Until the 1960s, American jazz, for all its improvisatory and rhythmic brilliance, remained rooted in formal Western conventions originating in ancient Greece and early Christian plainchant. At the same time, European jazz continued to follow its American model. When the creators of so-called 'free jazz'--Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, and others--freed American jazz from its Western ties, European musicians found their own distinctive voices and created a vital, innovative and independent jazz culture.

Northern Sun, Southern Moon examines this pan-Eurasian musical revolution. Author and musician Mike Heffley charts its development in Scandinavia, Holland, England, France, Italy, and especially (former East and West) Germany. He then follows its spread to former eastern bloc countries. Heffley brings to life an evolving musical phenomenon, situating European jazz in its historical, social, political, and cultural contexts and adding valuable material to the still-scant scholarship on improvisation. He reveals a Eurasian genealogy worthy of jazz's well established African and American pedigrees, and proposes startling new implications for the histories of both Western music and jazz.

Yale University Press, March 2005 

 

AllAboutJazz.com has named the book as one of the best jazz books of the year, in their "New York's Best of 2005" article currently online.

While improvised music in Europe has certainly had a storied history, despite being decidedly more "condensed" temporally than its American counterpart, this history is something that has often been overlooked in the canon of English-language jazz studies (in fact, European jazz is significantly overlooked in European musicology, probably more so than in America). To be sure, this is often a result of the perception that European jazz has nothing to do with slavery and the tradition of oppression that spawned the blues and jazz in America--yet this reasoning leaves to the side a case for Europe's own cultural heritage, tumultuous ethnic divisiveness, and rich aesthetic tradition as spawning that very same "cry" that imbues Afro-American musical culture.

Noted jazz critic and ethnomusicologist Mike Heffley has, in Northern Sun, Southern Moon, given an English-language voice to both the body of music and the body of criticism that has surrounded improvisational work in Germany (Western and Eastern), France, England, Holland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Scandinavia and Russia over the past fifty years. Yet unlike some of his contemporaries, Heffley goes beyond immediate aesthetic criticism of the music and the immediate sociopolitical factors it has reacted against, choosing instead to invoke Baroque traditions to discuss jazz as an art stemming from both reconstruction and fervor. To be sure, much of western literature and the Continent's men of arts and letters (Theodor Adorno, for one) have had a tremendous disdain for jazz and improvisational music, even as it may be used as a model for socio- cultural and aesthetic ideas.

Heffley is well-versed in modern philosophy, as his use of Husserl's diagram of time and memory shows (Chapter Six, based on an analysis of Alexander von Schlippenbach's "Sun"), particularly interesting as it discusses a music rooted in the experiential, expansive notion of time that subsumes memory to direct, physical experience. Time, as it applies to the directness of lived time as well as time in a cultural-evolutionary sense, is what Heffley uses to tie in European free improvisation with the other folk- and art-musics of the world: namely, that in expressing cultural memory via the "cry," this music carries with it a direct aesthetic experience that is completely its own and not beholden to anything outside itself. Northern Sun, Southern Moon has perfectly captured one of the joyous ironies in ethnomusicology.

Clifford Allen
AllAboutJazz.com

 

Reinhardt created an original style when he fused Gypsy musette with the swing of Ellington and Armstrong. But the European jazz musicians who came after World War II did not merely mine local folk music; they improvised according to the principles of Schoenberg, Stockhausen and other theorized clangor. Mike Heffley's Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz investigates the music of many of these practitioners as a phenomenon distinct from their American counterparts. Pianist Cecil Taylor, born in the United States, continues to slam the keys and demonstrate the journey from Bud Powell to the New England Conservatory and beyond, pounding out European avant-garde jazz better than anyone on the Continent. Why do we need Joachim Kühn, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Ekkehard Jost, Peter Kowald and others discussed in Heffley's book when we have Taylor? The answer has something to do with a Hegelian theory of freedom and atonality, but before Heffley can canonize the European avant-gardists of his book, he characterizes the "smiling stage personae of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and many others" as "crafted for those they served as masters throughout history." This was the view of some bebop musicians and hipsters in the 1950s--pretty much the attitude summed up by James Baldwin's 1957 story "Sonny's Blues." Indeed, managers Joe Glaser and Irving Mills did put Armstrong and Ellington where they wanted them--faux jungles, mobbed-up clubs, at a distance from their white co-stars in films. Still, Ellington never played a chef, servant or hero's best friend, and Armstrong even played a gangster in Artists and Models. In America's post-Ellison moment of jazz studies, the master-slave dialectic posed by Heffley has been negated. [I disagree; more negation of it is still possible--MH]

The European view of jazz is rather different, though, and that is the view of Northern Sun, Southern Moon. You have to hand it to Heffley: This is a man who knows his von Schlippenbach, his Jost, his Kowald. European jazz is certainly a subject important enough to justify substantial scholarly heavy lifting, and for anyone who wants to understand it, this is the definitive study. Distilled from a 1,757-page ethnomusicology dissertation directed by Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan, Heffley's book--trimmed to a Spartan 300 pages--is in the grand sweeping theoretical tradition of Durkheim and Weber, and one does not have to be persuaded by its argument or enjoy the music he champions to appreciate its heft. There is a certain jingoism about studying jazz as an exclusively American phenomenon, although one invites arguments when one tries to distinguish how essential the American--and African-American--influence has to be to call it jazz. Reinhardt might have been playing Gypsy music in cafe obscurity for the rest of his life if he hadn't fully intuited and appropriated the music of Louis Armstrong, whom he tried (and failed) to impress in an impromptu performance. "Ach moune!" Reinhardt cried in a Romany expression when he first heard Armstrong. Translation: My brother!

The German musicians discussed in Heffley's study find kinship with late period John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman (the latter evidenced in Colors, Coleman's fascinating 1996 duet with Kühn). But the German Emanzipation movement Heffley meticulously documents is not only an emancipation from rhythmic and harmonic structure but from swing and the blues. This is an Emanzipation proclamation of an ironic kind, a relinquishing of a distinctly African-American musical aesthetic; some of the European musicians covered in this book reject the word "jazz" altogether, a semantic distinction welcomed by jazz traditionalists in America. It's hard not to be unsettled by this German erasure of black influence, which Heffley neither judges nor endorses but studies rigorously. [I disagree that it constitutes an erasure!--MH]

If you like swing, blues and melody, you won't like the music discussed in these pages...[Disagree!]...but these European movements--with all their noise--are vital, seldom acknowledged elements of jazz history, and it is unlikely that anyone will cover it as thoroughly as Heffley. What finally emerges from all this noise is an attempt to dismantle ethnic and geographical boundaries, as much as it assaults harmony, rhythm and comfortable decibel levels. Heffley's book examines what happens when jazz is displaced from its native land, leaving swing and the blues behind. As the East German critic Bert Noglik put it, "Jazz, its background as an African-American idiom, has developed into a global musical language." But there are many ways to embrace musical revolutions, and there were some musicians in America who did not feel the need to choose. Charles Mingus, who had internalized the atonal scores of Schoenberg as a teenager in Watts while steeped in blues and bop, could be trans-idiomatic and swinging at the same time. Before any of the European improvisations documented in Heffley's book took place, Mingus was arguing for a global musical language in a Down Beat manifesto back in 1951. "All music is one," he wrote.

"Soul on Ice"
by DAVID YAFFE
December 5, 2005 The Nation

Gifted with an imaginative thesis--the migration of innovative free music from the African-American community of the United States and its adoption and mutation by Europeans--Mike Heffley's book encompasses interviews, analysis, musicology, and philosophical concepts...Often non-linear, as benefits a book on free jazz, the narrative is so discursive at points that it resembles those John Coltrane solos where the variations so outdistanced the theme as to almost make the head an afterthought. Heffley's minute analysis of important free jazz sessions adds to the significance of this volume...

At his best--when dealing with German free music--Heffley has produced a ground-breaking and insightful volume.

--Ken Waxman
from 11 July 2005 One Final Note

 

Free jazz, argues Mike Heffley in Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz, precipitated a loss of audience and a period of stagnation in America, but in Europe, it enabled musicians to break free of the American model and develop a distinctive and innovative jazz culture of their own...at the heart of Heffley's book are the Germans--the most intense musicians, the "energy" players. Germany, the author asserts, was the epicenter of free jazz in Europe from the mid-1960s through the '80s...Heffley freely acknowledges Joe Harriott, a black Jamaican emigrant to England, as the originator of European free jazz...Heffley set himself the impossible task of chronicling the free-jazz movement across Europe...the group at the core of the East German scene, a quartet originally called Synopsis and later renamed the Zentral Quartett. In one of the most engaging sections of Northern Sun, Southern Moon, Heffley interviews all four members of this remarkable group: pianist-composer Ulrich Gumpert, alto saxophonist Ernst-Ludwig Petrovsky, drummer Günter Sommer, and trombonist Conrad Bauer...the most interesting question provoked by his book: Why was Germany the European hotbed of free jazz? The authority of Heffley's claim is indisputable--he marshals an impressive roster of French and German primary source documents and extensive musician interviews...Heffley intermittently alludes to possible explanations for Germany's flourishing scene, mentioning free jazz as a symbol of personal liberty to politically repressed individuals and the German reverence for the deep-rooted Western classical tradition, but no one idea dominates his discourse...The two most provocative explanations relate to the Western classical tradition and to the phenomenon of the European musician-writer...Heffley draws an ambitious and insightful comparison between Coleman's harmolodic theory (in which equal musical weight is given to harmony and melody) and Bach's use of counterpoint, establishing a link (corroborated by his interviews with German musicians, most of whom are conservatory-schooled) between improvisation and composition. Heffley writes, "German jazz artists have exhibited the same life-or-death sense of 'serious play' that has marked the European composer-improviser tradition from Bach through Stockhausen." The musicians he interviews--from the trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff to the vibes and sax player Günter Hampel--corroborate this notion, discussing Coleman's influence on their music; the connections among jazz, Schoenberg, and fugal development; and their inclination to think "dramaturgically" about music...Free jazz is notoriously difficult to describe (Heffley recognizes this problem and attempts to develop a new system of analysis in the last part of his book), and, as a community of "serious amateurs," German musicians were well positioned to publicize the music they played by writing about it...the interviews in Northern Sun, Southern Moon are uniformly excellent...Soul Jazz Records has done a remarkable job of reissuing old soul and funk, and it would do well to follow suit with European free jazz. American audiences could then hear the music that inspired Heffley to spend over a decade unearthing a European jazz revolution...

Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2006
"Kind of Bleu," by Stephanie Hanson

 

From Eugene Chadbourne's review (signal to noise, winter 2006):

"The interviews Heffley conducted, the sections of these conversations he has chosen to document and his valuable collected research and commentary on writers such as the East German Bert Noglik represent in its totality an enterprise of massive proportions, created out of an intense love of this music as well as a deep desire to understand where it all came from and where it is all going."

Current Musicology

No. 78, Fall 2004 Columbia University

George E. Lewis

With the publication of Mike Heffley's Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz, Yale University Press joins the ranks of the few American academic presses that have published serious scholarly work on post-1965 experimental improvised musics in Europe. This book documents an important period in recent European music history that is only beginning to be addressed by scholars writing in English, and in the process, uses a unique combination of historical inquiry and ethnographic practice that brings out a series of fascinating and contentious issues surrounding this network of players and their music...Northern Sun is refreshingly ecumenical, refusing the polemical stance that marked British critic Ben Watson's hefty volume on guitarist Derek Bailey...

Readers expecting a straightforward chronological narrative of European free music will be disabused of that expectation within the first hundred or so pages. The organization of the book is episodic, traversing a wide range of discourses and histories. In particular, large swathes of the narrative are devoted to the exploration of origin stories, or what Heffley calls "big history"--not only the immediate geopolitical environment, which is well covered, but also the large-scale historical and cultural network within which European free jazz can be situated. Perhaps inspired by Curt Sachs's popular 1961 text The Wellsprings of Music, Heffley's origin narratives range across vast tracts of European history.

The effect is bracing. The seeming torrent of references sprinkled throughout the book establishes the author's familiarity with subjects ranging from neuroscience to the Masons to sociobiology. The points of reference are too many to count, and yet one seems to move rapidly through them, sometimes barely stopping to smell the flowers. Then, suddenly and without warning, we zoom in from Heffley's frequent and often fascinating disquisitions into the symbolic, the arcane, the occult, and the generally spiritual, to the microlevel of the actual subject, the musicians.

For instance, Heffley's references to the work of musicologist and composer Jacques Chailley, known for his contention that The Magic Flute's libretto was written to incorporate Masonic ritual, amply establish Heffley's method with respect to the relationship of history, sound, and spirit (1971). As Heffley sees it, Chailley's work illuminates the "relationship between harmonic moment and the West's unfolding of it into temporal flows" (Heffley 2005: 34). Later, Heffley zooms in, hearing the "big and dirty" timbre of [Peter] Brötzmann's tenor saxophone as an example of "Chailley's first-octave OM" (138).

...Finally, as I read this intriguing and very valuable narrative, I was left with the impression that for all the talk of Emanzipation, African American musical culture and its experimental musicians still loom large in the discussions with these European musicians--whether as revered antecedents, favored colleagues, as objects of critique or ambivalence, or as foils for a negative aesthetic. Indeed, the centrality of African American culture to the narrative of European free music cannot be overlooked, and Heffley, unlike some commentators, is not at pains to disguise this evident fact.

 

This is a weighty tome in all senses, but it deserves to find a serious audience. Heffley is a part-time instrumentalist whose ensemble has been fronted on record by his former teacher Anthony Braxton. But, more significantly here, he's an academic ethnomusicologist who's thought more deeply than most about the history of music from the ancient Greeks onwards, and the place of jazz--especially free jazz--within it...Heffley deals even-handedly with a vast array of individuals and albums while, in discussing the political currents of the period, he draws on numerous non-English-language books and articles. Given the scope of his subject, and the density of his references, he's surprisingly readable...He's just as happy to discuss in passing the relevance of Stan Kenton or Europeans such as Alfred Lion and Joseph Schillinger (whose teaching system was the basis of the original Berklee College) but he's also dealing with an important historical movement that has no counterpart in today's scene. Outside of Kevin Whitehead's New Dutch Swing, this is a first attempt to tackle this topic in English, and the book itself has no counterpart.

Jazzwise
May 2006, p.67
Brian Priestley

This is such an unprecedented and remarkably visionary book that it seems unfair to categorize it. Incited by Anthony Braxton's music, Heffley accepts the challenge by going wherever it takes him. His interrogation of Braxton's work is irresistible, and every page dares the reader to keep up with him, whether to the beginnings of civilization or to the outer reaches of space. Though it is as ambitious as The Road to Xanadu--J.L. Lowes' exploration of the secrets which lie behind Coleridge's poetry--I know of nothing quite like this extraordinary book.

John Szwed, Yale University, author of
Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra
(Pantheon, 1997)

This magnificent study is the ideal guide to a better appreciation of Anthony Braxton's visionary music. Writing with real flair and insight, Mike Heffley mixes panoramic overview and microscopic detail to explicate the complex brilliance of Braxton's sound-world. Like its subject, his book grips and inspires. It is the most exciting, creative, thought-provoking book on music I have read in years.

Graham Lock, author of Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music
(Quartet Books, 1988)

Confronted by the staggering breadth and complexity of Anthony Braxton's musical cosmology, Mike Heffley does not flinch; he creates a metaphorical ontology of his own, exploring Braxton's multifaceted work and far-reaching vision from mythological, philosophical, and scientific angles that extend beyond ordinary music criticism into realms of sociology and cultural anthropology. Then he turns to the music, and finds his way through the labyrinth of recordings, compositional strategies, and improvisational systems, leaving a trail of solid analysis and informed interpretation for us to follow. This is more than just scholarship; it is an extraordinary achievement, a document of courage and imagination, consideration and care.

Art Lange, editor of Down Beat magazine 1980-87

 

Mike Heffley is the author of a veritable thesis of 495 pages, The Music of Anthony Braxton (Greenwood Press, London, 1996). This work is without a doubt the old and new testament on Anthony Braxton. It is no light reading, but despite the absence of a discography it represents a level of achievement rarely attained. It will be the delight of Braxton aficionados.

 Jazz Hot (Paris)

 

The Music of Anthony Braxton draws on mysticism, numerology, the civilizations of ancient Africa, Greece and Rome. . . Heffley's labor of love brings a welcome, ambitious scale to the enterprise of jazz criticism.

In These Times (Chicago)

 

Heffley clearly acknowledges the importance of both Lock's and Radano's books . . . Given the success of these books, it is to Heffley's credit that he is able to find his own space within this spectrum. . . Heffley's contribution to an understanding of Braxton's work results in a book which, quite intentionally, is as complex and diverse as the music itself. . . Heffley's content is often rich in insights and conveys a real understanding of both Braxton's music and its relationship to previous musical traditions. . . . For many listeners, the main difficulty with Braxton's music may be situated in this blurring of imaginary boundaries between the improvisatory nature of American jazz . . . and the controlling impulses within the Western tradition. . . The resulting collision between these two distinct sound-worlds produces a vibrant, stimulating music of which Heffley's somewhat idiosyncratic prose captures the essence. . . . The challenging nature of Heffley's book, with its idiosyncracies of structure and presentation, no doubt leaves it open to criticism from several different perspectives. However, it does present a valuable range of insights into Braxton's music, and . . . can make its own distinctive contribution to an understanding of both Braxton's music in particular and the "trans-African tradition of creative music" in general.

Music and Letters (London)

 

While tough reading, it is the best book about Braxton yet. This is the most thorough examination of Braxton's music and the various contexts from which it emerges. It is the only book to date that very successfully explores the mystical side of Braxton, and Heffley does so with clarity, integrity, and genuine respect for Braxton. Because of its ambitious nature, this book is probably not the best place to begin when studying Braxton. But its ambitious nature has also created a book that matches the ambition of its subject matter, i.e., Braxton himself. This is essential reading for Braxtonians.

Amazon.com reader review

Festschrift featuring my essay
(London: Stride Publications, 1995)

 Mixtery, edited by former Wire Deputy Editor Graham Lock, is a festschrift celebrating Anthony Braxton's 50th birthday. Yes, the festschrift is a product of the European academic world, and no, I couldn't imagine a similar honour for Lou Donaldson or Kenny Burrell; but this wonderful and useful volume sums up much of what Braxton and his music are all about . . . Lock's selection of 56 contributors creates a fluid portrait of the artist during various stages of his quarter-century plus career. . . What makes Mixtery a valuable resource tool is the large number of first rate essays on Braxton's music.

The Wire

 

German-language book of essays by me, George Lewis, Ingrid Monson, Ekkehard Jost, Peter Niklas Wilson, Ursel Schlicht, Wolfram Knauer, Christian Bröcking and others.

 

From the Anarchic to the Archaic:
Theorizing Free Improvisation

A post-9/11 talk delivered at the 7. Darmstädter Jazzforum "Jazz und Gesellschaft," Darmstadt, Germany, September 2001.

 

 

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