"Unmute" Bread

While many of our colleagues are avidly baking and feeding their newly acquired sourdough starters while sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, we are conducting ethnographic work with individuals who have embraced the stylistics and aesthetics of improvisation in acts of caring for, listening to, baking with, and recording their sourdough starters, as well as performing alongside their bread-kin. Imagine, in some instances, the multispecies improvisational style of David Rothenberg’s co-performance with birds, whales, and insects (Rothenberg 2017; 2016; 2002; Ryan 2020), but with wild yeast and freshly baked bread. In this article we ask: What is it about the conditions of sheltering in place, quarantine, and domestic isolation that fosters an experimental space for reconfiguring multispecies improvisation and performance to include our foodways? Why has baking, specifically bread (and sourdough), rather than other forms of domestic activity and craft fostered this specific sonic response during these pandemic times? How are participants sharing, scrolling through, and listening to these domestic performances across social media? What does the sonic register of these multimodal texts communicate to other socially distancing social media users? Through ethnographic fieldwork of performing with, listening to, musicalizing, and caring for sourdough starters, their “screaming yeast” (Roosth 2009), and the baked result, this article places improvisation studies, domestic practices, multispecies performance, gastromusicology, and pandemic spatial conditions in dialogue to address these questions.

Charanguea’o En TÍpico

This chapter looks at flute player George Castro’s improvisational style in this ‘trombanga’ [trombones and flute] line-up. This combines charanga and conjunto elements, providing the template for the New York ‘salsa dura’ [hard salsa] sound later developed by the likes of Willie Colón. Here Castro’s típico 5-key soloing style is compared to La Perfecta II’s 21st-century versions by Eddy Zervigón and Dave Valentín to further explore manifestations of cubanía, sabor, Latinidad, jazz inflection, and freer forms of extemporization. The legacy of Eddie Palmieri’s experimental approach is also evaluated here.

The Artistry of Bheki Mseleku

Bheki Mseleku is widely regarded as one of the most gifted, technically accomplished and emotionally expressive jazz musicians to have emerged from South Africa. His individualistic and eclectic sound draws on American, classical and township influences. He had no apparent formal music training and grew up in a poor village on the outskirts of Durban where, at the fairly late age of seventeen, he discovered that he had an innate ability to play. He has become a key inspiration for aspiring young South African jazz musicians and has left an infinite source of knowledge to draw on. The Artistry of Bheki Mseleku is an in-depth study of the Mselekus compositional works and improvisational style. The annotated transcriptions and analysis bring into focus the exquisite skill and artistry that ultimately caught the eye of some of the most celebrated international jazz musicians in the world.

2012 Millennialism Becomes Conspiracist Teleology

Due to shared conceptions of the degeneracy of the modern era and a common distrust of mainstream narratives, New Age and conspiratorial milieus have often cross-fertilized. Conspiracy narratives can provide accounts of the types of corruption to be remedied by the advent of the next world age, and prophetic narratives of a new age can provide a teleological focus for the eventual success or defeat of the conspiracy. New Age interest in the millenarian significance of the Maya Long Count calendar took hold in the 1970s as an array of expectations for an approaching golden age around the year 2012. As such expectations became a more well-established commodity in countercultural circles, the associated dates were eventually incorporated into a variety of conspiracy narratives. Each innovator of 2012 conspiracism adapted this dating scheme into his or her own context in a manner that is exemplary of the improvisational style that Michael Barkun noticed to be prevalent in contemporary American conspiracy discourse; “2012” became utilized as a teleological trope which could be incorporated wherever such a temporal focus was desired.