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.

 

The review in the Dec. 5 issue of The Nation declares the book "definitive" and states that "these European movements [in jazz] ... are vital, seldom acknowledged elements of jazz history, and it is unlikely that anyone will cover it as thoroughly as Heffley."

The Dec/Jan 2006 issue of Bookforum calls the book "commendable" and also notes that "the interviews...are uniformly excellent."

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. From their review: "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...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.

One Final Note review: "...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...Heffley has produced a ground-breaking and insightful volume."

Signal to Noise (Winter 2006) review: "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 (George E. Lewis, Columbia University)

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...

In fact, French, German, Japanese, and Italian studies of improvised music rarely make it to the United States. In a globalized environment, American scholars' neglect of very well-developed writing on improvisation by people like Jost, Wolfram Knauer, Bert Noglik, Hans Kumpf, Christian Broecking, and the late Peter Niklas Wilson (one of the few whose writings have been rendered in English) can be seen as serious lacuna that impoverishes Stateside scholarship. Indeed, this is one of the major issues that the Heffley book addresses, and for which his book provides a welcome corrective...

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" 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] Brštzmann'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.

No. 78, Fall 2004

Yale University Press, March 2005 

 

To buy this book , please click on the image left.

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)

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

Als Duke Ellington einst zu Ausformungen des Free Jazz, also zur Musik Ornette Colemans und anderer, befragt wurde, meinte er nur: "Müssen wir uns mit etwas so Primitivem befassen?" Heffley beschäftigt sich in seinem Referat mit verschiedenen Beispielen des "Primitiven" im europäischen und amerikanischen "Free Jazz/Post Jazz", also in Neuer und improvisierter Musik, die Bezug auf Urgeschichte und Mythen nimmt--beispielweise in Sun Ras musikalischen Ägypten- und Weltraumreisen. Er versucht, die eigene westliche Version eines solchen Mythos zu beschreiben, die sich deutlich vom in diesem Zusammenhang öfter diskutierten afrikanischen oder afro-zentristischen Mythos unterscheidet. Schliesslich wird er die Ergebnisse seiner Darstellung in den grösseren Rahmen der kultur-theoretische Diskussion (Belgrad, Erlmann, Baudrillard) stellen, die sich mit archaischen Zeichen und ihrer Manifestation via Improvisation in der Kunst auseinandersetzt.

Click here for an English version of my essay.