There are shots of him working in the studio before we see him driving home. So, it better be good. Hopefully it makes the world better and people happier. But he went on to work with so many people, in so many different contexts, primarily as a drummer, but for the last six years or so of his working life was playing mostly keyboards in King Crimson.
I think I only ever saw him once, in concert, playing drums with Swans in All of his various contributions and collaborations were characterised by a tendency to take on new challenges, to always be moving forward, carving out new creative territory β making music that was neither self-satisfied nor complacent in terms of artistic potential; such complacency β symptomatic of a resistance to risk-taking or a repression of imagination β is the commonplace for mainstream Rock and Pop: forging a viable brand then investing a rigorously neurotic paranoia around maintaining it as a reliable source of income.
I spent 16 years teaching guitar to pupils of all ages and almost never came across anyone either whose conception of what it was they were undertaking involved anything beyond the incredibly narrow creative territory of corporate-invested, mainstream entertainment, or who were in any way amenable or responsive to music even slightly outside it whenever I felt like it was even worth testing the ground.
For Baraka, the point is to illustrate the tendency of fixing , securing property , as a characteristic feature of the broader European [white patriarchal] imperial-colonialist project; his premise unfolds brilliantly as a way of presenting improvisation as a vital practice in undermining the tendencies and dominant legacies of colonialism.
Swing , the verb, meant a simple reaction to the music and, as it developed in verb usage, a way of reacting to anything in life.
