In this chapter I will try to give an account of a musical encounter in the particular environment of a small and ancient Italian town, a quiet and drowsy place in comparison with an American metropolis, where the social status of a jazz musician, and especially of one of the group of transitional experimenters of the ’60-’70, made sense just for a small and very selected group of people.
It is true that among this group there were the organizers that gave to the city of Pisa a unique summer festival of Jazz and Improvised Music, connected with similar initiatives in other place of Europe. The festival was an appreciated opportunity for creative musicians of the USA, Europe, Japan, motivating local musicians as well and a sensible slice of public that saw the little university center as a possible crossroad of creative music research and performance, stages and productions.
But many obstacles and a sense of disillusion were interfering on the local side with the scopes and the expectations of the organizers. Who asked “jazz lovers” to be awaken from the inherent laziness of their confirmed preferences in music, who would change his habits just for the sake of it? More than that, it may be assumed that the necessary equipment in terms of information and experience to decode the sense of the presence of a personality such as that of Rafael Garrett in a similar environment was not easy to get or translate.
Often the dark zones of an equally vague sense of admissibility and convenience could materialize into alarming misunderstandings. In fact, especially in the first phases of his Italian sojourn, Garrett had frequently to protect himself from excessive, direct and unfounded manifestations of sympathy and camaraderie rather than expressions of incomprehension or hostility.
A man on his forties at the time, with his athletic complexion and fanciful dresses, he could be treated even too gently from local people. But some strange phenomenon could happen sometimes. For example he could evoke obscure war-time reminiscences in the brain of some older people, so that they superimposed on his actual aspect the simulacrum of an American soldier vaguely stored into their memory. I still remember the painful situation in which I knew that some fellow was on the point of trying to get near to him with with a kind of “you” vibration that is commonly given to a boy.
I was on my twenties and I remember this level of open social interaction as the “real political level” in which often local people was induced to dream-like states by the big interrogation mark imposed by his same presence. He did not take into consideration to speak Italian beyond the average buy and sell dictionary needed when no other mean was available. He probably considered learning it a waste of time. This is also to underline the inconsistency of the imputation of an ‘overtly political’ sense (Gates 1997) involved in the artistic practice of these musicians, especially when the ground involved is that of their trans-Atlantic traveling or diaspora context, the one in which they were directly communicating and often teaching their concepts, their social being and their artistic approaches. As such I was taking the possibility of a relationship: for me he was in a cultural mission whose time could expire soon for a reason or another.
Rafael was often expressing the irritation for being “labeled” through a purely guessed construction. A meaningful coming at the surface of the terminology of American sociology of the fifties and the sixties in everyday life was meaning immediately some unfounded and undesired inference or supposition. It could be also a sympathetic stance, but so formal and unaware of his cultural mission to be limited to the detection of a radical difference, maybe interesting, but to keep at distance.
Just to compare these non-musical facts with non-musical arguments employed in order to support the music, we may consider how Giacomo Pellicciotti was presenting Sun Ra in one of his first Italian tours. Here, in the more advanced among the popular music press, Pellicciotti writes an act of urgent legitimization.
The so-called Sun Ra myth, reflects all the reality of a serious and burning human condition. The Arkestra is a form of alternative life, a close community, reflecting the dramatic and painful condition of the African American people in its utopian “spatial wanderings”. When such a state of subjection does not flow into a precise conscience and does not not transform itself in direct political activity, it takes refuge in phantasmagoria. An imaginary series of multi-shaped microcosms becomes objectively and factually political as refuse of a certain codified and subaltern position (Pellicciotti 1973).
This was written five years before, five long years in that particular department of time, however that sensation of having to deal with surprising personalities and situations, fascinating and disquieting in their being surrounded from an halo of mystery, remained. That big question mark could be tamed by the problem of the ‘politicity’ of the symbolic twisting put into motion by the performance of the Sun Ra Arkestra. It is as Giacomo Pellicciotti is well aware that someone will ask him: “OK with Sun Ra, but what about the masses of workers and students?” In this context of an obsessive compulsion to solve questions in terms of immediate consensus and power relationships, to choose the formula of a “burning human truth reflected” was the simplest way to the wider legitimization of a deserved priority.
But this idea of “reflecting” a social situation was also meaning a sort of protection facing a conception of every-day life by “self-determination” as the only choice to afford surviving. In the case of Sun Ra it was evident that he succeeded in keeping together a group of people aimed to share all or the most part of their time, proving that this could be possible to a public that was well aware of similar attempts. I am saying protection here because the “alternative life” of the Sun Ra Arkestra succeeded where his young Italian public was mostly experimenting disillusions and returns to normality. This fact sounds implied when Giacomo Pellicciotti ends his Sun Ra advocacy defining the Arkestra as “a dream that must be lived in reality as soon as possible” (cited).
A real urgency of constituting local relationships for a musician in a new environment is both necessary for him as socially required. For Rafael Garrett, living in Pisa at the end of the Seventies, this fact was meaning the necessity to begin from scratch, being open to collaborate with musicians of a modest level. It is true that the now became “particular” spot of his musical share had the character of a node of a wider net, but it run the risk to be seen as not having other reason to exist beyond the contingencies of life, the closer orbit of his local relationships to be suspected as a waste of time for a musician like him.
Who may tell if the hero of this tale was considering himself in a travel of exploration and research? Around the year ’79 and specially 1980 the perception of a phase that was expiring was a common feeling for most of us, a time to assess and decide was impending. However, my recollections of those years continue to rise the question of how much the decision to come back was gradually becoming more and more concrete from what the traveler was reading from our countenances, actions and reports. After all we were his informers on the field.
From a side, Rafael’s relations with his peers were reporting that also Europe at the end of the Seventies was a lesser “promise land” for the exponents of the “New Music”. From another, the urgency of a man deeply involved in music to “give what he has” 1 cannot be rigidly assessed in terms of cultural capital.
So a part of the “overtly political” character of his own social being and intelligence consisted in considering debatable who were one’s own peers. Do they resided in someone else mind at his own convenience? What were the risks of an inclusive approach to musical practice, independently from the fact that those who turn around you most frequently, or who comes to you to “learn”, may not yet know too clearly where he is going as a musician?
This unanswered question continues to make me wonder how his pedagogical contribution could develop if he stayed longer than those three years. It was also a marketing problem to solve, ensuing from the dispersed spots of Italian music production. Looking to music as “technology of the self”, according to De Nora (1999), I remember his open workshops for musicians and non-musicians in which he proposed voice and body techniques as preparatory to actual or potential musical practice. This was surely a lesson for all participants as consumers of recorded or performed music.
A sort of prayer for “all religions or no-religion at all” by means of collective voice performance, stretching and movement, was the prelude to those open workshops on music improvisation. It is not secondary to note that a considerable part of people was more interested to the culture of physical fitness, macrobiotic kitchen and Tai Chi Chuan that Rafael brought from the USA as a part of his daily musical practice.2
This was the other side of a solidarity that was flowing into interpretations of a later Italian New Age reception eventually developing in concrete commercial initiatives. In this sense, after that the music was kept out of the picture, what seemed even “too American” yesterday became perfectly common in the following years.
notes
1.This is a kind of minimal common ground of offering that a musician from Yemen reports in the the documentary film Musical Gazz, presenting an encounter in Sana’a between traditional and jazz musicians (Privet 2004).↩
2. Roberta Sassatelli (2000) in his study on Italian commercial fitness system reports about a situation of twenty years after in which the presence of the music takes the form of a tool protecting privacy. In gym contexts, recorded music comes to divert attention from the body as the place in which conductors exert their power. Who practices using headphones has already conquered his own degree of autonomy.↩
references
De Nora, T., 1999, Music as a Technology of the Self, in: «Poetics», n. 27, 31-56.
Gates, H. L. Jr., 1997, Harlem on Our Minds, in: «Critical Inquiry», vol 24, n. 1, 1-12.
Pellicciotti, G., 1973, Sun Ra and his Astro Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, in: «Muzak», n. 2, November 1973.
Privet, P., 2004, Musical Gazz, documentary film, France-Yemen, distribution TV5.
Sassatelli, P., 2000, Anatomia della Palestra. Cultura commerciale e disciplina del corpo, Bologna, il Mulino.