree felled on a full moon. He explained that this
wasn’t just music but something more. He was trying to vibrate on
another level.
MG That’s it! It comes down to vibration, which is motion. As human beings, if there’s no motion, we’re dead! (laughter) You can call it oscillations or whatever. AM I want to say intuition, but that word carries a lot of baggage. I wonder if it’s related to our gut neurons. MGAnd this thing about machines
replacing human biology is too far out. If you want to build a smarter
machine, then you’ve got to feel the neuron. You’ve got to ride the
neuron! In Vodou, when a spirit, or loa, possesses a devotee,
they “mount the horse.” You take that ride to understand what it’s
about. If you just watch, you don’t get that. It’s like the observer
effect in physics, when the act of looking affects the results. You’re a
participant, and if you don’t develop a strong belief system or
convictions, you will never internalize. AM I’ve always appreciated your thoughts
on self-empowerment, believing in yourself when few others seem to.
Your life and career emulate this, and so you’re always ahead of the
curve. MG Do you know Connie Hawkins, the basketball player who just passed away? AM No. MG But you do know Michael Jordan and
Julius Erving. Well, they came from Hawkins, since he revolutionized the
game. Now that he’s dead, the media is talking about him. We were
actually classmates in high school, but not pals really. He was a
playground legend here in Brooklyn. All-American in high school, got a
scholarship to Iowa in 1960, but he was alleged to be associating with a
gambler, a corrupt kind of guy, who got players to shave points. He
lost his scholarship and was later banned from the NBA. It was a mess.
So he played for the Harlem Globetrotters for years. He was later
cleared of everything and hired by the Phoenix Suns. This guy didn’t get
a certain kind of recognition, and a similar thing has happened to me
perhaps, though I didn’t get banned for corruption. AM Banned from avant-garde jazz? MG Well, it was who and what I was
associated with.
I was told I would be blackballed for being revolutionary and too
involved with the Civil Rights Movement. And because I started SRP
(Self-Reliance Program) Records with Don Pullen, I was told the system
was going to come down on me. But I really don’t know what’s true. I
heard all kinds of stories. A white record producer called me up in the
’70s, saying, “If you were a white guy, you’d be a superstar.” People
connected me with Amiri Baraka, and I was in a book, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music,
by Frank Kofsky, who at the time was a known communist. He said free
jazz is socialist music. I was trying to organize musicians together,
and people said, “Don’t go up against the system.” But I wasn’t. We just
couldn’t keep waiting for the system to come to us. Some people in the
media said we played “hate” music, anti-white music, which is amazing
because the media never came to us, the musicians, to ask what we were
doing. We weren’t even thinking about that. It was the writers who made
an issue of it—black writers! They labeled us, but we only wanted to play. Do you know about H. Rap Brown? AM I don’t. MG He’s in a federal prison right now
because he wound up killing a police officer in 2000, though some say it
was a setup. But in the ’60s he was one of the leaders of SNCC and the
one who instigated the Baltimore Riots, which we called the Baltimore
Rebellion. So he was on the run, and a lot of people at the time were
sympathizing with him and Stokely Carmichael, all those guys who were
talking hard, saying peaceful marches aren’t going to do it. A lot of
artists were asked to play for these benefits. So they had this rally
for Rap Brown at a brownstone uptown. Everybody came. I was surprised to
see Papa Joe Jones, talking, Balabba yabba zow, huh! What in
the world was he talking about? It turned out to be Buddy Rich.
I was just so surprised that Papa Joe would be into any social
movements. We started talking, and he said, “Young man, we was young
once and wanted to play that way-out stuff, too.” I thought, Damn, Papa
knows who I am! I was just in my twenties. The older guys were checking
us out. Max Roach made extremely positive remarks: “You’re doing
something different!” I was playing once and could see Elvin Jones
smiling, eyes all open, bobbing his head. I was showing them I was a
liberated drummer. They considered me bold, saying I was soloing
throughout the piece. Some guys couldn’t deal: “Play time, man.” They’d get uptight because
they weren’t generating enough information to keep up! I was just flying
over the terrain. “Play simple, and stop sometimes.” But I didn’t come
out for no sleepy set or cocktail hour.
I was ready to go. AM It’s about the energy. MG And music is, of course, just one form. AM There’s also martial arts. I remember
you doing a demonstration of analog strikes versus digital strikes,
relating each to vibration and motion. MG I used to do some very hard sparring,
which might have contributed to throwing my hip out. Years of doing
wicked kicks at all kinds of angles. I stayed in it too long and it
twisted me out a bit, but it was an experience. Now I’ve got to do
research to regenerate my own self back again.
Milford Graves in Jamaica, Queens, 2017.
Photo by Andrew Bourne.
AM And you
do this by sonifying the energy coming out of the body. Is that
correct? I saw you do this with one of the people that meet here on
Sundays. I think you were recording the electrical signal around the
damaged hip and putting it through the software you coded to turn the
signal into a melody. MG It’s known that you can stimulate
tissue regeneration through electrical stimulation, but there are other
ways too. Did I only use electrodes or did I put acupuncture needles in
him too? AM It was the needles. MGYeah, I go deep down
to where the joint is and apply specific frequencies relative to the
body. I measure your electrical activity and transform that into a
frequency, then convert it into a melody, as it has some sort of
harmonics. That’s where the musicianship comes in. People ask if I use
spiritual geometry to do this, and I do make use of the golden
ratio—that spiral shape in nature, in snail shells and pineapples skin,
etcetra. But this is often isolated, dealt with as a constant. The
heart, for example, goes through a spiraling motion, and there’s coiling
activity in the motion of the intestines and circulatory system. It’s a
dynamic design. AMAt your performances you sometimes give a primer on your work, mentioning the stereotypical heartbeat sound—ga-gunk ga-gunk. What you’re most interested in are the vibrations between beats that can’t be heard without amplification. MGYou enter a house through the front
door and exit out the back, but what did you do inside? Most people just
observe the valves opening and closing, but there are all these
structures that make that happen, rotating all around, and never with
the exact same motion. “Oh that’s too chaotic, too random,” some say.
But if you walk down the street on a predetermined path, you’re in
trouble. “It’s too chaotic the way you’re walking, man.” Sure it is,
because I’m avoiding vehicles and people I may not want to run into!
Your organs understand this variability and shift to, say, deliver more
oxygen here or there. That’s feedback. The circulatory system is
bouncing, man. AM
It sounds like you are dealing with biological feedback loops and
improvisation rather than a rigid system. Do you feel people label
things they don’t understand as chaotic or random? MG Laypeople don’t bother, but
intellectuals and people who want control do. These controllers are very
insecure because they feel they’re in trouble, or they just don’t know
how to get liberated. When I first got to Bennington in ’73, a lot of
the students claimed they couldn’t improvise, but it was a requisite
course in the program. Improv scared the hell out of them. I would ask
about their upbringing, and they might tell me they started violin and
piano at age four with instructors. They’d never picked up an instrument
without worrying about what’s right or wrong, never got acquainted to
see what it could produce. The most sophisticated improvised music in
the world was done by an older generation of African Americans. They
didn’t have no schooling; they came up raw and rough, figuring out music
on their own. Their disadvantage became a positive. But when I later did workshops with the African American community here,
I had a problem. The discipline wasn’t yet there. I had forty drummers
the first class, then next week only four. “This is some heavy-duty
stuff you’re talking, man.” But I didn’t reduce it. I’d ask about the
arithmetic of their rhythms, slow them down and make them count. It was
the opposite with the white kids at Bennington. You’ve got to know both
the structured and the so-called unstructured. AM What drove you to exist in both worlds? MG I was eighteen and playing timbales
in Latin jazz bands. Some of those players would talk about an A at 440
Hz. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but if you played a
tune, I could remember that sucker. I was all memory, and I’m glad I
came up that way. But not knowing bugged me, especially when we
rehearsed with this bass player, and after he left they said he had been
all out of tune. I thought he was great and couldn’t understand what
they meant, so I went to the library to read about who started all this
stuff about the right and wrong notes. But, oh, it was just a human
being who devised this convention, without any objective backing! It
ain’t absolute. If it were, all the music of Asia and Africa would be
wrong! No way, man. How could those notes between the piano keys be
wrong! This lead me to study acoustics and collect books like On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music by Hermann von Helmholtz. I was on after that, baby!
I will call you out. If you’re playing a tempered scale, I’ll ask:
What’s the twelfth root of two? How was that scale developed? Are you
beholden to something you don’t even know the history of? Maybe you
are the one out of tune! And you do so because you want to build a
keyboard? Fitting twelve notes into an octave, instead of thirty-two, is
an industrial compromise! It has nothing to do with feeling in the
body. AM I remember being in Calcutta,
studying music. I was working on raga Marwa, and the flat second is
actually tuned much higher than where it would be on the piano. Instead
of lining up with a tuner, you need to get a certain resonance between
the major and minor second. I was also working on Malkauns, which has
this sort of vibrato motion between the fourth and the flat third. At
first it was hard for me to understand that it was about the constant
change of the sound in that back and forth motion. It helped me
understand that what matters is what you can do within the spectrum of
sound we experience. It’s not a fixed tuning system, which connects to
what you’ve said about how older drummers talk about music in the heart.
You take this well beyond the metaphor. MG It’s a total approach, down to your diet. In 1961 I was a street-corner bebopper, a jitterbug drinking pluck—the
cheapest wine. We had a doo-wop group and partied all night, then ate
at the worst Chinese restaurant and Fish’n’Chip in the so-called ghetto.
The fried oil grease had been in there for months. Those free radicals
were alive in us. A bad diet. I had friends die of cirrhosis, and I got
an ulcer. I looked like I was walking sideways when walking toward you,
ribs all showing. The local doctor said, “If you want to live, you got
to stop drinking.” I had a power deep inside though, a determination. I
became a vegetarian and recalled my grandfather talking about herbs.
Soon my friends noticed a remarkable improvement in my health and
started asking what herbs they could use to correct their problems, so I
became an herbalist, again going to the library to research the
subject.
AM So people have been coming to you for health advice since you were first on the scene? MG Oh yeah. I’ve talked to young people
in the streets and at Bennington, who were dealing with various kinds of
drugs. “Bro, that stuff you take? I’ve done it. And I almost took
myself out of the equation!” Kids can feel sincerity. My classroom was a
living room. It was hip. We had lessons, yes, but then we’d lock the
doors and do martial arts. I’d throw them all over the room, and they
loved it. I helped those kids, and they helped me. I got to see an
element of society that I didn’t pass through. It gave me a great
feeling of balance. Kids up there had different problems, emotional
ones. In some African American communities the gangs kill each other,
but the whites are shooting at schools and theaters. What motivates
that, man? Do they see life in a real way or as something artificial,
make-believe? Some might be given too much, with nothing to chase after,
and the walls start to crash down. I see this on the planet right now.
The Trump situation isn’t really about Trump anymore. It’s about the
people that voted for him. We’ve got to help each other out. It ain’t
about the demise of white people. What if African Americans went into
those so-called hard-racist areas and said, “We understand your
situation. We’ve been kicked in the ass, made to feel we would lose
everything we ever gained.” We can all rise to the occasion and come out
of the negative hole. Take the middle path. On the Buddha’s path, you
travel! You’ve got to feel what others feel regardless of
pigmentation—that’s compassion. We all hurt. The Civil Rights era was
great because many whites had no idea. They saw how African Americans
were treated on news television, and it pissed them off. AM Did you ever feel your creativity was
a political statement, or was it just coexisting at the same time as
the Civil Rights Movement? MG Like I said before, I was just
playing at first. In the ’60s a political awareness came. The Vietnam
War was on. Women’s rights. Black rights. It was a big time for this
country. You couldn’t imagine it today. I delved into American history
from slavery on and, being a musician, got interested in how the drum
was banned by white slave owners, how that music had to be underground,
then about the so-called “darkies” in New Orleans, about being put in
conservatories to learn to play music “correctly.” There’s more to
slavery than labor; it’s cultural genocide. Everything you did was
invalid.
Nasty stuff took place, but what positive came out of it? To be stripped
of your character and mental capacity, to be regarded as just bodies
moving around? My parents couldn’t help me with schoolwork, like I can
with my grandchildren today. I had to work my butt off to try to figure
out every little thing. You can get some brilliant minds out of that.
After studying Zen Buddhism, I thought maybe the true practitioners were
African Americans because they were stripped to a state of nothingness.
You come out hungry! African Americans should be at the forefront in
teaching people, all people, about what it is to be put down and how to
pull yourself out. The way I play my instrument is my dedication. It’s
my way of saying, “I don’t like the way the drum was treated.” AM During one of your Sunday hangs you
were talking about the need to bring the drum back to a central role in
music. The drum used to be regarded as the most important instrument,
but in recent history, it has become diminished. And now at concerts you
intentionally put the drums at the front of the band. MG I don’t allow myself to be a backdrop. To be taken to the back is a demotion. Do you understand what the drum was? Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Batá Drum: Cracking the Code
by Amanda Villepastour—that’s a good and recent book. The pressure
effect they use on that drum, which goes beyond the Batá actually, leads
to something else. People now talk about membranes instead of
superstrings in quantum mechanics. “But that’s not a drum, Milford.”
Come on now, it’s a circle vibrating isn’t it? Are we afraid to say that
the closest thing to this scientific idea might be West African
drumming systems? Relatedly, when I play, I do more than vertical strokes. I’m not just bah-bop bah-bop. My thing is moving around, touching the skins, knowing about momentum and position at the same time.
AM In one of our lessons you mentioned
that exploring all the sounds my voice can make and bringing them to my
saxophone playing would develop my “feel” in the music. And I’ve heard
you do a lot of vocalizing and singing while playing drums in your
performances or to demonstrate a point in your talks. In John Zorn’s
book Arcana V you wrote an essay called “Music Extensions of
Infinite Dimensions.” In it, you mention something about how when we
think of a sound our vocal cords are subvocalizing. MG I work with phonetics, and I also do
vocal stuff in the work. The pronunciation of different languages
activates different parts of the whole vocal system. Phonetics is
physiological. If I do a pharyngeal gag tone, anatomically it’s like
vomiting, which stimulates the medulla, which controls the
parasympathetic nervous system—the Yin system. Then there’s subvocalization, which even NASA is researching. By putting
these very sensitive receptors around the vocal folds they found that
the larynx pre-vibrates with just a thought. When you think or hear
something, you also silently speak it, imitating it. If that wasn’t the
case, you’d never learn to speak in the first place. I say “Hello!” You
think, Hello! with just a little delay, also subvocalizing it in your
throat. How interesting. So when people hear you play the horn, they are
unconsciously singing along. You don’t want to put people into a zone
of discomfort, so you’ve got to know not to hold a note too long because
people will get exhausted. You affect them, man.
The Yoruba turn speech to song. They can communicate in musical form,
but without knowing their language I can use those same inflections. I
put twists in there, like the blues: Oh my gurl, mmmmm, she took the world awayeeee from me, mmmmm hmm.
Those minor tones vibrate the sinus, hit the lachrymal area, which
stimulates the tear ducts. Why do minor scales have that melancholic
aspect? How do they make you feel a certain way? They stimulate those
ducts, then the sadness starts coming. I don’t know how the bluesmen
knew this, but I figured that sucker out. When I want to bring things
down, even my blood pressure, I just sing. But back to the gag sound: Three types of people do it. Young children,
because they are so relaxed. Junkies, who are also relaxed. And Batá
singers, especially the Cubans and Nigerians. But you can do this on a
drum. Muffle it, and go bleh. I hit that, and I can relax you,
manipulate your yin and yang, keep you in balance, because remember, you
sing everything you hear. Some musicians scream on their instrument,
but they’re wiping people out. What’s your purpose? To show how loud and
long you can scream? Are you in pain? Are you angry, man? No, we got to
feed people vibrations. Another thing about the power of relaxation: in martial arts, you learn
to relax when you get pinned to the floor. Your routine choreographed
moves will not save you. You have to relax. I would have one piece of
advice for a fighter like Conor McGregor: You can train physically all
you want, Conor, but you’re in such a hyper state. You burn up. Against
Floyd Mayweather, you came in, making that money, putting on a show. But
you exhausted yourself. I’d take old Connor through some relaxed
states, man. Cool him out. When I would spar, I’d sing on people! Put them to sleep. Just like on
the trap set, one hand goes this way, the other that way. They never
knew what was coming. I was wicked, man. I was weird. That was my MO.
They said, “You’re unorthodox, unpredictable.” That’s the name of the
game. I was having fun. I wasn’t no pugilist. I was an artist. It made
me learn how to make quick decisions, how to not panic. When I come to my instrument, I am relaxed and can pull stuff off. When I
was doing tai chi, I would bring that fluidity in. It’s not just about
practice; there are a lot of other experiences to have. In acupuncture, I
can hit some dangerous points—bam! That’s drumming.
Aakash Mittal is a performing artist and composer who employs
improvisation, noise, and biological arrhythmia. His primary ensemble,
the Aakash Mittal Quartet, has released four recordings and tours
internationally.
Drummer and percussionist Milford Graves has embraced
unorthodox styles in both jazz and martial arts. A new documentary about
his work has set its international debut. (Photo: Courtesy Jake Meginsky)
The new film Milford Graves Full Mantis is as much a visual poem as it is a documentary. The film—which examines not just the career, but also the teachings
of drummer/percussionist Milford Graves—will have its world premiere at
this year’s International Film Festival in Rotterdam, The Netherlands,
which runs from Jan. 24 to Feb. 4. The movie will be screened as part of
“Pan-African Cinema Today,” a program that includes short- and
feature-length films, lectures, a virtual-reality installation and
music. Jake Meginsky, who co-directed the film with Neil Young, was living
in Springfield, a quick drive to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
back in 2004. And as the Northeast plays host to a bevy of experimental
improvisers, Meginsky was able to catch a Graves performance at the
school. Something about the show obviously reached Meginsky’s core. About a year later, he drove up to Bennington College to ask the percussionist if he’d be able to take on a student. Graves,
who worked at the Vermont school for 39 years, said yes, and Meginsky
landed a gig up there to be closer to his mentor. The pair also worked a
bit in South Jamaica, Queens, where Graves is based and first taught
his brand of martial arts, Yara. “By 2004, I was recording him telling certain stories from [his past]
or what was going on with the recording he was doing,” said Meginsky,
who used Graves’ home and extensive gardens in Queens as the film’s
setting. “This movie … comes out of 14 years of working with Milford
directly as a student. It’s a personal project.” Full Mantis is fully focused on Graves’ voice. The drummer’s
perceptions of art and living blend with impressionistic visual turns:
glacial camera movements, stolen moments in the gardens and archival
footage. Unlike a slew of recent music docs, though, Meginsky and
Young’s film eschews talking-head specialists. Meginsky said that for
him, as a viewer, when those arbiters of culture show up in a film, it’s
not uncommon for him to zone out. Graves’ career reaches back to the 1960s, when he began recording
with free-jazz luminaries like Albert Ayler, Giuseppi Logan and Sonny
Sharrock. The percussionist, who said he was waiting for someone to make
a movie about his work, recalls garnering a bit of attention pretty
early on, though. “I was the new kid on the block, you know? Word got around: ‘You have
to go see Milford Graves,’” the drummer said on New Year’s day. “People
I had respect for … these guys were coming over to me and giving me
high praise. They made me realize that maybe I had something.” In a March 19, 1970, feature on drummers, DownBeat writer Jane Welch
described Graves as “a serious man and a serious musician.” She wrote:
“His way of life is on a high ethical plane and his playing reflects
this. He is a ‘cultural nationalist’ who firmly believes that an artist
can take all the necessary things from the existing environment and
shape them creatively to suit his own needs.” Graves is still at work, using the same perspective. And to the filmmaker, Full Mantis
is a primary document, culled from more than a decade of knowing
Graves, exploring his teachings and listening to discussions of the
percussionist’s ideas and the “ways he conceptualizes the instrument and
his creative process, in general.” Meginsky called some of the material used in the film “hardcore
archival” and said the movie’s name comes from Graves’ martial arts
discipline. “Milford was training his peers in his backyard in South Jamaica
Queens—boxing and kung fu,” the director said, going on to detail a
story of some folks being turned away from teachers in Chinatown because
of their race. Graves, though, came to the conclusion that most martial
arts masters study directly from nature. “So, he ordered a bunch of
praying mantis eggs, hatched them in the garden and studied from the
praying mantis.” It’s that kind of intuition that spurs Graves’ discourse today. And
over the course of the 90-minute film, viewers get to hear previously
unreleased electronic music and see animation by Graves, as well as
Super 8 footage of the drummer’s first tour of Japan and 16-mm footage
of a tour in Belgium. For more info on the film, visit its Kickstarter page. And for info on International Film Festival’s “Pan-African Cinema Today,” visit the festival website. DB
For Milford Graves, Jazz Innovation Is Only Part of the Alchemy
Milford Graves in his Queens
home. The jazz drummer’s garage and basement laboratory are filled with
evidence of his varied interests, from martial arts to the biology of
the human heart.Credit
George Etheredge for The New York Times
Calling
Milford Graves an autodidact would be basically correct, but it gets at
the wrong idea. Known as a game-changing drummer of the 1960s
avant-garde, he’s also become a kind of underground thought-leader in
martial arts, natural healing and cellular biology. That wasn’t just by
learning from what was available; he likes to build new systems,
reshaping the channels by which information comes to him.
Mr.
Graves prefers to live in territory that’s uncharted, which often means
unseen, but a small wave of recognition has started to flow his way.
Since the fall, he’s been featured in a range of major art magazines
and has exhibited his first sculpture (exploring connections between
body and rhythm) at Hunter College. Last month, he played two triumphant
sets at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn. And on Friday, the
documentary “Milford Graves Full Mantis” has its New York premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
A wall of Mr. Graves’s basement laboratory is lined with bottles of the herbal extracts he’s made.Credit
George Etheredge for The New York Times
The
film’s main lesson is that it’s possible for an artist to spend an
entire life working his way back from the source material: If he makes
his principles expansive enough, he might even succeed in creating a
loose society of learners around him, with or without an institution’s
help. In one scene, Mr. Graves, now 76, stands in his backyard garden in
Jamaica, Queens, speaking to the film’s director, Jake Meginsky. A
vegetable provides more nutrients if you eat it directly, he says. Then
he bends over and gobbles up a spinach leaf, chewing it down to the
stem. This moment shows where his creativity flourishes — at the square
root of super-seriousness and total innocence.
Walking
into his basement laboratory last Saturday, I found a wall lined with
bottles of herbal extracts he’s made. He’s frequently sought out as a
healer and acupuncturist by neighbors and artists across the city.
Even
to a knowledgeable jazz fan, the depth of Mr. Graves’s inquiries would
probably be a surprise. He’s spent decades directly researching the
human heart in that basement, using software he’s built to measure its
textured pulse and convert it into a melody. By feeding those sounds
back to a person, he’s found he can increase blood flow and possibly
even stimulate cell growth. This work recently led Mr. Graves to a partnership with a team of Italian biologists. Last year, they patented a device that aims to use these melodies to regenerate stem cells.
“I didn’t have a teacher,
and that was great, because I was allowed to figure it out without
anybody telling me to do it this way or that way,” Mr. Graves said.Credit
George Etheredge for The New York Times
Mr.
Graves does this research in the semi-suburban Queens home where he and
his wife, Lois, have lived since 1970. (He grew up nearby, then
inherited the house from his grandmother.) Years ago, he festooned its
exterior with a creeping, GaudÃesque mosaic of stones and colored glass.
In the comfortably cluttered basement, books on biology, Kundalini yoga
and 20th-century music perch next to West African drums and Indian
tablas.
“I
guess I’ve always been my own person,” Mr. Graves said, sitting in
baggy sweatpants and a flannel jacket by a bank of six computer
monitors. “I didn’t have no teacher, and that was great, because I was
allowed to figure it out without anybody telling me to do it this way or
that way. That came later, when I said, Oh, that’s the conventional
way.”
He
grew up playing timbales in Latin jazz and mambo bands, where the
rhythmic complexity is greater and more gravity-defying than in standard
jazz drumming. Mr. Graves decided to move to the kit after hearing Elvin Jones with John Coltrane
at a club — not to imitate what he’d heard, but to transcend it, add
more range. “I said, ‘He’s cool, but I hear something else, man,’” Mr.
Graves said. “I heard what he wasn’t doing.”
On
the drum kit, he met the new challenge of incorporating foot pedals.
Playing Latin percussion, he recalled, “we’d be doing dance movements
while we were playing. So I said: ‘That’s all I’ll do. I’m going to
start dancing down below.’ I started dancing on the high-hat.”
He fell in with the improvising avant-garde around 1963, recording first with the New York Art Quartet,
a group that’s now iconic. He had begun to develop a polyrhythmic style
of free playing, shapely and articulate and unabating. Delivering most
strokes at about 60 to 80 percent force, Mr. Graves sometimes holds
multiple sticks in one hand, each tapping a different drum with a
different rhythm. He maintains a low and certain flow, even as patterns
tilt and tempos shift.
Soon
he had radically remodeled his drum kit, ditching the snare drum and
taking the bottom skins off his toms, getting a soupier resonance. He
said the snare’s stiff-toned sound fit its European military origins
better than it did his music. “The potential of how you can manipulate a
vibrating drum membrane is much greater,” Mr. Graves said. He suggested
that jazz drummers who use the snare might simply be “following orders
without questioning those orders” — his idea of a grave sin.
Mr. Graves studies the human heart, measuring its pulses and converting them into melodies.Credit
George Etheredge for The New York Times
In
1973, he began teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, where he
stayed on as a professor until 2012, holding forth on topics well beyond
any single subject, despite having no more than a high school diploma.
But he spent most of each week back in Queens, teaching percussion and
yara, a hybrid martial art of his own creation, to interested artists
and neighborhood residents.
In
“Full Mantis,” Mr. Graves is the only speaker, which makes for both a
captivating sound poem (philosophical speech interleaved with
performances) and a risk: It positions him as a solitary figure, too far
ahead to relate to, whereas, in fact, he’s always been a convener and a
sharer. For many years, he has hosted informal Sunday get-togethers in
his basement, assembling different groups of guests, teaching and
opening up broad discussions.
“At
the house, you meet people from all over,” said Mr. Meginsky, who
served as Mr. Graves’s personal assistant for over a decade before
making “Full Mantis” out of a combination of his own recordings and Mr.
Graves’s old videos. “You’re meeting classical musicians there, you’re
meeting consecrated priests in Santeria and Ifá and voodoo, you’re
meeting doctors, you’re meeting guys who run the health food store in
South Jamaica, drummers, gardeners.”
Mr. Graves and his wife, Lois, have lived in this Queens home since 1970; he inherited it from his grandmother.Credit
George Etheredge for The New York Times
The
pianist Jason Moran, who sought out Mr. Graves for a duet at Big Ears,
said in an interview that he’s long been impressed by the way Mr. Graves
“turns the way that knowledge functions around, into the personal, away
from the textbook.”
He added: “He follows through on all those intuitions where I think most of us sometimes don’t, really spending his time.”
Onstage
at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville, the two musicians let their
instincts multiply, Mr. Moran moving from chunky chords to rippling
repetitions of a single high note. Even when the pianist swept down to
the lowest reaches of his instrument, Mr. Graves seemed to stay
underneath him, a ballast in constant flux, offering only the guarantee
that he would listen, and change.
From martial arts to the science of tear ducts: a new documentary about the noted free-jazz drummer.
Milford Graves in Full Mantis.
Milford Graves: Full Mantis, directed by Jake Meginsky, co-directed by Neil Cloaca Young, screening at various locations through March 23, 2018. For full list: www.fullmantis.com
• • •
Speaking in Tongues,
a 1982 documentary on the percussionist Milford Graves and the
saxophonist and clarinetist David Murray, begins with a somber tale
about John Coltrane’s funeral. Graves performed with the legendary
saxophonist Albert Ayler at the event in 1967, the film announces
solemnly. There is a cut to a desolate expanse of the East River, where
Ayler’s drowned body was found in 1970. As fascinating as the
documentary is, Graves is portrayed less as himself and more through his
relationships to these famous dead musicians, in these historical
moments frozen in time. Milford Graves: Full Mantis, a
new documentary directed by one of Graves’s students, Jake Meginsky,
with co-direction by Neil Cloaca Young, is a dynamic portrait of the now
seventy-six-year-old Graves, via observations of his life in his
rambling, colorful Queens home, just down the street from the South
Jamaica Houses where he grew up. No one else is interviewed but him; the
documentary is focused entirely on the legendary drummer and his
kaleidoscopically varied interests—herbalist, martial artist, musician,
acupuncturist, scientific tinkerer. The feature-length film pulses with
energy, and Graves talks a mile a minute, each sentence a mouthful
almost more inconceivable than the last one.
Milford Graves in Full Mantis.
In
a scene near the beginning of the film, Graves walks through his
overgrown garden filled with herbs as cars zoom by. “Plants are
constantly picking up cosmic energy, beyond photosynthesis,” he says.
“To me they’re just like humans, man, you’re constantly breathing in air
. . . we’re breathing all kinds of elements of nature. So what makes
you think that plants are any different?” In another scene, he’s
affixing electrodes to his torso, measuring EKG signals and animatedly
discussing the connections between sound and the body. A few minutes
later, he’s exuberantly demonstrating the martial art form he invented
in the 1960s, which he calls yara, a word taken from the Yoruba
language that means “nimbleness.” Graves set out to devise his own form
of martial art, partly inspired by the moves of a praying mantis—hence
the movie’s title. “I said I’m gonna go right to the praying
mantis—that’s the boss, not some human,” he explains. “I watched them
and I watched all their moves. I went to the best teacher.”
Milford Graves in Full Mantis.
His
energetic and unpredictable patterns of conversation seem to parallel
his approach to music. It is clear he doesn’t like following anyone
else’s beat—nor does he follow a constant beat himself. A steady,
repetitive rhythm, he says, is akin to death. “People say the best way
to play in tempo is to get a metronome,” he says in the film. “Oh my
gracious . . . too exact, too exact. But you know what? The body, the
heart doesn’t have the same time length between each contraction and
relaxation of the heartbeat . . . If the doctor heard that, and
everything seemed to be clean, the more exact the time measures, the
more dangerous it is.” For a documentary about a musician best
known as an icon of free jazz, there is little in the film that is
explicitly about jazz. For much of Full Mantis, Graves isn’t
playing music. He delivers numerous monologues, carrying the film with
his undeniable charisma as he expounds on the science of tear ducts, his
philosophy on gardening, or any number of other seemingly unrelated
subjects. It becomes clear as the movie progresses that all of these
disparate topics are part of his practice. Music is felt throughout Full Mantis, though, even when it isn’t being performed: in the rhythmic patterns of kicks and sparring of yara, in close-ups of the flowers in Graves’s yard fluttering in the wind. Meginsky
and Young’s thoughtful edits have their own internal rhythm,
complementing Graves’s idiosyncratic flow. Graves, for his part, is a
perfect fit for the screen, playing to the camera and clearly relishing
being in the spotlight. He spent several decades teaching at Bennington
College before retiring from there in 2012; he snaps quickly and easily
back into a professorial speechifying mode, while also folding in the
manic intensity of a martial arts master from a 1980s kung-fu flick.
Milford Graves in Full Mantis.
Some of the most spellbinding segments of Full Mantis
involve black-and-white archival footage of a much younger Graves
playing the drums with an epic ferocity. As LeRoi Jones—later known as
Amiri Baraka—memorably wrote in 1966, Graves’s drumming “is great
natural roars and chugs and stops and puffs and scrambling. Graves
weaves and wheels in the back, the sound always changing. Never the
quickly dull pre-felt tapping of the simply hip. The sound and sound
devices, always changing, and the energy pushing it, unflagging.” Full Mantis
is a nuanced portrait of Graves, lovingly created from the perspective
of filmmakers who are clearly major fans of his work. Meginsky and Young
dispense with the usual tropes of music documentaries—the dry
historical scene-setting, the airy pontificating from various talking
heads—instead favoring a more disjointed approach, which succeeds in
being both more provocative and more intimate at the same time. But
perhaps hearing some other voices, outside of Graves’s own, would have
helped to vary and develop the narrative. Shirley Clarke’s 1985
documentary Ornette: Made in America was imaginative and
free-form, much like its subject, Ornette Coleman, but it took in other
people, too, from Don Cherry to William S. Burroughs to Coleman’s son
Denardo. Full Mantis misses out on some of that potential
for diversity of perspectives, but gains in its close understanding of
the subject. The film plays like a ninety-one-minute private lesson from
Graves himself. “What makes a person able to swing, versus not being
able to swing?” he asks rhetorically at one point. “I’m not playing your
typical dangadangadang . . . Swing, man, is getting you to
move from one point to another point. It’s putting life into you . . .
swing is when you can feel, man.” The film admirably depicts that feel—what happens not only in the notes of the music, but all of the spaces in between.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Geeta Dayal
is an arts critic and journalist, specializing in writing on
twentieth-century music, culture, and technology. She has written
extensively for frieze and many other publications, including The Guardian, Wired, The Wire, Bookforum, Slate, the Boston Globe, and Rolling Stone. She is the author of Another Green World, a book on Brian Eno (Bloomsbury, 2009), and is currently at work on a new book on music.
Music documentaries usually fall into a few limited categories,
including glowing hagiographies, concert films and rise-and-fall
tragedies. These categories persist, at least in part, because they
provide foolproof audience-friendly templates for filmmakers to follow. Milford Graves Full Mantis goes down a completely different path and the results are magnificent.
Milford Graves is a famed jazz drummer and percussionist who has
performed with the likes of Albert Ayler and Paul Bley. Although Graves
is justfiably regarded for his drumming, music is a single element of a
personal philosophy that synthesizes art, physiology, alternative
medicine and martial arts. Co-directors Jake Meginsky, who has studied
under Graves for 15 years, and Neil Young eschew standard tools and
techniques (e.g., linear biographical timelines, detached narration,
multiple talking heads) to capture multiple aspects of their subject's
life and personality.
Milford Graves Full Mantis is solely focused on what
the arist has to communicate to the world. The film was shot
in-and-around the Graves' home in Jamaica, New York. The house's
exterior is adorned with stones and crystals. A colorful eclectic garden
teems with bees, butterflies and other insects. Inside the house, one
finds sculptures, instruments, computers and books. At the center of
this rich environment is Graves who, at the age of 76, is full of
energy, creativity and vunerablity. His musings are interspersed with
rare archival footage, art and photos. All of this material is
assembled with a fluid hypnotic style that reflects the many moods and
rhythms emanating from Graves' words and music.
Milford Graves Full Mantis is a beautiful and
carefully constructed portrait of a uniquely talented human being.
What's more, the film shows the creative possibilities that still exist
within the increasingly staid realm of music docs.
Vision Festival 18 – Opening Night – Celebrate Milford Graves: A Life-Time of Achievement
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 @ 7:00 pm
Since 1996, the Vision Festival has been New
York’s premiere festival of free/avant-garde/experimental/world jazz
music bringing together visionaries from New York and all over the world
for dynamic collaborations, the exploration of new sounds, and to
foster multicultural and multigenerational dialogue.
Roulette welcomes back Vision Festival 18 to our performance stage
for 5 evenings of wall-to-wall programming, beginning Wednesday, June 12
through Sunday, June 16, with extraordinary performances from Milford
Graves, William Parker, Roy Campell, Joe McPhee, Marshall Allen, Amiri
Baraka, Hamid Drake, Roscoe Mitchell, Mary Halvorson, Craig Taborn,
Henry Grimes, among others, along with a robust multimedia program that
features dance, poetry, film, and panel discussions with artists.
Vision Festival 18 – Improvisation / Freedom / Revolution – opens with a celebration of drummer/percussionist Milford Graves,
recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, with 3 performances
highlighting Graves’ extraordinary career, from his Afro/Cuban roots to
stellar sets by Transition Trio and NY HeART Ensemble, featuring Amiri Baraka.
8:30 PM – Milford Graves Transition TRIO
Milford Graves – drums, percussion
D.D. Jackson – piano
Kidd Jordan – tenor saxophone
10:00 PM – Milford Graves NY HeArt Ensemble
Milford Graves – drums, percussion
Charles Gayle – tenor saxophone
William Parker – bass
Roswell Rudd – trombone
Amiri Baraka – poetry Arts For Art, Inc. is a not-for-profit,
multi-cultural organization whose purpose is to build awareness and
understanding of avantjazz and related expressive movements while
encouraging a sense of community amongst artists and their audiences.
Our principal activities are the presentation of innovative, creative
music, dance, multi-media performances, spoken word, and the exhibition
of visual arts and through educational efforts involve a new generation.
Since 1996, Art For Art has produced the Vision Festival, beginning in
various venues in New York’s Lower East Side and at Brooklyn’s Roulette
performance space since 2012.
THE MUSIC OF MILFORD GRAVES: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MILFORD GRAVES:
Milford Graves (born August 20, 1941 in Queens, New York)[1] is an American jazz drummer and percussionist, most noteworthy for his early avant-garde contributions in the early 1960s with Paul Bley and the New York Art Quartet alongside John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, and Reggie Workman. He is considered to be a free jazz
pioneer, liberating the percussion from its timekeeping role. In fact,
many of his music contemporaries, musician inspirees, and fans worldwide
would argue that Graves is perhaps the most influential known musician
in the development and continuing evolution of free-jazz/avant-garde
music, to date. Milford Graves taught at Bennington College, in
Bennington, Vermont, as a full-time professor from 1973 until 2011, when
he was awarded Emeritus status.[2] Initially playing timbales as a kid growing up in Queens, Graves has worked as a sideman and session musician with a variety of jazz musicians throughout his career, including Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Albert Ayler, Don Pullen, Kenny Clarke, Don Moye, Andrew Cyrille, Philly Joe Jones, Eddie Gómez, and John Zorn.[1] He has invested his time in research within the field of healing through music.[3] In 2013, Milford Graves along with Drs.Carlo Tremolada and Carlo
Ventura received a patent for an invention that relates to a process of
preparing a non-expanded tissue derivative, that is not subjected to
cell proliferation in vitro, which has a vascular-stromal fraction
enriched in stem and multipotent elements, such as pericytes and/or
mesenchymal stem cells, or for preparing non-embryonic stem cells
obtained from a tissue sample or from such tissue derivative, wherein
the tissue derivative or such cells are subjected to vibrations derived
from a heart sound to control the degree of differentiation or possible
differentiation of the stem and multipotent elements into several other
types of cells and optimize their potency. The invention relates also to
a device for carrying out the process, to stem cells obtainable by the
process as well as a drug for the regeneration of an animal tissue.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Milford Graves 
Milford Graves in Full Mantis.
Some of the most spellbinding segments of Full Mantis
involve black-and-white archival footage of a much younger Graves
playing the drums with an epic ferocity. As LeRoi Jones—later known as
Amiri Baraka—memorably wrote in 1966, Graves’s drumming “is great
natural roars and chugs and stops and puffs and scrambling. Graves
weaves and wheels in the back, the sound always changing. Never the
quickly dull pre-felt tapping of the simply hip. The sound and sound
devices, always changing, and the energy pushing it, unflagging.”
Since 1996, the Vision Festival has been New
York’s premiere festival of free/avant-garde/experimental/world jazz
music bringing together visionaries from New York and all over the world
for dynamic collaborations, the exploration of new sounds, and to
foster multicultural and multigenerational dialogue.
Milford Graves (born August 20, 1941 in Queens, New York)[1] is an American jazz drummer and percussionist, most noteworthy for his early avant-garde contributions in the early 1960s with Paul Bley and the New York Art Quartet alongside John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, and Reggie Workman. He is considered to be a free jazz
pioneer, liberating the percussion from its timekeeping role. In fact,
many of his music contemporaries, musician inspirees, and fans worldwide
would argue that Graves is perhaps the most influential known musician
in the development and continuing evolution of free-jazz/avant-garde
music, to date. Milford Graves taught at Bennington College, in
Bennington, Vermont, as a full-time professor from 1973 until 2011, when
he was awarded Emeritus status.[2]
