The Thousand Birds

I played some Rhodes piano on the final Andrew Weathers Ensemble album, The Thousand Birds in the Earth, The Thousand Birds in the Sky, out this week on Full Spectrum Records. I've admired Andrew's music and ethos for years now, and this project in particular -- actually we first met at an AWE show in Santa Fe. He's found a way to split the difference, showing up as an actor in the current system and atmosphere while remaining actively critical of all of it. It's not easy to run a record label and release your own music while explicitly resisting the pressures of commercialization. (As ever, Sun Ra comes to mind.) We feel the need to sell our music, even if we'll never make a meaningful amount of money doing so, because the guise of professionalism is a marker of serious engagement. But as soon as you post your music in any commercial context, you become implicated in the notion of music as an industrial product. There ought to be a way to share our work without immediately subscribing to a fundamentally immoral and degrading economic system, but that's where we are, and the dissonance of it is exhausting. All of this was bad before, when recorded music was bought and sold as a physical artifact. The disrespect is miles deeper now, as the streaming economy has converted music into a sort of lubricant for the incorporeal machinery of late capitalism. Now what we do is "produce content," and we have to trust that same destructive machinery to occasionally throw us fractional pennies for its use. As Greg Saunier has  pointed out, music was not invented by Adam Smith in 1776; it was also not invented by Henry Ford in 1913. Music is part of all of us, part of our fucking inheritance as human creatures, and we don't need to measure it with dollars or views or any other number. I don't entirely know why Andrew's music seems to breathe different air than all of this nonsense. Maybe because he's earnestly working within a dehumanizing system to try and get above the bullshit, and that struggle itself is re-humanizing. Certainly the humanity of collaborative openness is part of why the AWE releases have resonated with so many people. This is the sound of a serious musician making a thing with friends, and in the lyrics and the musical approach he's trying to work his way through the wreckage of the current situation and come up with alternatives. Going forward it appears that AWE is no longer the alternative he needs. But it worked well, for a while.