Voice, Freedom, Anachronism: On “Moten/López/Cleaver”

Fred Moten, Brandon López, Gerald Cleaver | Moten/López/Cleaver | Reading Group/Relative Pitch Records | 2022

Voice

I have loved Fred Moten’s voice since I first heard it, but perhaps never as much (or at least not in the same way) as when listening to Moten​/​López​/​Cleaver, a phonopoem, as Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production, would have it. I mean voice here in both the literal and the musical sense, both the timbre that makes Moten pleasing to listen to and also the style that Moten performs, a kind of overside of his written voice. Indeed, his style of speaking is how I first became enchanted: where Moten’s writing can feel at times impenetrable, his speaking seduces and illuminates. While I’m busy enjoying syntax and texture, a delightful side-effect inevitably bubbles up; a lagged sense that something I’ve long ago read and not fully processed is coming clear—not transparent, but radiant. 

Moten’s poetic voice is yet another thing, I suppose, but it’s also just a different side of the same thing. As anyone who’s read his scholarship knows—as anyone who catches this album’s references to Spillers, Okiji, and Gilmore understands anew—Moten’s poetry and scholarship are both caught up in one another. That makes this album a study, all incomplete. 

And that matters: part of the point of Moten’s work, I think, is to help assuage any anxiety a reader or listener might have about music, art, or culture that involves study, that refuses shyness around the fact that it takes the work of thinking seriously, regardless of any affiliation with the damned and at times still meaningful institution of academia. In Moten’s hands, scholarship is rigorous but vital, critically important and devoid of any of higher education’s worst tropes. In Moten’s world, all study means is love—that we study something because it compels us enough to spend all our time with it. Further, Moten’s work suggests that love and study are synonyms simply because it matters to be able to think through things better than we could before, to be able to understand our situations a bit better, both the pain and the joy produced by our collisions with what Moten calls “the organization of things,” such that we can ultimately care for one another a little more completely. Do not be put off, in other words, if I suggest that his poetry is scholarly, because all this means is that it is engaged with attempts to think through what we can make of this life—the same as any song, the same as any painting. To say that the poems of Moten​/​López​/​Cleaver are about study doesn’t mean that they’re obtuse, but that they’re concerned with what can happen when we are invested in something.

“Art don’t work for abolition,” Moten observes, opening the album. “Art works for bosses, like you and me,” a line that implicates us along with the art we love as incapable of building a new world insofar as both are already claimed by this one. Moten continues, “If ‘let’s abolish art’ sounds too close to ‘let’s abolish you and me,’ that’s cause it is.” The implication here is that we are right to be uncomfortable, and we are right to pursue that discomfort anyway. In other words, we can’t escape with the things we love intact; we have to reimagine them totally, even if that means sacrifice. 

Still, this doesn’t mean we’re abandoning what matters. “I love art,” Moten admits next, 

And I love you too
And this is a love song
So it’s got to be too close

Here we can see clearly what I’ve been trying to say about Moten’s approach to the work, where study has to do with the kind of knowing and questioning and imagining that only intimacy makes possible, the kind that’s “got to be too close.” For one thing, this moment shows how Moten’s poems don’t suck your breath out through echinate language, but with direct vernacular, right here in front of you. 

For another, we can also see the conflation of love with study in Moten’s citational practice, which is not limited to academics and writers. In this first track that references Ruth Wilson Gilmore, June Jordan, and Sylvia Wynter, Moten also strings together citations of Missy Elliott, Prince, and Bob Marley to establish a kind of lineage, all while calling us to action: 

Let’s work it and reverse it
Like Misdemeanor
Let’s work against monastic rule with the boy next door
Let’s work against anything that works against “We jah people can make it work”
Let’s work against royalty, like a Prince formerly known as The Artist
Let’s work against
How art don’t work for abolition

In the same track that begins by claiming the futility of art’s political promise, Moten enjoins us to work so that art may one day do what we’ve always hoped it might. Prince and Missy are as essential to this work as Gilmore and Wynter because although they are singular, they all have something to do with the same project, with overturning the terms of this world by inserting into it that which necessarily exceeds those same terms. Moten brings them all to bear equally, because their voices are a part of his, because he studies and loves them.

Like Moten, Gerald Cleaver and Brandon López also bring questions of voice to the fore, since  improvised music all but comes down to the ways in which individual musicians’ musical fingerprints can be perceived in performance, how each musician’s unique approach to sound produces surprise by coming into contact with equally distinctive performers. On this record, López and Cleaver play how I’ve always wanted to play—on paper “free,” but in a way that’s deliberately focused on building and probing. As on What Is To Be Done, one of my favorite records (also featuring Cleaver), here free improvisation is not characterized by limitless exploration nor by the tropes of its history; what surrounds Moten’s voice is the utmost commitment to a mood, to a texture, rather than the maximum exploration of what could be done in a given timespan. There’s something like discipline or restraint here, but those aren’t the right words because whatever mood is being created is built and sustained with utmost care, which is to say sweat. This music is not disciplined but it is focused. The band builds something, together but separately, and keeps it. 

At 3:40, for example, on “surfacing,” the repeated bassline—undergirded by ceaselessly scraping cymbals and lasting for some seven minutes with only the subtlest variations—builds up a cinematic scene so that Moten can narrate it. On “abolition,” López and Cleaver repeat the same motifs for five whole minutes, sometimes linking up with one another but other times allowing each other to interject one’s frenzied movements against the other’s contemplative space. This happens because everyone is listening to one another, so closely that Cleaver can notice and then grab an eighth note from López, freeing López up to have a turn dancing around it (8:30). This is give and take, improvisation as practice of reciprocity. Throughout the record, time, groove, and tonal space are built collectively, often only to be traded, tossed, shared, returned, or abandoned: this band isn’t afraid of playing in-synch but also doesn’t feel bound to that approach. 

Such explorations turn individual voices into a collective one—the sound of a band takes hold. We can hear it at the 4:43 mark of “abolition,” where the bassline that Lopez has been exploring already for minutes takes on new urgency as Cleaver starts playing in time, grooving regularly but unpredictably, keeping us waiting for those magic moments of collision and alignment before spinning back out on their own, like two parallel gears of different size and the same rate of rotation. This is virtuosity in the sense that we hear on this record countless textures from López—extended techniques, bowed strings that unearth wild harmonics, plucked rumblings, and low funk rootings—each conjured from a deep sense of what is being called for in a moment. This is virtuosity as vocabulary, a total command of texture, subtlety, and a depth that can be reached into. It is not the kind of soloistic performativity or frenetic get-it-all-out that characterizes so much free playing—but it is still free. 

Freedom

And it is in the end freedom that matters here, that animates this record, though not in the sense we might be used to. The “free” in free improvisation has exhausted itself as a concept, rendered facile by the all too easy comparisons between musical and social freedom. So why insist that freedom has something to do with why this album matters? Moten himself seems to disavow the word: “Freedom is too close to slavery for us to be easy with that jailed imagining,” he says in the opening track, conflating two terms we’ve been trained to understand as opposed. 

We—scholars, musicians, fans—are perhaps especially susceptible to thinking of freedom and slavery as opposed to one another, particularly insofar as we understand jazz and free jazz as expressions of agency that work against the logic of oppression. But for Moten, these are not opposed terms so much as they are interdependent—we are only able to identify the one because the other exists. Put differently, “Freedom is too close to slavery for us to be easy with that jailed imagining” has something to do in my mind with Moten’s claim that jazz is not a solution to a problem:

Some may want to invoke the notion of the traumatic event [of slavery] and its repetition in order to preserve the appeal to the very idea of redress even after it is shown to be impossible. This is the aporia that some might think I seek to fill and forget by invoking black art. Jazz does not disappear the problem; it is the problem, and will not disappear. It is, moreover, the problem’s diffusion, which is to say that what it thereby brings into relief is the very idea of the problem. 

You don’t get jazz without the conditions of violence that necessitated it. This is why we can’t look to jazz for a way out. 

At first blush, Anthony Reed, who gives us the language of the phonopoem, is concerned with refuting Moten’s claim by locating a kind of freedom in the collaborations between poets and jazz musicians across the long Black Arts era. And yet, we can’t take Reed’s understanding of freedom at face value, either. “The fight for freedom,” Reed writes, “is a fully transfigurative fight to reshape the discursive and political terrain upon which people struggle, a fight for new ways of imagining collective action and collectivity itself without guarantees of their future shape.” In this way, aesthetic practices matter not as models of freedom or as mechanisms to attain it; they matter as a means of disrupting our sensory habituations, which then opens up unknown possibilities.

Anachronism

Is there a tension here, between Moten and Reed? Where both understand jazz as an outgrowth of oppression, Reed seems to locate more potential for freedom, if not in the music, then in the “sound work” that makes it. Yet both thinkers locate something in Black art that  is ultimately uncontainable by the conditions that give rise to it. Whether this is a true distinction or a matter of differing emphasis, what I want to do in closing is to bear on this question indirectly by raising a different tension altogether, haunting this discussion from the beginning.

On the one hand: all these musico-poetic voices I’ve spent some words stupidly describing contribute to an undeniable feeling of freshness, vitality, and new life in the music—this music is a vibrant reimagining of a genre whose heyday is long past. On the other: because of the very undeniability of that vibrancy, the record stands out as a stark interrogation of the genre itself, asking what in phonopoetry might be at this point inherently anachronistic.

It is simply true that American culture has not, in general, had much occasion to experience phonopoetry as a matter of course since at least the 1970s. Any performance of jazz and poetry together has been known by most Americans only in the context of characatured references to a time and a political context beyond our reach. Phonopoems are so thoroughly associated with the free jazz movement of the late 1960s that I suggest we can’t hear them except anachronistically—they belong to another time, even if, as in this case, the band is also playing with sounds from the future. 

Rather than dating or diminishing Moten/López/Cleaver, however, its status as anachronism lends a different type of urgency to its sound. This becomes clear if we can listen for what French philosopher Jacques Rancière articulates as a rupture or a redistribution, a line of flight that points to another timeline in the language of the current one.

For Rancière, an anachronism is not a dusty relic but a radical rupture. It identifies itself by appearing in the wrong time, which is another way of saying the wrong place. It belongs elsewhere, but is here instead. As Rancière puts it in the essay “Anachronism and the Conflict of Times,” published in the November 2020 issue of Diacritics,  

The core of the problem is untimeliness. Untimeliness is a deviation from the normal sense of time. It is the fact of doing, feeling, saying, or thinking something whose possibility is not allowed by one’s time, the time to which one belongs…Anachronism ultimately means “impropriety;” it is a sin against time as location, against the social distribution of positions, occupations, identities, and capacities.

For Rancière, the improper, the out of place, and the untimely are identified as such from the perspective of the police, from the perspective of the dominant powers that structure what counts as “proper” in the first place. To identify that which does not properly belong to power is not to denigrate it but rather to identify the “riotous potential” that Reed discusses, the revolutionary vanguard of the excluded. For Rancière, impropriety is therefore the very definition of the political: the “out of place” or in this case “time” is precisely that which had no “proper place” in a bankrupt system, and which renders perceptible the fiction undergirding our “natural” order, revealing it for what it is, in all of its arbitrary yet brutally focused violence. The anachronism thus represents a discontinuity that refuses be reabsorbed into a continuity. And this is exactly “what emancipation is about: changing one’s manner of inhabiting time.”

Rancière therefore helps to understand what Reed means when he writes that “The structurally unorganizeable, the structurally uncountable, is riotous potentiality.” That which does not belong yet is carries within it as a function of its very displacement the potential to imagine otherwise. Thus for USC Dornsife professor Kara Keeling, who specializes in African American cinema and critical studies, the affective work of Black art is at one and the same time bound by the parameters of our current context and irreducible to it. In a Rancièrean register, she writes that “whatever escapes recognition, whatever escapes meaning and valuation, exists as an impossible possibility within our shared reality, however one theoretically describes that reality, and therefore threatens to unsettle, if not destroy, the common senses on which that reality relies for its coherence.” This redistribution of sense is what I ultimately hear in the anachronistic, painfully contemporary music of Moten/López/Cleaver: the improper unruliness of that which is too timely, so relevant that it might as well be eternal, a changing same.