Prompted Assent by Cubby Phillips

This album marks a beginning and an end. It is the culmination of my time living in the Midwest, performing and recording adventurous jazz with other Midwesterners (mostly), venturing with open minds through artistic terrains as we pleased. We enjoyed a freedom that I associate with our geographic locations (Omaha, Kansas City). While these places can exert a cultural pull on its artists, we did not feel as though we needed to yield. If I ever felt stifled, it was because I felt there was a lack of pull, at least in my artistic niches, if not fundamentally. In my experience, our midwestern cities are oriented toward comfort, familiarity. When, in these places, there is a creative forward gaze, it is due to a creator’s decisive resistance to inertia. While there are ample reasons to grieve the inertia, it affords space and contrast. The quiet scene meant we did not have to work very hard to draw attention to our work. Just as importantly, living comfortably allowed us to deepen our craft and practices without much disruption. Pursuing creative music in the Midwest gave me the opportunity to begin developing a grounded, self-sufficient relationship with inspiration. I began to unearth the connection between my spiritual life and my artistry, with the support of friends, family, and ample time in the region’s forests and hills.

Prompted Assent is the fruit of my rich relationships with the people and nature of the Midwest. It is the fruit of the love my colleagues and I share for the revelatory art of our predecessors. It is the fruit of my burgeoning acquaintance with the actual magic found both in daily life and in ecstatic encounters with Mystery. It is a record of our adventures into Mystery, improvisation as our raft.

While finishing this album, I moved to NYC. It was not my plan to do so. In fact, I overturned other plans in order to seize this vacancy in Bushwick. For my entire artistic career, NYC has presented itself as the primary center of adventurous creation, home to the most vital approaches to creation, the most intense and unabashed improvised music. It served as an external point of reference, to which I could relate from afar. Of course, I wanted to be closer to the action, and hadn’t yet done so for want of means and opportunity. Now that I am in the thick of it, I can confirm that proximity to the action deeply nourishes my artistry. It is becoming clear to me that NYC will nurture me and my work. Yet, in an important sense, the nature of my work during these first months in NYC has not changed. My work remains principally a matter of deepening my connection to spirit and nature. Just as in my previous homes, my artistry resists contingency. My creativity seeks a ground that does not depend upon location, nor year, nor mood, nor climate. My creativity seeks solid ground, so that I might honor life’s transformations, the undying novelty of experience and connection.

The title of this album, Prompted Assent, is a phrase from the work of philosopher and logician W. V. O. Quine. According to Quine, we can observe people’s meaningful responses to the world before we can understand language and other systems of meaning. Our ability to observe other people’s assents (or dissents) in response to the world’s prompting is the basis for our initiation into systems of meaning. I believe that this pre-linguistic ability is crucial to improvised music. I believe that we can witness the meaning in other improvisers’ gestures without interpreting them according to systems of predesignated signs and rules. I believe that we can respond meaningfully to others’ gestures (and, reflexively, to our own movements) without imposing interpretations. I believe that beauty and meaning can emerge without being constructed. In fact, it seems to me that beauty is never constructed. Rather, it is granted to those creations which are the fruit of love. So, my work remains simple, no matter where I live, no matter what I encounter: to continue cultivating the strength and awareness required to sustain love, to stay open, such that my actions may participate more deeply in beauty and truth. This album, then, is an inaugural presentation of this mission, executed with my most trusted co-creators.

Cubby Phillips is a guitarist, bassist, writer, and teacher, currently residing in Brooklyn. An improviser to his core, Cubby moves through an array of creative situations with ease. Just the same, he adheres to a methodology of trust and receptive spontaneity, honed through years of dedicated practice and exploration.