Don Cherry's life and music: popular modernism and consciousness-raising

唐·切里的生活和音乐：流行现代主义和意识提升

• 批准号: 2244533
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2244533
• 关键词: Don; Cherry; life; music; popular

Don Cherry (1936-1995) was a multi-instrumentalist best known as a jazz trumpeter. Despite the singularity of his musical career, from the birth of free jazz to his ventures into "world music" avant la lettre, surprisingly little - scholarly or otherwise - has been written about him. For this PhD I plan to undertake a rigorous study of Cherry's popular modernist approach to music as consciousness-raising via his recorded work and largely untold biography.The concept of "consciousness-raising" as political practice has seen a recent revival both in cultural studies - notably in the work of Mark Fisher et al. - as well as in contemporary social movements (from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter and beyond). This concept will allow us to explore the alternative sociality embodied by Cherry's music, which will in turn extend recent work on the social aesthetics of improvisation (Georgina Born et al.).Central to Cherry's music was his complex engagement with modernism. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy highlighted the integral role that black diasporic culture has had in shaping modernism. The role jazz has played in this is the subject of extensive debate. Cherry's music is best understood as an intervention in what Werner Sollors dubbed "populist modernism" - a seemingly paradoxical pairing in so far as modernism's experimentalism is usually understood as inimical to popular culture. As James Smethurst argues, African-American avant-gardes attempted to overcome this paradox in two distinct ways: either engaging with mass culture or reimagining folk cultures. A study of Cherry's approach - which falls largely within the latter endeavour - would deepen existing understandings of attempts to reconcile popular politics with modernist aesthetics. The way in which he played with this apparent contradiction- taking it on a world tour - is unique.Cherry's approach took him away from marketable forms of modernism and into the street. Footage from 1976 shows him walking through Harlem with a West-African doussn'gouni. Rather than selling albums with political lyrics, he foregrounded a live, democratic form of music, troubling the performer-spectator divide, and even running free jazz workshops for children.Yet what makes this live, democratic, consciousness-raising approach to music uniquely interesting is the way it intersected with Cherry's high modernism. Cherry is best known for having broken through as a sideman in Ornette Coleman's first experiments in free jazz. Despite going on to explore "folk traditions" from around the world, Cherry never repudiated the formal, modernist experimentations that he began with Coleman. Rather he attempted to democratise and re-route this experimental modernism by drawing it through popular musical traditions. Such an approach is significant in so far as it suggests that Cherry's spontaneous happenings were not simply about "rediscovering" African culture, but rather about forming new popular cultures by routing black experiences of modernity through a transnational approach to "folk traditions" (an aesthetic shaped in significant ways by Cherry's itinerant lifestyle, split between the Swedish countryside, New York, and frequent travels). In a speculative re-imagining of post-1968 history - in which such "folk" experimentations were not recuperated by commercial labels and packaged into the neat category of "World Music" - this popular, transnational modernism could have been the (anti-)sound(track) of global revolution. As such, this research will seek to trace Cherry's music through the "structures of feeling" (Raymond Williams) that run through it, from hippy mysticism to residual Third Worldism to nascent ecological sensibilities.

唐·切里（Don Cherry，1936-1995）是一位多乐器演奏家，以爵士小号手而闻名。尽管他的音乐生涯是独一无二的，从自由爵士乐的诞生到他冒险进入“世界音乐”的先锋，令人惊讶的是，关于他的文章很少--学术上的或其他方面的。对于这个博士学位，我计划进行一个严格的研究樱桃流行的现代主义音乐方法，通过他的记录工作和大部分不为人知的传记提高意识。“提高意识”作为政治实践的概念已经看到了最近的复兴无论是在文化研究-特别是在马克·费舍尔等人的工作。这一概念将使我们能够探索樱桃的音乐所体现的另类社会性，这反过来又将扩展最近的工作对即兴的社会美学（乔治娜波恩等）。切里音乐的核心是他与现代主义的复杂接触。在《黑色大西洋》一书中，保罗·吉尔罗伊强调了黑人流散文化在塑造现代主义中的不可或缺的作用。爵士乐在其中扮演的角色是广泛争论的主题。切里的音乐最好被理解为对维尔纳·索勒斯所谓的“民粹主义现代主义”的干预--这是一种看似矛盾的配对，因为现代主义的实验主义通常被理解为对流行文化的敌意。正如詹姆斯·斯梅瑟斯特（James Smethurst）所说，非裔美国先锋派试图以两种截然不同的方式克服这一悖论：要么参与大众文化，要么重新想象民间文化。研究切里的方法--这福尔斯在很大程度上属于后一种努力--将加深对调和大众政治与现代主义美学的现有理解。他处理这种明显矛盾的方式--带着它进行世界巡回--是独一无二的。切里的方法把他从现代主义的市场形式带到了街头。1976年的一段录像显示，他带着一只西非杜森古尼走过哈莱姆。他没有销售带有政治歌词的专辑，而是突出了一种现场的、民主的音乐形式，打破了表演者和观众的界限，甚至为儿童开办了免费的爵士乐讲习班。然而，这种现场的、民主的、提高意识的音乐方式之所以特别有趣，是因为它与切里的高度现代主义相融合。切里最出名的是在奥内特科尔曼的第一次自由爵士乐实验中作为一个配角取得了突破。尽管继续探索来自世界各地的“民间传统”，切里从来没有否定过他从科尔曼开始的正式的现代主义实验。相反，他试图通过流行的音乐传统来使这种实验性的现代主义民主化和重新路线化。这样的方法是有意义的，因为它表明，樱桃的自发事件不仅仅是“重新发现”非洲文化，而是通过跨国的方法来形成新的流行文化，通过“民间传统”（一种美学，在很大程度上是由樱桃的巡回生活方式塑造的，在瑞典乡村，纽约和频繁的旅行之间分裂）的现代性黑人经验。在对1968年后历史的一种投机性的重新想象中--在1968年后，这种“民间”实验没有被商业标签所恢复，也没有被包装成“世界音乐”的整洁类别--这种流行的、跨国的现代主义可能是全球革命的（反）声音（轨道）。因此，这项研究将试图通过贯穿其中的“感觉结构”（雷蒙德威廉姆斯）来追踪樱桃的音乐，从嬉皮士神秘主义到残余的第三次生态敏感。