23 january 2025 Where’s the queer lineage?
I am continually at a loss of a lineage that I belong to. Certain days I feel like an unstoppable trailblazer that happened to exist in the world just as my perspective gained public acknowledgement, and most days I feel alone in the world. I know I’m not the only one.
I should probably discuss this separately, but I see a clear distinction between music and the music industry (pool into that all you can think of: broligarchs, bushy jazzheads, new music gatekeepers etc.). Music being the thing that evokes passion and leads individuals (like me) to go head first into an uncertain reality where the thing that matters first and foremost is to be able to live in a world where music is central. The music industry being that business vessel that allows for the former to happen. The infrastructure I sometimes call it. The music industry is in many ways a popularity contest where trailblazers are praised (albeit mostly after their passing) but only insofar that praise only falls on those who are widely understood. And to understand something one has to understand the context in which they exist.
We’ve seen some of the true icons of jazz pass away lately, and it seems as though their audience is all but ready to move on. In fact, ones passing is a powerful story to be utilized as promotion, it is so much easier to call someone great when they’re no longer around to hear it (or tarnish their own legacy by being assholes). So what happens in a cultural landscape with an unsatiable hunger for “something new” and where death is the ultimate pr stunt? The audience (and the machinery that tells the audience what they want) get to work in finding the artist that can hold up the legacy. I refuse to think that superficial identity markers are not in play here. This way certain characters can latch themselves on to a lineage, a lineage that isn’t available to others.
I’m missing a speculative work of sci-fi that imagines a person with confusing gender expressions to be the Bird or Coltrane or Miles in jazz history. I don’t think I’ll ever write it, but I wonder… would we see a jazz audience (and again, the machinery that tells them what they want) that celebrated queerness like they celebrate African roots? These characters exist in culture, just not jazz (I’d really love to be wrong about this!). Perhaps they’d be ridiculed to an equal or higher degree to how they are admired, but isn’t this also true for the greats in jazz? Didn’t Miles go far in ridiculing Satchmo’s appearance? (yes, this is a larger civil rights context). Wasn’t the same Armstrong so often patronized by the very gatekeepers that presented him to an audience?
So what does one do when the lineage is missing? The task becomes to create culture, and that can only happen with a high degree of failure. Maybe, just maybe, with persistency, can it become something for others to build on. I know I’m not alone in this quest, but where are you all?
A significant part of queer becoming is that you don’t know where you’ll land (until you’re dead). It’s not about the result, it’s about the process and the questions that fuell it. If I have one criticism of the “straight community” (I’m using this facetiously) it is a lack of imagination, and in worst cases a lack of space.
22 january 2025 Doubt
Sit down, turn off every notification on every device, set a timer. My way of finding focus is akin to a sensory deprivation experience where I’m not interacting with anyone but myself for the duration of a day. Instinct is to know what happened in the night, see who’s looking in my direction on social media and perhaps even check the stock market. Not that I’m heavily invested, more that I’m looking for an answer out there rather than within.
My reality is daunting.
How am I supposed to create something from nothing, especially something I don’t know what is yet. The key (for me at least) is to stop entirely thinking about the result and give nourishment to the process. The questions that fuel the process, find a problem that I can solve.
Find a collaborator that I can trust.
Wouln’t it be wonderful to work with an ensemble for Venice? Or ever for that matter? Venice could be the portal that opens this opportunity, but it can also be the one that closes it. I could come across as an imitator, I am intimidated by the experience of my friends in new music whose work points towards what that Biennale has commonly been. I’m afraid of setting myself up for a public humiliation if I write for an ensemble for the first time for the Venice Music Biennale.
There it is again. Doubt. Hello, we’ve met before. In fact: you are an integral part of finding confidence. You, my friend Doubt, is my conversation partner. You are manipulative and you know me far too well for comfort, but it is when I can stand my ground in conversations with you that I find real confidence in what I am about to embark on.
Unanswered questions is nothing new. They are problems that hold potential.
I keep asking myself what queerness has to do with anything. It does and it doesn’t. It’s feeling increasingly like a narrow term that I have to latch everything onto. But I have a more complex experience than just that.
Here’s an idea, like many of my fruitful ideas it’s informed by conversations with Brynjar Bandlien: Make it about the search for resonance. Sympathetic strings suspended throughout a space can be like the safe resonance of a community.
Do you remember when you started going to gay bars? Back in the day when gay bars were populated by homosexuals and straight people had no interest in going there (with a few exceptions of course)? I thought: We all share an experience here. There’s something that ties us together, even if I can hardly find anyone to talk to.
15 january 2025
Questions are actionable and lead to discoveries one can own. Demands like "you should just think before you speak" describe an end not what you have to do to get there. Questions can lead to realizations.
It's fascinating how streifenjunko seemingly performs str8ness. The sonic
explorations are beautiful, but their position and demeanor and looks seem to
assume that they are showing something, not posing questions we can come to realizations from. (Am i saying that right? Or am I imposing conclusions that belong elsewhere)
Their positions on stage, the intolerably boring side-by-side-playing-into-a-mic
position, couple with their hard-to-watch
outfits certainly made it alienating to me. "Who are these people to show me what they've figured out when they clearly haven't questioned much about their
appearance " -kind of mindset. Ican't help but seeing this as jazz dudes performing as jazz dudes, perpetuating the culture that felt such an urge to depart from. Perhaps this is my privilege talking- life is
hard for working musicians, especially the ones with kids. Why can't Ijust take it at face value? Because it feels oppressive somehow.
Was it straight culture? Ican't tell, because who other to define queer culture than the
queens producing culture. Icertainly don't want to sign up as a gatekeeper.