April 2010

  • Leaving Chicago: A Primer (Part 03)

    By cobwebsandstrange on 4/4/10 1:14pm
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    By contrast, Cohran remained in Chicago and lives here today. As a result, the few sparse recorded efforts that he has released have not made too much of an impression on the record buying public. After leaving Sun Ra’s band, the trumpeter formed the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, which, oddly enough, would morph into Earth, Wind and Fire a few years into its career. A lack of touring could be cited as the reason for Cohran’s oeuvre being ignored, but being based in Chicago did not always help. His dedication to Chicago, as well as teaching needs to be considered equally important to future musicians from the Midwest as anything that his peers accomplished (6).

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  • Leaving Chicago: A Primer (Part 02)

    By cobwebsandstrange on 4/4/10 1:12pm
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    Arriving in Chicago during the mid forties, Sun Ra (née Herman Blount) would extend and develop ideas left behind from Chicago’s first important epoch in jazz history (4). A fan of Fletcher Henderson, a big band leader and Armstrong’s boss in New York, Ra set about finding similarly minded players interested in music as much as history.

    In John Gilmore, Ra found an accomplished improviser as well as an individual willing to work in what amounted to the position of apprentice. The pair’s relationship was deep enough that Gilmore performed in Sun Ra’s Arkestra for the next forty years wearing costumes, performing alongside dancers and plate spinners (5).

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  • Leaving Chicago: A Primer (Part 01)

    By cobwebsandstrange on 4/4/10 1:09pm
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    Various art forms achieve similar ends at different times. Much as radical politics in any nation develops without it being perceived by straight society, visual art and music at varying times extend concepts beyond the understanding of a staid society.

    Abstract painting, which could be figured to begin its codification in the first few decades of the twentieth century, needs to be considered the forbearer of group improvisation, free jazz and free improvisation. While painters might represent any number of organic figures in terms of shapes or obtuse brush strokes, both visual art and improvisation aims to relate some sense of place or feeling through the use of non-traditional conception of a medium. There are detractors of both, but at the same time each unique approach to painting and music has worked to engender change in mainstream art works, aural and visual.

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