If you've lived long enough and you look back on the trends and history of recorded music, you sense that something's missing. In that era of the late 60's when music was undergoing so many changes and revolutions, there's a space where there should be a groundbreaking female avant-garde musician. Perhaps someone who tripped with Leary, performed as a hologram in a Salvador Dali installation and a pioneered the use of the Moog Synthesizer in treating vocals. A person who changed the politics of avant-garde jazz improvisation by creating the “free form song.”
Annette Peacock was thinking about gender and the politics of jazz improvisation while most of us were having our minds blown by what appeared to be a free jazz improvisational structure. Free jazz was so new and such a different way of making music that we didn't know how to think about it, how to critique it. We barely knew how to appreciate it. Here's Peacock on how it was:
I came back to New York at the time I started my career – if you can call it that – in the world of avant-garde jazz, everything had broken loose. Everyone was blowing, improvising together simultaneously in the lofts. It was totally free. It was an aggressively masculine texture assaulting you. I’m not male and I wasn’t involved in it so I could see it from an objective perspective. And it seemed like I had to carve space out… to slow things down. So I started writing ballads, with two notes basically, just intervals. No chords. Very minimal. Musicians had no idea what to play on it. Drummers had no idea what to play on it. I felt at the time my responsibility was to create environments that improvising musicians could perpetuate; to create an architecture basically. ECM, the record label, built a very successful label on the concept of those ballads that I wrote.
Peacock's first recording, “Revenge” wasn't released by the record label. And that's why there's a hole in the history of recorded music. “Revenge” was an incredibly influential record that never made it on to the turntable. Peacock explains the choice she was forced to make:
Oh yeah, they didn’t release it. There was a problem with going over budget. Paul (Bley) had recorded some music in Boston with his trio but they weren’t interested in releasing it. So they gave me a choice: release the record and the musicians won’t get paid or pay the musicians and the record won’t get released. So I said pay the musicians because that’s the kind of guy I am! But it was devastating. It was agony. It broke my heart.
Annette Peacock has recently released a remastered version of what she calls “the right album, in the wrong century.” The new title is “I belong to a world that's destroying itself.” The white hot radicalism of the recording is still there, but from this distance we can begin to hear it. We can connect the dots and understand the missing sound that influenced so many threads of music. More importantly, the music still challenges us. We haven't progressed as much as we'd like to think. The ecology she sang about, is the ecology we've yet to sing about. All her recordings are worth listening to, but in this first one Peacock is still out ahead of us all these years later. Still avant-garde. Still a visitor from the future.
Yeah, she's the one.
Word is that there's a new record coming soon. And the great Anil Prasad of Innerviews says he's been in contact with Ms. Peacock about an in-depth interview when her new recording is completed. Happy days are here again. You can buy some of Annette Peacock's records artist direct. You should do that.