Well, I don't know John Tilbury, and I can only base my very abbreviatee response on the comments posted at the freejazz.org site / his May '03 WIRE letter. I (think I) also understand that he's not really trying to present a fully cogent argument here, and instead is finding a way to restore some of the comments that were stricken from the original profile that ran in the WIRE. Consequently, I give some slack.

That said, there is a central contradiction to a statement such as:

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No art, no music exists outside of ideology. Tilbury is in fact saying that his own music and associated performance choices -- who, what, when, where, how and why, and including the freedom NOT to preform, which is a significant freedom -- can contribute to the expression of, in this case, an oppositional ideology. Yet he seems to want to maintain the integrity and potency of artistic intent at the same time that he acknowledges its very real limits.

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How do we make the best, most humane use of our experiential materials, materials which choose us as much as we choose them? How do we contribute? How do we make culture our own? Is violence inevitable in this process? (My own answer is: no.) If -- and this is a HUGE if for me -- there is some aesthetic reality to terrorist acts, with all their inherent symbolism, they challenge us in so many ways. I firmly believe aesthetic questions are not only of interest to artists, but to everyone living "in the world". Tilbury has clearly made up his mind on how to do make his life as a citizen and his life as an artist come together, and I respect his decision. Yet I also reject his portrayal of America and his reduction of the American consciousness. For I also believe he also has an obligation to investigate and analyze the historical and cultural assumptions informing his own position. For example, it's all fine and well to issue condemnations of American Imperialism and make rhetorical comparisons to the Third Reich (repugnant to me, less for its meaning that for being a rather easy and cheap trope; such comparisons are not to be made lightly, at the risk of minimizing the horror that was Nazi Germany), but what of the, in some parts of the UK still-treasured, contributions of British Empire to the current geopolitical situation? And what about "stateless" agencies such as multinational corporations and terrorist cells? I don't really want to go on because the complexity of it all can induce apathy as much as the ignorance and apologist attitude Tilbury ascribes to the general American populace.

In the 1930's, American "Objectivist" poet George Oppen was very active in the American Communist Party, like many of his colleagues in the arts. But Oppen, who only wanted to improve the lot of his the impoverished and disenfranchised, refused to follow the dictates of social realism and in fact refused to use his (artistic) work to further the aims of the party. Instead, he chose to be an educator, to contribute as a laborer. AS a result, he did not write any verse for more than 20 years. He was afraid of a kind of pollution, and of the kind of abuse of his words by the Communist Party and the same time that he seemed to recognize that, organizational, they had the greatest potential of effecting real social change in this country. In other words, we seems to have understood all the many compromises impinging upon his conduct (aren't all deals somehow devilish?) and tried only to make the best of his and his family's situation. I would point out this example to Oppen -- his case being much more fully discussed in the introductory material to his COLLECTED POEMS, newly issued by New Directions -- as one of quintessential, and thus perhaps multiply misguided through its good intentions, American pragmatism. If "we" do draw from a national character, I feel that pragmatism is one of those resources we use in the shaping of our individual characters. Understand it, and you may understand "us" a little better.

Those 2 Tilbury quotes would be:

-- Furthermore, in making music there we are not ‘informing and enlightening the peoples of the USA’; we are in fact providing them with an alibi, a temporary escape, a haven, from the harsh realities of the consequences of the ideology in which they are subsumed. Just as the Orchestras who played Beethoven in the Third Reich did. --

and

-- I’m afraid Art cannot be trusted, can all too easily fall into the wrong hands. I agree with W.G. Sebald: “Art is a way of laundering money.” --

When I talked with Evan Parker a couple of weeks ago, the subject of this article came up. He mentioned that a few weeks earlier he had been in conversation with Tilbury and committed an apaprent faux pas by referring rather matter-of-factly to the "fall of communism". For this, he received quite a glare.

Tilbury's about 67 years old, I think. He obviously has a deep commitment to his chosen ism and is unlikely to change his mind at this point; he's too "invested" in it. I think this is generally the case with most people--you rarely see someone do a philosophical about face in middle age and beyond. He's probably unwilling to give up the dream at this point and that may well include the refusla to, as others might see it, face the facts. Now personally, I don't have the slightest shred of sympathy for Communism, but I can easily understand it's having had a strong appeal among well-intentioned people of Tilbury's age (I think it gets less and less retroactively justifiable as one goes further down the age scale, as evidence to the contrary mounted well past the point of ignorability). One of the central reasons that I didn't mind putting forward his views as clearly as possible is that, having met and spent several days with the guy, I'm very sure, as they say, that his heart is in the right place--he's a genuinely good, serious and lovely person. Do I think his solution is wrong? Yes, even tragically so. But it's not, I don't think, a solution ground in cynicism or the desire to control others (as,imo. is the case in much political dogma, left and right).

Re: Al's three questions. The first, I don't know; I never heard him take on that question.

He doesn't expect Americnas to all of a sudden leave there jobs and country; same with citizens of England.

He has nothing against individual Americans. He knows I greatly enjoy and, to some small degree, understand his music. I think it may have been more an issue to WIRE's editors that an American was writing this British icon's profile, but...

O, thanks for the clarification. Parker's going to be in town soon enough and I had intended on broaching the Tilbury subject with him when we speak. Maybe not.

Joe, at the very least you've made me want to check more into Oppen - his work and stance. I think what Brian has said about over-the-hillers settling in applies to Oppen, if I read you right.

Silly question, but you refer to Oppen as an "objectivist." Isn't this the same philosophy spearheaded by Ayn Rand (yikes?)?

not much time to enter into this discussion, leaving for London in a couple of hours, but the even bigger question you don't ask, Al, is why release some of your highest-profile projects on an American label?

I can't say I have too much interest in political debates, I'm mostly focused on making great records. FWIW, Tilbury makes a lot more sense when you talk to him in person about these things directly than when just reading his position statements, not that I agree with him.

one more comment: if Tilbury was a rich man, I think he'd definitely stop performing in the UK, and he might stop playing altogether. he performs in the UK as a means to help support himself and his wife (not that he makes much, but he needs what he does make), and he's well aware of any innate contradictions therein. he wants me to donate his fee for Duos for Doris to a Cuban organization, and I'm going to attempt to talk him out of that tomorrow (not that you can talk him out of much, as I've learned).

Jon, yeah, I had meant to ask that question but wrongly felt that the distribution bullet in the list would take care of it.

Why try to talk him out of those donations? From the little I've read, the Cuban thing is something he obviously feels very strongly about.

Al -- no real connection I know of between Rand's Objectivism and the Objectivist poets like Oppen, Reznikoff, Zukofsky and Niedecker. Check it out:

http://www.uapress.ua.edu/authors/duplessis_99.html

Not quite Rand's "My philosophy, in essence, is man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

Elsewhere... I can respond only to what Tilbury has said and written, not to the man himself. I certainly would not require of him an interior revolution of his beliefs. But I do find it interesting that some of the artists themselves whose work we most cherish for its adventurousness and its probing of fundamental assumptions about time, space, community, consciousness, art as experience vs. art as commodity can be still be moored to a rather strict and sometimes exclusive system of values. In Oppen's case, we have an artist who engaged a split in his own energies, both in theory and in practice. And he went much further into complete boycott and self-censorship than Tilbury is indicating he is willing to go, and without having, as I understand it, nearly as much invested in "the movement" as Tilbury seems to. And that to me is very interesting. I read Oppen's experience now as a narrative about man animated by doubt, a man so needing to be sure of the principles of his work that the manner in which he convinced himself of its worth was via deny himself both the pleasure and the pain of the work itself, by abandoning in fear of its almost certain misappropriation and divorce from his agency. Yet Oppen would not have been the poet he became any other way. If I were in his place, I would not have made the same choices he made.

What's my point here? Life live as you would make a work of art? I think what that ultimately means is always seeing that you always have the ability to make a decision. Take the paradigm that says the work is always greater than the lives that are involved in its making and revise it to emphasize a more symbiotic relationship between art and "life"? Byond the sounds, now. Think again of Tilbury in AMM, not so much as a pianist but as a citizen in a virtual community, sustained really only for the duration of the performance he shares with his colleagues. If AMM performances aim to give us a model for an "improved" way of life, even if only by suggesting new ways to think about the worth of the decisions we make, however small, and the collective worth of (not necessarily harmonious) group activity, then I have to expect that this worth has to exist prior to the work's existence, and to endure long after the performance is over. If you would challenge your audience and demand a concession from them in exchange for their entry into your world, you are obligated also to communicate to them that you yourself have answered and continue to answer just such a challenge, and that it has likewise exacted something from you.

Al, I mostly just want to make sure he knows what I'm paying him before he chooses to donate it all. I'd personally much rather see it go to him directly, since as I'd said before, he could certainly use it.

Although I've not yet had the opportunity to read the article, only the letter as published in the following issue. There was a comment Tilbury made that I think makes the distinction clearer between performing in the US, and living/working in the UK or using American writers/distributors/labels.

"By submitting oneself to the formal procedure of entering the US, by presenting oneself and one's passport to American custom officials for acceptance and approval one is conferring a status of legitimacy, of normality, on a situation which is abnormal."

Although he later goes on to talk about performing to concert audiences, this sentence seems to present a slightly different argument.

As a musician booked to play at a festival, Tilbury's entrance through US customs and immigration would be purely in his capacity as a performer - his length of stay restricted to what the US consider reasonable in order to complete the engagements - his activities restricted to the work specified on the visa, etc. etc. His only other option would be to enter as a tourist and work illegally.

In that sense, at the point of entry, his only function in terms of the INS is someone coming temporarily to the US to work, or more specifically, someone coming temporarily to the US to entertain.

This is very different from any kind of performer/audience or personal relationship he might have with American or British audiences. It is in this sense that entrance to the US would confer legitimacy _more_ than a UK performance. In the UK the most he'd do to legitimise any government is pay taxes on the earnings from the engagement. Performing is merely one of many functions which make up his activity, and the activities of any other resident musicians in this country, it's not the condition on which we remain as individuals. The same for musicians who live and work in the US.

When you cross into the borders of another country, the purpose of your visit (work, study, tourism) is your only purpose as an individual as far as the country, and more specifically INS records, are concerned, along with whatever potential risk to the economy or security of that country you might cause during your visit. This is somewhat different to the idea that the performance itself maintains an aspect of normality, although that is clearly spelled out later on in the letter.

Nat -- thanks. You've delineated a very important distinction here, one intimately related to ideas of citizenship and its responsibilites. It would not only be foolhardy but personally endagering in some way for Tilbury, as a "foreigner", to make the comments he has made on American soil, which is also an indictment of the currrent political state of emergency being trasformed into business as usual. But I still have to wonder if paying taxes to a government that then uses those tax dollars to -- among other things, of course -- participate in military actions to which you are opposed is not worse, by which I mean more complicit, than the capitulation to immigration procedures that (may be) at issue here. For the legitimacy Tilbury is really talking about the passge you've noted is only an apparent one.

Then again, I'm struck by something I read recently, in which the author (Slavoj Zizek) claimed that perhaps what is neede today is not a variation on "Socialism with a human face" -- an ideological milk of magnesia that does not assuage the real brutality of the system being sustained but only sofens its apperances -- but "the freedom fighter with the inhuman face" -- the functional meaning of which I'll still trying to puzzle out, but I do believe it has to do with the seeming violence of principled action, or the necessary revolutionary quality of any principled action...

Joe, the distinction I'd make between travelling and paying taxes, is there is a very real threat to personal liberty if you default on your tax returns - imprisonment. A large number of people openly defaulting (i.e. the poll tax protests/riots) may effect a change, and it's a long process if you fight it out in the courts, but still there's a serious risk of some sort of criminal liability. There's no such criminal implication in not travelling. As with many things, there's a fine balance between the effect any action may have with the risks associated with it.

Well, I wouldn't say if Evan Parker refers to the “fall of communism” in the presence of Tilbury, and Tilbury flinched, we should assume that Tilbury was a big fan of the Soviet Empire, keeps copies of Mao’s little red book under his pillow, and maintains a small collection of Kim Jong-il buttons. You have a pianist apparently schooled in Frankfurt school critical theory, at least according to his notes on the Hands of Carravaggio, familiar with the works of Marcuse, who wrote a critique of Soviet Marxism and escaped fascist Germany, basically told of having an “ism”. We all have an "ism," the biggest one of all—capitalism, which writes our brains everyday, whether we know it or not.

I have no doubt why Tilbury found Parker’s comment irritating. It’s the prevailing common sense, which means of course highly ideologically interpellated. You can’t, of course, have a “fall of communism” if communism never existed. If it was always totalitarianism and state capitalism rather than the required progression from feudalism through capitalism. This is third grade Karl Marx. Tilbury is at least past high school on that score. Then of course, no Marxist these days outside of a few orthodox boneheads who can’t give up the word “peasant” ever talk much about “workers of the world uniting” these days nor about “manifestoes.” How, so, 19th century it all would be. No, most on the left have graduated to somewhat different terms—critiques of empire, hegemony, globalization, etc., terms that fit the current realities a bit better.

Joe wrote: “For example, it's all fine and well to issue condemnations of American Imperialism and make rhetorical comparisons to the Third Reich (repugnant to me, less for its meaning that for being a rather easy and cheap trope; such comparisons are not to be made lightly, at the risk of minimizing the horror that was Nazi Germany).”

Or you could say “maximizing the horror that’s becoming the US under the current administration” which is very much starting to emulate Mussolini’s corporatism, which is where I would depart from Tilbury.

It’s apparently getting rather difficult for Americans (I’m one) to look clearly at what their country is doing in the name of “good.” Joe rejects Tilbury’s “portrayal of America” and thinks he needs to look at history better. Well what sort of history do we have in the US that has been repeated throughout the present? Colonialism--of a very vicious and expansive variety. It started with the conquest and displacement of Native Americans and it continues to the present. For the last fifty years the tally is 22 countries invaded or bombed by the US. This sort of thing is obvious to Tilbury and to most of the rest of the world. Is it obvious to the rest of us? Do we forget it, forget to take responsibility for it? Is this why we question Tilbury's politics? It's all fine and good to say America is a nice place and has many good qualities. To most of the world, it's an impressive behemoth that delivers a lot more orders than good will. It was like this even before Dubya.

Tilbury is an improviser. Live performances are everything, and once the desire for the live gig is wetted by the recording, than his “no” has a little more meaning. Besides, if he sells his CDs though a non-American label, like his own, they’ll be imported anyway. I think the question is moot. As for the second question, let’s not misunderstand which superpower is running the planet these days. There was a coalition of two: Bush and his lap dog, who would have been whistling a different tune if Clinton were in office and wasn’t interested in invading Iraq. What happens when you don’t say “how high” when the master says “jump?” Ask France.

On the other hand, if Tilbury wants to send his money to help Cuba after 40 years of American economic embargo, more power to him. He’s doing the right thing when so few do so little. As for his boycott, you make a statement in anyway that you can. If you’re a producer you can decide not to sell at least part of your product. If you’re a consumer you can refuse to buy. Just think of it this way. Tilbury is imposing "sanctions" on the US. Now he's not so naive as to think the economic currency of his move will be stronger than the moral currency.

Anyone notice how Tilbury sounds a lot like Hans Haacke in his statements? Now it's far more appalling I suppose to imagine the Nazis listening to classical performances in between exterminations of Jews than to imagine the victims of cluster bombs in Baghdad hospitals (or perhaps the 19 low-level tortured prisoners at Guantanamo who tried to commit suicide) while we indifferent others spin some MIMEO. But since indifference IS the "banality of evil," it can only be a difference in degree but not one of kind.

"An American Fascist seeking power would not proclaim that he is a fascist. Fascism always camouflages its plans and purposes.... Any fascist attempt made to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of "super-patriotism" and "super-Americanism". Fascist leaders are neither stupid nor naive. They know that they must hand out a line that "sells". Huey Long is said to have remarked that if Fascism came to America it would be on a program of "Americanism".--U.S. Army (1945)

Bill -- you are, of course, correct in pointing out that there is no American innocence here, and I can even semi-accept a likening of the current administration to Italian fascism. BTW, your closing quote leads me to ask if you have ever read Nat. West's A COOL MILLION, a novel that imagines just the kind of Amercian "fascism", and, in fact, imagines democracy as a necessary precondition for fascism, in wonderfully grotesque but subtle ways...

Look, I have no illusions about our (your and mine) "elected representatives", their agendas, the perception others around the world have of them. And, as those two great Americans Exene Cervenka and John Doe sang way back in '84 ("I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts") --

I am guilty of murder / of innocent men, innocent women, innocent children / thousands of 'em / My planes, my guns, my money, my soldiers / my blood on my hands / It's all my fault!

Sentimentalized? Yes. Containing some truth? Absolutely.

But none of us are blameless. Hasn't Britain's pursuit of empire and it reductions of free subjects all over the world been at least as equally extensive and at least as equally damaging -- we owe the current "Middle East" to Britain, don't we, as well as the instability that threatens the world in India and Pakistan -- as the imperial intiatives we can attribute to the US? Sure, sure, the US is the superpower today, and we're doing it "now" and that was "then"... Such comparisons to me smack of an arms race mentality anyway. Moral evil in any quantity is still moral evil. And the more we try to hunt down these culprits, the more he find ourselves at our own doorstep. That's another way of saying eveil is the ultimate banal, I guess, an that it requires a much more disciplined and complex response than non-indifference

I know you're not advocating "merely" that. But I also don't think Americans are particularly remarkbale in that we have to overcome indifference, a sort of ingrained willingness to say "I don't want to know about it", an attachment to stasis, in order to confront these problems. But confrontation can take many forms, even unexpected ones.

What I am trying to confront in my discussion here is why there is a sense that, as an artist, one's work cannot amount to a variety of just such confrontation. Sure, there are real people out there with real problems. The donation of profits to good causes is not something with which I can argue, though the fact tha Jon knows he could really use the money, and perhaps could put it to an even greater good does give me pause. But why does Tilbury, and why did Oppen, come to the conclusion that the only workbale solution requires sanctions, even "censoring", an engagement of forces one wishes to oppose on their chosen field of battle? To me, that is a sort of indifference to the work itself. the hopeful obverse of pointing out that one's work always exceeds one's intentions and can be mis-appropriated is that we cannot predict what good may come from the thoughts and felings the work provokes in those who interact with it. And maybe what's really needed in these rather bleak times is a leap of the imagination, especially the kind of sensitive imagination both Oppen (a figure of such conflict for me: I agree and disagree with him simultaneously!) and Tilbury evince in the work they have chosen to do -- to enact.

update: I spoke to Tilbury on the phone this morning, and I'll be paying him for Duos for Doris directly. he plans to keep at least part of it, possibly donating part to the Cuban charity he'd earmarked.

more interestingly, it seems as if the feedback he's received from the Wire piece/letter to the editor has caused him to rethink his position a bit, and he seems a touch open to coming back to the US at some point. his criterion now is "if I think my presence there will make a difference". I pointed him to this discussion, and told him he should chime in, we'll see.

Joe, I'm delighted you mentioned Oppen in your discussion, one of my dearest friends. (You'll find me in the footnotes coupla times in the NEW COLLECTED). His stance vis-a-vis poetry and politics was shared by Carl Rakosi (also included under the Objectivist rubric...neither felt comfortable with it), and Carl too ceased to write for decades (also a Communist), then resumed, and still publishes as he approaches his 100th birthday in November.