It is difficult to place Milford Graves into a category. He is lauded as a master drummer of the 1960s avant-garde jazz scene, credited with inventing the martial arts form yara, and is established as both an herbalist and acupuncturist in New York City. Additionally, Graves is a passionate researcher of human biology and brings that knowledge to all of his work.
Milford Graves’s music career began with improvisation. As a young kid, he taught himself to play by experimenting with the sounds he could make on a drum set in the foyer of his home in Jamaica, Queens. His professional career began around 1961 with the McKinley-Graves Band, a funky Latin jazz ensemble he co-led in the neighborhood. The following year, he led the Milford Graves Latino Quintet with pianist Chick Corea, bassist Lyle Atkinson, conga artist Bill Fitch, and saxophonist Pete Yellen. His career accelerated to place him in the New York Art Quartet, which led him to create two independently released records with pianist Don Pullen. By his mid-twenties, Graves was recognized by artists such as Philly Jo Jones, Elvin Jones, and Max Roach as a drummer with an innovative approach to the instrument, as well as a unique voice in the music scene. His residency at Slugs in 1967 with Albert Ayler is still discussed among musicians today, as is his performance with Ayler at John Coltrane’s funeral. Graves went on to teach at Bennington College for 39 years and is recognized as professor emeritus by the institution.
Yet, to understand his music one must also inquire into the full scope of his creative pursuits. Within athletic communities he is known for bringing his ambidextrous drumming into the martial arts through the creation of yara, an improvised martial art that focuses on flexibility and dexterity. Graves taught yara at his studio in Queens from 1971 to 2000. Similarly, numerous people have visited Graves over the years for his acupuncture practice and to study herbalism. During my first lesson with Graves, he used software that he engineered to record my heartbeat and play back a melody that was derived from my EKG.
When I was first introduced to Milford Graves’s work, I defaulted to the mode of thinking I was accustomed to—that of genre. Even as I was searching for a concept of universal music, I couldn’t help but perceive Graves’s polymathic interests within the stilted categories of martial arts, herbalism, and avant-garde jazz. As I spent more and more time with the artist, I became increasingly unsatisfied with my understanding of his work. Graves employs the scientific method and a vast understanding of biology within his music. He draws connections between analog and digital motions—continuous motions vs. striking different points—in both the martial arts and drumming. He publishes essays, creates works of sculpture, and has recently played drums in a live experiment for non-embryonic stem cells. Yet, this is merely a list of actions taken, and I have long felt that each one is an expression of something much more profound. As I prepared for my recent conversation with Graves, I identified three fundamentals that permeate his work: energy, freedom, and healing.
Miford Graves and Aakash Mittal
Energy
At its core, Milford Graves’s work sculpts energy. This became evident to me during a previous visit to his house when he was doing some healing work on one of his martial arts students. Graves had recorded the electrical signal from an injured muscle and was feeding the signal back to the damaged tissue with the aid of an acupuncture needle and some wire. The goal was to aid the healing process by using electrical stimulation and specific harmonic frequencies to regenerate the damaged tissue. While this was taking place, we were simultaneously listening to a sonificiation of the damaged tissue’s signal using software Graves had coded. He explained to me that the sound of the speaker, the image of the waveform, and the electricity in the needle were all different expressions of the same signal. This was a revelatory moment for me with regard to understanding Graves’s work. Each of the disciplines he utilizes functions as an expression of energy. That energy can manifest kinetically through the martial arts or sonically on the drum set. The kinetic motion of yara can be applied with sticks in hand to a cymbal, creating a sonification of the martial arts form itself. Similarly the vibration of the drums can be translated into soundless motion. Graves utilizes this approach among his various interests. In his essay “Music Extensions of Infinite Dimensions,” which was published in John Zorn’s anthology Arcana V, Graves concludes with a statement about the importance of consuming watercress and parsley in order to “transmit high quality solar energy into the biological system.” In his work, Graves applies the relationship of eating food to creating electricity within the body, a process that also pumps the heart and sounds the drum. Whether he is tending his garden, practicing acupuncture, or playing improvised music, Milford Graves approaches each activity as a harmonic of the same fundamental.
Freedom
Milford Graves’s drumming is often associated with the “free-jazz” movement of the 1960s. On the surface, this is often described as a freedom from the previous era’s harmonic structure and traditional forms. When I further explored that musical community, it became evident that the word freedom was used in a much larger context. Among the freedoms that emerge are freedom of thought, freedom of the spirit, and freedom of sound. Albums such as John Coltrane’s Intersteller Space and Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity traversed the boundaries of music and entered the realm of trance experience and conceptual journey. Within this context, Milford Graves offered a unique perspective on freedom. Through his understanding of the fundamentals of energy, Graves’s music incorporates a freedom of motion that stretches beyond traditional audience/performer dynamics. In the New York jazz scene today, a story circulates about the time Milford Graves picked up John Zorn mid-solo and carried him around the stage while Zorn continued improvising. Through the improvised use of his voice and storytelling, Graves’s performances come across as a joyous ritual that loosens up the listener and offers the first step down the path of freedom. The experience of Graves’s multidisciplinary work suggests a freedom from the limiting nature of our mind, which is compelled to categorize and shape the world around us. As Graves re-harmonizes those shapes and brings us back to the fundamental, I believe we are given a glimpse of what true freedom means.
Healing
Artists frequently talk about the healing power of music, but it rarely goes beyond simple conversation. Milford Graves has taken it upon himself to do the research behind it. As I learn more about Graves’s work, I find that his use of energy and freedom is often purposed for healing. His understanding of a listener’s automatic sub-vocalization and the effect the vibrating tympanic membrane (part of the ear drum) can have on other organs informs his improvisations. This results in musical performances that could be perceived as a sonic massage as well as a concert. In this way, Graves is successfully bridging scientific, artistic, and spiritual methodologies in order to free people from societal constraints and remind them of the energy that already exists within. This leads us to what I find to be one of the most challenging aspects of understanding his work. Rather than contributing a body of compositions to an archive or entertaining audiences with his virtuosity, Graves is primarily interested in collaborating with biology itself. This results in a music that mutates, adapts, and transforms in the same manner that our heartbeat fluctuates in reaction to our bloodstream or our various organs create a polyrhythm of life processes. Janina Wellmann writes in her book The Form of Becoming that “[t]he tension of organic life finds temporary resolutions in rhythm, but always, in its onward aspiration, points forward into the future.” Graves’s work draws from the rhythms of movement, energy, and sound to support transformation and propel the journey forward.
Creative Spaces
I walk up toward Milford Graves’s house on a chilly and grey day in January. Among a row of ordinary houses and barren twisted trees sits a single house decorated with a mosaic of colored stones and glass that ascends the walls and accentuates the windows. In a recent public interview with Graves, the writer John Corbett referred to this house as a secular “temple.” The house is a work of art in and of itself. From a distance the designs appear to be geometric, but on a closer inspection each mosaic is filled with frenetic momentum and the unique shape of each piece hints of arrhythmia. The golden ratio—expressed as a nautilus shell—is painted next to the front door. It is a meeting place for creative people from various disciplines and walks of life brought together by Milford Graves. I know from my previous visits that I need to approach our conversation as an improviser rather than as an interviewer. Before entering the house, I meditate on the one question I want to approach within our talk: how does Milford Graves utilize music, the martial arts, and biology to sculpt energy, gain freedom, and create healing in the world? Then I open the door and walk inside.
January 11, 2018 at 10:00 a.m.
Milford Graves in conversation with Aakash Mittal
Video and photography by Molly Sheridan
With performance footage courtesy Jake Meginsky and Neil Young
Transcription by Julia Lu
Aakash Mittal: I was watching a trailer for the new documentary about your work, I believe it’s called Milford Graves Full Mantis, and there are some clips in there of you doing yara. I think one might even have been in the yard over here.
Milford Graves: Yeah, one was in the yard, and the other one was in the back before it was changed.
AM: You had this motion going on. I can’t even describe it. It was fluid, but in your control.
MG: Oh, no. That was in Japan when some Japanese musicians were doing a form of martial arts they call shintaido. They wanted to see what yara was, so we went out in this little area there. I said, “This would be a great area, with the bamboo background.” And I did my motion, because it was on a little slope there. That’s when I went down and disappeared. The ground wasn’t even, so your balance had to be right because it was uneven.
AM: That’s really cool. What it reminded me of was the last time we talked, you were talking about the yawning reflex and the relaxed state, and creating from a place you call the parasympathetic nervous system—how you have to have that relaxed yawn feeling and the sound that comes with it, and you’re thinking about that in your sound. When I saw that video clip, it felt like you were moving in that same way.
MG: Well, it had something to do with the physiological process. However, that was 1977 and I was just happy to be in Japan and to be around the element I was around—and the people. It was such a great feeling when people from the Far East would come and then martial artists—Chinese, Japanese, and Korean martial artists. Here I am in the Far East putting on a little demonstration. I have to be very relaxed. People had a much more linear and stiff style of motion. Shintaido was much more relaxed, but people were doing aikido, so I said, “You gotta be relaxed.” I just didn’t have the stress factor. I felt like being in New York. You look at other martial artists watching you, and you see their facial expressions: “What is that stuff? That’s not tradition.” I looked out there, and I saw some serious-looking people watching me and some smiles, and that was it. That was my physiological system: just to relax.
AM: So were they into it? What was their reaction? You said that they were smiling? Did you get any feedback?
MG: Well, I was invited as a special guest for them, to demonstrate improvisation and to play with Japanese musicians. So students were watching the kind of movement I was doing because of the rhythm. They had to connect that with the music, because of the way I would play. So I think their interest was: “If he’s not playing his drums, what kind of motion will he be doing in martial arts?” And they were able to ride with it. They took the ride with me. And I think that’s why they were smiling. It was like, this is how you do it—not so much martial arts but ARTS. There was an art to it. You take the military aspect out, the fighting aspect out, and just see an artist doing it without trying to be correct from an intellectual or science perspective.
AM: You’re able to distill out just the creative art form: the movement.
MG: Right. The fundamental. If you want to deal with the harmonics on the fundamental, then you can take that and become a ballroom dancer, a concert stage dancer, or you can become someone who wants to deal with the fighting aspect of it. But that’s just the harmonics. I was dealing with the fundamental. Now how do you want to shape the fundamental or the harmonics you were dealing with from the fundamental? The fundamental is to get your body just to relax so you can focus. Then I said okay, I can take from this fundamental, I can use it in really different ways.
AM: So the harmonics are the form that the fundamental shapes itself into.
MG: Right.
AM: That seems like another connection between the way you’re thinking about martial arts in a universal manner, as well as music and all the other activities that you’re a part of.
MG: Yes.
AM: You’re not even thinking about them idiomatically. You’re dealing with it in terms of what is the fundamental, what are the harmonic shapes, whatever the practice is.
MG: Right. That’s it. You have a harmonic, but you may not be able to do all the other shapes, because you don’t understand the fundamental.
AM: Sorry, that’s just mind blowing already. How do you understand what the fundamental is of what you were doing physically there? Maybe it’s not even about the physical; maybe it’s about something else.
MG: First of all, you’re not feeling any resistance. Resistance is the thing that makes you feel like you’re struggling to do what you do. That’s the most basic thing. It’s like at the point when you’re tired. You’re just real tired, and you’re in a standing position. We’ve all experienced this. You may sit down in a chair and say, “Ahh.” But then you move—“ahh, eeh, ahh”—and say, “You know what, I have to get into bed.” And when you get into that bed, “AAH.” This is it. Just before the point where you’re asleep, if something falls off the table, or somebody knocks on your door hard, or you hear somebody screaming outside, you can jump up real fast and be alert. But if you were sound asleep, someone would say to you, “Didn’t you hear that person outside? They were in danger. They were screaming.” You don’t want to get to that point in your relaxation. So when I’ve got that feeling I’m in my bed but I can still respond, that’s when I know it’s happening. I get to that point where I’m standing up like that, I’m in a vertical position, and I want to get to almost horizontal. I almost get there, but I’m just dangling. I feel so good. But raargh!—[I can] just shoot on out, right from there.
AM: And do you get into that same relaxed state when you’re playing drums?
MG: Yes. That’s when you can achieve the full energy that I deal with.
AM: You were saying that when you were in Japan doing that particular demonstration, they were wanting to see how an artist would translate it. They knew you as a musician, and they wanted to see how it translated into what you did physically in martial arts.
MG: Yeah, because they knew I did that.
AM: So how has the martial arts practice influenced your drum playing?
MG: A few years ago I had a very abstract answer. I said, “Well just do it, and you will find out.” It was very abstract. You know, that’s the way you clean up when you can’t really precisely say. Well, the kind of martial arts that I wanted to develop was based on my experience as a teenager and in my early stages of growing up in the area here, South Jamaica, and then moving into the housing projects when I was eight or nine-years old. Before I did that, we had little kid wrestling, because I grew up around a family that was called a very tough family—large people, close to 20 people in the family. And they had a military life. At least one was a sergeant in the Army, so he came home and the house was like a military barracks, so it was rough and tough. Then when I got to the housing project, we had these body punching arts. We played basketball, but then when the basketball game was over, everybody said, “Sham battle!” Everybody started getting up there punching each other in the arms and chest. The face was off limits, but when somebody was getting frustrated because they couldn’t punch you in the chest, they would sneak and punch you right in the jaw and almost a real fight would take place. But you participated in these things because if you didn’t, you should have stayed off the playground. Maybe four guys would grab you and stretch you out and punch you all in the arms and muscles and stuff like that. So basketball was tough and rough. It wasn’t like the rules you played by when you played in high school or college ball when you’ve got a referee. You know, you got hacked. If you drove through, if you did a drive to the basket, all this fancy stuff, all these turns and angle movements they’d be doing, it was rough to do that because they’d knock you down and really try to hurt you. And they’d say, “Don’t come here driving like that again. We’re not going to let you look good.”
I remember a whole lot of experiences. One of the things that I got out of that was I’m not afraid to get up there and sham battle. There were guys around us who physically were intimidating. They had the muscles and always kept certain kinds of facial expressions. And they had that kind of voice, like the bully guys. When you’re sitting in the basketball court at the housing project, you may have 15 or 20 guys out there. And they would come over and say, “Come on, let’s sham box.” And you were hesitant, but then you say to yourself, “Well, it’s not a real fight. So this guy’s not going to hurt me.” And I found that some guys that I thought were real tough guys, they weren’t tough guys. They just psychologically gave you that impression. So it gave me confidence. When you don’t participate and you just look at images, it could be intimidating. You have to participate in the event to see what it’s about.
So when I did the martial arts, I said, “This is going to be just beyond a fighting situation. I’m going to set this up. I want to set up a system where people truly become their so-called warrior within.” You get to the point where you really intimidate people. I used to get people to come in and some of my students said they trusted me. They said, “I don’t think you would hurt me.” And even with that said, I would scare people. I would take them down. I’d do a takedown, a wrestling technique: I’d get on top of them and put my chest across their face. They said, “Professor, I can’t breathe; you’re smothering me.” But they were more intimidated by the fact of the potential than that they thought they wouldn’t be able to breathe.
I watched the mixed martial arts UFC. I just like to see how people react to any kind of danger. And you see these tough guys come up, and they get in bad positions sometimes. They get in these chokehold positions, and somebody said, “Wow, they tapped out real fast because they potentially panicked.”
This is beyond fighting, in a sense. How do you react when that crisis comes? How do you react when pain comes to your body from an illness? Do you run out to the doctor right away? Or do you go internally and try to control that pain? I see people go out to meditate. They think if you do these chants, you can meditate the pain away. Yeah, that’s easily said, but put a person in a pain position, and then tell them to try to chant and meditate, and see if it works. So, it’s non-functional. I try to make it more functional. Put a person in that position, and I can tell by the pressure, they can breathe. But they’re seeing potentially, “Wow, I may not be able to breathe.” Then I’ll let them relax a little and then I’ll let them come back. The second time they’re not so quick to say that; they try to see how to get out of this.
So I’ve used that as a situation, for you to be attacked by a foreign agent in a sense. And a foreign agent could be from pathology. It could be bacteria. It could be a virus. So when you get this thing, you don’t panic. You say, “Okay, well, I think I can handle this. I can deal with this.” Then you can release what you have inside.
But to do these different kind of so-called art forms, to be able to increase your thought process or neuroplasticity, you have to put yourself in the position whereas you’re not intellectualizing on it. So that’s what I did with the arts—martial arts. It wasn’t just to go out there to say, “Well, I can fight. I can hurt somebody. I can protect myself.” It was beyond that. I wanted you to have a confrontation with something that was real. Instead of you being a one-cell organism or a piece of DNA—we’re talking bacteria, funguses, viruses—think of yourself as a multi-cellular piece of bacteria or virus. When you see that person in front of you, or that competition you’re going to have in a sparring session, you have to look at each other. If you touch the body, it’s like therapeutic massage or active massage. So when you get on the floor, you don’t say, “Oh, that’s my enemy.”
When you see somebody, sometimes it’s somebody you may know, sometimes, somebody you may not know. A lot of times you say, “Are you feeling okay?” And the person says, “Well, I’m not feeling too good today.” I say, “Yes, I noticed that. You just don’t look like you. Is there something bothering you? Are you sick? Are you going through any emotional stress?” What do you do when somebody’s like that? You give them some advice. Maybe you need a great medicinal soup. Take some herbs, you know. Or you need some rest. Or if they’re stressed out from some kind of other factors, [you tell them] don’t let that bug you. That happened to me before. This is how I mostly calm myself down. So the martial arts come, and we’re supposed to look at each other and we’re supposed to say, “You know what, I think you need a massage treatment.” When we test the body, or we grab the body, and hit certain points and grab certain points, you’re not doing a destructive touch. I’m trying to massage them back in again. And when it’s over, both people will look at each other and say, “Thank God. I feel great. I feel good.”
If you’re out there in the street, you don’t have to destroy anybody. You’re a healing martial artist, a constructive martial artist, not a destructive martial artist. The softer forms like tai chi, some people don’t think it’s a fighting form. By the way, you just don’t do tai chi. You may put some aikido in there. You have to mix it, the different martial arts styles. You can’t get just locked into one style, because all of them have some value. If in a confrontation, if somebody is in the street and grabs you, the philosophy I have is that I may stop that person, grab him up, touch certain points and then melt him right down, sedate him. If you use acupuncture when you’re doing acupuncture massage for a tonification or sedation, you’ve got to know when to tonify somebody, you’ve got to know when to sedate somebody. In this case, it’s not so much tonifying somebody, because if somebody’s aggressive, they don’t need to be tonified. They need to be sedated. So there are ways just to sedate, but if you don’t understand the healing aspect or the constructive aspect, then you’re not going to know how to sedate somebody in a real confrontation. You just don’t want to be somebody who learns a martial art to go out and be a bully and hurt somebody. I think that’s wrong.
AM: You’ve talked about before how with music, it’s just changing the pressure in the air, and that affects the tympanic membrane. I’m curious if the way you’re thinking about massaging physically also happens sonically, or if you’re thinking about that at all in terms of the way the sound might massage either the mind or, through the energy, maybe even the body.
GM: Okay, we need to backtrack to answer that question with the martial arts and the playing. Two things were said to me by the Japanese. One was a photographer. He was a great photographer, I thought; everybody thought he was great. He used to follow me around Japan. This was about 1981, but he [first] saw me four years earlier in ’77. I came back to do this solo and he came over to me and said, “Wow. Before you were very good, but now, you’re much better.” I said, “I would hope so. I hope I’m developing after four years.” And then he made this statement, “You’re so fluid—relaxed and so fluid.”
The second guy who said it to me was one of the [most] respected Japanese internal martial artists who was an official representative for internal martial arts, Chinese martial arts. He came to the performance, that same one in 1981. He came back stage, and he said, “You do every punch there is to do in Chinese martial arts.” He looked at my flow and he thought it was from martial arts. And I said, “Okay, so what I used to do was instead of doing—again—a nonfunctional tai chi, just getting up in the air and doing certain kinds of movements, I would get down to my drum set and I’d go—ting-raww—frapt!—I would keep that whole flow and go around. If I was doing a sword technique, I would practice my sword stuff and with the strokes like—thwap!—like this here. There I would exchange a stick, so if I’m hitting down here—pop!—and hitting the cymbal—shhhap!—the strokes like this here. I was directing the energy in a very precise, meaningful way, so they helped each other out. I would hit the sound and just get it, make it go like—rat-a-tat-a-rot-a-toko!
So that’s how I was interchanging them. I was using the form, because with both things, I’m using body motion. The photographer enjoyed me from imagining just the flow, and said, “Oh wow, the way he’s flowing.” [The other guy] saw that and he thought of martial arts. One of the guys I met from the aikido family over there wanted me to play talking drum and do some drumming stuff for his aikido class. They wanted to be able to do the movements of the drummers. They realized it was a rhythm thing that was missing, you know. I was doing it in a very empty way; that was just timing. It was putting me on a timer, so that’s how I locked all that in.
AM: Ah, so he saw the martial arts in your drumming. When you’re playing drums, do you think of it as the word I learned when I was doing karate—the kata, which is like the pre-composed form that you have to work through? You’re improvising, so maybe you don’t think about it that way.
GM: Well, you don’t fight with kata, you don’t use a kata. That’s not a fighting form. As an artist, a performing artist, a stage artist, some people think the performance starts when you come out on stage. So if you’re a dancer, it’s the first steps you do. If you’re an instrumentalist, it’s the first sound that comes out of your instrument. But the performance starts, it could be a day before, two days before, three days before. When you come on that stage, it starts before you even make one motion. When you’re coming out there, you have to be generating as soon as you walk out on that stage. The worst thing I see is people come out and start distributing their music charts to people on stage. The audience is watching that! Even if you fix your horn, if you’re touching your horn, you have to do it in a way that has theater and drama to it.
The way I interpret kata is I would go from a so-called hard style to a soft style. I would come and I would do hard karate. I’d come out—Eeuuooahh!—to show I had that look. And I see people like, “Whoah!” They flinch out, because it looks like I’m going to rip you out; I’m going to go through you. I say [sings phrase]. Bah. And so kata is like an eagle posture. A kata is to get your attention. It’s not fighting or a block. You’re only doing that to set somebody up. They see that door or they see this fist; that’s what kata is. Look at me! It’s almost like hypnotizing them. And you do just the opposite. It’s not hard or hard, it’s hard-soft, soft-hard. You may look just like you’re very soft then—bam!—you come out like this here. You see? So tai chi you may be like this here, but inside you’re ready to explode. If you see a nuclear bomb or you stand next to a nuclear bomb, it looks like it can’t do anything. But if you set the trigger mechanism off, my gracious, look at the damage. I say, do you know internally what’s in that nuclear bomb and the damage you can do? That’s tai chi. The real internal arts. You’re ready to explode. And sometimes you look like you’re going to explode. That’s the whole process that goes on inside. Everything is moving very quick.
AM: So the performance begins with the energy inside of you.
GM: Right.
AM: Days before the performance.
GM: Right. Right. Get ready.
AM: How do you cultivate that energy? I know that’s something you think about, because you’ve written about it in an essay in terms of food. What you’re consuming matters. You’re also talking about a lot of heavier stuff there, in terms of energy and relationships.
GM: I find myself talking to more people about this now. I tell people, “Why are you doing what you do?” when people come and they want to do this. They want to elevate to this level, that level, and then all they have to do is say one thing to me, “I’ve got to see how I can make some money off of this.” Then I say, “You’re not going to do it then. You don’t really have a divine, deep commitment.”
Some things you do may not make a lot of money because you’ve got to be dedicated towards doing it. You’ve got to know why you’re doing it. You’ve got to know the importance of what you’re doing. As far as music and being a musician, I tell people, “Why do you play music? What’s your purpose? If you’re going to play music and just use it as a mechanism to be able to pay your rent and all of that, I have no problem with that. Only time I have a problem is when you tell me you want to reach this so-called cosmic or celestial higher level. You know what I mean? You want to get people to be able to visualize and transform in this kind of state and that kind of state?” I say, “You’re not going to do it like that, because you’re going to fail to realize your importance.”
You go to a restaurant. I don’t think people realize when they walk through that door in a restaurant: you’re not cooking your own food. Someone else is cooking that food. You’re trusting that person in that kitchen to be correct. You don’t know exactly what they’re doing. If you’re a chef, cook, whatever, you’ve got to say, “Wait a minute, these people are coming here and I’m making food for them to be able to put inside of their bodies to allow them to maintain their life processes that require certain nutrients. I’ve got to be responsible here. These people are trusting me.”
As a musician, what do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to win a critics’ poll or get a Grammy? I think people are trusting us, trusting the musicians to do the same thing the cook’s doing. They want their vibratory system to be fed. They’re coming in there, you know what I mean? You got your food, that’s why you see the combinations of restaurants having a band in there sometimes. And it’s got to be a band that doesn’t cause you to regurgitate your food, or get a spasm in your esophagus because it’s too crazy. So they want more soft, cooled-out music. They have nice relaxing music with people eating. That combination’s always been there—that mouth and that ear have always worked as a combinational thing there. So you’ve got to get that ear vibrating. We’re vibrators. You know? You’re not a saxophone player; you’re not a drummer. We are there to make that ear drum vibrate, to convert [the sound] into electrical energy. The brain gets it. Ah, okay, now we’re cool. We can do our job, man. And we can energize the whole body.
Once you realize that, then you’re going to say, “I have an obligation. I have a responsibility. People are trusting me.” You do a concert, you see people coming into the hall sitting around, they’re coming in to say, “Turn me on. Feed me. I’m here.” If you come over there to trip on yourself, you’re this person without knowing that you have a responsibility to keep the folks vibrating. If they vibrate, then maybe the whole planet will all vibrate. Any culture that wipes out the arts is in trouble, and I think we’re seeing that right here with young kids in school and how they’re taking the arts out. We’re wiping the whole vibratory system out.
AM: I appreciate how you talk about arts education in medical terms, how it is essential. One of the problems in our culture is we are taught to view the arts as a form of entertainment. Some people are taught to appreciate it on a deeper level, but you’re talking about it not just as spiritual, but as a physical and medical need.
MG: Well, what we were talking about is the entertainment part. We’re working on the superficial part of the body. We’re basically working on a lot of the motor system. So we get all the motor and muscles and everything moving, but we forget about the cellular level. The cellular level also has to be fed, but then you’re taking away from the entertainment aspect. We just do one side; we don’t do the full situation. If you’re talking about so-called creative arts, abstract arts, you’re not talking on a cellular level. You know, it’s not going to be as defined; whereas, you see, in the entertainment perspective, if you try to take the art and put it on graphs, and try to put mathematics to it, you’re not going to get the true benefit. I’ve been dealing with people, how do you put numbers to it?
You’ve got to the get to the point where you trust each other. As a musician, you’ve got to trust each other to get on the stage and get this tremendous feeling happening. When it’s over, someone will say, “Well, what note did you play?” I don’t know what note I played. I just play and don’t worry about it.
Some people just don’t trust that they can do it. It’s extremely difficult to improvise, to be spontaneous and improvise, make changes in a very small amount of time and space and then come back and make another change in a small space of time and don’t repeat what you do. After 15 or 20 minutes, you have made it through all of these different changes and so on, but what’s amazing is how when you walk out your door in the morning, you may spend an hour or two traveling. Think about this. You’re going to make all kinds of adjustments. You’re capable of doing it. But you’re told you can’t do it. It’s like a little child. The parent takes care of the child. You don’t know how to cross the street yet. Then after a certain time, you’re supposed to mature in a way that you’re able to see if you’re walking 20 blocks, that you’re ready to make any changes that can take place. But when it comes to certain things, like something specific in music, you’re taught that you have study this and you have to study that; you can’t do this.
I remember up in Bennington, when I talked to some of the classical musicians who were teachers there, they would say, “I wish I could improvise.” And I’m saying, “Wow, they can’t improvise?” I’m trying to figure this out. It really hit me. It made me realize: they’ve been taught piano lessons or violin lessons since they were like three, four, five-years old and they were always taught that you have to follow these kind of rules. You have to do it this way and that way. That’s horrible.
AM: To back up a little bit, it sounds like one of the things you said earlier—that part of your music is about resonating on the cellular level. It sounds like your entire vision and goal of what you’re creating artistically through music and through martial arts isn’t even necessarily in the same category or place as goals that musicians typically have. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I was just curious about what you’re saying in terms of your goal of vibrating people on the cellular level, or on a level even more microscopic.
MG: Well, I’ll tell you what. When I was coming down the stairs, I was thinking about the two of you down here, and I said, “Something’s happening right now.” People have been contacting me now, and all of a sudden, it’s like an onslaught. One promoter told me I’m going to do this festival. We got into a conversation and I said, “It was nice of you to think about me. People had almost erased me out of history. They’re making these historical statements and I’m not even mentioned.” So the person said, “Well, people are ready for you now.”
I was told back in the last century, in the late ‘60s, that my concept of music was in the next century. And of course, I didn’t want to hear that. And then 2000 came, and I was trying to find that person to say I think you were right! Things are starting to develop. Sometimes it’s not for you to say what you want to do or who you are. Maybe we all have instructions. Some higher power that we may not realize. I just feel like I’m carrying out orders from another kind of power. No one ever told me to do this or do that. It just felt that what I’m doing now is developing it to another level, and the reason I’m developing it to another level is because of people. I’m not sitting outside wanting to be an oddball. People talk to me about coming in. They say I want to study with you because of this or because of that. I’m just naturally doing this. I want to work on it now because I know I can do that. People think you’re doing something great, but the feedback is not great. I was looking at it passing the wrong way. I can’t fault the people. I guess they’re just not ready for it yet. That’s what people were telling me. They’re not ready. So I said, “Have some patience.” All you have to do is talk to people my age that I grew up with and they’ll always say, “Milford was always eccentric. This guy was always unorthodox.” I never thought about it. I guess I was. I would always challenge the situation. If something came up, I said, “Let’s think of another way to do this here.” So I think I found my mission. What some people have told me, either directly or indirectly, is they may not understand what I’m doing, but they say, “I respect you because you didn’t deviate. You’re still doing what you do. Other people just went for the money.”
A long time ago I used to listen to some of the older musicians saying, “Wow, I wish I would have not been playing commercial. I wish I would have done this, and I wish would have done that.” In the late ‘60s, Papa Jo Jones told me something, and it really hit me hard. First of all, we were at this political meeting and I didn’t expect to see Papa Jo Jones there. Then he started talking to me. He said, “We want to do some of that avant-garde playing, too.” Gee whiz, Papa Jo Jones knows me! I didn’t think Papa Jo knew me. Then he started talking about Count Basie and all of these things and he said, “They want to make money.” Then I said, “Okay, Papa, I’ve got to leave.” And Papa just said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m going over here to Seventh Avenue. I got to get the train to Brooklyn.” And he said, “I’m going that way, young man.”
And I went that way. He wouldn’t even allow me to buy a token. He bought a token. I’m impressed with this. He’s Papa Jo the legend and he’s treating me like royalty. When those old bebop guys were talking about the so-called free jazz players, they didn’t really dislike us. They were just saying, “Wow, that’s what we wanted to do. But these young guys coming up now can do it and get away with it. We couldn’t back in the ‘40s.” I always wonder what these guys would sound like if they would have kept developing their skill level. You never know what that person could have been.
So I said to myself, “I’m going to keep developing myself because I want to see what I would develop into.” Right now there are certain things I can do on the instrument that I couldn’t do then. I used to think about it. “Wow, that’d be great if you could play with this hand doing this and this doing that and all this here stuff.” Now it’s coming so easy, because I stayed with it. My conviction was: what would the arts be like if artists were allowed to develop ourselves? What would the planet be like now? How would the people be vibrating? The educational system in this country is the worst. We don’t have the innovation. Creativity’s needed again. We’ve got to rise to another occasion. When you wipe out the arts, which is stimulating the vibratory system, it’s going to cause a real slowdown. That’s what I see now, the feedback I’m getting, like when people come over to me and say certain things when I do performances. I stayed in there to try to see them the way a human would vibrate inside. It’s not just Milford Graves—that brings in the ego thing. Other people say, “Well, that’s his thing. That’s not my thing.” I always say, “This is our thing!” I’m trying to bypass it and I’m trying to follow certain rules, and that’s when the physiological process comes in. There’s a publication now, I won’t knock the publication, but it’s The Jazz of Physics. For me, it should be jazz, but if you want to use any kind of science name, it should be physiology not the jazz of physics—that’s a machine, that’s outside of the body. You know what I mean? You don’t reduce the human body to a mechanical device.
AM: At the last interview we did, we talked somewhat more idiomatically about all the different things that you are interested in and how they connect. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since then. What struck me was that the one thread through all of your interests is energy—and not just managing energy, but sculpting energy or creating with energy. I was wondering if you’d speak about that a little bit because it seems like when you’re dealing with acupuncture, you talk about energy. When you’re dealing with martial arts, you talk about kinetic energy. When you’re talking about music, you’re talking about sonic, vibratory energy. Maybe these are also, like you called it, harmonics of another fundamental that’s even lower than all of those disciplines.
MG: Well, if you’re just going to translate energy to “the ability to do work,” that’s one thing. Like on a construction site, you have workers there and you’re telling the workers, “Come on, you’ve got to get this pipe lined up.” “But I feel out of it. I just don’t have energy. I cannot pick up this other section of this pipe to connect it.” I always say that whenever you see humans doing something on the outside, it’s probably just a reflection of what’s going on inside. So how do you connect these different pathways in the body with a certain kind of energy? Now certain pathways call for a major work ethic. It has to be a work ethic. To be able to create that ability to deal with energy, there’s got to be a whole lot of different mechanisms involved in there. So you’ve got to have a lot of vibratory things going on. Vibratory motion. You’ve got to activate the inactive areas, different parts of the body.
I just had a conversation about body healing and morphologic fields. It may be impossible to deal with the so-called morphologic fields, in a sense that you can create a new liver or can create a new heart. Some people say, “That’s impossible.” I don’t think it’s impossible. Instead you should just say, “Well, I don’t know how to do it,” because you don’t know how to do it. Why would you say it’s impossible to do if you can create this energy? I mean, they demonstrated it in the physical world. Einstein had something going on! But you have to interpret. The energy is one thing, but how are you going to interpret the mass? How you are going to interpret what light is? You don’t even know what light is, if you can’t see. So it’s a visionary thing. Right? As soon as you turn off these lights, it’s dark. You may know from being in that environment where everything is. You can walk around and grab a seat here, but if that’s your first time, when those lights go out, you don’t know where the heck anything is. So light really is about your ability to visualize. So you have to turn the whole mechanism that’s dealing with light; you have to look inside.
The whole morphological aspect of what’s going on is so you get a way of seeing nature’s design, the patterns that nature has. What you’ve got to say is there’s a possibility that we can connect this with this and connect that with that. This is something I’ve been talking about for the longest time. It’s very interesting that a person can have a certain kind of mythology. A female is capable of nurturing a baby, once that sperm and that egg come together; it’s amazing. People just take stuff for granted. That little small ovum can mix with a waggling little tadpole-looking type of thing and make a human being. Unbelievable. But it’s coming from inside of us. Everybody thinks it’s the reproductive organs, but there are other factors in the brain that are controlling that. You’ve got the pituitary gland and all these other organisms that are connected. They still don’t know a lot about the brain, the whole circuitry. On a global perspective, if you can stop killing each other, fighting each other and can come together and work together as human folks and work on the planet, then the planet will help out the whole solar system, help out all other galaxies, all the universes. Once you all know how to do that, the ruler will give you the key to how to deal with morphogenic fields and how to reproduce another kidney. You don’t need a kidney transplant or a liver transplant. We will be able to reproduce another one, but it takes a tremendous amount of work to energize that person. It’s almost like a person that’s just worn out and has nothing they can lift. All of a sudden—Boom!—they’ve become really alert again. There are many ways to do it, when you’re going to stimulate. You can use acupuncture. You can use plant foods. You can use visual things. But the key is you get the body active and moving. It has to be a holistic, total involvement of the body. You’re not going to have one little thing working and not the other thing working; it’s a collaborative aspect that has to take place in the body. Everybody has got to be working towards this. What I mean by energy is to get all of these different areas of the body activated. And then once the complementary thing’s going on, that’s the only way a morphogenic field can happen. Your heart, when it acts from a pumping perspective, to pump blood out, is sending nutrients throughout the whole body. So everything’s got to be coordinated for your body to work as a whole. One little organ can be disrupted, and then you have a problem.
AM: Another thing I wanted to ask you about is that I’ve never heard you identify as a composer specifically. But from my perspective, I feel you could be equally thought of as a composer, but you’re using biological processes as your form. And not even as a form where you take the superficial sound and notate it, but you’re actually trying to compose biologically. You’re composing with energy. You’ve created so much that involves improvisation, structure, form, and things that evolve along continuums. To my mind you combine the martial arts, acupuncture, herbology, and sound into—I don’t know what you would call it—a composition of the universe itself.
MG: Well, if we’re talking about the paper composer, I think that’s a class structure. Sometimes you do things and then people can be enlightened about what you’re doing, or it can hurt. Sometimes you’ve got to say, “What is it really about that I’m doing?”
I remember an experience I had with Jimmy Giuffre around 1965. There was a book out called Where’s the Time? by a journalist, Martin Williams; he may be still around. He wrote this book about the different rehearsal bands that Jimmy Giuffre put together. Joe Chambers was doing some of the rehearsals, and I did about three rehearsals with him. I wanted to take the challenge, because Jimmy Giuffre had this reputation. So I went up to his house, and he had these charts. I knew he was doing some Ornette Coleman stuff, but when I looked at the chart, I said, “Jimmy, this is a little different.” He was trying to write the melody down for the drums. This was not a standard way you would notate for the drummer—try and hit the side of the shell, the edge of the rim. He was trying to get all these different pitches out. And just for the basic melody of the head, we followed the instructions. But I told Jimmy, “Look, I will play the rhythm. I’ll do my best with the sounds.” I should have been able to read that the way I wanted to, because I’m the new kid on the block and I’m going to be controversial. After that, he’d probably go around and say Milford Graves doesn’t know how to read music and want to fire me. That wouldn’t have bothered me. But then I thought I did bad. So I took the chart home. I told my wife, “I’m going to my room and look at this guy’s music.” I spent less than a half an hour [there]. I remember leaving the room. My wife says, “You’re finished?” “I’m finished. I see where he’s coming from now.” I sketched out what he wanted, so when I came back the next day I played it. Don Friedman was on piano and Barre Phillips was on bass. It was a quartet. After it was over, Don Friedman said, “Wow, how’d you get that so fast?” I thought I was doing bad. He said it took us a little while to get all this stuff together. And I felt real good after that. It wasn’t so bad after all. But then what happened was, they had an improvisational section. Jimmy Giuffre walked in. I wanted to go up there and see the challenge, man. When he came to improvising those sections, I improvised off of the head. So Jimmy said, “Wow.” He listened to the recording we did there and he said, “Could you rewrite the head for me, rewrite the drum parts? Because the way you improvise, that’s how I want the drums to be played.” So he didn’t want to write it like that, but he didn’t want no regular dang-dang-ga-dang. So when I was playing, I heard something and I said, “This is what I would be hearing.” But then after that there, I saw him at a concert and he said, “So when are you coming back?” I said, “You know, I don’t know.” He said, “Well, I want to see if you can read my charts now. I got some other stuff.” It was like a competitive thing. So I just said that’s it. No more gigs. I don’t need to go there no more. But I was listening to what he wanted to hear from the drum perspective. All the tonal changes, I can do that with all that stuff. You don’t have to be hitting it all over. You can stay on the membrane and play the melody out like I do now. You can play that stuff right from there.
So that was just one experience I had. I had a few more of the same. “Wow, that’s a composer? So what are these guys about?” It’s almost like an ego trip. I know some composer may say, “What is this Graves talking about? This guy don’t know what the heck he’s talking about. Who does he think he is?” I would say just think about what you’re doing. You sit down, you may spend days or months, and you are telling your story, and then you finish your story, in a musical way, and then you want to give me a piece of your music that’s talking about what you feel, what you want to express, and you’re saying, play me. I’m bothered with that, like what [someone else] feels doesn’t [matter]. Or when somebody gives you a composition, you add something in. I had that experience, too. They say, “Well, that’s not written. That shouldn’t be in there.” What do you mean? Your music caused me to feel that, and I thought it was cool to put that in. So if we’re driving in an automobile, and we have to get some place in an emergency—let’s suppose we’re transporting somebody to the hospital or something—and you make a left turn. I say, “No, to get to the hospital, you have to make a right turn.” “Well no, that’s the way we do it. It’s a left turn. You’re not listening to me.” That’s the same thing as music composition. You may do something and I don’t think that’s the way. You’re not even screwing up, man. If you do it this way, that adds onto it.
I’ve [also] had that experience with a conductor. They said that I made the track on this particular recording. They said the way you was playing, that made the thing. If I would have done it the other way, it was too dry. But that person wanted to act like they have control. They wrote all the music and they conducted. So I said, “You’re not giving me respect.” When I hire a band, I respect you. A composer to me—that’s a responsible situation. A composer to me is just like a teacher. If you’re in a classroom with students, they’re expecting you to teach them. And if you’re teaching a subject, and they can’t understand that subject, you don’t go and say, “Oh, you’re stupid. I’m going to fail you.” You’re supposed to talk to that person and say, “What kind of difficulties are you having?” And if they say, “I don’t like history.” Well, say, “Let’s talk about history. Could you tell me something that happened five years ago? Is there anything you remember five years ago that you don’t like?” “Oh, I remember something five years ago. I will never forget that.” “But that’s history. It’s important that you don’t forget that. So you don’t repeat that mistake you made.”
Or if it’s a math problem—I’m going to tell you something real fast. In the 1970s, I went up to IS 201. A friend of mine was an assistant principal at that time. He wanted me to do three workshops in the summer for these kids up in Harlem. So I went up, and I had a pocket full of change. I took the hand drums, congas, and all of that. I’m going to teach these kids these rhythms, but I don’t know if these kids know about eighth notes, quarter notes, and all that technical talk. So I said, “We’re going to play a rhythm, but we’re going to pulse beats first. I’m going to hit the drum four times. One-two-three-four. Every time you hit the drum, think of a quarter, a quarter, a quarter, and a quarter.” I had four quarters out. Then I said, “How many quarters make a dollar?” They knew that. They may be failing in school, but they know how to count that money. “Oh, that’s one dollar.” So I had a one dollar bill. I said, “So that’s a one dollar bill. What’s a one dollar bill, compared to counting four twenty-five cent coins?” I just boom and don’t hit the drum no more times. But I quietly say, “Count four. ONE-two-three-four. That’s a dollar. So how do you write a dollar?” They write what they call a whole note in music. “That’s all, you got a dollar. You got a little circle like this here.”
Then I took the quarters and said, “Now, we’re going to play each pulse beat twice as fast. We’re going to count eight. We got that whole dollar, now we’ve got to make sure that we’re going to divide this one dollar bill eight times.” I had some dimes and some pennies. So I took out the dimes and said, “How many dimes and pennies makes twenty-five cents?” Take out a dime. Take out the five pennies. “Alright?” Anyway, I lined them all up and I took two of the students and said, “Look, we’re going to share this twenty-five cents. You get a dime and you get a dime, but how are we going to share these five pennies between the two of you? If I give you two pennies, I give you three pennies. You may get upset, because he got one more penny than you.” And they’re looking and I said, “I tell you what, anybody got any scissors here? Let’s cut this other penny in half.” And they laughed because they know no scissors can cut that penny. But if I do that, you’re going to get half of a penny. So you’ve got a dime, then another penny is eleven, another’s twelve; you got twelve and a half. And we added all that up and in an hour’s time, guess what, I had those kids doing fractions. It blew them away. It blew the parents away. I said. “Yeah, you all can do fractions, but you can’t do non-functional fractions. Don’t mean nothing if you just write numbers!”
That’s a teacher. That’s a conductor. If you come to me as a musician, then I may say, “Here, you play.” You’ve got more? I say, “I think we’ve got something.” Then I’ll get down and participate with you. Then I’ll say, “We’re going to try this; we’re going to try that.” I’ll lay out something to see how you’re going to respond to it. You didn’t respond. I left something open for you. There was no conversation taking place. It could be for many reasons. But I’m going to try to get inside you and inspire you to want to play and make stuff come out of you that you really didn’t have. That’s the conductor, or composer. And if you don’t need help, I don’t have to tell you what to do. But if you need some help, maybe I’ll give you some suggestions. But to out and out come out and not think about what someone can do because you wrote all this music? Then you hear this person in another kind of setting and say, “Wow. I didn’t know you could play like that.” Yeah, you didn’t allow me to play like that, because you already dictated what you wanted.
That’s why I’m devoted to improvisational, spontaneous music. And I think that’s what we need on the planet right now. I think people have to get deeper inside themselves. We all have the potential to be smart and intelligent, and we’ve got to bring it out of people. To resolve some of these major problems we have on the planet, we have to have more people working.
I was just telling somebody yesterday that when there’s peace, then they tell people, “Oh, we don’t need you. We have all these regulations; we don’t need your help.” But when 9/11 came, and what did they do? They asked for the public’s help because the military, the police, and everybody realized that they couldn’t watch everything. If anything looks suspicious, just call this number and let us know. So you’re really saying that when it really comes time for a major crisis, everybody has to participate. If you want to find out the cures for cancer and all this stuff here, you have to start from an early stage in elementary school exposing these kids to oncology, neurology, all these things, in the classroom. Make little toys, little games, so everybody can participate. You talk about trial and error. Somebody out of that is going to come up, it could be a five-year old kid, and say, “Well, what if you did this and did that?” Somebody will say, “Wow, we never thought of that.” That’s why I’m saying: we have to bring out the innovative and creative potential of what we as humans have, and you’re not going to do it by constantly putting a harness on somebody and saying you’re not allowed to express yourself or do what you do.
