Steve Lacy's "Politics of Survival: Experimental Improvisation and the War of Position

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Steve Lacy’s “Politics of Survival”: Experimental Improvisation and the War of Position By Daniel Blake, Ph.D.

The relationship between musical improvisation and contemporary resistance movements in the West is rooted in a complex dialogue between African American and European cultural politics. As expressed through the heterodoxy of post-War musical modernism, this dialogue helped move the elitist “social ineffectuality”1 of the European avant garde toward a freedom cry with explicitly revolutionary overtones. Such a musical-political nexus is embodied in the brief collaboration between soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy and Musica Elettronica Viva (hereafter: MEV). During Lacy’s time with MEV, the group pioneered an approach to “participatory improvising”, which brought audiences directly into the process of musical creation. MEV’s ideological commitment to improvisation as a vehicle for radical democracy carried tangible economic sacrifices, which this paper will explore through the combined lens of Steve Lacy’s “politics of survival” and Antonio Gramsci’s revolutionary “war of position” strategy. As the paper will argue, behind an artist’s ability to struggle and survive is a desire to steer public consciousness toward a revolutionary stance, where the aesthetics of free improvisation come to represent the medium of the revolution. Steve Lacy, a white Jewish member of the mostly African American free jazz community in New York City, moved to Rome in dire economic straits. His understanding of “political music” is rooted in the economic alienation he experienced during his time in New York, most notably while working with pianist and Afro-modernist pioneer Cecil Taylor:

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Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde, (Minneapolis, MN: Manchester University Press, 1984), 27.


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