Uploaded December 2010 | Updated September 2026, 59 minutes ago
Info
Joseph Jarman (recitation, alto sax) Christopher Gaddy (piano) Charles Clark (bass) Thurman Barker (drums).
Recorded October 20th 1966, Chicago Sound Studios.
'Song For', released on Delmark in 1967, is one of the earliest documents of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and was pianist Christopher Gaddy's only recording. Both he and bassist Charles Clark would die when aged just 24, in 1968 and 1969 respectively: Gaddy of internal disorders sustained during US Army service, Clark (who was the youngest member of the AACM) of a cerebral hemorrhage. Jarman, Barker (and the other musicians on the date, Fred Anderson and Steve McCall), meanwhile, would go on to have long careers in experimental jazz.
Jarman's poem 'Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City' (subsequently the title of a 21st-century Art Ensemble of Chicago album, and the subject of a setting by Roscoe Mitchell for orchestra and baritone singer) is much more than just the 'Black Dada Nihilismus' rip-off one reviewer dismissed it as being. Jarman's delivery is, like Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka's, deceptively quiet, almost menacing; but, whereas Baraka's poem (and its companion piece, 'Black Art') was a deliberately inflammatory, confrontational work, Jarman's is more reflective, concerned, like Jones, with European modernism ("dada/new word out of the twenties of chaos") but, though acutely aware of racial concerns ("returned in the suntan jar" suggesting, perhaps, the white man's desire for the 'exotic' trappings of blackness whilst remaining truly white - 'everything but the burden'), less tied to nationalistic cries for action ("exit the tenderness for power/ black or white"). Likewise, while some might dismiss this as 'beat poetry', based on a superficial understanding of its technical workings and general 'ambiance', in fact, the connection between music and words is actually, it could be argued, more fundamental than in the somewhat tentative experiments of Jack Kerouac or Kenneth Patchen from the previous decade.
As Sean Bonney puts it an essay named after Jarman's poem and published in the online poetics journal Pores: "Even with a good poet such as Kerouac, whose writing was exemplary in finding a literary mirror of what music can do, the music is reduced to an accompaniment, and while supposedly subservient to the words, actually carries them and, essentially, does their work. An exploitative relationship that destroys the music's own systems of thought, and where the analogies with capitalist division of labour are absolutely clear. [However], in the most militant periods of the 1960s, poetry began to appear with more and more frequency on radical jazz records, and managed to escape the problems of jazz-poetry we mentioned above. The poems, in recordings such as Joseph Jarman's "Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City", in Barbara Simmons' work with Jackie McLean, and in Baraka's own work with The New York Art Quartet, Sunny Murray and Sun Ra, were able to be incorporated into the sonic field in such a way that they became one equal element in the collective of voices that made up the piece. The music was no longer there as an accompaniment that allowed the poem to sound greater than it actually was, but would respond to the words only inasmuch as the poem would respond to the music. The poem would push the music into clear speech, and the music in its turn would take that speech into places that it wouldn't ordinarily be able to get to, thus refusing the too easy fixion of meaning that a less equal partnership of music and words would be unable to get beyond."
Photograph of Joseph Jarman (c) Amir Bey, 2009
Info
Joseph Jarman (recitation, alto sax) Christopher Gaddy (piano) Charles Clark (bass) Thurman Barker (drums).
Recorded October 20th 1966, Chicago Sound Studios.
'Song For', released on Delmark in 1967, is one of the earliest documents of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and was pianist Christopher Gaddy's only recording. Both he and bassist Charles Clark would die when aged just 24, in 1968 and 1969 respectively: Gaddy of internal disorders sustained during US Army service, Clark (who was the youngest member of the AACM) of a cerebral hemorrhage. Jarman, Barker (and the other musicians on the date, Fred Anderson and Steve McCall), meanwhile, would go on to have long careers in experimental jazz.
Jarman's poem 'Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City' (subsequently the title of a 21st-century Art Ensemble of Chicago album, and the subject of a setting by Roscoe Mitchell for orchestra and baritone singer) is much more than just the 'Black Dada Nihilismus' rip-off one reviewer dismissed it as being. Jarman's delivery is, like Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka's, deceptively quiet, almost menacing; but, whereas Baraka's poem (and its companion piece, 'Black Art') was a deliberately inflammatory, confrontational work, Jarman's is more reflective, concerned, like Jones, with European modernism ("dada/new word out of the twenties of chaos") but, though acutely aware of racial concerns ("returned in the suntan jar" suggesting, perhaps, the white man's desire for the 'exotic' trappings of blackness whilst remaining truly white - 'everything but the burden'), less tied to nationalistic cries for action ("exit the tenderness for power/ black or white"). Likewise, while some might dismiss this as 'beat poetry', based on a superficial understanding of its technical workings and general 'ambiance', in fact, the connection between music and words is actually, it could be argued, more fundamental than in the somewhat tentative experiments of Jack Kerouac or Kenneth Patchen from the previous decade.
As Sean Bonney puts it an essay named after Jarman's poem and published in the online poetics journal Pores: "Even with a good poet such as Kerouac, whose writing was exemplary in finding a literary mirror of what music can do, the music is reduced to an accompaniment, and while supposedly subservient to the words, actually carries them and, essentially, does their work. An exploitative relationship that destroys the music's own systems of thought, and where the analogies with capitalist division of labour are absolutely clear. [However], in the most militant periods of the 1960s, poetry began to appear with more and more frequency on radical jazz records, and managed to escape the problems of jazz-poetry we mentioned above. The poems, in recordings such as Joseph Jarman's "Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City", in Barbara Simmons' work with Jackie McLean, and in Baraka's own work with The New York Art Quartet, Sunny Murray and Sun Ra, were able to be incorporated into the sonic field in such a way that they became one equal element in the collective of voices that made up the piece. The music was no longer there as an accompaniment that allowed the poem to sound greater than it actually was, but would respond to the words only inasmuch as the poem would respond to the music. The poem would push the music into clear speech, and the music in its turn would take that speech into places that it wouldn't ordinarily be able to get to, thus refusing the too easy fixion of meaning that a less equal partnership of music and words would be unable to get beyond."
Photograph of Joseph Jarman (c) Amir Bey, 2009
![Chinampas #343 [Cecil Taylor]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/O3ornWtg8QM/mqdefault.jpg "Chinampas #343 [Cecil Taylor]
The second track from Taylors poetry album, Chinampas. Transcription is my own, and therefore may include a few errors.")
