New translation of Lê Quan Ninh’s book mediates life, pleasure, and art
Improvising Freely: The ABCs of an Experience, local press and print-on-demand bookstore PSGuelph’s most recent title, collects, in alphabetical order, the musings of French percussionist Lê Quan Ninh. The book, in an English translation courtesy of University of Guelph Philosophy professor and poet Karen Houle, is, indeed, about drumming. But this slim, Kraft-Dinner-orange volume is just as much about intimacy.
Houle’s introduction lovingly details her meeting Ninh at With the Grain, following a life-changing performance at the 2008 Jazz Fest. Her photographs of Ninh, scattered throughout the volume, offer beguiling glimpses into their friendship, and Ninh’s words themselves stress that free improvisation has less to do with pounding skins and more to do with listening closely to oneself, to one another, and to the world all around. Ninh’s prose (or Houle’s translation) seldom proves simple to parse, but when Ninh writes that “The long and slow apprenticeship is how to be in each other’s company,” and, of the fondly remembered musician Peter Kowald, that “his ear for music transcended and transformed into an ear for others,” he clearly characterizes improvisation as a species of human intimacy.
“To say that tuning is nothing but one moment coordinating different tempos,” he later writes, “is perhaps also a good definition of love. The multiplicity of tempos going on during a performance is not unlike the everyday of relationships.” At the informal reading group held shortly after the book’s September launch in PSGuelph’s nothing-if-not-intimate workshop, nestled in the front corner of cozy experimental music venue Silence – the general consensus echoed these sentiments, as readers applied Ninh’s observations to parenting, dance, and conversation. As Houle puts it, “Living one’s life is improvising.”
As Ninh makes clear in several chapters, free improvisation, at the level of political organization, means anarchism. But most of these reflections are more personal than polemical. In the performance practice he describes, Ninh asks a lot of himself and, occasionally, he asks a lot of his readers too. Certain passages are so heady that they approach total confusion, like the maddeningly elliptical chapter on “Air.” At such alienating moments, one may relate all too well to Houle’s description of dreary contemporary subjectivity: “You move through your days … not really looking anyone in the eyes … it’s amazing how dead we can be, even in the middle of being alive.” Thankfully, such passages are seriously outnumbered by those that enliven the intimate experiences of reading and living. Such passages, like the gorgeous “Dance,” awaken one’s attention and, paradoxically, encourage distraction. Improvising Freely drops from one’s hands and one sits dumbfounded by existence. The flexing limbs of a spider. The calm hum of the refrigerator. The squeak of fingers on paper.
In a charming passage from his book The Pleasure of the Text (also about intimacy and also, perhaps coincidentally, arranged alphabetically), French thinker Roland Barthes writes that reading is most pleasurable, “if … I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.” If inspiring one to experience the world more vividly is anything like the point of literature, then Improvising Freely is a very great work indeed.