Henry Flynt – Raga Electric: Experimental Music, 1963-1971 (Locust)

Henry Flynt – New American Ethnic Music, Volume 2: Spindizzy (Recorded)

Henry Flynt – C Tune (Locust)

Marcus Boon

(This review originally appeared in Signal to Noise)

These three releases continue the rediscovery and renaissance of minimalist hillbilly fiddler extraordinaire Henry Flynt, which began last year with the release of New American Ethnic Music volume 1 on Baltimore improv impresario John Berndt’s Recorded records, , and Graduation, a startling collection of jazz-rock-hoedown pieces that was originally slated for release in 1980.

A Harvard educated, classically trained son of the South, Flynt’s world was rocked in 1960 by a meeting with minimalist guru La Monte Young.  Alongside his better known minimalist, drone driven work, Young was at that time playing mutant gospel and jazz pieces on piano and saxophone, and turned Flynt on to the notion of a new kind of ethnic music, in which the vocabulary, techniques and bag of tricks of modern classical composition would be hijacked and placed at the disposal of the blues, country, rockabilly, jazz and so on (later Flynt would expand “ethnic” to include global ethnic musics, including most notably Hindustani classical music).

Raga Electric: Experimental Music, 1963-1971 documents the early days of Flynt’s musical career, at which point Flynt  was still working predominately in a modernist vein.  Flynt had repudiated traditional ideas of art and culture in a series of texts and talks given in 1962-63, before he moved to New York City.  Received notions of musical form would be replaced by something Flynt called AUDACT (“auditory acognitive cultural activity”).  Like a number of musician/composers after Cage, Flynt rejected the notion of performing a pre-set score, observing, in a note on AUDACT appended to his 1976 essay “The Meaning of My Avant Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music” ,that, having abandoned the arbitrary rules of serialism, “if one wished, one could produce music without a pre-existing language of any sort.  Indeed, if one did not produce a series of related pieces to establish a genre, then a given piece had no musical language at all.  What to do when everything was permitted?”

The answer, from these 1963 recordings, is a series of extraordinary vocal improvisation/compositions, named “Central Park Transverse” after the road that spans Central Park where Flynt, who lived nearby, practiced them so as to spare his neighbors.  The pieces, with their screams, grunts and glossolalia, come close to the work of that other great modern repudiator of art, Antonin Artaud, whose 1948 radio broadcast “To Have Done With the Judgment of God” explored similar notions of expressivity beyond all language and structure.  By no means easy listening, Flynt’s pieces nevertheless have a playful quality that the gnostic Artaud does not have.  “Free Alto”, a saxophone improvisation from 1964 explores similar territory, but calls to mind another key influence on Flynt, Ornette Coleman, another voyager in search of an expressivity beyond established forms.  Raga Electric’s title track is something else again.  In this freeform electric guitar and vocal piece of wordless mutant hillbilly flamenco yodeling recorded in 1966, the elements of “new ethnic music” are clearly coming together.  The piece has only a superficial connection with Hindustani raga music, of which Flynt at that time had only heard a few recordings at La Monte Young’s loft.  Nevertheless it’s a jaw-dropping success, one whose uniqueness suggests just how little has still been done in terms of exploring ethnic musics not merely as exotic novelties or ornaments, but as models of expressivity that point to attainable, transfigured worlds beyond that of bourgeois modernity.  The set is rounded out with Flynt’s rendition of the “Marine’s Hymn”, recorded using an acoustic guitar as a pseudo-drone instrument in 1971, after attending a Pandit Pran Nath concert – around the time that Flynt, like many of the figures around La Monte Young, who was Pran Nath’s sponsor after his arrival in America in 1970, began his studies with the great raga singer.  Like his hijackings from the modernist corpus, Flynt’s raga rendition of this anthem of military esprit de corps is the act of a renegade, a fierce, quiet, moving gesture of disloyalty to the American empire.

Volume 2 of New American Ethnic Music brings together “ethnic music” pieces from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s.  Although the music, performed on banjos, fiddles and electric guitar in a series of mutant blues, rockabilly and country structures, is complex, it’s an extremely accessible collection of music that embodies Flynt’s aspirations to produce a “beauty which is ecstatic and perpetual, while at the same time being concretely human and emotionally profound.”  It’s a mistake to see Flynt as a misguided egghead redeemed by the fact that he is secretly a good ol’ country boy.  Flynt’s a great fiddler and plays a mean guitar, but the beauty of his music is different to traditionally conceived country and blues, and full of innovations which should be acknowledged as part of the pleasure of listening to him.  As Flynt himself says, ethnic music (indeed genre music of any kind) needs to be reinvigorated by new techniques as much as it needs to repeat itself in order to articulate the aspirations and cohesiveness of a particular musical community.  These recordings could be enjoyed by any blues or country enthusiast, once they get over the initial surprise of Flynt’s arrangements, and this disk would make a good starting point for someone new to Flynt’s work.

C Tune is a composition for La Monte Young protégé Catherine Christer Hennix’s tambura drone and Flynt’s fiddle in the style of the awesome “You Are My Everlovin’” from last years New American Ethnic Music vol 1, but with the drone in C rather than D, “C Tune” is a more serene, melodious but no less extraordinary piece than its sibling.  Again, the influence of Pandit Pran Nath is strongly felt, particularly in Flynt’s fascination with meends or glissandos, bending and curving notes into gorgeous new shapes reminiscent of Coltrane’s shehnai-like soprano saxophone work of the early 1960s.

Flynt gave up making music in the mid-1980s, for a brief but successful career as a visual artist, and for his philosophical writings, some of which can be sampled at www.henryflynt.org.  The lack of interest in Flynt’s work until the last couple of years remains puzzling.  Perhaps Flynt’s work has finally become an object of interest in this postmodern age of style and genre pastiches – and perhaps such interest is in fact a complete misunderstanding of what Flynt, who despises novelty seekers and irony, was trying to do.  Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to finally hear this work and be able to piece together some fragments of an extraordinary, and extraordinarily marginal, musical life.

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