Nihilist Optimism

“James Brown gives the people what they want; I give them what they need.” – Sun Ra Mixtape on Firefly Frequencies Mike Kelley remembers the exchange in the collection Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals . He has seen Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival and finds his way backstage afterward. Somewhere nearby in memory is James Brown: another bandleader, another extraordinary spectacle, another way of organising bodies through sound. Kelley asks Sun Ra about the difference. Sun Ra answers with what sounds almost like a joke, or a boast, but also like a theory of aesthetics: James Brown gives the people what they want; Sun Ra gives them what they need. Memory complicates the story. At the 1974 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile, Brown and Sun Ra were in fact programmed on the same Friday-night bill, though Kelley’s recollection appears to fold together different years and different performances. But perhaps the confusion improves the story. It prod...

Improvised music tends to arrive burdened with a surprisingly limited collection of images. On one side is the noodly jam band: musicians wandering amiably through an indefinitely extended groove, waiting for something to happen and apparently unconcerned if it ever does. On the other is the ecstatic saxophone solo inherited from the popular memory of free jazz: eyes closed, cheeks inflated, the player pushing upwards towards some threshold where expression becomes scream, transcendence or bodily exhaustion. Improvisation appears either as endless conversational meandering or as heroic individual release. Neither model is particularly helpful for approaching Eddie Prévost. There are moments in this performance with Signe Emmeluth and Anton Lukoszevieze that could be located within the histories of free jazz or free improvisation. Emmeluth’s alto saxophone can move rapidly between fine melodic fragments and more abrasive, fractured cries. Lukoszevieze’s cello carries its own accumulated...

Capital cannot produce social cooperation by itself. It must make living labour carry it – and that dependence is where struggle begins. The history of the working day is not, for Marx, the story of enlightened reform gradually moderating the excesses of industrial capitalism. It is the record of a “protracted and more or less concealed civil war” (202) between capitalists and workers. The isolated worker, formally free to sell their labour-power, is powerless to determine the conditions under which that power will be consumed. Left alone in the marketplace, the worker “succumbs without resistance” (202). It is only through workers acting collectively that limits can be placed upon capital’s apparently unlimited right to command labour. This changes how the struggle over the working day must be understood. It is not simply a dispute about how the products of society should be divided: how much goes to wages, how much to profit, who receives more and who receives less. The apparent laws...