Daevid Allen (1938 – 2015)

"There’s a million ways to laugh. Sometimes absurdism can be subversive. Sometimes it’s necessary to look further, beyond the Pot-Head Pixies and Flying Teapots and see what’s on the other side. In a sense Daevid Allen is no longer with us, in another he’ll always be here so long as we play the records, he’s just evolved to another form, transmuted into the music. This sounds frivolous. It’s not. It’s part of the magic he deals with, part illusory, part dexterity. Jazzer Sun Ra claimed to be from Saturn. His cosmic philosophy was ludicrous, his avant-garde improvisations could be breathtaking. When Christopher David Allen (as he was then) fetched up in Dover, from his native Australia, via a stint at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, the Paris ‘Beat Hotel’, he was listening to the endless pulse of Sun Ra. This was around 1961, and jazz was the cool underground. The drummer in Daevid’s first free-Bop trio was a young Robert Wyatt, with Hugh Hopper on bass. When the group eventually evolved into Soft Machine it took its name from the ‘Beat’ junk-mythologies of William S Burroughs too. Daevid had discovered the Beats back home in Melbourne while working a scuffed bookshop. Poetry can be spontaneous Bop jazzetry. It takes your head into places straight ‘serious’ art cannot. It can be the jolt that tips you over into altered states. All this was alchemy for the soul. From Charlie Mingus to Robert Graves. Accident, chance and serendipity were part of its strategy. So when, after playing Côte d’Azur dates with the Softs, Daevid was refused re-entry to the UK due to visa problems, he gravitates to Paris in time for ‘les évènements’, which was the place to be. ‘Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!’ is another mythic-layer occupying the zone between prankster insurgency and subtle brain-games. He recites Beatnik poetry in fractured Franglaise which is also an assault on the senses (...)" (daqui; + aqui)