Preliminary notes on the research The Story So Far by Edward George

Where am I? Today, I recorded a new episode of The Strangeness of Dub at Morley Radio, Morley College after a live performance at Step Forward: Sonic Visions at Ormside Projects in London. A few weeks ago, I recorded some vocals for two tracks for a single by a Berlin dub techno producer Vril. The vocals are, more or less, a hailing up of jazz drummer Art Blakey and free improvised music percussionist and AMM founder Eddie Prevost. Ironic to be larging up the drummers who play with and around and against metronomic time against a backdrop of minimalist, metronomic dub techno. My two vocals, ‘Secondary Devices, Pt. 1 & 2’ will be out in December on Kynant Records.

I should mention that Prevost, founder of AMM, about whom the penultimate edition of The Strangeness of Jazz, was the subject of a live collaboration for the last Strangeness of Jazz for 2024 at Café Oto.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I did my first gig with Pat Thomas and Orphy Robinson of Black Top at the Paul Hamlyn Awards, a performance at Brussels’ Echoes of Dissent Volume Five festival with contemporary music group X Ray Hex Tet. Our first, eponymously titled album is available on the US label Reading Room: the group’s Echoes of Dissent performance will be released in 2025.

A few days from now, I will be performing as part of a trio with Steve Beresford and Maggie Nichols for an improvised performance at the London Jazz Festival. In between now and then, I will be working at the Warburg Institute, the associatively structured library of arcania, and home of the Menil Collection, whose fifty-year anti racist archive of black folk in western art will be the subject of my current project, an artwork and short film titled Black Atlas and a radio series, The Ebony Tapes, to be completed in 2025.

There’s more: re-recordings of the second of a three-part live presentation, Listening to D’Angelo, Hearing Voodoo and ‘Duke & Billy’, an episode of the Strangeness of Jazz on Duke Ellington and his queer co-writer and friend, Billy Strayhorn.

I’m actually writing this in my office at the Warburg, unable to feel half my face after some serious dental surgery. I mention this to make a point about performance and a kind of line: my broadcast and live work, on Jazz and Dub, have in common a shared relation to improvisation – improvisation is, after all, the basis of contemporary music performance and dub mixing.

Both series share an approach to the documentary essay generated by these two very different ways of making improvised music which nonetheless form one side of a line, a line that separates, and joins, an interest in producing narratologies of improvisation with the performance of improvised music.

And the dentistry? Well, orality takes us to the question of performance understood as a kind of embodiment, to speaking – and to writing, and their contrapuntal activity of listening. Troubled orality leads me back to the body, my body, as the basis of two radically opposed approaches to performance and, critically, to a relation to the generativity and the limits of thinking in, and out, of improvisation

This line, its edges and overlaps and bifurcations, the continuities and discontinuities of the two complimentary, antagonistic spaces and modes of practice designated by this line will, inclusive of D’Angelo (what is it with you people and this guy – how does his music dissolve metaphysical oppositions between hardened avant gardists and pop kids of all distinctions?), inform my residency.

And as for the nature and histories or lineages of this line, well I’m thinking that a line might be a way, a mark between spaces, a curve, a scratch, something to depart from and return to a thinking on my work in the form of something like the work itself, a presentation, a script, and music.

Listening and Reading Links
Morley Radio
X Ray Hex Tet
The Guardian, Interview with Edward George
Dweller, Dub as an Act of Love: An Interview with Edward George