Since Alex Chilton’s death in 2010, one revelation of the continuing Big Star revivals has been the enduring charm and power of Jody Stephens’ voice. As the only continuous member besides Chilton since the group’s founding, Stephens primarily distinguished himself as the powerful drummer behind their sound, yet also contributed the occasional vocal to their original three albums. His singing then always conveyed a tone of youthful naivete perfectly suited to Big Star’s original aesthetic, as defined by founder Chris Bell.
That aesthetic was acknowledged grudgingly by Chilton at times, as he described the Big Star fans as “nice little guys who are usually in college, and they’re kind of lonely and misunderstood, learning to play guitar.” It was a wistful, yearning sound that Chilton himself conveyed beautifully when he wanted to. But so did Stephens.
Now that he alone is left to carry the torch, Stephens has taken a crack version of Big Star on the road, sharing vocal duties with Chris Stamey, Jon Auer, Pat Sansone, and Mike Mills, with Stephens leaning into the songs that most convey that wistful feeling, as in recent celebrations of the group’s debut album (chronicled by The Memphis Flyerhere). But over the past decade, he’s had another, less celebrated platform for the disarming innocence of his voice: Those Pretty Wrongs.
Ostensibly a duet featuring Stephens and multi instrumentalist Luther Russell, their sound has grown more ambitious over the decade since they formed, until, by the time of last year’s Holiday Camp album, they had taken on the power of a full-fledged power pop group through the magic of overdubs. With Stephens’ vocals front and center, rich harmonies, acoustic strums, and electric guitar riffs flow over the listener like some of the most delicate Big Star tunes, yet with a personality all their own. While all of the duo’s songs are grounded by Stephens’ reliable beat, they’ve also become showcases for Russell’s imaginative guitar work and other instrumental flourishes.
Those elements have always been present, but have ramped up on all fronts as time has passed. “We have more experience with each other,” says Stephens. “It’s evolved into, I think, richer embellishments with the production and songs, and maybe lyrically too. There’s a certain ease that we have now when we get in to record, and more focus. We don’t have to spend much time on trying to figure out where to go. Things just came together naturally for this record.”
Holiday Camp is also notable for the contributions of other players who’ve long been in the Big Star orbit. “On the new album,” says Stephens, “Pat Sansone plays Moog and Mellotron on ‘Always the Rainbow’ and he plays Mellotron on ‘Scream.’ And then Chris Stamey did a string arrangement with flute and clarinet on ‘Brother, My Brother.'”
Stephens and Russell typically tour as only a duo, even mounting a minimalist tour of the the U.K. last year using only train travel, but this week’s show will show off their sonic evolution like no other. “We’ll actually have a string section at the Green Room,” says Stephens. “One of the nice things about Crosstown Arts is that at each one of our shows — and this is our third, I believe — they’ve provided a string quartet. So we’ll have Rebeca Rathlef and Michael Brennan on violin, Katie Brown on viola, and Jonathan Kirkscey on cello. It’s a special show because it’s the only time we ever get to have strings, and there will even be a flutist for this performance.”
There will also be a chance to hear the stripped-down version of Those Pretty Wrongs this week. “We’re also gonna play on Jim Spake’s show on WYXR [Cabbages & Kings, Thursday, April 4th, 2-4 p.m.],” Stephens says. “I’m excited about that.”
Michael “Birdcap” Roy, Dove Hunt: The First Shot, acrylic on panel (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Homer’s Iliad begins with a promise of anger, of Achilles’ wrath that would bring about the ruin of Troy. “Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,” goes the epic. “Many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures.”
It’s a story driven by men’s pride, cloaked as heroism, yet leading only to bloodshed and tragedy. Or, as artist Michael “Birdcap” Roy puts it, “All these men were doing all these sort of idiotic things under the guise to be heroic.”
But Birdcap doesn’t say this to belittle these characters, but instead to remark on their humanity that might go unnoticed under the prestige of classical literature. “I just found something very like comforting or familiar in these men,” he says. “It reminded me of just growing up in the deep South and what it means to be a man in Mississippi and how sometimes cleverness and wit are almost looked down upon. Like, your ability to be stoic within pain is more exceptional than your ability to avoid pain. So you stay during a hurricane or you work a hard job. … Those characters reminded me of my family and me.”
Fame Over Everything: Bust of Achilles, mixed media
Birdcap’s current show at Crosstown Arts plays with this idea. Titled “Iliumpta,” the exhibition is a retelling of Homer’s poem, set in the southernmost bayous of Mississippi in the fictitious county of Iliumpta. “It’s based on the word Ilium, which is the Latinized version of Troy, and umpta is sort of like a false noise to make it sound like a Mississippi county,” Birdcap says. “I thought it was a good way to have an introspective show that talked about myself but using this sort of universal reference.”
He writes in his artist statement, “The men in these works shout from a nihilistic void, and in their attempts to be heroic, they, like the ancients before them, choose death over happiness, a closed ear before sound advice, and doom before an apology.”
This is Birdcap’s first solo show in Memphis. While he is known for his large-scale murals seen throughout the city and around the world, Birdcap says, “This is my first chance to have like a big sort of homecoming show.”
It’s also been an opportunity for the painter to experiment with different media like mosaic, sculpture, and silk screen. “I think you have to keep you have to keep the learning process in your routine or you get bored.”
Michael “Birdcap” Roy, Father’s Legacy (Relic), stone on panel
Last year, he attended a mural festival in Pompeii, where he was fascinated by the ancient city’s mosaics. “I was blown away by just how anti-ephemeral the work is, how long it lasts.” Plus, it doesn’t hurt that mosaics have a built-in aesthetic of antiquity to go along with the Greco-Roman mythology at the core of the show. Yet, in true Birdcap style, his mosaics are “ridiculously cartoony” — as are the other pieces in the show.
“I like cartoons because when I was young, I would try to make dramatic work about my feelings or politics or whatever, but I would visualize it in this dramatic way,” he says. “And I think it had the opposite effect where people didn’t really want to pay attention to it. But I think cartoons are very safe and we all have this child-like relationship with it, and so it allows you to put these complicated or harder messages in but still be listened to. Like, it’s not baroque. It really is subtle.”
Too Much to Bear: The Suicide of Ajax, mixed media
His piece, Too Much to Bear: The Suicide of Ajax, he points out, deals with male fragility quite darkly, yet because it is presented with saturated colors and is an inflatable, reminiscent of holiday decorations or childhood birthday parties, it takes on a sort of softness. But Birdcap says, “My character is Ajax, who basically got drunk with rage and really embarrassed himself, and the next day, unable to deal with this shame, he committed suicide. And so that piece could be a fairly heavy piece. Suicide, it’s not fun.”
On a similar note, Birdcap later adds, “I’ve been pretty transparent about my own mental health over the last few years, and this work is an extension of that. The paintings are about the South and the Southern man, but in no way am I trying to divide myself from the Southern man. I am imperatively a Southern man. So all the faults displayed in the paintings, I see in myself.”
But he says, “I think there’s magic here, and I think there’s like room for mythology and folktales in a way that maybe other regions don’t have. I think we have a unique relationship to the power of myth, and so it’s not a big jump for me to think these make sense together. … I’m 36 now; I’m old enough to know I can’t be from anywhere else. I think there was a time when I was young, where I was like, if I try, I can be from somewhere else. And it’s like, no, your memories are there and they’re a part of you, they’re a part of your myth.”
Birdcap’s “Iliumpta” is on display at Crosstown Arts through April 28th.
From left to right, Lili Nacht, Neena Wang, Yidan Zeng, and Thandi Cai (Photo: Jin Yang)
Although their respective parents didn’t exactly dream they would one day become artists, Thandi Cai, Lili Nacht, Neena Wang, and Yidan Zeng did just that. “Our parents all chose to come here to achieve some dream that they had, the American dream,” says Wang, “and that transformed into something different for each of our parents. And then they also had dreams for us. And then we took those dreams and made them into our own.”
The four have known one another since childhood, having grown up together in the same circles within the Chinese-American community in Memphis. Over the years, though, as so often happens with childhood friends embracing the next stages of their lives, they lost contact, outside of following each other on Instagram. By 2022, Cai was splitting their time between Chicago and Memphis, while Nacht, Wang, and Zeng resided in Berlin, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, respectively. They hadn’t seen each other in years, but that summer, Nacht reached out via email to see if they would be interested in Zooming.
What followed were months of Zoom calls, wherein they formed the MengCheng Collective — the name finding its origin in the Chinese phonetic name for Memphis, which also happens to loosely translate to “City of Dreams.”
The Crosstown Arts residency this summer was the perfect opportunity for an in-person reunion, they decided. From the outset, the four knew that their residency would not be about sequestering themselves away to create the art that would be featured in their capstone exhibition. Instead, they would engage the community that they grew up around. “The intention [has been to create] an archive that is not just static, but can also be interacted with, participated in,” says Zeng. “It felt like a lot of our histories in the Mid-South were very invisible or suppressed, so how can we create a way for people to see their histories be displayed in a very public way, in an institution, and also for that to be a moment of celebration and collective witnessing?”
To accomplish this, the group hosted weekly potlucks throughout the duration of their residency, harkening back to their childhood days of attending potlucks at Chinese-American households throughout Memphis. That first potluck was open to the public and had 100 or so in attendance — a turnout they did not expect. In the weeks following, they hosted potlucks with other Asian-American creatives in Memphis, with students from the Memphis Chinese Language School, and with their own families.
With each potluck, the collective says they’ve found themselves in awe of the support they’ve garnered. “I feel like I’ve been on the verge of tears since I got here,” Wang says. “People have been so open and willing to listen to you. People are not just looking for what you can do for them. They really want to connect with you on a human level, and that is just so, so special and not something I’ve found almost anywhere else in the world that I’ve been. It’s made me realize how much Memphis has made me who I am.”
Yet the four agree that being away from Memphis has also solidified their identities. With distance, they were able to look from the outside in, able to question their experiences and to process them. “Living in Berlin,” says Nacht, “I felt a freeness that I never felt growing up, but that was also to do with me having not come to terms or not having not processed the traumas yet, like bullying that I had when I was growing up and the pressures from these generational conflicts. I didn’t even know until I left that it was not a great environment.
“I processed through the traumas [since then], and I’ve grown and matured and reconnected with my sense of self, and after having done all that — it took, like, 11 years — I can come back now as a person with my own agency, from a place of awareness of my culture and my own boundaries.”
Like Nacht, Cai, Wang, and Zeng express similar sentiments — that they feel more sure of themselves, especially in their identities as artists, since leaving and returning to Memphis. “My parents have been really amazing to me,” says Wang. “They’ve never heard me really talk about my artwork, but after my artist talk [at Crosstown Arts], they told me how proud they were of me, that they want me to actually really focus on my art, which is not something that they would’ve said, like, a year ago.”
The potlucks, she says, have also been instrumental in this sense of generational healing, with Cai referring to the potlucks as forms of participatory art.
“It’s helpful, at least speaking for my parents, to witness art in a way that is very much in the communities, that they themselves can also be part of that artistic practice,” Zeng adds. “I feel like, oftentimes, it’s easy for people to just kind of see art as a distant thing, like a sculpture or painting in a museum. But we are all very much interested in using art as a tool for change in relationship building.”
“[Art] is like a language,” Cai says, “especially in places where you have people, different cultures coming together. You may not understand the words or the context of what their sentiments are, but you can feel what they might be feeling. Even just the humility of watching someone create art and being there to receive it is really, I think, an important listening skill for human connection.”
Through their potlucks and artistic practices during their residency, Cai says, “Our community came together in a way that hasn’t happened before. I think that it’s just really important for us to be in the same room affirming one another. I think that is the core of everything that we’re doing. Healing is big on all levels — like within ourselves, within our community, with our presence in the city, between the generations, all of it.
“Art is not just a tool for communicating with people in the present, but it’s a tool for communicating with people in the past and the future. As a time traveling tool, I think it can be really powerful to create the futures that we want to see.”
And the future they want to see, Nacht says, highlights diversity. “We need more representation, first of all,” she says, “as well as a different way of interacting with each other to promote this sort of care for each other in a community that comes from this place of understanding.”
“I don’t know if it is too ambitious to try to strive for,” Wang adds, “but the healing that we’ve experienced and that we’ve seen and that our parents and other people have shared with us [during this residency], I really wish that for other communities in Memphis that have experienced intergenerational trauma and just really anyone who needs to heal their relationship with themselves or their creativity or their family. Yeah, if we could just be an example of that.”
This Saturday, July 22, 6-9 p.m., the MengCheng Collective kicks off its week-long exhibition, “Kai Pa Ti,” with a night of food and fun. RSVP to the free event at Crosstown Arts here.
“Kai Pa Ti” will be on display July 22-29, 3-7 p.m., or by appointment. Appointments can be made by emailing mengcheng.tn@gmail.com.
New Music composer Evan Williams is no stranger to Memphis, having lived and taught here from 2018-22. And, as he noted in his remarks in the Crosstown Concourse East Atrium last night, his time as a assistant professor of music and director of instrumental activities at Rhodes College made an indelible impression on him. Indeed, Wednesday evening’s premiere of his new work, Crosstown Counterpoint, was a deep rumination on that iconic space and its place in the city’s history.
But that multi-movement suite was book-ended and contextualized by other pieces that helped situate Crosstown in time and space. Williams began with a trombone solo titled Amber Waves, in honor of the semi-rural Chicago suburb where he grew up. His use of delay effects only added to the natural reverberation of the towering atrium, with its echoing brass tones reminiscent of Sean Murphy’s Sketches of Crosstown from 10 years ago, featuring tuba and saxophone in the abandoned Sears Tower, pre-renovation.
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!
Historical recordings of Savio’s words were woven into a duet for flute and cello, and, echoing through the cavernous space of Crosstown, the combination served to remind listeners of the political and aesthetic dimensions of such a public commons, and the citizens’ duty to make good on any promise that such a space implies.
And then came the centerpiece of the evening, taking place within the very space it celebrated. Subtitled “for two antiphonal string quartets and audio playback,” Crosstown Counterpoint and Memphis’ own Blueshift Ensemble made use of the concourse’s multiple levels, with one quartet on the ground floor and another on the mezzanine above. The sound of stereo strings responding to each others’ hypnotic patterns evoked the origins of Sears, Roebuck and Company’s founder, Richard Warren Sears, in the railroad business; and as recordings of voices were heard on the P.A., the effect was reminiscent of Steve Reich’s Different Trains. But the voices’ stories were closer to home.
Those voices, originally recorded for the Crosstown Concourse Breaking Ground Oral Histories Project, were provided to Williams by Crosstown Arts, and recounted decades of history, from the original Sears department store to its demise and abandonment, and finally its rebirth. In one moving passage, a Memphian observes, “The building has a personality,” then adds, “and layers of history,” a phrase which repeated as the strings played on, the words echoing through the very walls being remembered.
Throughout the proceedings, it was as if the atrium itself was an instrument, its reverberations throwing the composer’s sounds back at us in real time. When Crosstown Counterpoint concluded, Williams then led an expanded ensemble through a classic of the modern classical canon, Terry Riley’s In C.
Evan Williams leads scattered musicians through Terry Riley’s In C (Credit: Alex Greene)
This piece was also well-suited to the space, full of cascading, contrasting patterns played by various musicians scattered strategically throughout the atrium, on multiple levels. The slightly out of sync parts would ebb and flow, harmonizing with each other in unpredictable ways. Though considered groundbreaking when it premiered in 1964, the piece is not often heard in Memphis, though Williams noted that he led a group through the piece during his time at Rhodes.
In this case, the ever-shifting piece held the crowd’s attention for nearly a half hour, as audience members wandered through the atrium, sampling the sounds from different niches of the concourse. It was met with a standing ovation and raucous cheering as the evening came to end, the reborn vertical village of Crosstown still resonating with its own history.
The Otis Mission: L-R, Alvie Givhan, Tony Dickerson, Christian Kirk, Joe Restivo, Carl Caspersen, James (Otis) Sexton, DeAnté Payne, & James (Jennings) Sexton (Photo courtesy James Sexton)
When Crosstown Arts musical director Jenny Davis introduced The Green Room’s featured artist last Friday, she noted something unique about him: “For those of you who don’t know, James Sexton is the unofficial M.V.P. of jazz month, he’s drummed with so many of the bands performing this March.” And while it’s true that Sexton is one of the city’s most versatile drummers, often playing with the Ted Ludwig trio and their disparate collaborators, last Friday wasn’t about his track record. Rather, it was about tracks, his tracks, never yet heard on a record but surely deserving it.
To a sold out room, Sexton and band took to the stage as he gave a shout out to his time studying with Dr. Jack Cooper and the late Tim Goodwin at the University of Memphis Scheidt School of Music, noting that while he never finished his degree there, it had profoundly affected his grasp of music and arranging. Creating his dream band, the Otis Mission, for Friday’s debut was a culmination of those and many more years of composing and arranging. “Otis is my middle name,” Sexton explains, “named after my late godfather Otis Washington.”
While one could broadly describe the compositions as jazz fusion, that would belie the stylistic versatility of the band, as they deftly navigated charts bursting with stop-time phrases and unison lines in the classic jazz fusion approach, yet ranging from funk to salsa to reggae to gospel. That band included Sexton on drums, Alvie Givhan on keyboards, Tony Dickerson on “auxiliary keys,” Joe Restivo on guitar, Carl Caspersen on bass, DeAnté Payne on mallet instruments (via a large set of pads triggering samples), and Christian Kirk and brother James “Jennings” Sexton as guest singers, and they rose to the challenge of the material’s complexity with aplomb.
And yet, to hear James Sexton tell it, that was just the beginning. “This is a condensed version of The Otis Mission,” he wrote to the Memphis Flyer. “I originally wrote the music for a 15-piece ensemble, consisting of three singers, three horns, a string quartet, keys, bass, lead guitar, percussion, and drums. So the next show will be the whole kit and caboodle.”
As a drummer, Sexton is a world-class talent, having performed or recorded with the likes of En Vogue, Amy Grant, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Branford Marsalis, Kirk Whalum, BeBe Winans, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London, and Stevie Wonder. But last Friday, he was playing for one person in particular: “I just really wanted my dad to hear it,” he notes. “He’s been on me the last three years or so. We’d tried to pull off the show before Covid hit, but it didn’t work out. So, I’m very relieved to have finally gotten the ball rolling, with my pops in attendance.”
The group brought Sexton’s work to life with precision and soul, offering some stunning solos along the way, including Sexton’s own solo turn on the kit as he kept a perfect clave beat with a foot pedal hitting a wood block. Below, Sexton offers his commentary on the intricate, funky pieces he premiered last Friday:
James Sexton (Photo courtesy Crosstown Arts)
•No Limit ‘Cept Yo Limits is “funk inspired, a Prince kinda vibe.” •A.M. Spired, a compositional highlight, was “inspired by modal jazz of the ’50s and ’60s.” •Duly Noted. Lesson Learned was based on a “bad experience that’ll never happen again. A mixer of rock and reggae that featured prominent Memphis guitarist Joe Restivo and myself.” •Get up Sunshine was “inspired by classic vocal jazz ballads, and featured Christian Kirk, the daughter of legendary Memphis jazz pianist Sidney Kirk. It also featured Alvie Givhan on piano and DeAnte Payne on vibes. The message is simply ‘Don’t dim your light. The world needs it.'” •Eden’s Aura was “inspired by my then five-year-old daughter’s mood swings, and my time playing in a salsa band. Her name is Sarah Eden Sexton. It featured DeAnte Payne, Alvie Givhan, and myself.” •Got That Good Feelin’ (How bout’ Chu?) was “inspired by my time as a drummer in the The New Orleans Jazz Ramblers. A great tune for a second line dance.” •The Liberator, sung by Sexton’s brother James “Jennings” Sexton, revealed the importance of the church to Sexton. “This shows my gospel roots. In the Christian faith, Jesus is the door to liberation, in every aspect of life.” •The Hatchling, a title Sexton said referred to himself, is “an up-tempo jazz fusion tune, inspired by artists like James Brown, Tower of Power, or the Dave Weckl Band. There’s a fusion version of a James Brown tune called ‘The Chicken,’ and this would be my version of an updated spin off.”
With “jazz month” drawing considerable attention and attendance at Crosstown Arts for the past two weeks, encompassing everything from hard bop to the city’s burgeoning avant garde scene, it’s worth taking a step back to consider an artist who mastered all those styles and more: Sun Ra.
The fact that both he and his longtime saxophonist John Gilmore were from the South (Birmingham, Alabama and Summit, Mississippi, respectively) makes them all the more relevant to the current moment, above and beyond the fact that Ra’s legacy informs all artists who walk the line between “inside” and “outside.” Those words, of course, are jazz lingo for playing inside the lines of conventional chord changes versus stepping outside into a world of free improvisation.
That line matters when it comes to Sun Ra — born Herman Poole “Sonny” Blount — as the mere mention of his name these days is often used to signify any music that’s outlandishly free or experimental. What’s often forgotten is that, behind the sci-fi-influenced language and costumes of Ra’s futurism, there was a disciplined composer and arranger who revered Fletcher Henderson scores dating back to the 1920s. That’s not to say that the Sun Ra Arkestra didn’t have its moments of more chaotic improvisation, but they were only partial refractions of the ensemble’s wider palette of sounds.
The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra, first released on Savoy Records in 1962, then re-released last fall on 180-gram vinyl, CD, and hi-res digital by Craft Recordings in honor of its 60th Anniversary, is a good case in point. It was an historical milestone, being the first recording made with his band, The Arkestra, after moving to New York from Chicago. Produced by Tom Wilson (who would go on to produce Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, and the Mothers of Invention, among others), The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra has long been considered one of the avant-garde artist’s most accessible albums.
According to John Szwed’s Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, the album was not even reviewed at the time and immediately sank into obscurity. So much for being accessible! And yet, compared to what came later from the Arkestra, this album is indeed approachable, and a good entry point into Sun Ra’s oeuvre for listeners hoping to expand their horizons.
It’s “a record which could have easily represented their repertoire during an evening at a club” at that time, as Szwed writes, with a listenable balance between free improvisation and composed pieces for an octet. The latter pieces are not so different from other cutting edge, large-ensemble jazz albums of the time, such as Gil Evans’ Out of the Cool (1960), Charles Mingus’ Oh Yeah (1961), or Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961).
That’s apparent right from the start, as “Bassism,” beginning with a sparse bass line, soon incorporates tight horn bursts and grooving piano before making room for a more freestyle flute from Arkestra stalwart Marshall Allen. The tracks continue in that vein, mixing tightly arranged horn lines, piano vamps, and freer soloing in relatively concise compositions. With “Where Is Tomorrow,” the arranged horns soon drop out to make way for intriguing freestyle interplay between two flutes and bass clarinet (the latter played by Gilmore).
That “outness” takes over on the next track, “The Beginning,” which begins and ends with a melange of unorthodox percussion. The album liner notes tout this element, noting that the record features bells from India, Chinese wind chimes, wood blocks, maracas, claves, scratchers, gongs, cowbells, Turkish cymbals, and castanets. These flourishes lend a distinctive sonic stamp to the entire album.
At times, the mood mellows, as with “Tapestry from an Asteroid,” a ballad that became one of Ra’s most-performed works. Interestingly, out of the 10 original selections on the album, “Tapestry from an Asteroid” would stand as the only work that the artist would ever revisit — on stage or otherwise — again. “China Gates” is also in this mood (and is the sole track not written by Ra), with vocalist Ricky Murray sounding almost like Billy Eckstine amid the bells and gongs.
Following the release of Futuristic Sounds, which marked Ra’s sole album under Savoy, the artist and the Arkestra enjoyed a fruitful period in New York and Philadelphia. In 1969, Ra graced the cover of Rolling Stone. In the early ’70s, he became an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. Later in the decade, back in New York, his shows would attract a new generation of fans, including the Velvet Underground’s John Cale and Nico. As he grew older, Ra’s influence only continued to grow, with bands like Sonic Youth inviting the artist to open for them. During his lifetime, Ra also built one of the most extensive discographies in history, which includes more than 100 albums (live and studio) and over 1,000 songs. And now, nearly 30 years after his death, the legacy of Sun Ra lives on through the ever-evolving Arkestra, which continues to record and perform today under the leadership of the forever-young Marshall Allen.
August 17, 2018, was a historic night in the Bluff City. A new space in the newly renovated Crosstown Concourse, The Green Room, was about to enjoy its inaugural concert — the culmination of years of planning. A sizable audience had gathered to hear the music of celebrated avant-garde pioneer John Cage, and a hush fell over the room as the lights dimmed. Then Jenny Davis, a flutist in the genre-defying Blueshift Ensemble, stepped up and began to play … a cactus.
Jenny Davis (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Around her was a scene from a gardening shop. Cacti of different sizes were arrayed on a table, and Davis was systematically plucking the thorns of each plant as if it were a drum. Each movement resonated over the sound system; the cacti were outfitted with microphone pickups. It was as if we’d all shrunk to the size of geckos, immersed in a world of desert greenery, every brush of the needles an arpeggio.
For lovers of unusual sounds and textures, Davis’ performance was captivating. But it also marked the beginning of an avant-garde renaissance that is putting Memphis on the map of all that is strange and fascinating in 21st century music. It was only fitting that Davis was making the sounds, as that night foreshadowed the extent to which she, as programmer of Crosstown Arts’ musical performances, would be making waves. As it turns out, she’s only one of a host of players and presenters who are introducing Memphis audiences to sounds well off the beaten path. Beyond that, she sees no need to define what the music is. It’s here to stay, whatever you call it. “The avant-garde realm is hard to describe,” Davis says. “It becomes kind of tricky. Maybe it’s not even necessary to always describe something as being in one genre or another.”
The Cactus in the Room: A State of Mind
As Davis notes, playing Cage’s “Child of Tree” that night was a prescient grand opening. “That was the first concert we ever did in The Green Room,” she notes, “which I love. We christened the room with some John Cage!” In keeping with that, the space has become a key venue for musicians who want nothing more than to be listened to, and it’s likely rooted in the context of that first show. As part of the 2018 Continuum Festival, also organized by Davis, attendees could learn of the different states of mind that most avant-garde music demands, with talks on “Suggestions on How to Listen to Contemporary Classical Music” or a “Mindful Listening Workshop” based on composer Pauline Oliveros’ sound and meditation activities.
The seriousness suggested by such presentations is often belied by the sheer playfulness of the music. Beyond cacti, for example, the John Cage tribute also included his “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” in which players adjusted the frequencies and volumes of 12 transistor radios. Whether whimsical or disturbing, the one thing that most avant-garde, experimental, or “out” music has in common is the need for deep listening. While B-Side Memphis or the Lamplighter Lounge have also cultivated scenes for strange music, The Green Room and its big sibling, Crosstown Theater, have set the standard of spaces that encourage silence.
Art Edmaiston, a veteran saxophonist of more conventional R&B, soul, and rock ensembles, has played enough noisy bars in his storied career to really appreciate silence. “You know, people wander into bars just to have a drink, and then they’ll say, ‘What is this? Why is a guy dragging a music stand across the floor? What’s going on with the flame thrower?’” he says with a chuckle. Such a crowd may not be tuned in to the subtleties of experimental music, and that can impact the playing itself. “The other thing is how quiet some of the music can be,” he notes. “We’re all listening. If you’re not in a listening environment, which means the crowd has to be quiet, then it’s hard for us to communicate, almost telepathically, and everybody’s going to miss what’s going on.”
What’s Going On
Edmaiston is a key figure in the local music landscape, and his involvement in the free improvisational group SpiralPhonics is indicative of just how much is happening on the cutting edge here. As he describes it, just having a venue for avant-garde music has made all the difference. “It’s hard for our little group to find places,” he says. “Revenue and venue, it’s all kinda in there together. You’ve got to find people. Listeners needed!” That has usually required staying on the more accessible side of the street. “Playing commercial music, you have a structure and vocabulary applicable to that situation. If you come in playing like Albert Ayler on [a track like] ‘Take Me to the River,’ you’re not going to be called back. So throughout most of my career, I was trying to assimilate, trying to be a studio musician. I’ve had a life of doing that, but never lost my desire to be on the more artistic side of things.”
When drummer Terence Clark proposed collaborating in a more improvisational context, and they joined forces with guitarist Logan Hanna to form SpiralPhonics, the mere existence of a venue helped them to manifest their vision. “We only played sporadically,” he recalls. “So we booked The Green Room in order to make us get our stuff together.” Ultimately, the gig not only brought their group into focus; it led to their debut album. “The Green Room being a listening room, that’s the spot to do it,” says Edmaiston. “That’s where we recorded our Argot Session. It was a live performance that we recorded there, and we couldn’t have done it anywhere else. It would take a lot more tries to get good takes and a quiet environment somewhere else. Your head space has to be right.”
Others note the resurgence of “out” music as well. Chad Fowler, a saxophonist, woodwind player, composer, and producer from Arkansas, studied at the University of Memphis in the 1990s, and the experimental music scene here at that time had a profound impact on him. Having then left town, he was surprised upon his return over a decade later. “I felt, when I first moved back to Memphis six or seven years ago, like there was a real dearth of creative music happening. It was kind of disappointing. I felt it had been stronger in the ’90s. However, since then it feels like it’s changed. A lot of it is due to Jenny Davis and Blueshift. Crosstown and B-Side have made a huge difference.”
The scene’s personal impact on Fowler is in turn reflecting back on the local environment. Having ultimately settled back in Arkansas, he’s nevertheless a regular in the avant-garde music world of Memphis, even as he also increases his profile in the New York experimental scene. His Mahakala Music label, focused on experimental jazz, has built on associations he forged in the ’90s Memphis scene, with players like Marc Franklin, Chris Parker, and Kelley Hurt, and Anders Griffen often appearing on Mahakala releases today. But he’s also used his and others’ connections to New York, Chicago, and New Orleans to create ensembles of world-class players from elsewhere, often bringing them to Memphis.
Dopolarians at The Green Room (Photo: Jack T. Adcock)
As Fowler notes, “It’s kind of weird because the same people might be on, like, a New York Times best of jazz year-end list but then also playing in a room the size of a closet for a tiny crowd in Brooklyn. We might get better audiences in Memphis for the same music.” He points to a gig by one of Mahakala’s “all-star” groups, Dopolarians. “With the Dopolarians show, I think William Parker was blown away by how great the energy was when we were there in The Green Room — by how many people came out, how engaged the audience was. It was a good experience.”
Collaborating with William Parker, a highly respected free jazz bassist and co-organizer of the Vision Festival, “New York City’s premier live free jazz event,” according to TheNew York Times, has been a boon to Fowler and Mahakala, arising quite organically from Fowler’s earliest free jazz experiences. Parker played on the debut album of Memphian Frank Lowe in 1973, as Lowe’s star was rising. Ultimately, Lowe would join Alice Coltrane’s band and enjoy a solo career of some renown, yet would still return to Memphis and jam with the likes of Fowler, Franklin, Chris Parker, and other University of Memphis students. Now, Fowler carries that inspiration back to New York on a regular basis, often playing with William Parker in various ensembles and recording projects. Mahakala’s star is now rising as well. “The first record we put out was on Rolling Stone’s end-of-year jazz roundup list,” says Fowler, “and since then, pretty frequently, we’ve been mentioned in Jazziz, JazzTimes, DownBeat, and all the go-to jazz publications. It seems the label is becoming one of the most respected of the genre, even though it’s very new.”
Lately, the links between Memphis and leaders of free jazz from the Northeast have only strengthened, as when drummer Ra Kalam, aka Bob Moses, who’s been on the cutting edge of the free improvisation world since the ’60s, relocated to Memphis permanently. Edmaiston recently played with the drummer on a New Year’s Eve show and was surprised at his embrace of more traditional R&B. Edmaiston recalls, “Ra Kalam told us, ‘Hey man, that was ‘Cleo’s Back!’ I recorded that in 1967 with Larry Coryell and Jim Pepper. We used to play it all the time!’ So that was kind of wild. He can play inside, but he’s developed into something else. When he plays himself, he says, it’s like he’s got to be in Europe to be expressive. Over here, less people want to hear that. Over there, he’s celebrated for it.” Yet now, with improvisational music on the rise here, that’s changing. On January 18th, Ra Kalam will be holding a master class and concert at Nelson Drum Shop in Nashville.
New Music, from Punks to P-basses to Piccolos
If there’s an uptick in free jazz and improvisational groups like SpiralPhonics and Fowler’s various projects, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, since Jenny Davis and Jonathan Kirkscey founded Blueshift Ensemble, a loose collection of Memphis Symphony Orchestra players with a penchant for experimental music, an Iceberg has orbited them — for that’s the name of a composers’ collective that collaborates with Blueshift every August to bring their works to life. “I like to have some new stuff along with some more familiar sounds, and that’s a nice way to introduce new things to audiences,” says Davis. “Blueshift’s work with Iceberg New Music, the composer collective out of New York, encapsulates that idea, too, because it’s a group of 10 composers, some of them more on the experimental, avant-garde side of things and some whose works are more lyrical and tonal, so you have the whole spectrum of what’s going on in new classical music today.”
Other avenues have long been available for the edgier side of the classical world, though they tend to be tucked into programs that showcase more traditional works. Conrad Tao’s “Spoonful,” commissioned in 2020 by the Iris Orchestra in honor of Memphis’ bicentennial, was a New Music tour de force, pivoting from cacophony to explosions of orchestral texture to delicate piano lines in a heartbeat and even a sample of Charley Patton’s “A Spoonful Blues.” It lost none of its power by being sandwiched between works by Haydn and Brahms. And many such experimental works continue to percolate out of the classical world.
A more hybrid approach was concocted by David Collins’ Frog Squad, when they premiered his arrangements of the music of Erik Satie at The Green Room in 2021. Turning the composer’s original sparse arrangements into showcases for a more jazz-oriented octet represented a perfect balance between accessibility and “out” music, as the players took solos with the abandon of a free jazz group, even as they remained grounded in the composer’s classic works. This year, they’re set to release a similar treatment of Horace Silver’s music and an album of all originals.
Misterioso Africano (Photo: Courtesy Khari Wynn)
Frog Squad’s bassist, Khari Wynn, is a virtuoso in his own right. While best known as one of Public Enemy’s go-to guitarists, his real passion is a kind of Afrofuturism first pioneered by his hero, Sun Ra, yet channeled through a thousand other influences he’s absorbed over the years as he plays under the name Misterioso Africano, or a few years back, The Energy Disciples.
But there’s plenty of experimentation coming from less-schooled musicians as well. Goner Records has long waxed enthusiastic for musical risk-takers, and in recent years they’ve brought many edge-walking groups to the city, from the surrealist big band sounds of Fred Lane to the free improvisational textures of Wrest to Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra. The latter wowed music fans gathered at Off the Walls Arts last year, part of that gallery space’s increased staging of “out” musical events under its roof.
The label has also played host to some of the city’s more rock-adjacent groups who test the boundaries of conventional musical ideas through combinations of electronic music and guitar noise, from Aquarian Blood to Nots to Optic Sink, who all offer servings of noise and synth madness to variations on the big beat of rock. Yet other, less-punk groups are dipping their toes into strange waters at the same time. Salo Pallini’s new independently released album advises it be filed under “Progressive Latin Space Country,” and while that obscures the heavy dollop of rock in their sound, it does capture their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. They’ll be playing a record release show on January 20th at — you guessed it — The Green Room.
Some of these artists are also featured in the annual Memphis Concrète festival of electronic and experimental music, also centered in and around Crosstown, set to resume this June after some Covid-related setbacks.
IMAKEMADBEATS at Continuum Fest with Delara Hashemi (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Meanwhile, more hip-hop-adjacent sounds are percolating through the city. Unapologetic, who have long celebrated strangeness and vulnerability in their edgy hip-hop productions, now have a dedicated studio space, and producer IMAKEMADBEATS is enthused about the possibilities for combining traditional beat production with live players free to create new textures in a more spacious setting. “We’re all electronic/hip-hop-based producers who play instruments,” says IMAKEMADBEATS. “Finally having the kind of space that allows us to easily incorporate live instrumentation into our music is a game changer here. Because our minds are decades-trained to think of warping sounds in ways never done traditionally, but now we can combine that with traditional instruments in a space sonically set up to present it in an amazing way. Our producer engineers aren’t just band recording people or rap recording people. They are that and everything in between. We just needed space. Now it’s time to take off.”
MonoNeon and Daru Jones (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Of course, the kitchen-sink approach has also been perfected by MonoNeon, whose transpositions of Cardi B tirades into carefully pitched bass solos and whose jams in his YouTube offerings may be the most experimental music of all. While he often records at home, he’s also branched out with other producers, including his work with Unapologetic. Like most of these artists, he’s appeared at The Green Room and/or Crosstown Theater multiple times. So it is that we must give credit where credit is due, as Crosstown Arts sits squarely at the center of the avant-garde revival. As Amy Schaftlein, co-host of the Sonosphere podcast and radio show, notes, “Jenny Davis has been doing such an amazing job of getting great artists to come to Crosstown Theater and The Green Room. She’s continued in that vein of ‘Let’s try to get folks to Memphis who may not hit us on their tour.’” Often recruiting acts on their way to or from Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, Davis has brought a steady stream of experimental and jazz artists to town, the likes of which have not been seen in decades. This March and April alone, Crosstown will feature Deepstaria Enigmatica, Makaya McCraven, SpiralPhonics, The Bad Plus + Marc Ribot and the Jazz-Bins, Tarta Relena, Ami Dang, and Xiu Xiu.
All of which is making the city a richer, more connected community. As Davis says, “I like the challenge of hearing something new. And [it] can be jarring at first. But then if you go back a second time, you start to see the patterns and it’s like learning a new language. I think that keeps things interesting.”
After her father passed away, Katrina Perdue began patching a pair of his old jeans, the last pair he’d worn. Though she had knit and sewn a bit before, this was her first time mending a piece of clothing, but the act of repairing loved and worn clothes was therapeutic in itself. “It’s kinda slowing down and having something that’s calm and meditative to do in a busy world,” she says. “I found that it was a very healing process and it really helped me through that grief.”
So, after that first pair of jeans, Perdue turned to mending as often as she could, wanting to bring new life to the materials around her — from her childhood blankie to her daughter’s stuffed bunny to a chair from her partner’s studio. Before long, Perdue broadened her scope beyond the personal. In her exhibit at Crosstown Arts, Perdue has gathered some of these items that she’s mended — some personal, like her blankie, and some not so personal, like a mended plastic bucket found among curb-side trash.
“Part of it is really studying the way something’s made and thinking about how, even though there are these huge factories and these machines, it still requires a human hand to piece those things together, and we are so removed from it,” Perdue says. “In the last 20 years, fast fashion has become a thing and we are now seeing the result of that in how much waste there is — these literal mountains of waste landfills.”
With this in mind, the act of mending, for Perdue, is more than just extending the life of an object; it’s honoring it, too, by not treating it simply as disposable among our material and consumerist abundance. Perdue even uses bright, colorful stitching to highlight this idea. “It brings attention to the wear instead of trying to hide it,” she says. “That’s a metaphor for life, thinking about sharing our struggles, sharing things that are difficult — you know, our scars that are a part of our story.”
Have you ever watched a movie or witnessed a painting and wondered how on earth did someone come up with that? Well, this Thursday, you can peek into the processes of Crosstown Arts’ fall-session resident artists: Nelson Gutierrez, Angelo Madsen Minax, and R Jason Rawlings.
Each of these artists will present a 20-minute talk, followed by a Q&A session. “You’ll learn about the artists’ priorities, how they got where they are,” says artist residency manager Mary Jo Karimnia. “It’s not a comprehensive talk about their practice; it’s more like a window into their practice. The talks are always fascinating. I never get tired of learning how artists approach things.”
“All of the artists bring something unique to the table,” Karimnia says, before adding that this cohort of three-month residents happens to have a local flair. Both visual artist Nelson Gutierrez and filmmaker R Jason Rawlings are from Memphis, and filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax, a current Guggenheim Fellow, taught at University of Memphis back in the day, though he now resides in Connecticut. The fourth resident, Brittney Boyd Bullock, is also a local and will give her artist talk in the spring.
The talks will also be an opportunity to learn more about Crosstown Arts’ residency program, Karimnia says. “[The residency] can be a really concentrated time to work on your practice. … We want people from elsewhere to learn about the great stuff that’s happening in Memphis, and we also want the people who are working in Memphis to be able to network with the greater arts world.”
In addition to this speaking engagement, Minax and Rawlings will screen some of their work on November 9th, with yet another Q&A to follow. “I think [the two films] will complement each other well,” Karimnia says. “They’re sort of a different type of filmmaking.”
Rawlings’ short film “Natives” follows a traditional narrative structure, telling the story of a claims adjuster returning home to New Orleans two years after Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, Minax’s feature North by Current is much more experimental and personal, exploring the inconclusive death of his young niece in Michigan. “It’s a lot of found footage and interviews,” Karimnia says. “It’s very aesthetically beautiful, but also not what you expect.”
Applications for Crosstown Arts’ 2023 residencies are now closed, and the next application period will open May 15th for residencies in 2024.
Crosstown Arts Resident Artist Talk, The Green Room at Crosstown Arts, Thursday, November 3, 6 p.m., free.
Film Screening by Resident Artists, Crosstown Theater, Wednesday, November 9, 6:30 p.m., free.
There’s a lot of laughter when Stephan Crump and I catch up on the phone, partly because long ago we played together in Big Ass Truck. Even then, both of us set our sights beyond Memphis. “For me, at that point, I knew that I had to be a musician, and I knew that I was going to finish school and move to New York,” he says of those days. His reason for making a hometown stop now has less to do with our old combo than what he found when he moved on to Gotham. For New York is where he’s truly carved out his own niche in the free jazz/improvisational music scene, and where he’s lived, composed, taught, and performed for nearly thirty years.
On Saturday, he’ll leave a little of what he’s learned along the way in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. And, as he confesses, the possibility of old friends and family distracting him is daunting. “It’s quite rare that I play Memphis. And it’s pretty intense, because there are just so many more dynamics at play for me personally. I could talk about going straight into and through the fear! I’m just recognizing that there’s all this stuff, that’s all wonderful and a blessing, but is a lot to deal with. It’s more distracting.”
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, diving straight into and through the fear is part of the do-or-die attitude that Crump and many other players embrace while improvising in the most unstructured settings. But while he’s often pegged with the free jazz/improv tag, Crump actually plays in a variety of ways across many projects, as he explains below.
Saturday’s show will focus mainly on his latest album, a selection of works for solo bass dubbed Rocket Love, and, as revealed below, Crump is relishing the chance to bring all the sonic possibilities of the instrument to the fore on his current six-city tour.
Memphis Flyer: In your description of making the new record on Bandcamp, you say making it sustained you through the first year of the pandemic, “materially and spiritually.” It sounds like that was a real life-saver.
Stephan Crump: It was, man. There were so many blessings in that period. We have two boys who are now 17 and 13. My wife’s a high school history teacher, so she was teaching all day on Zoom, and I was helping the boys manage online school. I started teaching music online, but having the album project was absolutely a lifeline as far as creativity. Having my Bandcamp fans support an aspect of it made it feel like a community was behind it. A modest community, but it still felt good. So that was great. Also, I had a home studio, and I could have just planned a record and made it and been done with it, but, as I usually do with albums, whether it’s at home or another studio, I wanted to do a different process with this and really take my time and build that community, and not feel like it needed to be a certain number of pieces. It could just be open-ended. I could experiment. It was a really good mode.
How exactly were you interacting with your supporters?
It was through Bandcamp. They have a subscription-based thing that you can do. I wrote my subscribers updates and they would get two pieces a month: one cover or a standard, and an original piece. Then I also did a series of Facebook live concerts from my studio. Not only would I broadcast those to supporters and fans, from all parts of the world, I had all my microphones set up and I was recording it properly in my studio. So some pieces on Rocket Love were just me doing them in my studio in various moments, but some were recorded during those concerts. And that brought a different energy. Facebook Live is not like being in the same space with people, of course, but it’s still a performance and still creates a good kind of tension and energy to engage with. You do have to step up to a certain mode of performance that galvanizes your focus and energy. People would write comments, and I’d stop between tunes to respond. It felt good to me. I needed that.
Musically, it’s just you playing solo, right?
All of the pieces are just me on bass, except for one cool thing which was an experiment that worked out. The record is book-ended by this two-part piece called “Lament.” Those two pieces happened on the last two days of 2020. I wanted to try something different, so I said, “Let me do a piece channeling all my feelings about this year, all the complexities of it. And do a short piece where, instead of just one bass I’ll do three, with overdubs.” But on the first track, which I did on December 30th, I said, “Let me play one of the voices and then immediately play the second one and immediately play the third one, but without listening to any of it, with no headphones.” So I wasn’t listening to what I had played previously.
The next day, I did the same thing, but I listened as I overdubbed. And that’s “Lament, Part II.” I could hear what I played before. But on “Lament, Part I,’ I wasn’t. I love both pieces, but there’s something that is transcendent about the first one. It was such a learning experience because I realized I was playing along with what I had played before, because I was in the same zone, and I had just done it. Emotionally and spiritually, I was playing along with it. But the part of my brain that gets engaged when I’m listening and playing along, and interacting with something, was not a factor. So it remained on a less cerebral plane. It remained on a more spiritual plane.
I feel like it’s just a reminder to me that that’s where the real shit is anyway. That’s what we’re trying to get to when we are listening and interacting. That experimental way of doing it was just a more direct thing. Technically, if you were to analyze it harmonically and melodically, obviously there are things that never would have happened had I been listening and playing. But there’s something that gets communicated that’s so right, that whatever details on the surface that would be deemed to be dissonant or wrong or whatever, are totally irrelevant. That’s just surface information.
The stuff that we think music is about — notes and tones and chords and melodies and harmonic relationships — all of that is just the surface, the crust, of what it is. The real stuff that you need to make any of that worthwhile is living underneath.
Borderlands Trio, featuring Crump, Kris Davis, and Eric McPherson (Photo courtesy Stephan Crump)
Free jazz or improv is your stock in trade, isn’t it?
Yeah, like my project called the Borderlands Trio. We have two albums, and the latest one is a double CD called Wandersphere. It’s a piano trio, all spontaneously composed. It’s always evolving and always grooving. Playing that way is also a big thing that I teach. I love bringing people into that zone and clarifying for them how to be in that mode.
I also compose. I write pieces for my band, and for improvising ensembles. And that’s a whole other thing. How do you create an environment with a distinctive, powerful DNA that maintains its identity while also inviting people in to express themselves, and be as expansive as possible within that?
You write that you had planned the album even before the pandemic hit.
I had been thinking about it the year before, then in January I put the plan together, and February was when I did the initial outreach. I announced the process and planned to start in March. And then…[laughs].
I completed the year. I did it from March to March, which was my original plan. I completed it and had two albums worth of material, but this plan was never about being constrained by good album length. It was about using another forum to see what that brings, and not think about an album until afterwards. So I finished in March, but only later that spring or summer did I decide to curate an album from that whole body of work. And that’s what Rocket Love is.
The bass has so many sonic possibilities, yet it’s rare to be able to focus on that instrument alone.
When you’re talking about the acoustic bass, there’s so much to the sound of it that doesn’t speak through a traditional ensemble. There’s a lot of it you can’t explore and get to as a player, when you’re exclusively playing in those contexts. So it’s something I’ve been exploring in some of my other, less traditional ensembles, to try to make space for some of the expressiveness of the bass. Playing solo is an extreme version of that. You get to decide what your sculpture is, what you present to the audience. You can decide, this piece is going to be about texture, about sound. The next piece might be about melody, or groove. You can make those decisions, and by limiting yourself to the one instrument, you’re also expanding the palette of what’s viable as a piece of art.
Stephan Crump plays The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Saturday, October 15, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $20 advance/$10 student | $25 day of the show.
