bebop/rebop/bop free jazz noise, avant garde/experimental music his dad, Elliot Fine recordings authors
	Concert poster on the front of the West Bank School of Music, April 5, 2002.

Free jazz
Free jazz was the next step after bebop; it was necessary to break things down, to get away from such a rigid, codified way of thinking about jazz. Free jazz broke the bonds of melody, harmony, and rhythm as they were commonly understood; the emotions and soul came to the forefront. Free jazz musicians were vilified and regarded as charlatans, but if you go and listen to these recordings, there’s no denying their validity, power, and eloquence. For classical music to go from formal, rigorous, organized patterns to aleatory music (music in which the composer has made a deliberate withdrawal of control) took hundreds of  years, but for jazz, a child of the industrial revolution in America, it took only fifty or sixty years. The social underpinning of free jazz was the black nationalist movement in the U.S., but since the mid-1950s there had also been movements in Europe and Japan that "expressed a desire for 'freedom.'" Artists such as pianists Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra (who also played electronic keyboards), saxophonists Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Giuseppe Logan, and Pharaoh Sanders, drummers Sunny Murray and Milford Graves, trumpeter Bill Dixon, bassist Alan Silva, and others (many of whom released albums on the '60s ESP label) provided early impetus for Milo's work.

Noise, avant garde/experimental music
Simultaneously, Milo was also drawn to classical "new music," from Edgar Varese, (the French-born American composer credited with being the precursor of electronic music; Milo calls him the “elder statesman” of the genre) and American composer John Cage, one of the leading figures of the postwar avant garde, to Italian composer Luigi Nono, a leading figure in the postwar European avant garde, who explored a social and political commitment through the most advanced technical means, electronics especially. Another influence on Milo: György Ligeti, widely acknowledged as a musical pioneer of the late twentieth century, who responded to a stylistic crisis in the mid-century avant-garde by forging his own musical alternative, based on texture and sound density, that has become one of the major influences on contemporary music. Other artists Milo was drawn to include German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, despite his being, in Milo's words, "a megalomaniac who thinks he invented everything," Iannis Xenakis, the influential French-Greek postwar composer whose musical language remained singular for its uncompromising harshness and conceptual rigor, and others. In a sense, this "school" impacted free jazz in that free jazz's inherent explosive nature was tempered or re-routed, thus giving rise to so-called non-idiomatic improvisation, or what has come to be simply termed "improvised music." Though Milo considers his work directly rooted in the spirit of jazz, he acknowledges that the tone and tenor of his work since the mid-seventies probably falls more under the umbrella of "improvised music" than "free jazz" per se.

His dad, Elliot Fine
Elliot Fine, now retired and living in Bloomington, Minnesota, was a professional musician with a background in jazz, vaudeville, and burlesque. He played in the Minnesota Orchestra for forty-four years. He also taught music to many people through the University of Minnesota, and played at clubs, bar mitzvahs, etc. In a sense, there was never a time Milo didn’t think about playing music, but he stresses that his father never pushed him to be a musician. Elliot Fine played on two of Milo’s recordings: Lucid Anarchists (Meat with Two Potatoes) 1981 and Surges/Suspensions, Comme Toujours 1998.

Recordings
Milo is hard pressed to name specific recordings that influenced him. But he did name three LPs that, in the case of Captain Beefheart, clearly illustrated the unrealized creative potential of rock-based music, and, as concerns the Coltrane and Shepp, served as his formal introduction to avant garde jazz. He picked these up at an odd little discount store in East Bloomington called GEM, which he thinks stood for Government Employees Market, or something similar. He purchased the ESP recordings (see above) at the erstwhile Wax Museum record store in Minneapolis.

John Coltrane’s Om (1965)
Coltrane was an American jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist, bandleader and composer. It’s been argued that he was, after fellow jazz musician Charlie Parker, the most revolutionary and widely imitated saxophonist in jazz. Om, along with Meditations, the late versions of My Favorite Things, and Naima, represents the final stage of Coltrane’s musical evolution, which was concentrated on maintaining extraordinary levels of intensity by filling a vast spectrum of frequencies, tone-colors, and (when he employed extra percussionists) accents.

Archie Shepp’s Mama Too Tight (1966)
Archie Shepp is an American jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist, playwright and teacher. He recorded with Coltrane in 1965 (Ascension). Thereafter he led his own groups. Shepp became an eloquent spokesman and apologist for free jazz, which he interpreted as a medium for political expression. From the mid-1960s he began to make use of powerful poems evocative of life in the black ghettos (Malcolm, Malcolm, semper Malcolm, on the album Fire Music, 1965) and African percussion, and to play marches, slow blues and sentimental ballads (Prelude to a Kiss, also on Fire Music; In a Sentimental Mood, on this Night, 1965). Mama Too Tight, along with Four for Trane and Live in San Francisco, set a precedent for incendiary, colorfully voiced, midsized ensembles like those of David Murray and Henry Threadgill 30 years later. If you have a fast connection, (56 kbps or faster) you can listen to selected tracks from Mama Too Tight at Tigersushi.com, an online music vendor.
Click this link: http://www.tigersushi.com/site/frameset.jsp?page=Rcd.jsp&RcdId=5230

1. Select "a record name"
2. Type "Mama Too Tight" and click Submit
3. Click "Archie Shepp"
4. Click "Mama Too Tight" : your choices of tracks to play will be displayed.

Samuel Beckett (plays and post-1934 prose)

Thomas Bernhard

Hermann Broch

Charles Bukowski (selected prose)

Brion Gysin

Doris Lessing (selected writings)

Yukio Mishima

Robert Musil, especially The Man Without Qualities and Precision and Soul

Gregor von Rezzori

Ernesto Sabato

The Marquis de Sade

Douglas Woolf