Digital Poetics 3.16 Jazz, Utopia, Nonbeing: Tigran Hamasyan at the Barbican by M. Elijah Sueuga
‘We must be rooted,’ not as beings but as existent things, ‘in the absence of place.’
- James Goodwin, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip
The lights slowly dimmed, leaving the austere interior of the Barbican Theatre in shadowy abyss, save a subtle lustre from the front stage. The pianist sat down without a word. Chatter subsided. There was an immense stillness in the room, I worried my breathing might upset the placidity. Within the confines of this moment, I could feel Tigran’s composure from my seat, despite my position hundreds of feet from the front stage. Bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Damion Reid took their positions next. Tigran began: a sweep of high notes wafted from the piano with movements so swift, delicate, that he may not have touched the keys at all. The drummer and bassist, heads bowed, followed in humble succession.
Minutes later, the performance was quickly burgeoning. Intricate melodies from the piano were offset by sizzles and cracks of hi-hats and snares, with bass plucks beckoning from below. The room was full. Then at once, something changed. The pianist's carriage was different, less predictable. He played the notes harder, faster, with a vigour I had not witnessed in jazz. There were split seconds during which his mien might be likened to a child under the euphoric spell of their first bite of ice cream. Rapture. Soon, his expression became flustered, frantic, shoulders more arched and maniacal. He jolted up out of his seat from time to time in the midst of his frenzied ecstasy, orchestrating an assemblage of rapidly syncopated notes. I thought of grindcore punk shows I had seen over the years; the whiplashed, jerking movements of guitarists, coupled with a subtle grace and command of the instruments, despite apparent hysteria.
Tigran’s semblence of a hardcore performer should be unsurprising given the pianist’s early influences. In a conversation with John Lewis of The Guardian, he describes his obsession with Black Sabbath as a child, manifested in frequent and exaggerated air guitar sessions with Paranoid on full blast. "Still, to this day, if I could become a killer guitar player in a couple of years, I'd quit playing the piano and start learning now,” commented the pianist. “I'd love to front a thrash metal band!" As Tigran gritted his teeth and wrenched his body around the piano in that theatre, it was not difficult to imagine a seething mosh pit emerging beneath the stage.
For passing moments, Tigran existed in a world of his own making, sinking further into solipsistic elysium with each gust of notes. The first song neared its third minute, and I began to discern an exchange of glances between the drummer and pianist. I understood then that I was witnessing a sort of psychic coadunation, a chemistry transpiring on that stage. The two musicians were communicating, allowing their performances to interact improvisationally, to grow consensually into something unscripted, ephemeral, hauntingly beautiful. I recalled the end of James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), the recollections of an algebra teacher as his brother Sonny, prodigious jazz pianist, works through drug addiction. At one point, the brother to the titular jazz player muses on the bandleader’s interaction with Sonny during a live performance at a nightclub in Harlem: “He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing—he had been there, and he knew.” In noteworthy jazz, each performance is a risk which embodies a passionate expression; each time, the musicians immerse themselves in these depths anew, bearing traces of the lives and histories that preceded them.
One cannot speak of jazz without speaking of Black performance, Black history–the kind of which Baldwin wrote, and from which the genre was born. Beginning in the early 20th century, thousands of Black folks migrated to New York, seeking economic opportunity and escaping the violence and oppression of the Jim Crow South. Throughout this period, New York City was central to both the jazz scene and to the growing civil rights movement. The Harlem riots of 1943 and 1964, triggered by police violence against African Americans, inspired protests across the nation. During this time, live jazz was inseparable from Black radicalism–it was a creative form that both epitomised Black resistance and functioned as a means of utopian worldbuilding. Total freedom–deliverance, emancipatory possibility, a potential for unearthing a truer selfhood–was realised in the havens of live jazz, both by the performers, and those who lost themselves in the music as it occurred. Luminaries including Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Langston Hughes frequented jazz venues in Harlem, drawing inspiration, envisioning Black utopias from the improvisational freedom of live performances.
Tigran states that he was greatly influenced by music of this era– from Charlie Parker to John Coltrane. Yet the artist brings his own ancestry, quite deliberately, into his music as well. Tigran’s family is Armenian, and moved to Los Angeles, California when he was ten years old. Despite years of training in American music academies, the artist remained fascinated by the musical traditions of his ancestral homeland. The artist eventually returned to Armenia, studying the folk music of his hometown Gyumri, which he sought to bring into the language of jazz improvisation. In the year 2011, Tigran released A Fable to much acclaim, the first record of many to incorporate traditional Armenian hymns, Armenian poetry and folk music as a basis for the artist's jazz experimentations. As piano notes trailed off for the last 30 seconds of the song, I thought of Gyumri; the stories, meals, music that had colored his life there.
But there is another sense in which Tigran’s ancestry persists in this work, one which hearkens to the sombre and ongoing history of the Armenian people. In Lewis Gordon’s distinguished work, What Fanon Said (2015), the author aptly describes racial othering as, ‘denial to an Other attributes of the self and even those of another self–in other words even of being an Other–the resulting schema is one of location below, in the zone of nonbeing’. The zone of nonbeing was ascribed to Tigran’s great-grandparents, forcibly displaced from the now Turkish town of Kars, previously Armenia. The Armenian identity, it could be said, is one that is constantly plagued by physical and psychological uproot; a tangible lack of grounding in addition to its perpetual lingering threat. Over recent decades and centuries, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran have made repeated attempts to remove, relocate, stifle the Armenian identity, to raise its very existence into question. The Armenian people exist, despite being rendered non-existent, nonbeing, by those who deny them the attributes of self. The poet-theorist James Goodwin, invoking the late French philosopher Simone Weil, writes of Black sociality: ‘We must be rooted,’ not as beings but as existent things, ‘in the absence of place.’ The longing to fill such an absence, to find and take root, percolated through Tigran’s live performance that evening, as with the ongoing plight of the Armenian people.
The first song ended. Applause thundered. The artist clambored from his stool into a standing position, and quietly introduced his stage companions, Matt and Damion. His demeanour was shy, but playful. He stood tall at 162 centimetres, draped in a white button up shirt and dark pants with suspenders, the sort that might be noticed amidst the whimsy of a Wes Anderson film. In a meek voice, Tigran informed the audience that during the evening his trio would be playing his own renditions of American jazz standards which he loved dearly, inspired by the recordings of his most recent record, StandArt. The next song, he continued, was called ‘Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise’.
The Barbican Theatre is a remarkable site for contemporary jazz performance, not least for its history as an architectural attestation to the ideological utopianism prominent after the war. The Centre was originally constructed over the course of ten years, opened to the public in 1982. Prior to its construction, the Barbican district had been a vibrant site of commerce, home to traders and large market stalls. During the war, the entire area was brought to rubble as a result of multiple bombings and fires. The Barbican was thus envisioned by architects Peter Chamberlin, Geoffry Powell and Christoph Bon, in a brutalist style popular in postwar Britain, erected as a beacon of possibility, a stride towards social utopia. The architects sought to create something that embodied resilience, a design of utilitarian, low-cost community housing influenced by socialist principles. Expectedly, the social-welfare centred ethos did not sustain beyond the Barbican’s completion, and upon opening, the Estates were rented out at market value, quickly becoming some of the most expensive housing available in the city of London, home to tech industry moguls and Forbes-aspiring bankers.
Watching jazz at the Barbican was nothing like the smokey clubs of New York that ignited the after hours during the Harlem Renaissance. At the conclusion of Tigran’s second song, I was reminded of this. As the music faded, and I romanticised about the inception of jazz with Black radicalism, my musings were interrupted by the loud croak of a nearby audience member, presumably directed towards the stage: “The drums are too loud!” Another voice chimed in immediately after in an accent more posh and pompous than the first: “Turn the bass up, turn up the piano!” For an instant, I was stunned. The entitlement of audience members to such particular subjective sonic standards–and the urge to proclaim so unabashedly in midst of a live performance–served as a reminder that we were in a place of extreme privilege, affluence. In this theatre, a can of filtered water at the concessions stand costs five pounds, and the cost of an apartment in the neighbourhood would most certainly exclude the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants.
As my attention drifted back onto the stage, Tigran–unperturbed by the outburst–announced that the next performance would be called ‘I Should Care’. Damion put down his drumstick, opting for the drum brushes that had until then quietly waited at his hip side. What proceeded was some three minutes and fifty seconds of one of the most melancholic live performances I have ever experienced. The piano and bass began slowly, with staggered strokes of drum brushes, quietly intersticing the melodies. I immediately felt a weight pulling my heels deeper into the ground, pronounced with each chord. This song possessed an edge of ominosity, one that was non-existent in renditions I had heard of the original song–an upbeat bebop that sometimes came onto my local late night jazz radio back in Brooklyn. In the midst of this performance, I could feel a depth that seemed to encapsulate the last few years: the certainty of uncertainty. This was a sonorous refusal to pave the ground for those seeking stability. I let it carry me into meditation, where I lingered on the fires that had decimated communities of California, the smoke that many of us breathed for months over the years in the wake, and would continue to breathe in years to come, assuredly on a wider scale. This performance seemed to evoke the thin veil of normalcy beneath which the pandemic persisted, causing untold, unacknowledged trauma, accentuating antiblack death due to lack of care from medical practitioners; internalised negligence.
As the song concluded, I rested in the liminal space of silence between the ending and the anticipated applause. In this margin, I allowed myself to be overtaken by something. The sadness, the terminal wave of hopelessness sunk its way into the bottom of my stomach. A coin dropping to the bottom of a pond. I was being overindulgent, mawkish, I suppose. I straightened up. Perhaps there was something else here, I wondered. In the aftermath of this performance, in my inebriated melancholia, I felt a yearning. Perhaps within these bounds, beneath that ominous progression was a utopia that would one day reveal itself. Perhaps this was it. I remembered Baldwin’s words at the end of “Sonny’s Blues”: “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal; private, vanishing evocations.” The applause began, and my moment was over.
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M. Elijah Sueuga is a writer, poet and art historian focusing on late modern and contemporary sonic arts. They are a current graduate student in the History of Art at Williams College, and Curatorial Fellow at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. They are currently interning at the87press as Resident Art and Sound Writer. They work additionally as a composer and dj.
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