VoF 004: Milford Graves
A walking meditation inside the late polymath's Lower East Side gallery show.
i. the body is the main key
When I received an email asking me to review an art show by the late free jazz drummer and visual artist Milford Graves, it set off a series of cognitive flares within me, the most pressing of which was a sort of mystical connection I had to the man and his work through different touchpoints in my life, all seeming to tell me “yes, go towards this.”
While I had not known Milford personally, without knowing it I had been constantly surrounded by his disciples in my travels through New York City. Drummers, avant-garde musicians, jazz aficionados, sound designers, artists, and intellectuals drawn to Milford’s energy like a geomagnetic field. In the mid-aughts, I briefly studied at New York University under the tutelage of drummer Tony Moreno; a disciple of the late, great Elvin Jones. In a biography on Moreno’s website, he claims to have met Jones at the tender age of 11 and to have received his first set of drums from the post-bop era icon. Jones had been a major influence on the drumming of Milford Graves (or perhaps it is better viewed as symbiosis), a fact that becomes crystal clear upon comparing videos of the two icons drumming. Jones had played with John Coltrane, Graves had played Coltrane’s funeral, a most memorable and incredibly spiritual session in the enigmatic Albert Ayler Quartet. Watching them both, there is a certain childlike whimsy to their distinctive styles, never naivety, only childlike in the total freedom of their playing, whimsical in mastery. There is a book I reference often when thinking of this topic, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryū Suzuki, its preface stating, “in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." Listening to records like Percussion Ensemble, you can feel the possibilities, the heartbeat, the lifelines pumping behind the rhythm.
Another association that increased this exhibit’s metaphysical pull was in Graves’s ongoing study of sound therapy. Prior to visiting Fridman for this exhibit, I had purchased Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives by musician and sound healing practitioner Lavender Suarez. I had purchased it on a whim for my now fiancé’s birthday and it became a theme we both became invested in exploring. On a recent trip to the Yucca Valley we sought out sound therapy through the kitsch extraterrestrial mysticism of George Van Tassel’s The Integratron, sitting around the cupola structure with singing bowls feeding back into a desert night sky. Having just come off of a Buddhist retreat outside of San Diego where the lead monk and abbot informed me that music could only be considered a distraction from the Dhamma (a claim I believe, but simultaneously seek to challenge in my individualistic non dualistic interrogation of existence), I wanted to see if enlightenment and music could actually coexist or if one could even lead to a better understanding of the other. Watching Neil Young (a musician, but no relation to the rock star) and Jake Meginsky’s Graves documentary Full Mantis before visiting the Fridman Gallery exhibit, I couldn’t help but notice how Graves’s gardening practice closely mirrored my own experience tending to the lands at the monastery during this retreat, (after a few hours of picking weeds on a steep sloping hill, a lay person from the monastery had asked “so what did you learn about the Dhamma?”) The natural world was indeed the great teacher; paraphrasing Graves’s own words, “if you are uninspired look no further than to nature,” this idea of nature including the natural world as well as the natural order within each of us, our physiological states, our heart beat, the blood rushing through our veins, and perhaps, most importantly, the breath keeping the whole process flowing.
The last immediate association I felt was that of death, or perhaps better put, the pursuit of the deathless. 2020 was a reminder for many of us of how truly temporary this plane of existence is. A gifted thinker in addition to being a gifted artist, Milford Graves's work encompassed the idea of deathlessness both in scientific rigor, in religion and mysticism, as well as in his artistic practice. In February, Graves passed away of congestive heart failure brought on by amyloid cardiomyopathy. This was in the middle of planning the Fridman Gallery exhibition; consistently painting even while in hospice care, Graves worked till his death. Tuning into Graves’s frequency before visiting the exhibition, I found a broadcast from Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio, where the Ars Nova Workshop (“Philadelphia’s most reliable and ambitious presenter of new jazz and improvised music”) and a group called the aRT trio presented Neurovisceral Sonifications, a tribute for Professor Milford Graves. In the performance, musicians Pheeroan akLaff, Scott Robinson, and Julian Thayer played alongside TonoRhythmology by Milford Graves; sounds generated by computer software designed by Graves which turned his (and others) physiological data into freeform music. In other words, the trio played with the rhythms and data of Graves’s earthly body. It seems in this pursuit, Graves had found something deathless, as – five months after his passing – I could still witness a trio jamming with the makeup of Graves’s life, extended beyond the mortal coil.
There is something to be said of this certain mesmerism, of Graves entering your mind and physical space, of engaging with his work in a way that is active and allows you to enter into an altered, transfixed state (even as I write this, I let Graves drumming guide the speed and selection of my words, my thought processes, as I am hoping he would appreciate). In Buddhist meditation, one is constantly striving for this idea of the deathless, using the body’s physiological metronome (the breath) as a means of centering the mind and the body. For Graves, that clock was music, and it was free.
ii. professor
Heart Harmonics: sound, energy, and natural healing phenomena brings together three bodies of work comprising the most recent (and last) of Graves’s artistic output and research, encompassing many aspects of the acclaimed polymath’s oeuvre. As an American free jazz drummer, proto-world percussionist, researcher, inventor, painter, computer programmer, sculptor, gardener, herbalist, acupuncturist, shaman, martial artist, and Professor Emeritus of Music, Graves's work knew no bounds. Having attained a teaching position at Bennington College through fellow free jazz trailblazer Bill Dixon in the early 70s, Graves had spent the majority of his career teaching in addition to his research and artistic output, in the process earning the simple but apt nickname “professor.” His work was always multidimensional, always multi-hyphenate, often referencing multiple different touchpoints of his expertise and research in a single piece, and these three bodies of work when presented together at Fridman Gallery seem to blossom and bloom into one another.
Paintings by Milford and his wife Lois Graves line the walls. The work represents the artist’s pioneering work into sound vibration as a painting technique. For professor’s later paintings, the artist pulled source material from his archives – home recordings, unreleased performances, heartbeat music. With the help of his assistants, he would sandwich the paint between two surfaces, take a transducer, and play the back surfaces like a drum skin, rubbing the transducer on the surface, hammering it, causing the paint to blend. He would later peel the paintings apart and make further interventions onto the surface as needed. Talking with Fridman Gallery Director Hillary Dvorkin, this style of painting hadn’t really ever been seen before, it was a style that was distinctly professor’s. “He’s been making these paintings for 50 years on vinyl covers,” Dvorkin says. “He had started his own record label called Self-Reliance Records, he didn't have the money for big runs of vinyl covers and so he would just paint them himself.”
Intermixed with Milford’s work – new and old – were paintings Lois created as a tribute to him and their love. An introvert, Lois never sought out the spotlight for herself but was encouraged by Milford to paint. In Jamaica, Queens, they adorned the house they shared together in elaborate mosaics they designed working in tandem. As Dvorkin describes it, if you were going to have your heartbeat recorded by professor you would have to walk through a downstairs basement hallway that was covered floor to ceiling in this cascading mural, composed of two different styles. Lois and Milford would work separately on this piece, one often making progress while the other was away, but you can see their connection in the work. For this exhibition, the gallery reproduced parts of this mural from Graves’s house and tiled it on the most immediate street facing wall. One of Milford’s last wishes was to start a small museum in the temple behind his house in Jamaica that he and his life partner adorned together over the years for their neighbors, friends, children, and grandchildren. Two months ago, a GoFundMe was set up by his daughter Renita Graves, his granddaughter Tatiana Graves-Kochuthara, and Fridman Gallery Founder Iliya Fridman to see that dream become actualized. In front of the tiled mosaic reproduction at Fridman, there stands a single gong with a portrait of Milford Graves, done by Tatiana, her first public facing artwork.
While walking past black vinyl and white canvases, sounds emanate from the back of the gallery. A set of four hand-painted gongs resonate throughout the gallery, activated by the sounds of Graves’ unreleased Heart Music recordings, the culmination of 40 some odd years researching and theorizing his connection between the vibrations of percussive instruments and the rhythms of the human heart, what he termed “biological music.” To create this effect, each gong is set up with a transducer affixed to it, triggered from an office in the back of the gallery (when asked what was triggering the gongs, Fridman jests “Kalika” which I can only assume Milford would have enjoyed.) Of the four gongs on display, the outer two were painted by Milford while the inner two were painted by Lois. “You can’t always tell which gong is resonating,” Fridman tells me, the art of Milford and Lois in a slow resonant dance beyond the physical realm. While the largest gong painting by Milford is still on view at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, these last two gongs by him are “truly his last works,” Dvorkin says. The mixed media installation had been installed by experimental music luminary, curator, and sound artist Bob Bellerue. “The starting point is what Tesla called the ‘fundamental frequency,’ it’s what the core of the earth vibrates at,” Fridman tells me, mentioning how human hearing can’t perceive those low fundamental frequencies, “but going up an octave at a time, you get to audible ones.” The gongs each play loops of these frequencies which sometimes overlap and sometimes disappear altogether. “It’s completely circular: sometimes it's one, sometimes it's two,” Fridman says. “The key is that it matches – according to Milford – what the heartbeat frequencies are.”
Under the resonating gongs, a subwoofer rumbles the flooring beneath us. Downstairs, the gallery presented a four-channel audio-video installation of Graves’s Labview Animations, a mixed media work based on electrocardiogram recordings made in Graves’s basement laboratory, where he studied melodies generated by the human heartbeat. For Labview Animations, Graves programmed software which assigns a musical note to each frequency of the heart along with visual information – part abstract clip art, part DMT-dream sequence – converting heartbeat recordings into an audio visual presentation.
Some of this Heart Music is inaudible. To give audiences as much information as possible, Graves had commissioned a special subwoofer that went down to five hertz. Originally created for his ICA exhibition, the subwoofer would play deep enveloping notes. Even when you couldn’t perceive them, you could feel them. In silence, frequencies translated outside of the audible spectrum dissipate and wander to impossible places, deathless and free.
Milford Graves: Heart Harmonics: sound, energy, and natural healing phenomena continues through July 7 at Fridman Gallery (169 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan).