Part of the problem for a music festival like Big Ears which showcases jazz legends and trail-blazing new-music pioneers of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, is that many of the performers are now quite elderly and many of them die within a year or so of their Big Ears performance.
I call it "the Big Ears curse." I saw the minimalist composer Jon Gibson at Big Ears in 2018; he died in 2020. In 2019, I saw ambient artist Harold Budd and he passed the next year. The festival was cancelled in 2020 and 2021 because of the covid pandemic, but in 2022 I saw Jaimie Branch's Fly of Die and the indie band Low. Jaimie died that August and Low's drummer Mimi Parker died later that same year; neither were particularly old (by Big Ears standards). And then last year (2023), I saw electronic music pioneer Phill Niblock, and he died just last January.
Certainly there's no cause and effect, and I don't hold Big Ears or myself at all responsible for the deaths (although I do hold both the festival and myself responsible for seeing them in the first place). Impermanence is swift and on a long enough time scale, everyone's life expectancy is reduced to zero. And although some of the artists I mentioned died within months of their Big Ears sets, some didn't pass until well over a year later, sometimes even after a subsequent festival was held.
Impermanence came particularly swift this year. Cellist Charles Curtis performed an extended (three-hour) composition titled Just Charles & Cello in The Romantic Chord in a Setting of Abstract #1 from Quadrilateral Phase Angle Traversals in Dream Light, written by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. I didn't attend the set - it was separately ticketed with an additional add-on price, and I had already spent a small fortune on a VIP Sonic Explorer pass for the rest of the festival. A security guard I talked to while waiting on line for a later show told me the set was "just one note played for three straight hours," and he didn't seem to think the audience any less kooky when I told him that somebody else had actually written that "one note" sustained for three hours.
Those "in the know" are aware that La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela are minimalist music legends; Young has been described as the godfather of all minimalist and ambient musicians. I seriously considered shelling out the extra bucks to attend the Just Charles performance because I wanted to be able to say I saw Young perform, or at least say I attended a performance of Young's music and Zazeela's light design. But at three hours, I would have missed several other sets and besides, I was kind of irked that I was asked to pay more for one particular performance.
In any event, cellist Charles Curtis survived the Big Ears curse, but I was saddened to learn this morning that Marian Zazeela has passed on.
Impermanence is swift.
Zazeela often gets overlooked and lumped together with husband La Monte Young, but in addition to music, lighting, and stage design (she really put the "theater" into the Theater of Eternal Music), her art included poetry and drawings of intricate calligraphic forms that were by turns hypnotic and dizzying. She should properly be recognized as an integral part of a 20th Century New York intellectual scene that included, in addition to Young, Angus MacLise (creator of the Universal Solar Calendar this blog has been following), Terry Riley, Philip Glass, John Cage, John Cale, Henry Flynt, Catherine Christer Hennix, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Morton Feldman, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, Merce Cunningham, László Moholy-Nagy, Samuel Beckett, Bill Evans, Charlemagne Palestine, and so on.
On one level, Zazeela wasn't present at the Big Ears performance of Just Charles, so her passing can't be blamed on the curse. On a deeper level, though, it's another reminder of the transitory nature of our brief time on this Earth. On an even deeper level, her art lives on and will serve as an inspiration for generations to come.
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