In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
What might Carter and Parker’s collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
TEST is a collective creative improvising quartet based out of the NYC Underground (figuratively and literally). Their street-hardened, spatial Jazz is riotous and intense: is also makes us think about collective organization, and different ideas of responsibility and liberty.
For day one of Ultra-red’s project, the investigation will take up protocols for listening to the sound of freedom composed and facilitated by George E. Lewis.
Percussion used to explore the social construction of space
Performances of compositions by Jean-Luc Guionnet and others, with Julia Letitia Scott, Iain Campbell F-W, Neil Davidson, Fritz Welch, Liene Rozite, Emilia Beatriz.
A tour with John Butcher and Akio Suzuki that set out to allow the audience to experience (and to listen to) the enviroment around them in different way.