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Preview of a two-part Substack post on jazz and hip hop poetics. The next two posts here will explore some background to two book chapters I worked on in the past few years, both just published in edited collections. In the next post, I’ll write more about “A Question of Form: Jazz in Joans, Kaufman, and Cortez”, a chapter in The Cambridge History of African American Poetry , a monumental volume…
Preview of a subscriber post on Substack on Nellie Wong and Harmony Holiday. In the past month, two articles of mine on two quite different poets appeared in The Poetry Foundation and the newly founded Hythe Review . This post goes into a bit more detail on the background to those pieces and serves as an additional tribute to the late Nellie Wong, who passed away earlier this year. It’ll be…
I was at a party on Saturday night when someone came in and said that a van had driven into the Berlin Christopher Street Day parade, killed one person, injuring more. I’ve never been to CSD; go, instead, to the Internationalist Queer Pride demo that, since 2021, has been organised in contradistinction to the corporatisation and pinkwashing of the main CSD demo, whose organisers had called the…
Abdullah Ibrahim (1934-2026) Abdullah Ibrahim, pianist, now follows James Blood Ulmer, guitarist, who died a few weeks ago; Sonny Rollins , saxophonist, who passed a few weeks before Ulmer; Gunter Hampel, multi-instrumentalist, former husband of Jeanne Lee, who passed a few weeks before Rollins; David Henderson, poet, who wrote so much of the music, and who passed a few days before Hampel; Éliane…
Reproducing here liner notes to a new CD r eleased by Edition Wandelweiser Records containing realisations of Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’ s score what is left if we aren’t the world : recordings from 2022—an early home recording, the premiere performance in Amsterdam—with one of the 2023 Klangraum performances, from earlier in the week, and a later performance in Thessaloniki, all with different…
Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge, October 7, 1961 © Atsuhiko Kawabata (photographer) /Hanako Kawabata. First published in Jazz Times . A subscriber post on Substack, on the late Sonny Rollins. There’s a radio recording from the Half Note in 1966 (or perhaps 1963 , depending which discography you use): Rollins with McCoy Tyner, Walter Booker, and Mickey Roker, moving in and out of tunes at…
Good News Blues by Karen Borca / Rob Brown / William Parker / Reggie Workman/Todd Nicholson/ Susie Ibarra /Taylor-Baker A subscriber post on Substack, on the great bassoonist Karen Borca. Outside the by-now better-known names of free jazz, Borca’s work offers few external hooks or ways into the music: no Sun Ra theatricality, no Cecil Taylor ritual, no Archie Shepp radical traditionalism. It is a…
A relatively spontaneous announcement of a relatively spontaneous gig: this for a new quartet combining poetry and music, with myself (poetry), Andrea Burelli (voice, poetry, perhaps violin), Lucio Capece (bass clarinet), and Stellan Veloce (cello). It will happen at the Casino for Social Medicine at Sonnenallee 100, Berlin, on this coming Saturday, 16th May, at 19h. As a trio, Stellan, Lucio and…
Reposting here a piece which just appeared on the excellent online journal Little Mirror alongside Luke Roberts’ collection of Prynne memories . Many thanks to the editors. A longer and more detailed piece on J.H. Prynne will follow elsewhere in due course. The poet J.H. Prynne died last Wednesday morning. Jeremy was important to a whole host of us down the generations, for a whole host of…
A subscriber post on Substack: three fragments from Daybook , on Mal Waldron/Jeanne Lee (with excursions through Shepp, Coltrane, and Gilroy), Jacques Derrida/Ornette Coleman, and Anti-Fascist Noise. For Jeanne Lee, words and music were themselves always in dialogue, communication traversing the endless path of the semantic and non-semantic, the spoke and the unspoken. Talking drums, speaking…
Very pleased to announce the publication of Abstractive , a new collaboration between myself and Candace Hill Montgomery, begun in Sag Harbor in 2024 and just published by Further Other Book Works. It’s been an honour to collaborate and many thanks are due also to publishers CJ Martin and Julia Drescher. Please see the publisher’s announcement below for more details. Candace Hill Montgomery &…
From Daybook. In 2003, mass anti-war protests against the choreographed build-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq. The protests politicised a whole generation of us. Twenty-three years later, the US and Israel launch another illegal war off the bat, with no pretence at UN presentations, consultations, weapons inspections, by a president at once pursuing a Nobel peace prize and illegally invading…
A subscriber post on Substack on a solo guitar (and saxophone) set by Dirar Kalash , with diversions on Paul Klee, Christa Wolf, mathematics, awkwardness, blues, and cheerfulness as ways to utopia. Before he plays, Kalash speaks about the idea that politics, revolution, resistance is not ideology, or not just ideology, but something that is forced from one when one can no longer breathe, as Fanon…
Mid-December 2004. The Museum of Garden History, Lambeth. AMM—Eddie Prévost on percussion and John Tilbury on piano—perform with Sachiko M on empty sampler, a performance a little over an hour long, unearthed from Tilbury’s archive and released in 2025 as Testing. (The album is available from the Matchless Recordings website here .) We begin with a duet for sine wave and the rumble of muffled…
Charles Mingus recorded this version of Martin Niemöller’s anti-fascist warning in 1965. And today, sixty years later in Minneapolis when people intervene to help their neighbours, to come to the aid of those in their community, to attempt to ensure due legal process, they are pushed to the ground by the agents of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and shot ten times, shot four times, shot in…
A subscriber post on Substack about Chinese sound artist ake. ake’s biography describes her as “a surrogate weeper, currently working and living in Beijing, conducting site and context specific sound experiments, events, behaviors and installations, also writing poetry, being a musician, organizer and waiter”. Among other activities, ake “accidentally initiated the nomadic space A2 space”, and…
No New Year’s list of projects like last year for 2026, but in the New Year, I’ll be endeavouring to write up my notes for reviews that didn’t manage to find a home elsewhere, potentially to include all or some of the following... —Jessie Cox’s Sounds of Black Switzerland —Jack Spicer’s Collected Letters and some new Spicerian titles from Wry Press —Records by the Urs Graf Concert / Gabriel…
New Year (January 2025) (Update Post) Reprints from Materials (February 2025) (Update Post) Recent Poems Read (March 2025) Paul Shearsmith (1946-2025) (March 2025) MaerzMusik 2025 Report: Part 1 (May 2025) MaerzMusik 2025 Report: Part 2 (Mazen Kerbaj) (May 2025) MaerzMusik 2025 Report: Part 3 (May 2025) "I Say 'I'": Alice Notley (1945-2025) (May 2025) There's a Riot Going on (June 2025) Louis…
Bill Dixon, Codex Series I (lithograph, 1994) A subscriber post on Substack on some rare pieces by Bill Dixon and his relation to extended (or compressed) songform. In 1979, Dixon wrote a piece called ‘Places’ for the soprano Jennifer Keefe. Premiered at Bennington at an Erik Satie tribute concert organised by composer and Bennington Faculty, Vivian Fine, with work by Dixon and Fine in the…
Angelika Niescier with Tomeka Reid and Eliza Salem, October 30, 2025, JazzFest Berlin. Photo (c) Berliner Festspiele / Camille Blake (The third of three subscriber posts on Subtack on this year’s Jazz Fest Berlin. The first two are longer essays on particular sets by Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer and by Pat Thomas, the third a more general overview of the festival.) Angelika Niescier—Marta…
Pat Thomas, JazzFest Berlin, November 2, 2025 © Berliner Festspiele, Camille Blake (The second of three subscriber posts on Substack on this year’s Jazz Fest Berlin. The first two are longer essays on particular sets by Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer and by Pat Thomas, the third a more general overview of the festival.) Thomas manifests absolute presence on stage: gregarious off it, on stage he…
Wadada Leo Smith, JazzFest Berlin, October 30, 2025. Photo © Berliner Festspiele / Camille Blake. The first of three subscriber posts on Substack on this year’s JazzFest Berlin. The first two are longer essays on particular sets by Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer and by Pat Thomas, the third a more general overview of the festival. How to describe Smith’s sound? You could say : “Smith plays a…
In the past few weeks, I’ve been working quite intensively on a long essay on Cecil Taylor’s poetry for what looks to be an expansive collection on Taylor’s work edited by Peter Valente. Having long thought a book like this should happen, I’m delighted it finally is! Taylor’s work has meant a lot to me for what seems like forever—certainly, since writing, or trying to write an MA thesis on his…
As a subscriber post on Substack , this piece on a track from Adegoke Steve Colson’s and Iqua Colson’s album Triumph! , along with thoughts on survival, the outcast and, once more, the work of John Wieners. Often, the poems that give consolation to others don’t always give consolation to the poet themselves, or the time of release is different. The renewal they offer wavers in its power. It saves…
On the Substack version of this site , a review of Dom Hale’s First Nettles and Jennifer Soong’s My Earliest Person , both published by the Last Books. As it’s a long post (6,000 words or so) it’s only available in full behind the Substack paywall. But some excerpts below: “How did the earlier poets hold it together[?]” asks Hale in the wracked ode ‘Castor and Pollux’, which I first read in a…