Blaise Siwula

Blaise Siwula came into the world on February 19, 1950, inside Detroit, Michigan, where his upbringing unfolded inside a middle-class Black neighborhood. A neighboring resident rehearsed saxophone each afternoon and sometimes permitted the youngster entry to observe the sessions. Engaged with creative pursuits throughout his youth, he took up alto saxophone study at age 14 and performed inside his middle-school concert band. Exposure to John Coltrane’s album Om in 1969 prompted him to adopt the tenor saxophone and project his own expression through the instrument. Live encounters with Art Pepper in San Francisco plus Ornette Coleman, Sonny Stitt, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Blue Mitchell, Elvin Jones, and Miles Davis at notable Detroit-area concerts during the early 1970s left lasting impressions; Cecil Taylor’s recordings alongside Jimmy Lyons later supplied further inspiration. The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival of 1972 together with recitals by Ravi Shankar and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra also proved formative.

Between 1968 and 1980 he attended college intermittently, pursuing theory and composition at Wayne State University before completing a B.F.A. His earliest direct meetings with jazz musicians occurred near 1971 while he resided in a hotel close to the university’s downtown campus. Drummer Doc Watson, who had been frequenting the premises, later returned to study composition; the two spent evenings discussing music, art, and Charlie Parker. After marrying, Siwula relocated to San Francisco, where he began presenting free improvisation inside coffee houses and composing poetry shaped by Spanish Civil War writers such as Miguel Hernandez and Federico García Lorca, as well as French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud, beat poet Gregory Corso, Hart Crane, and W.B. Yeats. Four years in Northern California preceded a return to Detroit; in 1989 he traveled to Europe, busking for three months before settling permanently in New York City.

Following independent ventures into drama, poetry, architecture, and visual art, and without securing a label contract, he initially released music on self-produced cassette tapes. The autonomous artist thereafter participated steadily in the metropolitan New York improvisation community through Amica Bunker, the Improvisers Collective, and most visibly the Citizens Ontological Music Agenda (COMA) series. He had first arranged Bunker appearances in 1991 and 1992; COMA itself launched formal, ongoing presentations of varied free-music concerts beginning March 1998. Each Sunday an improvised-music gathering occurred, followed by an open session. Annually COMA organized a benefit festival that assembled more than 100 musicians performing throughout every floor, rooftop, and garden of the venue.

In the early 2000s Siwula functioned as a spontaneous composer, merging conventional scoring methods with visual, graphic, and performance-based formats. Although primarily an alto saxophonist, he employs multiple saxophones, clarinets, flutes, percussion instruments, string instruments, and computer-modified sound files as improvisational backdrops. Among his frequent collaborators have been Doug Walker’s Alien Planetscapes, Cecil Taylor’s Ptonagas, William Hooker’s ensembles, Judy Dunaway’s Balloon Trio, Dialing Privileges with Dom Minasi, and many additional partners.