Keeping Time, dir. Darol Olu Kae, 2023

Introduction

Darol Olu Kae’s Keeping Time (2023) follows Mekala Session, the young drummer and new bandleader of the revitalized Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (the Ark), the legendary avant-garde jazz ensemble founded by Horace Tapscott. As Session tries to gather the members of The Ark to prepare for a potential gig, he learns how to bridge the gaps between older and newer members of the band, listen to and find the stories and histories of the band and its members, and figure out ways to care for those who show up.

To keep time is the role of the drummer, who holds the beat for the ensemble to follow. It is this keeping time that allows each member to create their improvisational lines of flight and what enables them to return home. To keep time also points to the holding of time, the remembering of it. The past provides its own rhythm to follow, leave, and return to. To keep time also gestures to that “other dimension,” where Fumi Okiji tells us that a jazz piece continues to play for a future generation who can pick up the song where it was left.

In Keeping Time, filmmaker Darol Olu Kae’s mixture of media formats (16mm, 35mm, and digital) with archival footage and home movies follows the same beat as the jazz ensemble where the past offers a guidepost to return to after we improvise our own lines. Kae describes the archive as a “storage house of feeling,” a site that retains not only knowledge but the “core” and "guttural." As Kae says of his film, I ran from it and was still in it (2020), the archive is an “interplay between intimate, personal moments and broader collective experiences.”

The ensemble’s communal interdependence, trust in memory, and celebration of experimentation shape the formal and political imaginary of Keeping Time and this research project.

Research

Keeping Time offers an opportunity to return, once more, to the jazz ensemble we have studied in “Passing Through: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble” (2015) and “Horace Tapscott: A Griot” (2017). With this project, we take on a new lens: sound. More than the musical performance—an event that never occurs in Keeping Time—sound points to the practices and imaginaries of jazz. How does jazz build its chords? What are its rhythms? How does each performer find and express their sound? And how do each of these accumulate in multiplicity while remaining in concert? These questions speak beyond that of performance to the very gathering and even imagining of the ensemble. The sociality, politics, history, and alterity of the ensemble come into new perspective through its sound.

We take as a guide Keeping Time’s composer, James William Blades, who describes his practice as “conveying a non-linear sense of sonics, playing around with combinations, depths, tempos, and making it feel like you’re in a moment surrounded.” To be surrounded, here, is to be enmeshed in complexity and difference that nevertheless holds together while it holds those who hear it. It is a mode of transmission and relationality—a place to speak across and speak with. How does the archive come to speak and guide when heard? What lessons are found in the incomplete and dusty music charts that provide only pieces of the sound that was desired? What form does a space take from the stories of who once sat on a stool? The ensemble accumulates sounds of the past, vocalizations of needs and wants, and pausing silences and listenings.

For this study, we thus consider the sonic topography of the ensemble, the polychoral and polyrhythmic flows that define not only its sound but its fugitive practices of gathering and remembering. In Keeping Time, the garage, van, front porch, and boxes of music charts and piles of cassettes become communal spaces of memory and possibility through the promise of playing together. These transmissions amidst time and generations surround the ensemble providing care, and most crucially, preparing it for its work.

Theoretical Contexts

In our own preparations for thinking through and with Keeping Time, Darol Olu Kae, and Josslyn Luckett, we have been guided by the following conceptual frameworks:

●      Generosity in the Garage: Improvisation and the Communal

●      The Polyrhythmic: Sound and Its Haptics

●      “We Are Missing Some Charts”: Legacy and Archival Temporalities

●      Jazz as Critique

 
GENEROSITY IN THE GARAGE: IMPROVISATION AND THE COMMUNAL

Rodriguez Fielder, Elizabeth. The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.

Rose, Simon. Relational Improvisation: Music, Dance and Contemporary Art. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Haley Elizabeth Anderson in Conversation with Eric Lavallée. “Interview: Haley Elizabeth Anderson – Tendaberry”[CC1] Ion Cinema. February 26, 2024. https://www.ioncinema.com/interviews/interview-haley-elizabeth-anderson-tendaberry

Thomas (T.) Jean Lax and Lilia Rocio Taboada, eds. Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces. New York: The Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum, 2022.

Feige, Daniel Martin. “Ontology of Improvisation and Jazz.” In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts, eds. Bertinetto, Alessandro and Ruta, Marcello, 60-72. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Hamilton, Andy. “Improvisation as Spontaneous Creation versus ‘Making Do.’” In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts, eds. Bertinetto, Alessandro and Ruta, Marcello, 171-186. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Benson, Bruce Ellis. “Improvisational Phronesis.” In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts, eds. Bertinetto, Alessandro and Ruta, Marcello, 259-270. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Williams, James Gordon. Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space. University Press of Mississippi, 2021.

Luckett, Josslyn, “Rebellion Musics: The Reel Multiracial Jazz Archive Way Out West” in Rebel Musics, Vol 2: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Making Music, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2020

Lewis, Eric. Intents and Purposes: Philosophy and the Aesthetics of Improvisation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Siemerling, Winfried. “Social Aesthetics and Transcultural Improvisation: Wayde Compton and the Performance of Black Time.” In Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, eds. Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, 255-267. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Brackett, David. “The Social Aesthetics of Swing in the 1940s: Or the Distribution of the Non-sensible. In Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, eds. Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, 113-134. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

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DeFrantz, Thomas F. “Improvising Social Exchange: African American Social Dance.” In Critical Improvisational Studies: Volume 1, eds. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 309-338. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

McMullen, Tracy. “The Improvisate.” In Critical Improvisational Studies: Volume 1, eds. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 115-127. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Ed Pavlić, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listerners. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Natanangara, Al “Intuition and Education: The Catch 22 of Improv.” In Media Res, “liquid blackness presents: Passing Through,” curated by liquid blackness. September 15, 2015. https://mediacommons.org/imr/2015/09/11/tbd

Teague, Jessica E. “Black Sonic Space and the Stereophonic Poetics of Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time.” Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 22-39.

Fischlin, Daniel, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz. The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation. Duke university press, 2013.                    

Moten, Fred. “The Subprime and the Beautiful.” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 237-245.

Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. “Politics surrounded.” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 4 (2011): 985-988.

Anderson, Iain. This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Isoadri, Steven L. The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.

Tapscott, Horace. Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott. Duke University Press, 2001.

 

THE POLYRHYTHMIC: SOUND AND ITS HAPTICS

Gotrich, Lars and Sheldon Pearce. “New Music Friday: The best albums out Oct. 4.” NPR. October 4, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/1203595450/new-music-friday-october-4-2024

“Riffs on Spiritual Metadata,” In Media Res, “Reflections on Music Video as Black Art: Claiming the B-Side,” November 1, 2023. https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/riffs-spiritual-metadata.

Hendricks, Ashley. “Rhythmic Refrains: Counting Time through Duke Ellington and Fred Waller’s Jazz Shorts.” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 7, no. 2 (October 1, 2023): 28–45.

Navin Brooks, Andrew. “Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercommons.” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 6 (2020): 25-45.

Nicola, Cezara. “A Question of the Sonic: Problematizing Afrofuturism and Its Relation to Black Sound, with a Case Study of DJ Steloolive’s Performance Art.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 37, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 337–49.

Restivo, Angelo. “The Sound of Color/ The Color of Sound: The Aesthetics of Passing Through,” liquid blackness 2, no. 5 (2015)

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ebeab0729212022c4b5b91d/t/5ee4bd1b06a84020c0455b17/1592048924345/LB5Restivo.pdf

Walley, Jonathan. “Identity Crisis: Experimental Film and Artistic Expansion.” October, no. 137 (July 1, 2011): 23–50.

Lock, Graham and Murray, David, ed. The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Dougherty, Carissa Kowalski. “The Coloring of Jazz: Race and Record Cover Design in American Jazz, 1950 to 1970.” Design Issues 23, no. 1 (2007): 47-60.

Maurice, Alice. ""Cinema at Its Source": Synchronizing Race and Sound in the Early Talkies." Camera Obscura 17, no. 1 (2002): 1-71.

O'Meally, Robert. “Jazz albums as art: Some reflections.” International review of African American art, 14, no. 3 (1997): 38-47.

 

“WE ARE MISSING SOME CHARTS”: LEGACY AND ARCHIVAL TEMPORALITIES

Okello, Wilson Kwamogi. “Bone-Deep Engagement: Black Methodological Intonations and Ethical Response-Making to Black Living.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, September 14, 2024, 1–11.

Neal, Mark Anthony. Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive. NYU Press, 2022.

Collier, Zakiya, and Tonia Sutherland. “Witnessing, Testimony, and Transformation as Genres of Black Archival Practice.” Black Scholar 52, no. 2 (April 1, 2022): 7–15.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Suny Press, 2021. (1981)

Raengo, Alessandra. “The Jurisgenerativity of a Liquid Praxis: A Conversation with John Akomfrah.” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 (2021): 127-148.

Linscott, Charles, P. “Secret Histories and Visual Riffs, or, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Flying Lotus Go to the Movies.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 145-150.

Mueller, Darren. “Black Studies in the Digital Crawlspace.” Invisible Culture, no. 31 (January 1, 2020): 1–13.

Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York University Press, 2019.

Juarez, Kristin. “Passing Through, the Black Cinematheque, and the Networks of Larry Clark.” In Media Res, “liquid blackness presents: Passing Through,” curated by liquid blackness. September 17, 2015. https://mediacommons.org/imr/2015/09/09/passing-through-black-cinematheque-and-networks-larry-clark

Raengo, Alessandra. “A Withdrawing Object.” In Media Res, “liquid blackness presents: Passing Through,” curated by liquid blackness. September 18, 2015. https://mediacommons.org/imr/2015/09/18/withdrawing-object

Desideri, Valentina, and Stefano Harney. “A conspiracy without a plot.” The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, edited by Jean-Paul Martinon. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 125-135.

James Tobias, Sync: Stylistic of Hieroglyphic Time. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010

Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177-218.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

 

JAZZ AS CRITIQUE

Leal, Jonathan. Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop. Duke University Press, 2023.

DiPiero, Dan. Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life. University of Michigan Press, 2022.

O’Meally, Robert. Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture. Columbia University Press, 2022.

Reed, Anthony. Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. Duke University Press, 2020. 

Okiji, Fumi. Jazz as critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford University Press, 2018.

Heble, Ajay and Rob Wallace, eds. People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

O'Meally, Robert G., ed. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. Columbia University Press, 1998.