Ezz-thetics a column by Four for Abdul: Seeking a language for a very particular music In May 2024, the IICSI (International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation) presented the call for papers for its annual symposium held concurrently with the Guelph Jazz Festival. The subject topic for the coming session was liner notes, a subject of keen interest to me. I previously devoted the Ezz-thetics column in Issue 83, June 2023, to their early significance for me as well as a variety of recent samples. I jumped at the opportunity to talk about writing liner notes, wanting, really, to scrutinize my own practice in public. The liner note has also been something of a dwindling species, under assault from successive shifts in media since the CD first typically hid them in a booklet under shrink wrap, before they largely disappeared in the era of the download. In its golden age, the LP had once revealed its argument to the potential consumer on the back of the sleeve, floating in a netherworld between advertisement and essay. Fortunately, the LP has come back, buttressed by CD loyalists, and there is again expansive space for the art, whether or not it gets used. For me, the significance of liner notes goes back to my absorption in the music some 60 years ago, when the most penetrating writing on jazz that I could find were liner notes – by writers as different as Nat Hentoff, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Gunther Schuller, Martin Williams, A.B Spellman, and Don Heckman. Sometimes Cecil Taylor wrote his own (part prose poem, part poem) and Charles Mingus once had his psychiatrist write one for him. It’s a tradition carried on by several writers today. One of my ideals was the late poet Paul Haines: his omni-directional, surreal narratives created uncanny resonances with their subjects. What can a liner note do? Provide background – biographical, musicological, situational, compositional, sociological, historical. I know its apparent function is to explain and pitch. I try to treat it as a form of aesthetic advocacy, not so much to assert what it means, but to reach toward how does it mean. In my most ambitious and foolhardy moments, I like to think that a liner note might match some of the interior logic and methodology of a music, through repetition, displacement, surprise, and rhythm, not to create an imitation but a parallel discourse. I rarely try it, but that’s what Paul Haines excelled at. When I thought about this, I began to examine my own practice. What was I doing? I picked examples from a distinct set of notes that I had written for four recordings by Abdul Moimême, a Lisbon-based guitarist and friend. The notes stood out originally for me because they were distinct and brief, also because they had developed their own processes from the beginning. From the start I had developed a method – listen once, as closely as possible; the second time I listened, I would write simultaneously to the length of the music. It’s as close to “improvising” as I want to get in print. Writing first time through, listening to wholly unknown ground, might interest some as an experiment, but it’s not much use as an account. When you improvise with people or watch them improvising, you can almost see what’s coming; it’s far less the case with a recording.
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I met Abdul Moimême in Lisbon in 2010, with fellow writer Kurt Gottschalk, both of us there to review the annual Jazz em Agosto festival. At a dinner at Abdul’s home, he introduced me and a couple of other guests to the music of Diatribes, the Swiss minimalist duo of D'incise & Cyril Bondi with whom he played and recorded, also their label, Insub, and some of Abdul’s own works for prepared or augmented guitar, an instrument he had already highly evolved, and one that’s been evolving and mutating ever since, sometimes under metal sheets. The music was something of a revelation to me. Though I had been a keen auditor to a range of improvisatory practices, there was something distinct in the sonic palette, its openness to silence and isolated events, and there was also the elastic space that characterized Abdul’s own work, conditioned in part, perhaps, by his day job as a municipal architect. I also felt an immediate resonance with my own past labors, working under the lids of grand pianos with mallets, foil, cardboard, vibrating plastic tape reels, the uncollated galleys of books about Salvador Dali and Aleister Crowley, junior school alphabet cards, etc., from 1966 to 1985. We discussed music online and soon became fast friends. I reviewed some of his works as they appeared over the next year and offered to contribute a liner note to any of his forthcoming recordings that might have me. He accepted, though he was particularly concerned about length, needing a single panel of the Creative Sources CD jacket format for Fabula, a single piece recorded in concert by a quartet with Axel Dörner, trumpet; Ernesto Rodrigues viola; and Ricardo Guerreiro, computer. Something happened in the process for that first liner note, something different from the 65 or so notes I’d written up until then (it’s close to 140 now), inspired in part by Abdul’s alter ego, his architect’s description of the black-box theatre in which the concert had taken place. In a sense, the performance was as much about the space as the musical dialogue and I responded with my own equivalent architecture, the sentence, writing a single 307-word sentence employing every technique I could muster to avoid run-on. Since then, I’ve written three more liner notes for his work, highly distinct from anything else I’ve done in the form, in part perhaps homages to my late friend Paul Haines, the bravest and most creative liner note author I’ve ever read (and who wisely only wrote about 15 of them, and who, like Abdul, seemed to work suspended between two muses become one in the middle). I found myself developing a semi-improvisatory technique for these “briefs,” that I’ve since employed for the four notes for Abdul. I listen as intently as possible to the recording once, somehow jotting down a couple of notes. When next I listen to the music, I aim to write as close to a complete draft in the length the recording lasts, associating, thematizing. I will edit and correct later, adding occasional detail like a record producer in a studio, but the note is as directly connected to the immediate experience of the recording as possible. Examining the liner notes now, each aims for a continuum, embodied in very long sentences. The first, for Fabula (2012) and the latest, Transition Zone (2021) So far, I’ve only otherwise applied this timed method to the liner note for Cecil Taylor’s Respiration, a 2022 Fundacja Słuchaj release of a 1968 solo concert in Warsaw; a direct reflection and celebration of a revolutionary time. For the Guelph presentation, I narrowed my view to two pieces – a solo concert at Portugal’s National Pantheon, Exosphere, and an eponymous recording of the trio called Dissection Room. One is an invocation of a place and a history, the other a narrative. Because I was generally satisfied with the results of the recording-timed method, I thought of it immediately when the ICISI conference subject was announced.
(for Exosphere: Abdul Moimême at the Pantheon) Abdul Moimême's first CDs bore the titles Nekhephthu and Mekhaanu, suggesting place names in an imaginary geography, and suiting perfectly those alien soundscapes. The metal-on-metal scrapings called up the shunting of cars and locomotives in a railroad yard, and yet it was a railroad yard in space, its ground an illusion, its boundary a dark absence, the shapes of its transport sometimes bright and streamlined to hint at the interplanetary. Heard in the Santa Engrácia Church (that is, Portugal's National Pantheon), this music is established in a particular locus, both mythic and familiar, short steps from the creaks and groans of the Lisbon docks. There is a sense in which Moimême's guitar music is at once epic and abstract, physical and metaphysical, the reimagined instrument itself become projectile (resembling as well an aerial view of a ship), but both its launching mechanism and target are here subject to inquiry, the former seemingly less knowable owing to the very scale and ambition of its temporary locus, its grandiloquent site, this circular celebration of itself as slingshot and landing base, from its stony compass and silence, the reverberant sound hang of its room, the river viewed from its balcony flowing westward as only a deception before cultural currents run equally North and South and East, that sound no immurement but a delay of centuries, remains of heroes gathered for codification, until things can be heard clearly, as if a late Richard Diebenkorn glimpsed from the air is once again a farmer's field, a Mark Tobey the street map of a town in which you cannot get anywhere from everywhere, less true than its opposite, in which the thin light of Newfoundland, the cod of Alpha Centauri and the mix tapes of Africa jostle for space in the leafy, shadowed marketplace beyond, the Pantheon's economy class, the Feira da Ladra, (a thieves' market, yes, but site, too, of semantic dispute). As the Pantheon's sonic architecture engages with Moimême's guitar and his particularly subtle and detailed use of feedback, together they create speculative star maps in sound. The Pantheon, centuries in the making, is here a monument to its own sonic deconstruction, a place so resonant that everything becomes a metaphor for itself, a potential site for a reading of Antonio Lobo Antunes' As Naus (The Ships, translated into English as Return of the Caravels), in which the long-gone sailing ships return to port, filled with centuries of seamen, spices, colonial victims, precious metals, calumny and decay. It might be chanted by the leftovers of politicians or aptly sung by the remains of the sainted Amália Rodrigues. Was that concluding explosion a large one heard from far away, or a small one, very close? –Stuart Broomer
Commentary on Exosphere: Abdul Moimeme’s solo concert in Portugal’s national Pantheon is akin to a Derek Bailey solo concert in Westminster Abbey, something which, to my knowledge, couldn’t be imagined. My note to Exosphere approaches a concert through its cultural circumstances and markers, the exploratory character of Portuguese history, global exploration and colonial conquest, and the way those things come to roost – in the shape of Abdul’s self-designed guitar, the presence of two guitars on a table top under a metal sheet, the Tagus River right in front of the Pantheon from which the vessels of colonialism were launched. The liner note attempts, in a sense, all the context that might be missed by a listener unacquainted with the physical and cultural situation. Centuries in the making, the Pantheon is a national burial site that permitted entry to its first woman, almost ideally the sainted fado singer Amalia Rodrigues, her remains moved there in 2000 after popular demand. There’s the mark of colonial blowback in the grassy flea market that opens on the Pantheon grounds on weekends, trinkets, scarves and videotapes laid out on blankets. There’s the fictional description of the novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes of the boats – the Caravels returning centuries later to Lisbon from its far-flung third world colonies, bringing poverty, disease and every misery previously inflicted on the colonized world. Not precisely a description of the music, the note is an unconscious inventory of all the cultural markers that surround the physical location and improvisation as well, its radical inclusiveness and soaring freedom among great forces. The concert takes place in a hyper-resonant space, but the space and the music are as culturally resonant as they are sonically resonant. It seems obvious, I understood why I improvised the text, but I hadn’t realized the physical continuity of all the materials as analogous to the music itself. It's an homage to Abdul Moimeme, the acute observer of cultures in movement, as well as the speculative guitarist, roles here that are ultimately indivisible.
A Late Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day (for Dissection Room, eponymous CD of trio with Albert Cirera and Alvaro Rosso [Creative Sources 549CD]) Amid a reserved popping of balloons and the squeak of gurney wheels, The Body of Music is wheeled into the Dissection Room and lifted unceremoniously to the one available slab. It’s been busy today and, between the regular day and night shifts, a twilight crew has been added. Abdul, Albert and Alvaro, enlisted by the arbitrary whim of the alphabet, inspire either hope or fear among the regulars, following a random distribution. Will their methods speed things up, get clearer results, avoid the usual putrefaction and liquification brought on by the unseemly heat? Or will they simply make everything somehow worse? Things begin in an orderly fashion ... the sound of a body bag being unzipped will suggest the gourd güiro or perhaps more precisely the metal ratcheting of the güira. Accumulated gas in the abdominal cavity bursts forth and hisses with the first incision, and then things are underway. The three work methodically, evidently independent of one another, yet somehow weaving a shroud of harmonics, a transparent veil through which one another’s activities pass discreetly (heirs to the works of Messrs. Bailey and Parker, circa 1975), demonstrating the weirdly near fraternal twinship of bass and saxophone under these circumstances, amid the topographical incisions of prepared electric guitar. Beginning around the 28-minute mark (of the 53-minute hour), something happens in the room – a blackout, perhaps from an electrical short, or something vaguely fractal in the room’s geometry. Other materials quietly intrude, some falling from above. Parts left over from previous dissections (Body of Knowledge, Body of Science) enter the scene, building to a climax from the 35th minute on. The nature of the project, lightly concealed, begins to reveal itself. It is no mere dissection. The Drs. Frankenstein and Barnard and the Comte de Lautréamont observe from above, nodding approvingly at the components appearing on the slab (jewels, a sewing machine, binoculars, an umbrella) when the sudden jolt of electricity brings sputters and groans to the corpse and smiles to the assembled mouths. The Body of Music, now reanimated, is returned to the gurney, struggling to sit up as Alvaro, Albert and Abdul start to wheel it, the three moving quickly in the hope that a certain speed will dissuade the body from tipping the gurney before they get it outside. Once clear of the building, the attendants head briskly on a long, paved path, out finally to a verdant field beyond, where migrant workers harvest pulses for the coming feast. –Stuart Broomer, May 2018
Commentary on A Late Song for Saint Cecelia’s Day With Dissection Room, I wrote my first liner note as micro-fiction: the band’s name and eponymous CD title seemed to require it. There’s something very fitting about the band name in the way its members interact with concentrated efficiency and spare, precise gestures. The rest, the body of music, the sounds invoking specific instruments, the operating room as theatre of history, theatre of cruelty, seemed to dance on the name. The assemblage of a band, the assemblage of a collective improvisation, give rise to the narrative, including Frankenstein’s monster. There’s also an homage to the great liner note writer Bob Dylan. I don’t want to belabor something intended as playful. When I hit on the word “pulses,” I knew it was finished.
The Other Two Liner Notes (for Fabula with Axel Dörner, Ernesto Rodrigues and Ricardo Guerreiro [Creative Source 220CD]) Fabula It was Plato who wrote, “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city will tremble,” but then, Plato lived, by our standards, in a very small city, one that – with its distinguished plays, music and mysteries – we might readily confuse with a theatre, a concert hall, a place of worship, a site less lived-in than designated for ritualized performances, a place that might mark borderlines, whether between the old mode and the new, the sacred and profane, the place before and after bells, a place isolated within a larger building, like a minimalist’s large-scale appropriation of Russian nesting dolls, like this performance in the town of Montemor-o-Novo some 300 miles south of Montemor-o-Velho, that is, “the old main hill,” and some hundreds of miles north-west from that other room in the midst of which has been placed (box-like) a cathedral, a kind of Tennessee jar (“round it was, upon a hill”), but here in the Cine-Theatre Curvo-Semedo the performance is so intimate the theatre itself must be excluded and a new relationship installed, the audience instead gathered on stage with the musicians and the curtain then drawn to create a “black box” effect, the ceiling exceedingly high, the air cold, the bells distant, the fabula unfolding from the instruments in a way that can be neither translated nor precisely misunderstood (various secret passages present themselves; connections, routings are magnified: the trumpet’s brass tubes are moving granaries; the wound wires of guitar and viola grow train-tracks in space; minutiae mask themselves and slither seductively in computer circuitry), but later, when the fabula reaches its inevitable conclusion, we all – audience, musicians, and shared air alike – discover the black box and the folds of its cloth walls no longer there, and that we can’t leave, that we can never find ourselves outside of them. –Stuart Broomer, March 2012
(for Transition Zone (with Fred Lonberg-Holm and Carlos Santos) [Creative Sources 712CD]) Happy Ending ... someplace he had just wandered into and now he wondered not just why or how or even when, but who, who was this someone occupied as much as the one occupying, in there some self or not-self going on, or two of one and/or the other, like some seared seer in some sad seersucker wandered into a euphemism like WASHROOM or RESTROOM in a lost and futile decade's diner (the Future Diner the neon had declared, whether promissory note or veiled threat), no washing or resting initially in mind, but then transfixed by the circulating signs of the stall door message handles turned in every case to occupied (or some semblance thereof, like occupied [some message in numbers, a puzzle mathematical] or occupied [promotion of said diner's food] or occupied [state of being resulting from said food, leaving one or it or here the past tense of a noun] or occupied [some great bird not just extinct but now misspelled]), but somehow slipped away to stand in the recent past of an exterior doorway, backlit by the diner's neon or the desert sun, the air a threatened veil, dust motes en regalia ... that the digestion was a metaphor, some puzzle of hearing, some auditory hallucination, like a watery echo of an essential but incomprehensible warning, muffling up through the narrow passages of nothingness pinched between the trio’s machinery, whether promise or admonition or domination, some subset let loose, some variation on the solid state, like promise or admonition or just admonition, even domination... (the real song realized not on the jukebox’s recurrent medley but in the artfully sustained creak of the wooden screen door’s rusted hinges and muted thud-click when arriving back in place, the ring of hammered metal from the adjoining service station, the rush of fuel from the gas pump outside, the terrible memory of things as yet unhappened, nothing so hollow as the sound of a mridangam or all that rubbing, a dead letter office of lost sounds finding new life) ... or some misbegotten pilgrim’s perplexed arrival at a tripe festival later rendered stranger by learning a little further down the road the festival subject had been apple pie, then graced with the realization that if tripe were an occasion for commemoration and celebration he truly was among the blessed, truly he...by the stream of...sat...to read...”More than the absence of hope, it was the dreamclang – hirsute, bloody, vituperative – that made the sounds of the diner so refreshing.” –Stuart Broomer
On the day of the paper’s presentation ... As the presentation unfolded, the time allotted to speakers was shrinking noticeably. To compress my talk, I was reading with increasing speed, jumping back and forth between reading the liner notes, the brief composed commentaries and a spontaneous spoken commentary on the act of writing the notes themselves, echoing the original process of writing the notes in which I was trying to match a spontaneous text to the various musics’ unfolding structures, their “disc-course”. It was in the midst of this compound process of “talking through” and “reading through” that I gradually realized I was learning about the notes the same way I had learned about the musics, through a kind of anxiety-thinking (Salvador Dali’s gift to surrealism, the “paranoiac critical method,” perhaps resembles this: “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena” [http://www.salvadordali.com/art-2/]. I was realizing that I had unconsciously gotten close to the compound reactions going on in a work of improvised music. I knew things about the music and the notes in this back and forth, this double-talk of readings and talkings, that I hadn’t known before and as I reflected on the process, I realized that something of the same thing had occasionally arisen in the writing of other liner notes in which I would have sudden, abstracted descriptive passages occur to me in the actually compound experience of writing as listening and listening as writing. I realized as the talk sped up that I was learning things from the very haste with which I was moving between liner note and commentary (A friend, present at the talk, described the talk to me later as “the liner note of liner notes,” an insight into the multiplying doubleness of my process that I was not initially conscious of doing but which was coming into awareness in the telling. I only now understand something that I think he must have meant: that I was creating the kind of compound experience of “writing about” something passing, in passing, just as I had written the liner notes). Why write (pace, Sartre)? One writes about something, initially, to understand; one writes about that writing to understand how that works, too, and the relationships between the two. The process has gradually come to affect the way I review music, much of it improvised – that I will now (or “then”) just listen a couple of times, then write in a kind of “real time” listening, so that I am spontaneously reacting to the music, not quite for the first time, but likely the second or third “first time”. I don’t think some improvised music particularly gives itself up wholly to multiple casual listenings, but rather to “stressed listening,” the mind assembling at the pace of the music. There lies the special rush of the improvised concert. You really can only hear it “once” unless it’s recorded, and then it’s reheard (even repeatedly) as if for the first time. We listen repeatedly to improvised music in part to confirm what we had learned or experienced the first time. This kind of enforced listening recognizes the process of listening to complex improvised music as a unique experience. Just as every listener’s listening is a unique event, further listenings may too be unique experiences, things heard differently, the improvisation a kind of liquid Rorschach test (I have a standard set around here someplace). Rereading these liner notes reveals (has revealed) to me the extent to which each reflects the specific character of the music under question. Each is an “authentic” (at least in the sense of being time-restricted) reflection of a music’s distinctive relationships, however personal (improvised music of the highest order may be a Rorschach-type test, but it’s more like a Pollock, a Twombly or a Bosch), though each has also now imprinted (found) a particular individual structure, a specific and personal assemblage that in turn conditions future hearings. Some reflection like this might underly the course of the liner notes, beginning with an imagined description of a space (Fabula), moving to a compounded history of a place (Exosphere), progressing to a narrative of reanimation (Dissection Room) to a dissection of words themselves in the invented and deformed texts of the locking mechanisms of imagined washroom stalls (Transition Zone). I write this to emphasize that these liner notes, these word-things on which I now comment, hopefully touch on the music, but their reality is a specific listening to the music. Thus, in retrospect, while I retain the personalized accounts and associations of these listenings, the musics in question retain their mobility, their malleability, their freshness, their ability to form new shapes and rich associations for future listeners, whether it’s the chill air of Fabula’s Black Box theatre, the resonant dome and stone of the Pantheon, the insistent clarity of the Dissection Room, or the continuously interactive electric clang of Transition Zone.
Links: Fabula: https://creativesources.bandcamp.com/album/fabula Exosphere: https://abdulmoimeme.bandcamp.com/album/exosphere-abdul-moim-me-at-the-pantheon Dissection Room: https://creativesources.bandcamp.com/album/dissection-room Transition Zone: https://fredlonbergholm.bandcamp.com/album/transition-zone Other writings on Abdul Moimême: Stuart Broomer; “Ezz-thetics”: Lisbon: 10 Sound Portraits (Creative Sources 421 CD): Paul Acquaro: Abdul Moimême: Sound Sculptor / Sonic Architect: My thanks to the IICSI for providing the opportunity to write and present this; to Abdul Moimême and the other musicians involved in these recordings for inspiring the writing. A previous Guelph Symposium also provided the basis for another Ezz-thetics column (Issue 61, December 2017), on contrasting modes of free improvisation and their parallels in the prose of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
© 2025 Stuart Broomer
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