Pulling a Politics Out of the Hat at ‘The Noise Upstairs’ (A Manchester Case)

Abstract

The Noise Upstairs (NU) is a monthly freely improvised (‘free improv’) music night with a home above a café bar in a mixed/student suburb of Manchester. This chapter uses the perspective of critical improvisation studies to reflect on aspects of a performance ethnography carried out by the authors, both of whom are performers and one of whom (Hunter) curates the NU night for the NU collective. Free improv is a post-1960s set of meta-musical practices related to but contesting both ‘jazz’, ‘free jazz’, ‘new music’ and ‘experimental’ music. In it, real-time co-creation and negotiation of social-and-musical relationships are paramount. Consequently, the question of whether a politics of sorts is enacted in the dialogic and multilateral socialities generated in free improv is a substantive one. In addressing it, the authors deploy some concepts from the ‘affective turn’ in social theory to review how the general milieu and out-of-the-hat ensemble-formation approach adopted at NU in fact enables a ‘minor’ micro-political practice of participating differently to be established there. Arising from that discussion, and in line with a key theme of the wider PARTISPACE study, the authors then discuss whether that politics might meaningfully (and usefully) be articulated in terms of ‘democracy’.

Citation

Bright, G. and Hunter, A. (2022), "Pulling a Politics Out of the Hat at ‘The Noise Upstairs’ (A Manchester Case)", McMahon, G., Rowley, H. and Batsleer, J. (Ed.) Reshaping Youth Participation: Manchester in a European Gaze, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 173-190. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-358-820221011