"Be Brave. I'll see you again."
Our Founder: Yezget Nas1lsinez (1899?-1985)
(from archival & primary-source notes compiled by S. Jefferson Winesap. NB: work in progress 1987 / 1994 / 2000 / 2013ff)
- b Vrdunkos, Bassanda (1899?), grandson of Habjar-Lawrence Nas1lsinez. Mother Afshak from a family of traditional شاعر ("Shama"); Yezget thus inherits the bardic tradition on the maternal side.
- Moscow Conservatory (1919), contemporary with Jozef Wieniawski. In the wake of the Bolshevik uprisings from October 1917, enrollment had dropped precipitately ("The buildings echoed with the voices of the departed"), but in this period YN was exposed to the phenomenon of Anarchist workers' choruses as part of revolutionary activity. It is also just possible that he met Lt. James Reese Europe (of the 369th Colored Regiment's "Hellfighters" band) on a brief visit to Paris in 1918: the Hellfighters played Paris and on the Western Front for Allied troops in this period.
- 1920-early '21: hiatus. YN appears to have left Bolshevik Russia by heading eastward, via Vladivostok and, possibly, Singapore.
- Boulanger studio (1923-24?), Paris, contemporary with Copland, Thomson, Piston. Also extensive social and artistic interactions with Joyce, Hemingway, Stravinsky and Vera de Bosset, and Satie. Satie's Parade a particular influence on YN's later conceptions of Bassandan "concert theatre."
- Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin (1925); collaborates with Schoenberg in staging concerts of New Music and hears first sketches of what would become Moses und Aron. Discourse between YN and Schoenberg regarding "accessibility" versus "intellectual rigor" and ways to negotiate the two.
- 1927: hears some of the fruits of the Bristol Sessions (Carter Family, Jimmie Rogers) upon Ralph Peer's return to New York. Also correspondence on collecting "primitive" music with pioneering ethnomusicologist George Herzog.
- Collaborations with Edgard Varese, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright (Greenwich Village and Harlem, NYC, c1929). Quarrels with Varese regarding the composer's dismissal of jazz as a "serious" music (they were ultimately reconciled, though never in agreement about jazz). Hears and appreciates Louis Armstrong upon the cornetist's first visit to New York in the same year. Also, there is in the Archive a copy of Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources, published in this year, inscribed to YN.
- 1931: premiere of William Grant Still's Symphony No. 1 (The Afro-American) in Rochester under Hanson; YN takes note of the symphonic possibilities for folkloric material.
- Fieldwork with John Steinbeck and Henry Cowell (central California, 1932-34); Steinbeck researching migrant workers' camps (this research would eventually yield The Grapes of Wrath). On at least two occasions, accosted by deputies working for growers, Steinbeck and Nas1lsinez punch their way out of a confrontation.
- 1935-36 informant for John & Alan Lomax, US Library of Congress (this is the source of the Bassanda archival materials in the LOC); also some touring and guest appearancs with the Duke Ellington Orchestra; YN reportedly deeply inspired by Ellington's "African American national music"; reportedly present at the introduction of Billy Strayhorn to Ellington
- 1936 arrested NYC for "un-American activities"(correspondence exists b/w YN and E.Blair/George Orwell, which suggests gun-running for Republican forces in Spanish Civil War). These charges were dropped, apparently at the confidential behest of the Roosevelt administration.
- late '37-1939: hiatus. There are no known records of YN's activities or location in this period, but there is a rumour that he traveled in Tibet and Nepal, collecting music while also keeping surveillance upon the Heinrich Harrar-led Nazi expedition to the Dalai Lama's court. However, Col. Thompson has uncovered tantalizing archival evidence that suggests someone from Bassanda--Nas1lsiniz himself?--was present in Greenville Mississippi the night that legendary bluesman Robert Johnson was murdered. One bit of circumstantial evidence supporting this latter account is the presence, in the BNRO/ESO repertoire, of a uniquely Bassandan take on Johnson's "Walking Blues."
- 1939-41 organizing clandestine escape routes for Jews, Romany, "homosexuals" (sic), musicians, and other "undesirables" (sic) during German/Russian frontier disputes, Bassanda
- 1941-47 musical fieldwork with Bassandan refugees and Displaced Persons; first ad hoc performances (often in equally ad hoc spaces: bombed-out buildings, refugee camps, hospital wards, etc) of "The People's Liberation Orchestra", which became the nucleus of the BNRO.
- 1945-47 Yezget-Bey appears to have travelled extensively within Bassanda in the period 1945-47, frequently in extremely primitive or hazardous conditions, as he sought to reconnect with local and regional Bassandese musicians who had been displaced, gone underground, or fought with the Bassandan resistance forces during the recent conflict. It appears to have been in this same period that YN developed first contacts with some elder musicians who would continue to be extremely important sources for BNRO / ESO repertoire for the next several decades. It was often only after the intercession or advocacy of these elder artists that younger musicians, who were understandably suspicious of centralized government's control of the arts, could be persuaded to participate in the BNRO. Yezget-Bey spoke explicitly and with remarkable frankness about the challenges he faced in limiting the Central Committee's attempts to control or censor programming; his musicians' fierce loyalty (to one another, and the traditions, but espcially to Nas1lsiniz himself) is thus a part of the organization's ethos since first foundation. The fruits of this ethnomusicological fieldwork appear to reside in the Archives of Traditional Music, in Indiana, USA, but they have never been cataloged.
- 1947 YN corresponds with Ukrainian-born, NYC-based avant-garde dancer and film-maker Maya Deren as she prepares to leave for Haiti, for the fieldwork that would eventually yield Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Though they had known one another in NYC in the early '30s, they never met again, but her experiments with filmed ethnographic dance inspire YN's own use of ethnographic film in BNRO performances; those films, rumored to still exist in an unknown archive in Bassanda, have never been duplicated or digitized.
- 1947 Ballyizget (Bassanda's Soviet-era capitol): YN appointed artistic director of the BNRO, over the strenuous objections of Khrennikov; first named performances by the BNRO broadcast via shortwave over BXYZ. Apparently the 11-year-old Steve Reich, a ham-radio buff in New York City, heard a few of these early performances.
- 1949 publication of Orwell's 1984. It is thought that Nas1lsinez's samizdat reports and newspaper clippings from the Bassandan Soviet Socialist Republic may have provided some of the language Orwell employed to describe life under totalitarian rule.
- 1951 first Fleadh Ceoil in Mullingar. Piper, collector, and broadcaster Seamus Ennis, who may have visited Nas1lsiniz in Bassanda around 1946, and certainly met him in Paris some time in the '30s, is present and takes a lead role in organization.
- 1951 Jackie Brenston releases the Sam Phillips-recorded Rocket 88 (Memphis, USA). It is commonly believed that the prototypical "fuzztone" which appears on Ike Turner's guitar part was the result of a damaged amplifier. However, The General has posited an alternative explanation having to do with Phillips playing Turner a distorted shortwave recording of BNRO bagpiper Shimon Dağ Keçisi.
- 1955 teenaged Frank Zappa & Edgard Varese exchange letters; in this correspondence, Varese suggests to Zappa that, in addition to his ongoing interest in African American rhythm & blues, he also consider "taking the example of my friend Nas1lsinez, and building an orchestral idiom from your own indigenous musics." Within two years, Zappa, in addition to ongoing activities with African American rhythm & blues, is also composing music for chamber ensembles and film.
- 1957 Harry Partch's The Bewitched is performed at Washington University in St Louis; Partch insists that a Super-8mm (silent) film of the production be sent poste-restante to Nas1lsinez in Ballyizget. There exists in the Partch archives a series of letters between the composers and YN, which discuss, among other things, the models for "Corporeal Music" to be found in world--specifically Bassandan--vernacular traditions.
- 1957-58 (winter) Nas1lsiniz, during a semester as visiting professor of musical ethnography at the University of Munich, meets Thomas Binkley (1931-95); the two share many conversations and other intoxicants while discussing the "portal between old music and vernacular music". YN and Binkley maintained their correspondence and mutual exchange for the rest of Yezget-Bey's life.
- October 1962 During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nas1lsiniz leads a "Bagpipes Not Bombs" protest at the US Embassy in the BSSR; he is arrested and jailed without charge, but released within 72 hours. He later dedicates the composition Держите ваши холодильники Fvkyng ("Keep your fucking refrigerators") jointly to Soviet Premiere Nikita Kruschev and US Vice President Richard M Nixon.
- c1964-66 With the gradual thawing of cultural relations between the US and the Soviet Union that follows the first Kennedy and first Johnson administrations, YN and the BNRO make brief "showcase" tours in western Europe and North America, particularly in cities boasting significant bohemian and/or artist populations: Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Boston, San Francisco. Hearing the teenaged David Lindley playing maqamat at the Topanga Canyon Fiddle Contest in 1964, Nas1lsiniz proclaims him "the greatest Bassandan banjo player I've ever heard," and seeks to persuade Lindley to relocate and join the BNRO permanently. Lindley declines, but shortly after co-founds the groundbreaking "world rock" band Kaleidoscope, having said of Nas1lsiniz "the dude was like a musical avatar. And I don't know where he scored that 'Bassandan Gold', but man I could tell he'd had a lot of practice with it!"
- 1967-68 Various Irish, English, and American expat musicians, busking across Europe, visit Bassanda, drawn by the beauty of its coves, mountains, steppes, villages, and excellent fresh food & local wine. Some decline to leave. Several are incorporated into the ranks of the BNRO, as the BSSR cultural commissars instruct the orchestra leadership to become more "current"; Nas1lsiniz inverts this dictum, welcoming the foreign musicians and repertoires, saying in an impassioned speech to a concert audience, circulated on hand-copied reel-to-reel recordings, "we accept no boundaries around musics--even our own."
- 1968 Prague Spring. Nas1lsiniz is present at the inauguration of Alexsandr Dubcek. Viewed as a mentor and father figure by many of the intelligentsia for his visionary melding of arts, community, and politics in Bassanda in the late 1940s, he plays a key role in setting up artists' cooperatives and collective ventures during the period of liberalization. In August, when Warsaw Pact troops invade the city under orders of Leonid Brezhnev, the 69-year-old Nas1lsiniz has to be forcibly restrained from direct confrontation with Soviet tanks. He is smuggled out of the country, and within a few months has released Если вы наши братья, вы не предаст нас ("If you are our brothers, you cannot betray us"); possession of the LP, in the Brezhnev-era satellites, is a criminal offense. Within a year, Carla Bley and Charlie Haden release The Liberation Music Orchestra, a disc of Spanish Civil War and related songs, on a similar theme.
- To 1975: Throughout the late '60s and early '70s, as Brezhnev-era politics limits YN's political speech in the Republic, and while US involvement in Southeast Asia reaches a peak of apocalyptic intensity, performances under the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra name decline. However, because Bassanda is internally largely spared these upheavals, being a small, rural, isolated, and poor nation--and, most crucially, lacking any reserves of petroleum or other desirable resources--Nas1lsinez is able to hold the Orchestra together with short, underfunded tours of Central and Western Europe. He is strictly enjoined by the Central Commissariat from performing "political" repertoire, but in this period vastly expands the BNRO's repertoire of "avant-traditional" instrumental and orchestral arrangements of liberation and resistance songs from around the world: the songs of Victor Jara, Thomas Mapfumo, the Dubliners, Bob Marley, and the MC5 all find their way into the Orchestra's book, though most commonly being played only on western tours and underground recordings. KBG officials sent along as "press" and "public relations officers" for the Orchestra are regularly made drunk on Bassanda raki and dumped unceremoniously off the tour bus.
- 1980 The BNRO, in one of its last high-profile performances under the old name, performs on the same bill with Bob Marley and Thomas Mapfumo at Rufalo Stadium during the chaotic independence celebrations for the new nation of Zimbabwe. Harrison Sainsbury, a US-born, African-based musician, arranges a set of Mapfumo's chimurenga ("struggle") music in order for the BNRO to back Mapfumo and his Blacks Unlimited band. During this period, YN may have met clandestinely with representatives of the African National Congress who were working to ameliorate the conditions and sentence of Nelson Mandela, who had been in Robben Island Prison since 1962. In response to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's allegation that Mandela was a "communist terrorist," the BNRO recorded a samizdat version of Hugh Masekela's "Bring Him Back Home," sub-titled "tsasvla ighupeba t’k’ven khar britanet’is komisari" ("go die, you fucking British commissar").
- 1980-83 Conscious both of his declining health and of the seismic shifts internal and external as the Cold War winds down, the Soviet economy collapses, and Central Committee control of the satellites evaporates, Nas1lsiniz moves to solidify the BNRO musicians and resources for what he saw, with great prescience, as a "post-Soviet" age. He arranges for his own personal archive, as well as copies of the Orchestra's scores and parts, to be transferred to Miskatonic U, where he has developed a correspondence with an old friend from New York in the '30s Homer St John. Dr St John agrees to take on the very large body of materials, although, lacking funds for professional cataloging and preservation, the archives wind up in the attic of the Doctor's rambling Victorian mansion. Nas1lsiniz has already encouraged musicians from within the BNRO ranks to take on musical and financial leadership positions, and, as his legendary stamina begins to erode, the musicians' committee explores the possibility of accepting permanent exile in the West; as one said "we decided we would rather starve together, making the music we wanted to make, than starve in 3-star hotels playing music to prop up a twilight-stage Empire." A few LP recordings--and, seemingly, many multiple-generation audio cassettes--of the BNRO's sparse studio and many radio performances are circulating among western musicians, including especially the circle around Dirty Linen magazine, 3 Mustaphas 3, and the brass/winds/drones folk ensembles of England, France, and Quebec.
- In March 1985, a few weeks after the election of Mikhail Gorbachev, the BNRO, including both musicians, support staff, some family members, and others, exit a standing-room only performance at the Konzertshus in Tallinn, board a tramp steamer, and land next morning in Helsinki. Their request for asylum is nearly superfluous: the BNRO's shortwave broadcasts and short tours had been a major inspiration for the Finnish government's adoption of an enormously progressive university music curriculum which centralized the interaction of composition, new music, and traditional music, and Nas1lsinez was a legend throughout Scandinavia. Moreover, the disintegration of KGB control within the Soviet satellites, under the new Gorbachev dicta of perestroika and glasnost, means that there are no resources and, seemingly, little appetite for attempting to force the BNRO to return to the USSR. Local musicians and political activists house the ensemble members and entourage, and at a tumultuous concert at the Musiikkitalo, the 86-year-old Yezget-Bey, obviously frail and failing but summoning the inner fire which had carried him through nine decades of creative and political activity, conducts an epic, 3-hour retrospective concert by the newly-christened Eternal Stalwarts Orchestra. He collapses in the dressing room afterward, and is immediately hospitalized, but rallies long enough to bid farewell, by telephone or at his bedside, to 60 years of musical colleagues and admirers, including friends from as far back as Paris in the '20s, and young musicians who knew him only from the BNRO's late recordings, or in the reminiscences of their mentors and teachers.
- 1 April 1985: Yezget Nas1lsinez, founder of the BNRO; artistic visionary; student of Boulanger; colleague and friend of Varese, Cowell, Cage, Partch, Binkley; inspiration for Zappa, Lindley, and the next-generation musicians of the Eternal Stalwarts Orchestra, dies in Helsinki.
- His musicians, who remain at his bedside to the end, report his last words: "Be brave. I'll see you again."