Brooklyn Diasporism

Zach Barocas, Diasporist Diarist

Inspiration: Bakai

coltrane

John Coltrane, “Bakai,” Coltrane, 1957.

What’s most interesting to me about this tune is that it struggles alternately to stay close to then-current jazz conventions and, by including that quarantined polyrhythmic bit, move away from it. The group is characteristically satisfying but this seemingly conflicted effort is what draws me to Bakai. I feel something similar in my own music: I want it to move out from my own tradition (rock, punk, post-etc.) but if I can get it out there, I retreat to something more familiar. Why I do this is, I think, obvious enough. I’m not ready to work without a net.

Inspiration: Geoff Dyer

gd-bb

Years ago, he used to catch himself thinking about what he was playing, conscious of his own technique, and while this distracted it also reassured because it meant that in between these spasms of self-consciousness he had simply been playing — and he played best when least conscious of what he was doing. At a certain point, playing became a wild amnesia of technique.

— Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, p. 174.