Anne Waldman with James Brandon Lewis & William Parker
Thursday, September 30th at 8pm ET, ISSUE is pleased to present acclaimed poet Anne Waldman joined by bassist William Parker and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis as part of the 2021 Brooklyn Book Festival. Together, they will perform from Waldman's album Sciamachy and other recent works making use of melodic themes, improvisations, earth strings, woodwind, and throat. The program also features sound and visual artist Caroline Partamian, performing an original composition based on research and her own interpretation of Khaz, an ancient notation system of Armenian musical neumes.
In the spring of 2020, Anne Waldman released her latest tour-de-force, Sciamachy on her New York label, Fast Speaking Music. Derived from Greek, sciamachy means “shadow war,” and as such the album contains a formidable political message—dealing with subjects such as ecological ruin and war-mongering. In keeping with Waldman’s life-long ethos of cross-disciplinary collaboration, Sciamachy featured Laurie Anderson on electric violin, Deb Googe (of My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream) on baritone bass, free jazz legend William Parker on n’goni, Guro Moe and Hävard Skaset (of the Norweigan hardcore group MoE) on electric bass and guitar, Waldman’s son Ambrose Bye on synthesizer, and her nephew Devin Brahja Waldman on saxophone, drums and production. Sciamachy finds Anne at the height of her luminary power, and further solidifies her position as cult literary hero for multiple generations.
Over the last year Caroline Partamian has been researching and experimenting with Khaz, an ancient notation system of Armenian musical neumes used to transcribe religious Armenian music since the 8th century, which has since been replaced by Hamparsum notation and later Western musical notation. Scholars have studied Khaz, but it's incredibly difficult to determine one right way of interpreting these figures. This is because monks and priests across various townships (up to present day) have relied on their own individual oral traditions to interpret these sonic expressions. Partamian describes being drawn to this because “there is no right or wrong way in interpreting these figures, which ties back to my practice of graphic notation and curiosities in translation of both text and sound.”
For this performance, Partamian will create and perform an original composition based on her research and her own interpretation of Khaz, the individual neumes themselves as well as some of the manuscripts on which they appear. With an artistic practice deeply tied to kinetics and somatics, Partamian’s process of transcribing Khaz neumes for this sonic performance will reveal itself through direct dialogue with these sonic expressions. The performance utilizes an analog KORG MS-20 Synthesizer along with an acoustic instrument to bridge these notions of ancient and modern interpretation.
Internationally acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider'' experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. But has raised the bar as a feminist, activist and performer. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times. She is the author of more than 50 books, including Fast Speaking Woman, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in San Francisco, a collection of essays entitled Vow to Poetry and several selected poems editions including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure, In the Room of Never Grieve and more recently, Trickster Feminism. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity, which is a book-length rhizomatic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and Gossamurmur a meditation on Archive. Her monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, a 25 year project, won the Pen Center Award for Poetry. Waldman’s major publishers are Penguin Poets and Coffee House Press. Anne Waldman is a long time friend of ISSUE Project Room and a member of the organization's Artistic Advisory Council.
She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery, working there for twelve years. She also co-founded with Allen Ginsberg and Diane diPrima the celebrated Jack Kerouac School Of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired University in the western hemisphere, in 1974. Ginsberg has called Waldman his “spiritual wife.” She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary/oral archive and curate the celebrated Summer Writing Program. She has edited and co-edited many collections based on the holdings of the Kerouac School including Civil Disobediences, Beats at Naropa, and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics. She is also the editor of Nice to See You, an homage to poet Ted Berrigan, The Beat Book, and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology.
She has also collaborated extensively with a number of artists, musicians, and dancers, including Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis, Kiki Smith, Meredith Monk, Daniel Carter, Douglas Dunn, Ha-Yang Kim, Thurston Moore, Pamela Lawton, Pat Steir, and the theatre director Judith Malina. Her play “Red Noir” was produced by the Living Theatre and was shown in New York City in 2010. She has also been working with other media including audio, film and video, with her husband, writer and video/film director Ed Bowes, and with her son, musician and composer Ambrose Bye and nephew Devin Brahja Waldman, with whom she works on projects with The Fast Speaking Music label and live performance. Publishers Weekly has referred to Waldman as “a counter-cultural giant.”
William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City. He has recorded over 150 albums, published six books, and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists. Parker has been called “one of the most inventive bassists/leaders since [Charles] Mingus,” and “the creative heir to Jimmy Garrison and Paul Chambers...directly influenced by ‘60s avant-gardists like Sirone, Henry Grimes and Alan Silva.” The Village Voice called him, “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time” and Time Out New York named him one of the “50 Greatest New York Musicians of All Time.” Parker’s current active bands include the large-band Little Huey Creative Orchestra, the Raining on the Moon Sextet, the In Order to Survive Quartet, Stan’s Hat Flapping in the Wind, the Cosmic Mountain Quintet with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Cooper-Moore, as well as a deep and ongoing solo bass study. His recordings have long been documented by the AUM Fidelity record label and on his own Centering Records, among others. He also has a duo project "Hope Cries For Justice" with Patricia Nicholson Parker which combines music, story telling, poetry and dance. Over the decades, Parker has developed a reputation as a connector and hub of information concerning the history of creative music, recently culminating in two hefty volumes of interviews with over 60 avant-garde and creative musicians, Conversations I & II. He is also the subject of an exhaustive 468-page “sessionography” that documents thousands of performances and recording sessions, a remarkable chronicle of his prolificness as an active artist. He has been a key figure in the New York and European creative music scenes since the 1970s, and has worked all over the world. He has performed with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Peter Brotzmann, Milford Graves, Peter Kowald, and David S. Ware, among many others. William Parker works all over the world but he always returns to New York’s Lower East Side, where he has lived since 1975.
James Brandon Lewis (b.1983) is a critically- acclaimed composer, saxophonist, and writer. He has received accolades from NPR, ASCAP Foundation, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He has been described as “ a saxophonist who embodies and transcends tradition” by The New York Times. and a promising young talent having listened to the elders by Jazz Legend Sonny Rollins. The saxophonist has balanced a deep, gospel -informed spirituality with Free-Jazz- abandon and hard-hitting funk-meets-hip-hop underpinning - Rolling Stone Magazine. Lewis created Molecular Systematic Music in 2011 under a different moniker, it describes a twofold approach to music, braiding together the fundamentals of music theory with the ideas of molecular biology in the context of DNA. While not a molecular biologist, the ideas he expresses deploy the vocabulary of molecular biology as useful metaphors, while exploring new possibilities and relationships across disciplines. He has released several critically-acclaimed albums, most recently highly touted Jesup Wagon and tours internationally leading several ensembles, and is a member and co-founder of American Book award winning Ensemble Heroes Are Gang Leaders. James was recently voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist by Downbeat magazine's 2020s International Critics poll. He attended Howard University and received his M.F.A from California Institute of the Arts.
Caroline Partamian is a sound and visual artist. Her work is influenced by her training in dance as she integrates the concept of abreaction into her work – the extraction of dormant memory stored within a muscle, resurfaced through physical movement, of which an individual was previously unaware; these memories can take many forms – traumatic, erotic, comforting, etc. By focusing on the process rather than the anticipated result, her work encourages what can be revealed when one becomes conscious of their kinetic movement in the process of creation. Her work has taken on the form of compositions, graphic notations, sound environments, books, video, and more. She has shown work at BoxoPROJECTS, Marfa Open, Wassaic Project, Otion Front, Flux Factory, Anthology Film Archives, Babycastles, Compound Yucca Valley, and has recently collaborated with Julia Santoli as part of ISSUE's 'With Womens Work' commissions during Winter 2021. She also runs a small publishing press, Weird Babes, in the form of zines and prints featuring artists' and her own works-in-progress and experiments.
