Michael Foster and the Queer Free Jazz movement

                                                                                 Michael Foster at 411, Brooklyn NY, 2024, photo by J Pietaro

“What happened to vulgarity? The sexual nature of jazz can’t be denied. People of my generation are supposed to be offended by everything, but art should cut deep.” – Michael Foster

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Saxophonist Michael Foster stands as an activist of both LGBTQ+ culture and the wider avant-garde on equal proportions. With roots in New York City and then years spent in L.A., Foster returned to NY’s experimental music circle with a vengeance and has almost single-handedly carved a new, queer place in the annals of free jazz, magnifying the New Thing into something considerably newer, with tenor and soprano saxophone performance practice including physical manipulations. Two of the applications he’s mastered include blowing directly into the horn, sans mouthpiece, or replacing the bell with various lengths of rubber hose. To the latter, imagine the wonderfully bizarre imagery of soprano affixed to a highly flexible hose that Foster stretches wildly with his feet while improvising strange new modes. With all of this musical groundbreaking, Foster maintains an out and proud profile in the queer music community, not the least of which is his longstanding duo with Richard Kamerman, the NY Review of Cocksucking. Is it in the service of LGBTQ visibility or purely about the bounds of the avant-garde? The real question is, why shouldn’t it be both?

“The first time I heard Albert Ayler, I thought, ‘Wow this is too much info!’ It’s so scary, the music seems to grab you by the collar and say ‘help me’. It can take the wind out of you and leave you open to emotional interpretation”, Foster mused.

The NY Review of Cocksucking, an obvious play on the noted literary broadside, is Foster’s duo with ersatz electronic composer/improviser Richard Kamerman. “We met through a dating app; he had a lot of noise on his profile.” The duo mixes “broken or semi-functional electronics” with spoken word readings and sampled voices and sounds. Many of their pieces are based on narratives from the queer canon. “A lot are from ‘Straight to Hell’, gay erotic stories”, said Foster. “Almost anything can seem like a euphemism. Our desire was to make sexual identity visible.” To that point, Foster offered: “Once during a performance, Richard was reading a story and only realized mid-way through that it was a dude-rape fantasy. Of course we weren’t endorsing rape, but it made the whole thing so visceral”.

It’s been said that they use “gay extended techniques” in making music. “It’s funny how all this masculine expression of range and incorporates this”, he said before sucking loudly on his soprano saxophone after the mouthpiece was removed. “Looking like a total fag. So, how to make free jazz scream differently? Make it funny. But I want to insert context, another layer. The way film does.” The saxophonist/conceptualist began his professional quest studying film theory, a lasting influence. “I’m not really an abstract thinker”.

 The pair, along with visual artist Eames Armstrong, created Queer Trash, a diverse curatorial forum for LGBTQ artists in the experimental realm, reaching beyond the music. Founded a decade ago, the series faced some overt homophobic responses. “Maybe it’s less obvious in New York, but some of the people I’ve known began to perceive me differently”, he added. “Hosting queer events, I’m seen not as a musician but as a gay man. I didn’t think I could be seen as both simultaneously”, but it has slowly changed.

2019 was a particularly fortuitous year for Queer Trash with one event via the Museum of Modern Art. This from MoMA’s listing: “The collective Queer Trash was founded in response to the lack of a dedicated queer platform in many of New York City’s experimental music scenes… Queer Trash has hosted events at locations throughout New York City, presenting both local and touring artists working across experimental aesthetics and practices. This program features Joe McPhee; Sarah Hennies performing PASSING (for woodwinds) with Ka Baird, Derek Baron, Lea Bertucci, Michael Foster, Rebekah Heller, Julie Nathanielsz, Katie Porter, and Joshua Rubin; and New York Review of Cocksucking.”

Foster reminds us that “this shit doesn't come from thin air. There was post-modernism, now it's post-post-modernism...everything's available...anything’s possible". And his naturally radical edge came to the forefront as the nation faced another struggle with authoritarian rule:

“Especially since Trump, I’ve been wondering if music should be about screaming into a saxophone. I’m a white guy and screaming without the saxophone is constant. So much of improvisation works best when you’re not thinking about it, but now I’ve had to rethink not thinking about it.”

ON ANY GIVEN DAY, Michael Foster’s saxophones capture the spirit inherent in jazz’s heritage. When on soprano, in the mid-range of his straight horn (pun intended), one hears the trad echo of Sidney Bechet in all his vibratoed glory before unexpected multi-phonics force their way through. Beyond the range of his work with Kamerman, Foster has made major inroads into NYC’s ever-growing free jazz/new music circle and has been aptly queering it. His continually evolving trio the Ghost stands as a prime example. 2023 album Vanished Pleasures with Jared Radichel (double bass) and Joey Sullivan (drums and percussion), bore a cover of bondage imagery, casting a statement of LGBTQ culture as much as revolutionary free improvisation. The opener “Is this How Long the Pleasure Lasts?” wonderfully confounds each instrumentalists’ timber and role, pensive yet as avant as you wanna be. This is followed by “PsychoTwink”, a sizzling, uptempo Ornette-like (think 1960) piece that explodes into a fully liberated free segment; listen for the rhythm section’s bold capture of the aural space, a dueling of sound. This album includes ensemble versions of Foster’s “The Invisible Prick” and “Vibrator Torture”. His tenor saxophone on the former dips deep into Radichel’s harrowing arco bass as Sullivan’s drumming, at points stealth, colors each space about a newfound melody groaned by the saxophonist. Radichel at times reflects David Isenson’s work with Ornette, but one can hear Haden and Mingus in there, too. Relentless as his drive is, there is serenity at heart. And Sullivan is a drummer of rare taste and ability. It’s easy to cite Milford Graves here, yet this influence seems too authentic to overlook, as is the determination and artful elegance of a Paul Motian. Use of woodblocks and other “traps” along with a somber, open bass drum and clean, ceaseless chops, continues the tradition. This all comes together in the over 11-minute “La Touche” which evokes the best of Ayler’s trios, with Foster’s tenor and soprano reigning over the ensemble with a very special fraternalism only derived from an activism well beyond the music.

Foster’s “Industrious Tongue” has also been crafting soundscapes with iconic  no wave poet/vocalist Lydia Lunch, as well as the Barker Trio (with Tim Dahl, & Andrew Barker), While We Still Have Bodies (with Ben Bennett), and Weasel Walter as well as in collaborations with Han Bennink, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Luke Stewart, Brandon Lopez, Katherine Young, Michael Zerang, James Ilgenfritz, Pascal Niggenkemper, Mette Rasmussen, Michael Evans, and many others, hoisting the rainbow flag, by force or by inference, into the outer realm of creativity.

 

Karen Mantler: A Haunt Within

 

The NYC Jazz Record, April 2025

Karen Mantler: A Welcome Haunt Within

By John Pietaro

“I grew up on the road”, Karen Mantler explained, “and people said this is pretty cool, but it was simply normal at the time. My mother was working and needed to take care of me, so she threw me into the music.” And so began a “pretty cool” career ensconced in the hippest pool of new sounds and edge-of-jazz artistry.

Karen Mantler, the daughter of Carla Bley and Michael Mantler, could have been a historic figure on the basis of Bley’s seminal jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill, where Mantler, all of four-years-old, was one of the guest voices enlivening the poetry of Paul Haines, who’d earlier collaborated with Albert Ayler. Till this day, Mantler views Escalator as “part of my blood”. In 1997 when Bley finally realized the work as a performance piece, Mantler served as prime mover, copyist, and organizer of rehearsals. “We did a tour in the late ‘90s: Carla was conducting, and I played most of the (keyboard) parts she’d played on the original album. I had many roles, filling in on whatever was needed”. Mantler added excitedly that The New School may be producing the full opera this year, with the school’s Jazz administrator “Coker Keller and I think Arturo O’ Farrill involved”.

Most recently, O’Farrill commissioned a big band arrangement of Bley’s final composed piece, the presciently entitled “Blue Palestine” for his Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley, released February 7 (Zoho Records) which includes guests Mantler and Joe Lovano.

Well beyond the pen of Bley, Mantler has been highly active as a musician in her own right. Her connection to Brooklyn’s Ghost Train Orchestra, particularly the band’s 2023 album in partnership with the Kronos Quartet and a bevy of vocalists, Songs and Symphoniques: The Music of Moondog, includes Mantler on several cuts. “I was asked to sing”, Mantler explained, “but I never thought of myself as a singer, so I usually insist on playing harmonica, too”. Mantler began playing harmonica as a child after receiving a Marine Band as a gift from Bley. “I was kicked out of high school band because I was subversive”, she happily recalled, “and would sit in the stairwell by the band room every day, playing this harmonica. But I realized that I couldn’t hit all the notes, so Mom told me about the chromatic harmonica, like Stevie Wonder’s. Since then, it’s the only one I play”, Mantler added.

Raised as a composer by a radical (Bley advised her daughter to listen to the rhythm and melody within the words to “hear” the composition as it materializes), Mantler attended the Berklee School of Music from 1985-87, during which time she secured friendships lasting decades. One was Eric Mingus and another, bassist Jonathan Sanborn. They founded a band which included Stephen Bernstein, also studying at Berklee at the same time. Mantler added: “As we three had famous parents, we jokingly claimed Stephen was the son of Leonard”. This ensemble would be seen on David Sanborn’s Night Music television show and recorded several records for the XtraWATT label following the pianist’s return to New York.

Celebrated producer Hal Wilner was an early champion: “I met him when I was quite young. Hal was around Carla a lot in the early 80s, so I can remember him as being youthful and goofy, but then he ended up knowing everyone”, she said, reminiscing on the relevance of Wilner’s album collections of the day, his Monk tribute That’s the Way That I Feel Now, the Kurt Weill Lost in the Stars and the album of Disney music Stay Awake, among them.

“Even years later”, Mantler said, “Hal was doing concerts and put together incredible bands with a lot of famous guests. Some were not that famous but were lucky enough to be included”, she added, smiling. “In 2018 he organized a gig of Nino Rota’s music to be performed at Lincoln Center outdoors, but it was rained out. I had written an arrangement of The Godfather and my mother did 8 ½”, but this event wouldn’t come to be until a 2023 concert at Roulette, following Wilner’s sad passing.

Another important colleague was British vocalist Robert Wyatt, who’d been a leader of the legendary Canterbury scene and drummer/singer with Soft Machine, Matching Mole, Centipede and others. Mantler’s keyboards and voice can be heard on Wyatt’s noted 2003 album, Cuckooland. “I love Robert. I met him long ago and he was on my father’s albums. I saw him again in 2002 when I curated the Meltdown Festival in London and he invited me to the studio”, she recalled. “My parents knew all of those Canterbury musicians”, including John Greeves and Peter Blegved, the latter of which Mantler toured with as recently as 2022. Mantler’s list of credits also range from work with her father, to singer-songwriter Robbie Dupree, Woodstock NY folksinger Artie Traum, to an album with step-father Steve Swallow, a stint with the Golden Palominos “and I recently did an album, released in February, with Mortelle Randonnee, a French band who champion Carla’s music”. A noted single, “Ce maudit volcan” (“That Damn Volcano”), demonstrates the ferocity of composer Karen Mantler, who also provides the husky, whispery vocal.

However, it’s within the confines of Mantler’s own trio that she’s been primarily focused: guitarist/bass clarinetist Doug Weiselman and bassist Kato Hideki have flanked her on stage for the ten years following the 2014 release of Business is Bad (XtraWATT) which also brandished “That Damned Volcano”, albeit in a wholly different guise. The band’s unclassifiable sound only begins with the genre-berating stylings of Bley. Regardless, Mantler remains a welcome haunt within the new music sphere though, “I never saw myself as a serious jazz artist. My early influences were Jack Bruce (featured on Escalator), Cream, Pink Floyd (whose drummer Nick Mason collaborated with Bley) and Procol Harum. I’ve always leaned more to rock and roll side”, Mantler warned with a laugh.

Catch the Karen Mantler Trio at Barbes April 26 to judge for yourself.