Fugue Meadow

Poetry. Music. African American Studies. FUGUE MEADOW listens to, thinks alongside, dwells within Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell's legendary Mu sessions, one of the twentieth-century music's unclassifiable masterpieces. Recorded in Paris in 1969, Cherry and Blackwell accumulate vast silences, harmonies and disharmonies, vast plural and interlaced musics to think and counter, to protest, to heal the violences of what the Vietnamese called "The American War," Richard Nixon's Law and Order racists police state, and something of the general world situation through a studied and richly complex "world" music. The poems of FUGUE MEADOW are a patient response to this recording session's embedded colonial and post-colonial histories. As their poems unfold, or enfold, FUGUE MEADOW seeks to understand, and conjure the other kinds of thought and history that open up and are made possible by Cherry and Blackwell's singularly aesthetic and conceptual flight, their exile to the Old World, their burrowing out of and into old and new ways of thinking and feeling and being. Through their tracings and erasures and in their music, these poems hope to awaken, to voice, to re-score, to re-learn, to say again, and to widen the mythic's ensembles.