Process Prevails: A Conversation with Darius Jones on ‘FluXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s suite but sacred)’

What is music? What is art? How is art experienced aurally connected to its visual manifestations? To most people, these are seemingly answerable inquiries. But when pressed, they struggle to provide concrete responses. It is in this ineffable gray area that Fluxus thrives. Derived from the Latin word for “flowing”, Fluxus is a collection of artists that took a broad perspective on art to create entirely new forms, often multidisciplinary ones. As its founder, George Macinuas, put it, Fluxus aimed to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art.” Though seen by some as an artist community that existed solely during the 1960s and 1970s, Darius Jones’ fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s suite but sacred) (Northern Spy/WE JAZZ, 2023) confirms the vitality of its ethos.

Fluxus artists sought works that defied category. But a few commonalities often emerge from their output – a sense of humor, the thought that art exists everywhere, and the minimization of perceptions of lines between different artistic forms. Against this backdrop, one significant platform was the fluxkit, a collection of objects in a case designed to serve as a mini Fluxus museum. But one similarity among Fluxus work stands out the most. Heavily inspired by John Cage’s perceptions of musical indeterminacy and his belief that one should create art without knowing its end, Fluxus understated the end product in favor of the creative process undertaken to reach it. Like the attaché case housing a fluxkit, Jones’ latest work encapsulates it all. 

Often on fLuXkit, the listener receives pieces of a picture but not the full portrait, as if allowed to see brief scenes of a dramatic production but not the whole show. There is an urgency to “Fluxus V5T 1S1” portrayed by the bluesy cries of Jones’ horn above a foreboding cello, as if the group is concerned about an impending attack. But left undisclosed is the origin of concern. Midway through the movement, the ensemble moves into a high-volume and high-intensity fury, questioning who is speaking – the aggrieved or the instigator. Perhaps they are one and the same with the roles left open to interpretation.

Jumping to “Rainbow”, there is a moment, at about the 8:54 mark, where behind a slow bass solo lies what sounds like the horn from a car being locked. Is this an error that escaped production or an intentional subtle nod to Fluxus’ insistence on the integration of art into life? Perhaps the absence of a clear answer to that question is the entire point in an album dedicated to works of uncertainty.

The mysteries well emphasize that the listener should not seek a preset destination but, instead, enjoy the voyage. However, that is not to say matters remain wholly unresolved by the end. The closer, “Damon and Pythias” is shockingly beautiful at times. Named after the two-century-old structure that houses Western Front, the multidisciplinary artist-run center that sponsored Jones’ Fluxus project, one may expect somewhat antiquated sounds given the building’s vintage. Nothing could be further from the truth. Horn articulation and sputtering strings often sound like a broken electronic device – perhaps another reference to the extra-musical world – before it creates an air of mystery. Cellist Peggy Lee’s gorgeously folksy motif fills the void and sets the stage for the leader’s incredibly moving closing solo. 

Ultimately, the saxophonist’s four-movement suite is compellingly unpredictable. It is not music one seeks for a calm and relaxing Sunday afternoon drive. But for those who wish to be pushed and challenged, this recording does it in spades. We sat down with the effusively creative Jones – Downbeat’s 2019 Annual Critics Poll winner for Rising Star on Alto Saxophone – to discuss the fluxkit he left for listeners to experience.

PostGenre: How did you first learn about Fluxus, and what draws you to it?

Darius Jones: I first became aware of Fluxus through John Cage. I’m a big fan of Cage’s philosophies and his pieces where he approached the idea of improvisation by emphasizing chance. He built these amazing pieces which focused on the process more than the outcome. They are captivating.

Fluxus was born in New York, but it affected the whole artistic world, including the music world. I did a residency at Western Front, which was built because of Fluxus and the inspiration they drew from the people involved in it. I also studied Black Mountain College, another place like Western Front, but in North Carolina. At Black Mountain, they were creating a utopian world where all arts were combined. Their focus was on creating work from that space of questioning what is music, what is art, and what is a gallery. Yoko Ono’s work has also been tied to Fluxus as well. She made some very cool pieces that have inspired me. In general, I found those types of things where you question the role of art fascinating.

PG: Is it difficult to convey Fluxus’ emphasis on process over end product on an album, something that is literally a tangible final product?

DJ: Here’s the thing. Fluxus is all about the process, and you can’t always present the process itself to an audience in an understandable way. That is why I’m trying to make everything about this project super transparent.

There will be a documentary showing my process when I was in Vancouver with open rehearsals. I let people come into our rehearsals from the very beginning. I let them see the sketches of the music. Western Front is putting everything from the project into an archive. I wanna put the record contract in there. There are so many different things in the archives that people probably won’t see until maybe even after I’m dead and gone.

With this particular project, I also didn’t think about the final result at all. I remember working on it and having moments where I thought, “Oh, this is good enough.” I had to stop myself as I realized I was thinking about the idea of finishing or presenting. I forced myself to push myself further because I knew I was capable of more. I was capable of greater compositional feats. Capable of playing things better. But especially in the compositional part, I wanted to push things as far as I could, without considering what someone else would think about it. I decided to just go for broke.

PG: Would you mind further explaining the compositional aspects of the project? In Fluxus pieces, it was common for something to be composed in a way that provides an almost infinite number of ways of playing it. You have an animated score video for “Zubot” that shows your use of a unique graphic key that pushes beyond conventional Western notation.

DJ: Because Fluxus tied visual art and other art forms, I wanted a visual component to the score. I wanted to create a system of language unique to me and what I was trying to achieve as a composer. I wanted that effect where the worlds of both visual and sonic components meet in the middle.

I think sometimes people have the perception that composition is function-based; that composition itself is not art but merely a functional thing. One of the things I thought about when we were making the animated score was that we should make sure to use the composition that has the most graphics and non-traditional notation because I wanted the person engaging with the work to have an artistic visual experience as well as a listening experience. I feel like Fluxus combined those two experiences, in such an amazing way, so many times. Are you familiar with that piece where they demolished a piano?

PG: Yes; in 1962, at the International Fluxus New Music Festival.

DJ: If you closed your eyes while there, you have an experience of just listening to the hammers on the piano. But then there’s also the visual experience once you open your eyes and realize what the artists are physically doing to the piano. Fluxus is always trying to find that interdimensional space within art, where people are left asking, “Is this music? Is this visual? Is this auditory?” With this particular piece, I was trying to find where art and music meet. Where is that place- both visually and auditorily? I wanted the score to be a work of art. I wanted it to be something that felt like it had to be worked on too, which all goes back to the idea of process.

PG: Your use of graphic notation – while more personal than Western notation – would seem to present its own unique challenges. Was it difficult creating the language you used?

DJ: When you create a compositional world with graphic language, you need to be pretty clear on how to interpret that language. And I have to say, I’m very impressed with all the musicians I worked with, who went hardcore in terms of using the language. They are very precise.

But in terms of graphic score notation, I wanted to see how I could come up with something that has a certain level of function to it; something that can be used to communicate. But I also wanted it to be visually stirring to me, and hopefully to the other musicians engaging with it.  

I’ve [long] done line drawing and used that as a starting place. I started checking out Paul Klee, who wrote an amazing book about line drawing. I studied that book, some of his pieces, and some works by other artists. We also spent [substantial] time with artists in the Vancouver area, like Stan Douglas. I took all that information in, and I started to question simple things. What is a line? What is a curve? What is a block? How do I communicate the different things that I want? And so I just started drawing. One at a time, each symbol came to me. I came up with 25 of them then, now 26. Coming up with the symbols, I tried to speak directly to the idea of improvisation.

PG: This also seems to tie into Stan Douglas’ artwork for the album. The art is fascinating because if you look at it quickly, it seems like only a pattern with some circles. But when you examine the piece further, it appears to move around or vibrate. Is that element of the piece why you thought it was perfect for this work?

DJ: Yeah, that’s the whole thing. Stan had these pieces that I love and he shared them with me. That particular piece was never published or presented anywhere else before. He sent it to me and, when I saw it, I experienced that thing where it felt like my eyes were vibrating. I thought that was very cool.

From a larger perspective, when I was thinking about this album, I wanted it to be its own kind of fluxkit. So, I got the artwork of Stan Douglas on the cover and liner notes that themselves function like a piece of art. Then there’s the music itself, with contributions by the musicians playing the music. The entirety of the album is a larger body of work.

PG: Some Fluxus artists also used event scores. Your project does not make use of event scores, but did you study them during your research process?

DJ:  I am a fan of event scores. Yoko Ono, for one, did event scores.  I’ve also written event-based pieces. This piece isn’t one. There are moments where I’ll give instruction – verbal instruction – but the piece doesn’t function like an event piece. It’s heavily notated.

But with this piece, I also approached improvisation in a very different way than I have before. I tried to create moments where improvisation met written language. In a way, that ties to event scores because you find yourself wondering if these worlds are working together in a very deliberate way to create an event.

I was always thinking about that when I wrote “Fluxus V5T 1S1.” During the improvisational section in that movement, a lot of it is written material played by the other musicians when they interact with me while I improvise. A lot of people, after hearing the movement, are shocked that so much of it is written. There was only about one minute of completely open improvisation. But even that improvisation is based on the material that the strings played before. The piece is mostly a fully structured composition. If I performed it twenty times, there would have been a lot of similarities between each performance. It’s actually kind of interesting to me what would change each time and what wouldn’t.

PG: Is that uncertainty something you often seek in your music?

DJ: I like feeling like I don’t know what’s gonna happen, even if I know the map. Because of how things are set up and organized, things could go one way, or they could go another. That uncertainty is exciting, and I always want my music to have that quality where things seem familiar but different. Like when you remember something somewhat differently than how it has actually occurred. That’s what interests me about music in general.

For many reasons, I’m so stoked to perform this work again. It’s only been performed live once. I really wanna perform it live multiple times because I have a feeling what would happen would be something quite extraordinary. I think about all those graphic elements of the score and how even though there are great guidelines, things may show in many different ways.

PG: Given Fluxus’ emphasis on the integration of art and life, do you see a parallel between that openness to things being both the same and different in art and them being so in life more generally?

DJ: Man, you don’t even understand the depth of the question you’re asking me right now in relation to myself. That question is something I live with. People see me, but they don’t know me. They don’t know the fullness of who I am. I would say that’s even true with other musicians when I play with them. We meet each other, we play, we can even become very close and really good friends. Even so, there’s always this element of intimate privateness.

PG: A part of yourself that you keep to yourself.

DJ: Yeah, we all do it. We’re never fully present to another person. I feel like art exists in that place because if we’re looking at the same thing or listening to the same thing, your experience –  who you are – will give you a relationship to the work that is different from anyone else’s. I think that’s awesome. I hope people have conversations about this work and how they don’t see it the same way; that is an incredible thing about art.

PG: Even the album’s title seems open to artistic interpretation. Could you explain the title a little?

DJ: Sure. I have fun when I make titles for records. I capitalized the L and X in “fLuXkit” to bring out the word “lux” which is the name of the room [Grand Luxe Hall] at Western Front where I composed the piece. Of course, “fLuXkit” is also a reference to pieces that Fluxus artists would create where they would gather together and create a box of work. As I mentioned earlier, this entire album is intended to be a fluxkit. And, of course, since I created it in Vancouver, it is the “fLuXkit Vancouver.”

PG: What about the subtitle “i̶t̶s suite but sacred”?

DJ:  Of course, a suite is a certain type of compositional work where you compose multiple movements. Many times they have a feeling of dance to them. There’s a lot of that in this project, where you can move your body to the music. It was a compositional strategy I followed. Sacred is another compositional method, meaning the work has a spiritual quality. Thinking about this recording and listening to it gave me the feeling, at times, that there is a spiritual element to the work that takes you away and into a higher plane of being.

PG: Right, but why the struck-through “i̶t̶s”?

DJ: The version of “its” is crossed out because it is grammatically incorrect. It should be “it’s.” But instead of correcting it, I decided to keep the error but strike it out. I didn’t realize that doing so would be such a problem with different online platforms, but I thought that was pretty cool. When I find in writing a word with the cross-strike through it, I find it fascinating. It is interesting to see the editorial process in a physical sense. I think it’s beautiful. It’s also kind of funny.

PG: Do you see the strike-through “i̶t̶s” as adding humor to the overall fluxkit? Humor has certainly played a significant role in many Fluxus works.

DJ: Yes. There is also some humor in the “sweet but sacred” term. I am playing with the idea of something being sweet and savory. I like to add humor like that into my work, and it’s a big part of Fluxus too.

PG: Which, in a way,  goes back to John Cage, who you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation. One good example would be his piece “Water Walk”, where he would squeeze a rubber duck or knock a radio off a table. Cage was making an artistic point, even as many in the audience found humor in his work.

DJ: Yeah, that kind of thing is beautiful. I love it. I also greatly admire Sun Ra, who also put a lot of humor in his work and played with words a lot. He’s a great influence on me. Humor is important. I can’t judge what other people do with their art, but I can’t always treat my work so seriously. Sometimes, humor is needed.

With this record, I wasn’t trying to create music for any purpose other than to tell a story about a place and push myself to a greater level of expression. I wanted to see how I could challenge my skills further. How I could musically create problems for myself or situational circumstances that may be complicated. These are things with which I think all artists experiment, to some degree. For me, experimentation is a given. And so, in some moments on the record, we may change tempos seemingly randomly but, actually, with purpose to get deeper into the piece.  If I was a visual artist, I probably would do the same thing, in terms of experimenting greatly with form. Doing that, on this record, was tricky.

But the key to this project is focusing on the process rather than the outcome. I think I’m gonna do a lot more of that going forward. I really liked it. At this point, I’ve done a lot of stuff musically, but I feel that this particular piece is incredibly important and embodies something primordial to me. I’m excited for people to engage with the work.

fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s suite but sacred) will be released on September 29, 2023 as a collaboration between Northern Spy Records and We Jazz Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information about Darius Jones can be found on his website. Jones will premiere his fLuXkit work on September 15, 2023 with an 8 pm performance at 411 Kent Ave, New York. More information can be found here.