Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Josh Ronsen <>]

Years ago, I posted a few short sentences about the John Cage / Joseph Jarman 
collaboration that happened in Chicago in 1965. There wasn't much info in the 
jazz book I had read. On the Artforum webpage today, the cover story was a 
memorial on Jarman written by composer Roscoe Mitchell in which he mentioned 
the collaboration. That got me thinking, and since my long ago post, someone 
did the research for me, for us.

-Josh Ronsen
in Austin, Texas
http://ronsen.org


A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
By George E. Lewis

Starting from page 128:

In late 1965, through the efforts of students and faculty at the University 
of Chicago, a “Contemporary Music Society” began organizing concerts with 
AACM musicians in university concert halls and other campus spaces, including 
the Reynolds Club, the university’s student union, which offered space for 
student events free of charge. Joseph Jarman was helping the society to 
organize the concerts, as well as Friday-night jam sessions with people like 
Andrew Hill, Jack DeJohnette, Richard Abrams, and Rafael Garrett. By this 
time, as Leonard Jones said in an interview, “a lot of black people lived in 
Hyde Park.” “That was who we were trying to attract.” In addition, the 
university connection led to larger audiences that were more diverse in terms 
of race, class, age, and other demographic factors.

At the Harper Theater in Hyde Park on November 26 and 27, 1965, the society 
organized a midnight concert collaboration between Joseph Jarman, several of 
the university students, and composer-performer John Cage. The concert was 
controversial, to say the least, judging from Down Beat reviewer Pete 
Welding’s review of the event—the first major review of an AACM musician to 
appear in a national publication. “Cage did a concert at Mandel Hall,” Jarman 
recalled, “and [the students] asked if he would be interested to collaborate 
with me, to do a concert at Harper Theater. I had read ‘Silence’ and I had 
collected his music. I liked it. So I felt really honored to do that.” As the 
concert program announced, “To our knowledge, this is the first time that Mr. 
Cage has performed a work with a group of jazz musicians.” The program 
affirmed Jarman’s “great artistic and conceptual indebtedness” to Cage, and 
recounted a meeting between Jarman and Cage at a festival of contemporary 
music at which Jarman asked the composer if he would perform with the Jarman 
group.

At the concert, the Jarman Quintet performed first, with Fred Anderson, Bill 
Brimfield, Charles Clark, and Arthur Reed, followed by the Cage-Jarman 
collaboration, titled “Imperfections in a Given Space,” which featured Cage 
himself performing electronic sounds, Ellis Bishop on trumpet, Bob Hodge on 
bass, and a young U of C graduate student, Doug Mitchell, on percussion. 
According to the Down Beat reviewer, “Cage sent a variety of electronic 
stimuli through a complex of electronic amplification equipment (the sound of 
an eraser on paper, ot of water being swallowed, when amplified a thousand 
times, makes for an eerie listening experience indeed!), to which the Jarman 
group was to respond musically.

In our interview, Jarman’s account of Cage's demeanor was congruent with 
other contemporaneous descriptions of the composer’s gentle way of 
interacting. “He just said [imitates], ‘I’m setting up this… [pause] … Do as 
you feel.’ [Laughs.] And he just started playing. And because of my 
experience with the AACM concerts, I just started playing, and moved all over 
and blended horns.” Cage’s own account of the encounter published years later 
in an interview with frequent interlocutor Richard Kostelanetz, was 
considerably different from Jarman’s. There, Cage framed himself as something 
as a teacher for a group of unnamed “black musicians.” Moreover, despite his 
professed lack of interest in improvisation (reiterated later in the 
interview), Cage somehow managed to find ways to critique the musicians’ 
performance practice—at their request. “And I said to them that one of the 
troubles was that when they got loud, they all got loud. And they said, ‘How 
could we change that?’ They were willing to change.”

While one could well imagine that the AACM musicians were open to learning 
from Cage, the notion that these musicians would have learned about space and 
silence from him is at varience with the recorded evidence of AACM 
improvisations from the period. Moreover, asa Cage scholar Rebecca Y. Kim has 
noted in an unpublished paper, the program notes for the Cage-Jarman event 
employed “a language of historical synchronicity, identifying two parallel 
movements in new music” – hardly an attitude that one might attribute to a 
mentor-student relationship. In any event, the Down Beat review, which had no 
particular criticism of Cage’s work per se, criticized Jarman and his 
musicians for their supposed failure to respond to Cage's sounds. The 
reviewer found that the group created “little in the way of actual 
interaction with what Cage was generating; it was as though the group were 
merely sending into the air its own unrelated signals at the same time as the 
electronic ones were being generated, with little or no regard to ordering or 
organizing the combined sounds into something meaningful.” Most of the rest 
of the review was given over to musings on how collective improvisation, 
while requiring true group empathy, was unfortunately attracting “more than 
its share of outright charlatans.” These evaluations aside, assuming the 
reviewer’s descriptions reflected something of the reality of the event, the 
approach of the Jarman group as it is described here seemed to represent well 
the Cageian practice and aesthetic of indeterminacy.

For Jarman, “it was really beautiful, and I wish I had recorded it. It was 
awesome.” The reviewer’s take was considerably less sanguine. Punning on the 
collective work’s title, he found that the concert’s “manifest imperfections 
and inconclusive nature led to boredom and sterility,” producing “aridity and 
lifelessness.” Jarman recalls that at least one other very experienced 
listener shared the reviewer’s opinion to some extent. “Down Beat didn’t like 
it, and my mother didn’t like it either. She said [imitates]: ‘Joseph, if you 
ever play with that man again, don’t tell me, please. I love you, I love your 
concerts, I come to all of them, but if you’re going to play with him, don’t 
tell me,’ ‘Yes, ma’am.’

Leonard Jones came to the performance with something of the Zen beginner’s 
mind: “At the time, I had no idea of the musical importance of John Cage. His 
name kept cropping up at that time in this area of avant-garde or 
experimental music. But Joseph has always been exotic, and Cage was exotic 
just like the Japanese dancer that Joseph would have performances with in the 
‘60s. I remember that Cage sat on the stage next to a table, and he had a 
microphone attached to his throat. He sat there and he gargled water, and 
Joseph played the saxophone. That’s the one and only time that I’ve seen John 
Cage live. I remember Charles [Clark] being there, but other than that I 
don’t remember anybody else. At the time, it seemed to me that lot of it was 
conceptual, and I was pretty new to music: I didn’t start playing the bass 
until I was twenty years old.”

“Nobody liked it, and that made it even better,” Jarman recalled. “Right 
after that, they actually invited me to go up to Ann Arbor to the ONCE 
Festival. That was a beautiful experience.”