Two trips charted much of the 40 years that John King has spent as a composer and performer. One was a visit to the Middle East as Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s resident composer; the other, a New England family fishing trip. Back in the 1980s, King stopped at a bait and tackle shop with his brother-in-law, when he imagined the fishing line as a violin string and started considering musical possibilities in the lures and sinkers and bobbers.

Like any good experimenter, he had his violin with him, and bought a supply of implements to try. “I took the violin apart and started putting these things on it,” he explains. “I was bowing between the bobbers and making cork nuts (to stretch the strings across).” Once he started playing, he thought “there’s no one in the world who would want to hear this but John Cage”. The experiments, of course, recalled Cage’s prepared piano work but with one major difference: the violin had no built-in decay. A string vibrates for as long as it’s bowed. King made some recordings and sent a tape to Cage and, in January 1989, the composer paid a visit to King’s New York apartment.

Cage’s response was enthusiastic, and he introduced King to a Bell Labs engineer who gave him two violins with individual piezo pickups and individual outputs for each string, allowing him to play through a quadrophonic set-up. The meeting with Cage also led King to start composing for Merce Cunningham and the trip to the Middle East. Two years after the choreographer’s death in 2009, the Cunningham company’s Legacy Tour included concerts in Israel and Palestine, providing King new inspiration for musical exploration, as well as his political activation. He began learning the rhythm and melody modes of Arabic music.

The primary product of that inspiration is King’s ongoing Free Palestine series of string quartets. Each piece is named after a Palestinian village lost to warfare, beginning with the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and continuing through to the present. The works allow considerable latitude for interpretation by the performers, and have included background drones, chance operations and graphic scores within traditional notation. For some pieces, King joins the quartet on oud.

For this special Wire mix, King weaves his Free Palestine string quartets with blues, folk and jazz influences.

Tracklist

John King “Free Palestine: I. Sultani Yakah – Ijlil al-Qibliyya”
Karen Dalton “Same Old Man”
Howling Wolf “Meet Me At The Bottom”
Bernie Worrell/Cindy Blackman Santana/John King “Future-Blues – Spherical”
John King “11 Phasma For Multiple Strings”
Muddy Waters “I Can’t Be Satisfied”
Leyya Tawil & John King “Love Songs For A Free Palestine” (excerpt)
Abe Speller/Charles Baldwin/Roy Nathanson/Curtis Fowlkes/John King “Sun House” (excerpt)
Pharaoh Sanders “You Gotta Have Freedom” (excerpt)
Abe Speller/Jean Chaine/John King “Electric World/What Funk You Got”
John King “Moonlight Blues (After Blind Blake)”
Miles Davis “Ghetto Walk” (excerpt)
Abe Speller/Clifford Carter/Robert Levin/John King “Inner Thang”
John King “Nighttears In Nablus”
Sonny Sharrock “Many Mansions”
John King “Same Old Man”
Abe Speller/Robert Levin/Ted Daniel/John King “Spiritual #5”
John King “Ars Imitatur Naturam/Brooklyn Youth Chorus”
John King “Free Palestine: Al-Fatur – 12 May, 1948-Present”

In The Wire 495, King talks in more detail to Kurt Gottschalk about his background and music. Wire subscribers can also read the article in our online library.