Women in Jazz Media: On The Bookcase Episode 04 with Maria Golia

Women in Jazz Media: The Podcasts

The fourth episode in our podcast series ‘On The Bookcase’, featuring female authors from across the world, with host Fiona Ross, with original music from Hannah Horton. In this episode we welcome the brilliant Maria Golia, who has an inspirational portfolio of work including her recent book ‘Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure’.

An American Author in Egypt. ‘Egypt where I’ve lived for thirty years, has been a source of inspiration in my life and writing. My non-fiction books, Photography and Egypt and Cairo, City of Sand involved extensive historical research alongside an intimate understanding of the country’s present moment, its place in today’s world as much as in that of the past. In addition to many years as columnist and commentator for Cairo, Beirut and British publications (including the New Internationalist, Oxford), I’ve contributed to Vogue (New York), The International Herald Tribune, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), and the New Statesman (UK). I’m currently Middle-East reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (London).

Following Egypt’s 2011 popular uprising, as the unrest continued for over two years, writing about it all became rather fraught and frankly repetitive. The political side of the story may be summed up as follows: power seeks to preserve itself and Egypt’s seemingly inflexible authoritarian regime has so far managed to bend with the winds of the Arab Spring without breaking, while ensuring that no viable opposition can emerge. In terms of Egypt’s fragile desert environment, the subject of many of my articles over time, the main advances have been towards greater destruction. To achieve some intellectual distance, I turned to outer space. Meteorite, a cultural history of space rocks (2015). While writing Meteorite, I started listening Ornette Coleman(1930-2015), who I had the chance to meet while working at the Caravan of Dreams, in Fort Worth Texas (1985-1992), Ornette’s hometown. I hadn’t heard those CDs in over twenty years, nor had I been particularly receptive to Ornette’s music before. But the time had come and Ornette worked his magic. I was reminded of how little I knew about the musicians I booked to the club, and hung out with after hours. I grew up with jazz, thanks to my father’s love of music and my brother Frank’s decision to make a career of music and composition, but I had paid virtually no attention to these great artists’ lives. This knowledge gap needed to be filled in order to make those seven years of experience at Caravan mean something. Plus, someone needed to get the history of this progressive arts venue, located smack dab in the heart of defense-industry corporate American, on the record. It was quite a juxtaposition; while we were promoting the break-away arts in the 1980s, building on the gains of the 1960s and 1970s, corporate culture was consolidating, as a way of life and political force.

Hearing Ornette in the wake of Egypt’s uprising, when I had dared to hope that this part of the world would one day experience its summer of love, got me thinking about the 1960s. I was a little too young to experience it firsthand, but the ideas that emerged from that opening marked me. It was a time when artists of every genre were breaking with convention, convinced of their power to change the world, which for a while at least, they did. Ornette was not only there, his music was the soundtrack of the moment. In fact, Ornette was key to everything I needed to learn more about and to share: Texas music history, 1960s art collectives, the pre-internet 1980s, the role of jazz in the international avant-garde, and the life stories of some of the greatest American musicians of all time. https://mariagolia.wordpress.com/about/