From Dalston to Chicago: how XT and Kavain Wayne Space activate music history and cultural memory through the intertextual practices of improvised music and footwork
In 2018 the UK improvised music duo XT (saxophonist Seymour Wright and drummer Paul Abbott) instigated their collaboration with Chicago footwork pioneer RP Boo aka Kavain Wayne Space. As the trio state in the liner notes for their 2024 album YESYESSPEAKERSYES, their goal is to “hybridise the spontaneous interplay and timbral experimentation of free improvisation with the recursive formal structures of dance music.” This paper will discuss how they achieve this, and in the process, tap into music history and cultural memories of jazz, free improvisation, soul, funk, Chicago house and its 21st century mutation footwork. Rather than be weighed down by musical history, XT and Space treat it as a generative resource. In their improvised performances, XT and Space draw on the vocabularies, practices and what Cecil Taylor called “attitudes of preparation” from their respective genres: jazz’s use of reference, reinterpretation and pre-composed material, dance music’s samples, programming and sequences. This is facilitated by their use of hardware – CDJs, drum triggers, effects pedals – which gives the music a liveness/wildness which aligns it with jazz and early house music. Their music explodes binaries of pop and avant-garde, experimental and dance, positing a continuum of experimental electro-acoustic music that transcends traditional genre boundaries.
Stewart Smith is a writer, cultural historian, musician and DJ. An internationally recognised expert in contemporary jazz and improvised music, he is a regular contributor to The Wire, The Quietus, We Jazz and Bandcamp Daily. He is also a specialist in Scottish underground and experimental music and in 2021 he curated the Creative Scotland funded archival project Jazz At The Third Eye, exploring the musical legacy of the pioneering Glasgow arts space. His PhD thesis is on the poetry, prose and art of Ian Hamilton Finlay, part of a wider research interest in Scotland and the avant-garde.
BACK TO FRIDAY PROGRAMME