Le même A Love Supreme écrivait aussi :
"Lors d'une récente ballade nocturne dans l'espace numérique du Wouèhbe, filant un puissant moteur et son armée de robots, la recherche m'a conduit sur un article passionnant de la revue "Popular Music and Society", traitant de l'analogie de la spiritualité du free-jazz afro-américain avec la musique de Magma, et en particulier celle de Coltrane et de Sun Ra, par rapport aux notions d'espace, de mythologie extraterrestre et de liberté. Ces notions n'étant pas à prendre dans un sens objectif, quelles sont leurs significations? C'est ce que l'auteur tente de comprendre, en partant de l'hypothèse d'une revendication ethnique et identitaire.
Il s'agit d'un article de fond,sous la plume d'un érudit, Kevin Holm-Hudson, qui s'intitule
"Apocalyptic otherness: black music and extraterrestrial identity in the music of Magma" (Popular Music and Society. Dec 2003) Il est disponible ici, avec l'approbation des forces saturniennes :
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2822/is_4_26/ai_111507220/printEn voici quelques extraits :
"Apocalyptic otherness: black music and extraterrestrial identity in the music of Magma
Introduction
In the final months of the 1960s, drummer Christian Vander had a vision of an "eternal" music saga, concerning the future disintegration of Earth and the subsequent efforts of a few citizens to begin a new society on the distant planet Kobaia. This story was to be conveyed through the music of a new band called Magma.
(...)
In this study, I analyze Vander's work with Magma within the context of the writings of LeRoi Jones (later known as Imamu Amiri Baraka) and John Corbett, who have both written about the use of outer-space imagery in African-American music as a badge of "outsider" identity. Jones, in his collection of essays Black Music, wrote about 1950s and '60s jazz and R&B; Corbett has written about the "space jazz" of Sun Ra, reggae producer/artist Lee Perry, and funk musician George Clinton. For both authors, extraterrestrial imagery in African-American music is an emblem of social disidentification. Although Christian Vander is white, his music and cosmology have interesting parallels with the theories of Jones and Corbett, demonstrating that perhaps their conceptions of "otherness" are not strictly racially bounded after all.
(...)
Black music, space, and identity
In his 1966 essay "The Changing Same: R&B and New Black Music," LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), writing about composers and performers such as John Coltrane and Sun Ra, commented about the role that "space" plays in avant-garde jazz:
There are other new musicians, new music, that take freedom as
already being. Ornette was a cool breath of open space. Space, to
move. So freedom already exists. The change is spiritual. The total.
The absolutely new. That is the absolute realization....
Sun-Ra is spiritually oriented. He understands "the future" as an
ever widening comprehension of what space is, even to the "physical"
travel between the planets as we do anyway in the long human chain
of progress. Sun-Ra's Arkestra sings in one of his songs, "We travel
the spaceways, from planet to planet." It is science-fact that
Sun-Ra is interested in, not science-fiction. It is evolution
itself, and its fruits. God as evolution. The flow of is. (198-99)
(...)
Nevertheless, in Magma's music one can find elements of black musics filtered through a peculiarly teutonic sensibility, and so comparisons of certain aspects of Coltrane's music with Vander's compositional style can be illuminating. (2)
Space and freedom
Jones implies in "The Changing Same" that the open formal boundaries of black music constitute a place of refuge for black people. Lacking the freedom to "freely move" in the white-dominated society of 1960s America (or of America in 2003, for that matter), the "new black music" provides for its people a place to move in total freedom of the spirit. Jones elsewhere describes this "space to move" as "the absolute open expression of everything" (193). This freedom is this infinite, couched in spiritual terms.
John Corbett's essay "Brothers from Another Planet," found in his 1994 book Extended Play, is informed partially by Jones's analysis. Corbett, however, extends Jones's argument. For him, the preoccupation with "space" is not merely a locus for freedom in musical structure; it is also more than simply a badge of racial or ethnic pride (although that is certainly part of Corbett's argument). For Corbett, extraterrestrial imagery in African-American music--and its resultant "infinite" structure--is a form of protest, a politically motivated symbol for marginalization. He writes:
In fact, the use of space as a metaphor is more involved than it
might first appear. If metaphors basically work by taking something
unfamiliar and substituting for it a known object or concept, then
what happens when the metaphor chosen is, itself, defined as the
"unknown"? Granted, the word space conjures all sorts of
associations, but one of its primary attributes is the notion of
exploration--the very notion that links it with innovation in
African-American music. Hence, one is left to define something by
substituting for it the unknown....
What happens, then, in the case of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and
Lee Perry, is that they build their mythologies on an image of
disorientation that becomes a metaphor for social marginalization,
an experience familiar to many African Americans though alien to
most of the terrestrial, dominant white "center." Staking their
claim on this ec-centric margin--a place that simultaneously eludes
and frightens the oppressive, centered subjectivity--the three of
them reconstitute it as a place of creation. It is a metaphor of
being elsewhere, or perhaps of making this elsewhere your own. (18)
(...)
Nevertheless, the music of Coltrane--and Orff, along with others--has certainly imprinted itself on Magma's distinctive style. Perhaps the most radical contribution of Magma to popular music, however, is the total commitment required of its created ethnicity. Sun Ra did it first, of course. And David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona certainly explored similar notions of "otherness" (in Bowie's case, a badge of sexual marginalization in a "straight" society). But neither Sun Ra nor Bowie went so far as to create their own language and their own lexicon. This created ethnicity is shared by some of Magma's more obsessive fans--another parallel with Coltrane's legacy. For example, St. John's African Orthodox Church in San Francisco has canonized Coltrane as a saint and uses A Love Supreme in its liturgy (Porter 296-97). Meanwhile, on the Internet, the Ordonnateurs du Rituel Kobaien (O.R.K.) maintain a website collecting the "holy writings" of its prophet Christian Vander and even including its own statement of "doctrine".
nb: vous trouverez aussi dans cet article une excellente analyse de l'influence coltranienne sur MDK et Kohntarkosz. "
Sujet: Sun Ra 
Dim 11 Jan - 19:08
