Julius Eastman is making a comeback as a front-line composer-performer, perhaps in the nick of time. The multi-talented proto-minimalist, as he is now usually categorized, was eclipsed by the vastly greater popularity of his successors Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, a triad of white men now enjoying their late-life, even-year-birthday celebrations with tribute concerts, box sets and repeating rings of the cash register. Falling into the company of composers who ended short lives and even shorter careers in poverty, if not neglect, Eastman died alone in a charity hospital in Buffalo, NY, in 1990, age 49.
Only last month Philadelphia hosted a festival of Eastman's music; new recordings including previously unreleased live performances by Eastman himself continue to appear; archives of film and non-musical documents are swelling; and YouTube is awash with recordings by the composer and musicians since. This unlikely if welcome revival is anchored in an as-unlikely medium, a university-press book, "Gay Guerilla: Julius Eastman and His Music" (U. of Rochester Press), edited by Renee Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach.
The book is scholarly in appropriate ways: documentation is complete, even heavy in places; there are detailed musical analyses; there are appendices detailing life and works. But the 12 main essays, by musicians, historians and scholars with some to considerable direct knowledge of Eastman the man, together give a picture of him �" charismatic performer, magnetic personality and emotional escape artist �" that puts his work in a context larger and more representative than just his trail-blazing for the trio of successful white guys to come. It also lays bare the ways he was not unique. Drugs and alcohol, professional unreliability and sexual promiscuity took him down, reducing a blazing artistic phenomenon to a more ordinary cautionary tale.
A prodigy whose gift was recognized from childhood, Eastman had the good fortune to work with the major musicians and composers of his time. His piano teacher at Curtis was Mieczyslaw Horszowski (who gave him a B), and he worked and made music alongside composer-performers as illustrious and different as John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Frederic Rzewski.
"Gay Guerilla" presents a composer influenced equally by the free jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis (whose legendary collaboration, "Kind of Blue," is now often deemed "minimal") and disco, a performer of vast talent and limited discipline, a singer whose powerful voice was both a "sepulchral" bass and a keening falsetto, and a man so charming that he had to drive friends off, and did. His last residence was in a public park in which the other homeless men were so taken with him they'd save his place for his erratic returns. George E. Lewis, in a telling Foreword, describes Eastman as possessed of a "Sisyphean loneliness." The descriptor "outrageous" also appears.
Eastman's prolific public career spanned the late 1960s to the mid-80s, during which time being African-American and an out gay man were fraught, dangerous, sometimes illegal propositions in the larger culture, and disfavored in the new-music world in which he made his mark. He put both minority identities in the listening public's face, and some concerts of his music came without programs because the names of the pieces could not be printed. There was "Evil N-----," "Crazy N-----" and "Stay on It," the last to be part of a projected suite Eastman called "the n----- series." In 1978 there was "N----- Faggot," and on the posthumous collection album "Unjust Malaise" (an anagram of his name), "Gay Guerilla."
Packer's 70-page biography, the opening chapter, makes for jaw-dropping reading, marshaling the facts, providing context, and giving a clear-eyed portrait of the man and artist. She begins by introducing the idea of the "trickster," an archetypal amoral force that somehow makes things happen; she sees it reflected in both life and works.
Eastman the genius-clown, the joker, resurfaces throughout the collected essays. More than once the tale is told of Eastman's late-career performance, for always-needed money, as bass soloist in the Bach Christmas Oratorio, when, for his final aria, he walked balletically to his place on the stage and improvised an aria to Bach's text. David Borden, who contributes a weighty chapter on "Evil N-----," elsewhere provides rich anecdotes. When, during a car trip, Philip Glass' music came on the radio, Borden says Eastman exclaimed, "What kind of music is that? It sounds French!"
As a YouTube search will attest, Eastman's "Stay on It" "has quickly rushed to the head of the pack in listener popularity sweepstakes," according to Matthew Mendez, who provides a substantive chapter on it. It appeared, Mendez notes, in 1973, "the very year disco is generally accepted to have emerged into mainstream consciousness." Dubbing it "avant-disco," he adds, "Eastman was also comfortable setting [the piece] off as an 'inside joke' for a primarily gay listenership." For all its permutations, in Eastman's own time and since, there's a truth in the quote Mendez uses as the title of his chapter: "That Piece Does Not Exist without Julius."