Unjust Malaise by Julius Eastman
LABEL: New World Records

“Written for multiple pianos, hour-long works like ‘Evil Nigger’ and ‘Gay Guerilla’ refracted minimalism’s optimistic, patchouli-scented origins...”

Legend holds that Julius Eastman once showed up to a 10 a.m. rehearsal in full S&M regalia, bottle of scotch in hand, relishing the bemusement and outright incensement from his other conservatory-trained peers. A “walking one-man minority group” and provocateur extraordinaire whose transitory and intermittent career took him to parts uptown (he enjoyed a longstanding affiliation with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, then in its Lukas Foss halcyon days), downtown (Meredith Monk was a key early supporter), and pop (fellow academe-songwriters Ned Sublette and Arthur Russell were running buddies), Eastman, for all of his pianistic legerdemain, was destined to be a peripheral figure in the annals of music history. Bereft of the rigorous and disciplined acumen that characterized his contemporaries, his race and sexuality made him the logical target of oppression for an ivory tower that was only beginning to accept a white Frenchman (philosopher and literary critic Michel Foucault) who shared his proclivities. Meanwhile, as the new music scene was enriched (or mired) by the fecundity of rock, disco, and jazz in the early eighties, Eastman’s own compositions gravitated towards hypnotic, stylistically diffuse keyboard figures that owed more to the protoplasmic early works of Terry Riley—and the stoned cello noodlings of Russell’s World of Echo that were to come—than the Ray-Ban zeitgeist. After a promised professorship at Cornell failed to materialize in 1984, he succumbed to crack and homelessness in Alphabet City’s infamous Tompkins Square Park, dying indigently in a Buffalo hospital six years later.

Released a few years ago, Unjust Malaise collects the paucity of recordings that constitute much of his musical legacy. Spanning the tumultuous “short decade” of 1973 to 1981, the compilation makes a compelling and urgent case for the reappraisal of Eastman’s oeuvre, especially in the wake of Steve Reich’s recent (and one must concede, well-deserved) Pulitzer Prize. As Reich and Philip Glass were beginning to make tentative forays into the intricacies of orchestration after years of Shankar and Alorwoyie-sanctioned eschewal, Eastman had already concluded that pop and the concert hall were only bifurcated by haughtiness and a music degree. Recorded in 1973, “Stay on It” is the logical response to the Reich, Young, and Riley-influenced efforts of Captain Beefheart, the Velvets, and The Who, transposing relatively simple ideas over an ambitious orchestral framework. As dulcet as it is lumbering, the piece is a virtual call to arms for the next generation of composers—postminimalists such as Russell, Sublette, and Rhys Chatham—who were to come of age by decade’s end. Dating from 1977, the woozy horn arrangements of “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich” resonate throughout the work of the latter two artists.

“Many of his confederates thrived in the rhizomatic artistic environs of Koch-era New York; like Scott Fitzgerald, Eastman cut a bedraggled profile when finally immersed in the culture he helped give birth to.”

By the turn of the decade, in spite of a modicum of success as a featured artist on the valedictory New Music America tour, Eastman’s own career had stalled as he became a facilitator/factotum for those younger composers. Written for multiple pianos, hour-long works like “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerilla” refracted minimalism’s optimistic, patchouli-scented origins—both Reich and Reily did their time in the formative counterculture of San Francisco, after all—into the industrial decay (Eastman was a child of the Rust Belt), subcultural alienation, and mindless solipsism that would permeate the eighties. These aren’t his most aesthetically satisfying works, nor do they proffer much in the way of stylistic innovation, but they stand as some of the most transfiguring yet venal works in the postmodern canon. Lacking the wide-eyed plaintiveness of Russell, Glass’ hermetic austerity, or Laurie Anderson’s penchant for self-reflexivity, Eastman attempts to ape all three here—and fails spectacularly.

But that’s precisely the point, one fears. Many of his confederates thrived in the rhizomatic artistic environs of Koch-era New York; like Scott Fitzgerald, Eastman cut a bedraggled profile when finally immersed in the culture he helped give birth to. At least one friend has gone on record about the bizarre dichotomy between his intensely collaborative years upstate and his lonely downward spiral in the East Village. Did the radical rock and disco fusions of Russell and Chatham leave him creatively stifled, caught between the rock of potentially emulating his younger friends and the hard place of earning a living? Could it all be chalked up to overimbibing at the Mineshaft and the Anvil, as the above anecdote suggests? Are some people simply destined to write two or three great opuses before the muse leads them astray? Did his idiosyncratic notation style and the loss of many scores over the years serve as the true culprits? An inquisitive and uncompromising figure, Julius Eastman remains as elusive from the grave as he was in life.


REVIEWED BY SEAN MURPHY
SEAN'S 3 FAVORITE TRACKS: ???
Read more by Sean Murphy on his blog, Brooklyn Music


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