Double Review: Nothing but the Music by Thulani Davis, and Black Case Volume I & II by Joseph Jarman

Reviewed by Reviewed by Devin King

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Published: February 22, 2021

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Blank Forms continues the good work, re-publishing two texts connected to the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Thulani Davis’ Nothing but the Music and Joseph Jarman’s Black Case Volume I & II are both books of poetry, but their focused, clear, and sexy design would be lost on the 2^nd floor poetry room. Put ‘em next to all the other books Blank Forms publishes: music adjacent. Attendant to publishing books and records connected to inter-disciplinary art, Blank Forms gets good notices from the experimental music and art community, but they deserve to be paid more attention by small press folks. The press’s choice of material, stewarded by the historian and arts journalist Lawrence Kumpf (with help from a boardroom of sonic hotshots like Joe McPhee, Kim Gordon, Arto Lindsey, and David Grubbs), demonstrates the inter-disciplinary possibilities of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

Davis and Jarman (married, though Jarman passed in 2019) are better known for their practice in other disciplines (theater, journalism, fiction, screenwriting, opera, jazz), but Blank Forms’ highlighting of their poetry lays bare how poetry might be—and here, I’m arguing as a poet, so you know—at the root of their practice. This isn’t to say that poetry is preparatory, but that poetry provides a metaphysical key to their other, more famous, practices by laying bare what might be possible in the gesture of an artist.

Thulani Davis is probably best known as an arts and music writer, then editor, for the Village Voice during the 70s and 80s. That sort of thing led to a life lived in, mostly, expansive non-fiction: an opera about Malcolm X, a documentary about W.E.B. Du Bois, a history of her ancestry during the Civil War. But she’s also written novels and won a Grammy, for the liner notes to an Aretha Franklin box.

Her book, Nothing but the Music, provides a clear understanding of how Davis listens; almost every poem is either dedicated to a musician or band, sub-titled after a show the poem is based around, or, simply, takes its mood from some aspect of sound. Who are the artists? Henry Threadgill, Cecil Taylor, the Bad Brains, The Commodores, a street saxophone player… The book is slight, forty pages, plus another twenty of introduction and memoir. The poems are collected from throughout Davis’ writing life, but you wouldn’t know it. Whether from 1979 or 1992, each poem is filled with ancestors and the current moment. Here’s the beginning of Cicatrix. It’s for the Art Ensemble of Chicago and dated 1976, DC Space, Washington, DC—where Davis, no doubt, had seen them play:

apparition of my early markings

the music walks through my day and ordinary day ways

resurrection of the flesh/of the carving of my skin

I have come to be the dancer within

come the route of Chicago/New Orleans

my carousel days of rhythm n blues

come the route of a creole gal in flamingo satin

who wears the azure & indigo feathers of her beginnings

through swamp she clutches the plumes of a bird of Guinée

a remembrance of initiation

Throughout the book, Davis shifts between the facts and the mythological aspects of music making. I wouldn’t say that Davis shifts her technique to match the music, but she does attempt to write the difference of sound. The Art Ensemble were famously theatrical in their live performances, filled as they were with sound as much as costumes and gestures and spoken words, and so Davis’ response brings her own character to the play. Note her costume, her flamingo satin and feather.

But here’s part of Davis’ poem for Cecil Taylor, who, though he would also recite poetry to begin his concerts, approaches his piano with a more combative style that, ultimately, focuses the listener into a confrontation with the present moment. As much percussion as piano, Taylor’s playing comes at the listener in sculpted clusters of interlocked sound that stick to the body. Davis’ poem is called C.T. at the Five Spot and it’s dated April 15^th, 1975:

this is not about romance & dream

it’s about a terrible command performance of the facts

of time & space & air

it breathes of journey/brilliant light journey

up thru the where was & who lived

it works those melodies to their pith/to their pulp

it fists and palms the last dirt roads

of lives that have to give out before they give up

bury me with music and don’t say a word

Is there a better title for the collection in that last line? I wish there was a poem for every show Davis has ever seen, and I wish there was video of her reading through them to watch while I think about when I might be able to take my 3-year-old to her first show. Anything’s better than the current glut of internet concerts that barely approach the real thing.

Joseph Jarman was one of the founding members of the above-mentioned Art Ensemble of Chicago. One wants to describe them as a band of experimental Black musicians working (or playing?) themselves into a history of both music and dance and theatre that, all too often, refuses the possibility of their gestures. But that is probably too limiting. The Art Ensemble grew out of the important Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a Chicago-based non-profit organization to encourage the production of music. Though the non-profit is easily described as one that promotes jazz, this label proved too basic for the group, drawing as they did, on the history of European art music, popular music, and folk forms, amongst many others. Instead, call it “Great Black Music.” That’s what the Art Ensemble sounds like.

Black Case Volume I & II, was self-published by Jarman in a small edition in 1974, and then by the Art Ensemble’s publishing arm in 1977, but you’d be lucky to have seen it then and we’re lucky to see it now. The book is a facsimile of the ‘77 edition, typewriter font and all, and the book astounds, feeling like a great, lost ur-representation of the possibilities of small press publishing during the mimeo era. I’d trade every single one of the dozens of bland contemporary print-on-demand poetry books in my library for a copy of Jarman’s original, but I’d be ripping off whoever was on the other side of that trade. The book sparkles with poems and pictures and plays and prose. It has been made by hand. In his introduction, Brent Hayes Edwards argues that the book is a “spiritual Baedeker” for the “resident theoretician” of the Art Ensemble. Great Black Writing. That’s what you’re reading.

The critic of inter-disciplinary work hesitates to classify; the cross-cutting between genre, tone, and gesture are the point, rather than the genre, tone, and gestures themselves. Say this: that the experience of playing in a band, in dialogue with other musicians who are sometimes better players, sometimes better spoken, or even just sometimes in better moods than you is here, in book form, manifested into an expanded lyric persona. The Art Ensemble didn’t cause this book, and Jarman didn’t cause the Art Ensemble. Instead, the book presents songs in humble variations of form. There’s a picture of people dancing, there’s a prose account of a dream of a racist, there’s a poem to be used as lyric, there’s the scenes for a play to be performed, or there’s this, Jarman’s own version of Davis’ experiments in writing sound:

Music we come to you

wind into your

ear

breathing deeply

relaxing flowing

to this beautiful

feeling

spirit force

hold your hand softly we

see

peace

through this dance

of complete unity

of complete what I am

Music we come to you

with humility

with love

The book most ably provides “of complete unity/of complete what i am” and so there is the relative peace of the above and then this rushed and compressed wonder:

“The Feather Woman of the Jungle”

“titles”-he gives us FACTS, the tones of a beautiful

truth/a black feast of

reality/a mind=spirit that we all must

finallyUSE/to get us into our-

selves

GO OUT OF THE PLASTIC FOR A WHILE

COME UP BREATHING WHAT

YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU                               IS

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

-SONG!

Same number of “U”s and “A”s, humorously. In gestures like this, you can see how Jarman’s work is messier than Davis’. Both reach out humanely. Reading the books next to each other, you begin to imagine their love and their life together. The representation of inter-disciplinary possibility in elder artists. If Davis gives us some of the bands she’s seen, Jarman gives us all the bands, as himself. Live music is curtailed for at least another half-year, I’d bet. Let these books give you what you need.

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