Tag: improvisation

Cultured, Part 2

Posted on November 22, 2013 by - Columns

Music’s function as a carrier of social messaging has always been an essential part of human culture. Evidence presented in last week’s post showing that the innate characteristic of pattern recognition common to most animals can be prenatally engaged suggests that the use of music for introducing and indoctrinating us to our social hierarchy can begin while still in our mother’s womb. (Music’s power to influence an audience lies in the fact that it doesn’t really exist until it’s performed; that its reception is only possible over an extended period of time. So it can subtly present and deliver symbols, concepts, and opinions while we’re occupied by activities that are not specifically music related, e.g., driving, work, worship, shopping, eating, and maybe even sleeping.)

This led to the inclusion of the idea that music can act as an agent for social change with a reference to the summary of music-related news items that the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt in Germany publishes weekly. In the latest offering, a New York Daily News article is mentioned. The summary went, “Other researchers have found out that ‘piano players who had experience in jazz improvisation showed more connectivity between three major regions of the brain’s frontal lobe when they improvised music’.” But, when I read the article it linked to, I discovered that the report was part of another summary of events from the Society for Neuroscience’s Annual Meeting held in San Diego, California. The actual research and its results were mentioned only briefly and in no great detail.

After scouring through at least a thousand pages of abstracts from the meeting, I found the one pertaining to the study, which offered a bit more information. Especially interesting to see was that the mechanics of improvisation is not dependent on the amount of training for it:

A negative correlation was found between hours of improvisational training and the level of activity in the right superior parietal lobule and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There was neither a correlation between expertise and behavioral complexity of the improvisations, nor between general piano practicing and brain activity.

However, the extent of the mechanics was dependent on training:

Analyses of psychophysiological interactions (PPI) were performed using seed regions in premotor and prefrontal cortex that have earlier been identified as key regions involved in free response generation and improvisation. For all these regions, it was found that improvisational training was related to increased functional connectivity with other motor, premotor, and prefrontal regions, when controlling for age and general piano playing.

The final result was something any jazz musician could tell you, albeit less clinically:

Extensive experience with improvisation is associated with lower levels of activity in frontal and parietal association areas, regions which are central for cognitive control, working memory, and explicit response selection, suggesting that generation of meaningful musical materials can be more automated or performed with less attentional effort. The PPI analysis indicates that improvisational training results in extensive functional reorganizations within motor regions of the frontal lobe.

I still wanted to know what it was the thirty-nine subjects involved in the study were asked to improvise. Did they play over chord changes? One chord? Free-form? Of course, when I plugged the presentation’s title, “Neural basis of expertise in musical creativity—a functional magnetic resonance imaging study,” and the name of the author, Ana Pinho (Karolinska Institutet), into my trusty Google search engine, I immediately found the press release for the meeting, which showed that there were two more presentations about music and brain function being offered: “It matters when you start: The age of onset of music training predicts brain anatomy” (Yunxin Wang, Beijing Normal University) and “Enhanced multisensory processing in musicians” (Julie Roy, University of Montreal). The release, “Musical Training Shapes Brain Anatomy and Affects Function: Training before age seven has bigger impact on brain anatomy; improvisation can rewire the brain,” included the overarching thesis:

Playing a musical instrument is a multisensory and motor experience that creates emotions and motions—from finger tapping to dancing—and engages pleasure and reward systems in the brain. It has the potential to change brain function and structure when done over a long period of time.

While I mused over the idea that musical instrument playing is largely about finger tapping and dance-like body movement, I looked at the website, BrainFacts.org, that the release suggested as a place to find more information. Although there I found a fascinating article linking another activity to reorganized brain function, the intake of tetrahydrocannibol, I could not find the actual data from Pinho’s research. Back at the Google search page, however, I did find more published research about music and cognition that included some of the information that I find interesting.

What is germane to social messaging and music reception, and what I find most intriguing about the above mentioned research, is—without placing any relational value of worth on either—the difference in cognition (i.e., brain function) between creating music (improvisation) and reciting it (playing from memory). One researcher, Dr. Charles Limb, has gone to the trouble of making this understandable to the average person:


The difference between the two modes of cognition—how the improvising brain is engaged in less self-monitoring, more self-exposition, and more language-based functionality than the reciting brain—is fascinating. I posit that the language-based functionality discussed by Limb (starting ca. 11:25 in the video) requires attention to auditory input and is more like the state of mind experienced when one is just listening to music, as opposed to playing it from memory. And, according to one study on the subject, cognitive activity while listening to music is more universal than individual. As the author of the study explains, it doesn’t matter whether or not we’re listening to the same piece of music, or what details we’re paying attention to when we listen to the same piece of music—our brains will be doing the same thing. Listening to music is an activity that fosters cohesion and synchronicity. Ergo, music is very good for social messaging across large numbers of people who are listening to it at the same time.

Even though the concept of music as a semiological device isn’t new, the implications of the above-mentioned research are incredible. One of them is the idea that musicians, when improvising in concert (or consort, for that matter), have the potential to think as one—a kind of “disembodied cognition,” as one researcher I know, Dr. Martin Rosenberg, calls it. He will be giving a demonstration on this subject next month, which will be discussed in next week’s post.

Sounds Heard: Taylor Ho Bynum—Navigation

Posted on November 5, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

[Ed. Note: Last week at New Music USA, we hosted Caio Higginson from the Welsh Music Information Centre, Tŷ Cerdd, as part of the staff exchange program of the International Association of Music Information Centres. During the week, I arranged for Caio to visit a variety of music organizations in the city as well as to hear live performances of American music every night in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera to (le) poisson rouge, the Jazz Standard, and the Church of St. Luke in the Fields. Caio also worked with each of our departments here, learning about what we do and how we do it. As part of a way to understand what we do at NewMusicBox, I put a pile of new CD releases in front of him and told him he could write about one of them for us if he was so moved. After an afternoon listening bonanza, Navigation by the Taylor Ho Bynum’s 7-tette, inspired these thoughts from him.—FJO]
Navigation
Taylor Ho Bynum 7-tette: Navigation
(firehouse 12 FH-12-04-01-019)
Taylor Ho Bynum: cornet; Jim Hobbs: alto saxophone;
Bill Lowe: bass trombone, tuba; Mary Halvorson: electric guitar;
Ken Filiano: acoustic bass; Tomas Fujiwara and Chad Taylor: drums, vibraphone

Navigation, Taylor Ho Bynum’s recent CD release, seems particularly relevant to my own experience of visiting New York this week. I can bare no claim to navigating the airplane over the Atlantic, of course, but to me at least, this improvisatory multi-sectioned work reflects the adventure of experiencing a specific city for the first time.

Bynum has laid this work out in six movements—ISH, WUK, ZADE, TRIST, MANCH, and KID—each with some predetermined elements planned, but from there the music relies on the independence of the performers as it weaves from one scenario to another. These movements can be played in any order, simultaneously, and even multiple times within a single performance, as they are in the two realizations featured on this Firehouse 12 2-CD release. Diagrams printed on the digipack outline the specific paths taken.

In the first track, MANCH, Tim Hobbs’s alto saxophone and Bill Lowe’s tuba spar with one another before Mary Halvorson’s electric guitar and Tomas Fujiwara’s snare drum and cymbals kick in; it reminded me of my arrival to this city—e.g. depending heavily on maps at first and gradually feeling more confident of where I was going. This sets the stage for the second track, MANCH-ISH, which, after the heaviness of the proceeding interplay between the musicians, sounds relatively tranquil. It begins with an electric guitar solo that made me think of the sounds of dial-up internet connections from the 1990s. As a backdrop, bell-like percussion sounds kick in occasionally; although it might not have been the musicians’ intent, to me it felt like the subway rumbling underneath me from time to time! But there is a constant gradual build-up to a flurry of passion from Lowe’s saxophone and then Bynum’s cornet. The MANCH movement reappears on the last track of the second disc. In that performance there is a calm sense of confidence, with the saxophone taking the lead accompanied by the cornet while in the background the guitar lays back and strums away as if just observing the world go by.

The ZADE and WUK movements are each performed twice on the first CD. In the first performance of ZADE-WUK, the vibraphone (played by Fujiwara) is very prominent in deciding the path that the sax and cornet then follow. The subtlety of the vibraphone and bass (played by Ken Filiano) contrasts very effectively with the harsh and brash interferences, particularly from the guitar and tuba. The second performance, which opens with a bleak bowed bass solo, eventually builds to an ensemble interplay that has an almost traditional jazz feel to it, but not for long. In this performance, however, the navigation of the journey seems clearer and more confident due to its familiar landmarks.

There is an additional performance of ZADE on its own on the second CD. Here is a barren and sobering version of the movement with low and hanging sounds from the bass countered by both low and screeching expressions by the cornet which create a weird sense of uneasiness. About midway through, the saxophone enters and the tensions that had been building up to that point finally evaporate.

Throughout the piece, Bynum doesn’t allow the listener to dwell too long in any moment, choosing to steer back and forth from the traditional to newer waters. In my view, of the six movements it is TRIST and MANCH that reflect the traditional and fond essence of travelling and the confidence in your navigation that allows for a pleasurable journey.


In the first performance of TRIST there’s almost a sense of a strong, cold wind blowing across the landscape, but shelter is provided in the form of the guitar and warmth from the bass and drums. These foundations allow the performance of the wind instruments to thrive in a carnival-like atmosphere, yet at the end we are still made aware of the raging storm. But in the second performance of TRIST, there is no lingering threat from Mother Nature; this is reflected in a colorful cornet solo. It is the wind instruments rather than the guitar that take the initiative at the beginning of this performance. Those festive sax and cornet elements are more subdued in this performance, allowing the guitar to take center stage midway through the track.
The KID-WUK movement begins with the guitar and cornet playing in tandem, both shadowing the other. Suddenly the bass trombone appears (played by Lowe) which gradually builds a sense of tension. The cornet plays over it, responding differently throughout the movement, sometimes challenging the tension and sometimes embracing it.

From the beginning, this album challenged ideas that I’ve had about jazz and made me realize that there is a lot that I have to learn. I’ve listened to it many times during the last five days, and though it is a cliché to say it, every time it evokes a different emotion in me. This is actually the intention of Taylor Ho Bynum. In addition to having recorded two versions of most movements, he states in the CD’s program notes that he “wants to ask listeners to consider the composition as a set of possibilities rather than a fixed document.” And it is just that.

Double Trio: line upon line and Konk Pack

Posted on October 24, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Funky warehouses are being cleaned up and repurposed at a record pace here in Austin. As the city grows and its rents rise, many artists have found their way to the outskirts of town to utilize spaces in various states of renovation and renewal. Among the most recent additions is Canopy, which houses a variety of sleek spaces for artists of all stripes. I headed over there to check out line upon line percussion’s most recent Austin show, a showcase that featured two new premiers, one classic hit, and one golden oldie. I strolled past several units in which painters and other visual artists were holding court, some actively working on new pieces while others chatted about existing work with patrons. At the end of a line of such units, I found the venue; a large open space with groups of instruments around the perimeter. The setup made for a series of little vignettes, and the audience was invited to grab folding chairs and place them wherever they liked (and move them as they pleased) to experience each piece.

line upon line percussion

line upon line percussion

In recent years, line upon line has been on a real commissioning tear, and their list of upcoming projects is long, stretching over the next few years. This show started with a last-minute addition of one of their earliest commissions, Steve Snowden’s A Man with a Gun Lives Here. I have seen them perform this piece many times, and each performance is spirited, alive, and as full of wonder and humor as the work itself. The three players surround the bass drum and their interaction during the performance goes beyond the simply musical and becomes somewhat theatrical. Brush swoops, stick exchanges, and the passing of a bag of buckshot all serve to visually illustrate the music.  This rendition was no different and these dynamic elements played well with audience members young and old. Following the Snowden was Kate Soper’s In the Reign of Harad IV, commissioned with the support of Chamber Music America. In three movements with no pause, the work featured a sort of fractured speech stuttered among the three players. Each performer engaged their particular kit in fits and starts with each instrumental grouping popping in and out in musical chunks reminiscent of tape splits.

The three-station setup for Kate Soper’s In the Reign of Harad IV

The three-station setup for Kate Soper’s In the Reign of Harad IV

While specific words and phrases were difficult to discern, the small figurations developed their own syntax; some declamatory, others questioning, and all part of a conversation that was at once familiar and foreign. Contrasting the large setup for the Soper, Ben Issacs’s Several Inflections called for each performer to have only the top octave (give or take) of the vibraphone removed and placed on a small stand, arranged on top of a bit of curled rubber tubing. This arrangement allowed for all the attack normally associated with the vibraphone but none of the resonance. The piece was described by line upon line member Adam Bedell (he actually recounted a description from a friend who attended a rehearsal) as “sounding like wind chimes,” which might initially bring to mind a simple, wandering texture, but my impression (while positive!) was anything but relaxed. Fragile, nervous, and anxious were all terms that came to mind, not only because of the aural impression but also because of the performance requirements. An overall extremely quiet dynamic profile (we waited until the AC was shut off before they began the work) coupled with a rapid texture that, while measured, often felt (and occasionally looked) like various overlapping nervous tremolos all made for a very intimate and slightly anxious experience; like chopsticks on tiny deconstructed chimes. It didn’t sound like Scirrano, but there was that “approaching the edge of silence” element that kept me on the edge of my seat.

Ben Issacs’s <i>Several Inflections</i>

Ben Issacs’s Several Inflections

The work can last anywhere from six minutes to two hours, but in this case was closer to the ten-minute mark. The score was highly detailed and specific, and the lengths to which any ensemble would need to go to prepare and present the work are substantial. The show wrapped up with a fantastic rendition of Xenakis’s Okho. Written for three djembes but realized here on three connected drum sets that included tom-toms, congas, and a shared bass drum, Ohko could not have struck more of a contrast to the Isaacs, and the dynamic release coupled with the performers’ physicality felt like cliff-diving after meditation. You know you’ve got a concert on your hands when the Xenakis is the palate cleanser, and the polyrhythms running around that room had heads bobbing and people fully engaged, including a few munchkins outside.

*

The second stop on my reclaimed warehouse chamber music tour was the Museum of Human Achievement to see the German improv trio Konk Pack presented by Epistrophy Arts. The trio includes analog synthesist Thomas Lehn, drummer Roger Turner, and Tim Hodgkinson of Henry Cow fame whose work with co-founder Fred Frith left an indelible impression on progressive rock of the late ’70s. I’ve seen many improv groups play over the years, but very few exhibited the level of communication on display at the MOHA. Gone were the rounded edges and long transformations often associated with free improv and in their place were crisp transitions, precise timbral choices, and telekinetic, turn-on-a-dime shifts in the music. Particularly impressive in this embarrassment of riches was the impressive exchange of timbre and rhythm between Lehn’s synth and Turner’s drums. Granted, the analog synths have a visceral nature and connection to the primary elements of music in much the same way drums do, but it takes deft manipulation by both parties to connect the two so seamlessly that at times I wasn’t sure who was playing what. It’s worth noting that Turner was not amplified, so everything he played was purely acoustic.

Konk Pack at the Museum of Human Achievement

Konk Pack at the Museum of Human Achievement

Not to be left out, Hodgkinson’s work on the lap steel guitar melded similarly with the synth, especially in the high registers. And while the lappy was not without modest processing, the lion’s share of the sound was coming from his hands, not from stompboxes or other devices. Plucking behind the nut, staccato punctuations, and karate chops to the midsection of the neck resulted in gorgeous reverberations, like gongs rich with overtones. Many of these sounds and textures sat squarely in the same timbral wheelhouse as the analog synth, and I had several, “Where did that come from?” moments listening to the guitar/synth pairing as well. It was less like a typical improv show and more like a concept album that developed right in front of you. One “piece” started with Lehn’s synth chugging along in the lower register, skirting the line between pitch and rhythm. This was picked up by Turner rhythmically in the bass and toms and “melodically” by taking a dowel, striking it against the rim of one of the toms and drawing it towards himself as it rapidly rebounded,  creating a tremolo that had distinct, rising pitch characteristics. As those pitches ascended, Hodgkinson took the cue, coaxing similar pitch and motion from the lap steel. This material developed in a strikingly linear way, with little of the wandering and tangential characteristics of your less experienced improv teams. The term “sound world” is thrown around quite a bit to denote the particular style of a given composer or work, but Konk Pack was able to create several shifting sound worlds, all connected, but each with their own distinct characteristics as well.

*

I love chamber music. I love the intimacy between audience and performers. I never thought it odd to hear a string quartet in a seven-hundred seat hall, but when I started going to smaller shows I began to see (and hear) things differently. The irony of intimacy found in a giant old warehouse is not lost on me, but the cordoning off of spaces within these huge buildings makes for a very personal and connected experience. (The only tricky part is that I feel a little awkward taking pictures during these shows, but I suppose that speaks to the nature of what we’re experiencing as a smaller audience and performing group.) Whether it’s at a brand new space like Canopy or a somewhat more funky room like MOHA, the chance to sit up close to performers as they work their magic is what chamber music is all about, and I’m glad to see that opportunities like this in Austin are on the rise.

Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight

Posted on October 7, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Austin Wulliman

Austin Wulliman
Photo by Doyle Armbrust

Two weeks ago, I visited a pair of dynamic, hardworking Chicago musicians in their studio. I was intrigued to see violinist Austin Wulliman (known for his work with Spektral Quartet and Ensemble Dal Niente) and composer/bassoonist Katherine Young (known as a great improviser and increasingly in-demand composer) working together in an entirely new context. The pair was preparing to reveal Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight, the result of more than a year and a half’s worth of improvisation, sound creation, and collaboration. The immersive, fifty-minute piece would find its first home in the Defibrillator Gallery for a weeklong residency and culminating performance.

The instruments Wulliman would use for the performance—a prepared viola, two prepared violins, and a “normal” violin—were scattered throughout the small, windowless electronic music studio where the pair had holed up for the day. Young was stationed at the computer with an enormous array of sound samples arranged on the screen in front of her. Although they were at the end of a long day in the studio, the pair spoke with great energy about their upcoming performance. It was evident that their long-term, close collaboration had led to great mutual admiration and a wide array of new experiences for both of them.

When I asked Wulliman what was new for him in the collaborative process with Young, he answered: “Basically everything.”
“That was the intention going into it,” he explained. “When I approached Katie about this over a year and a half ago, I wanted to do something where I had the freedom to explore sounds with somebody who’s great at that.”

Wulliman saw the collaboration with Young as a chance to embark on sonic explorations that performers aren’t often afforded in the context of a fully notated score. Young began their collaboration by sending Wulliman videos and photographs for him to respond to with improvisations, and from this jumping-off place the pair began to develop a common language of sounds that would comprise Diligence. “This has been by far the most I’ve been in the workshop with somebody,” Wulliman said enthusiastically. “I feel like we made the materials together. I’ve always been in the room helping to make the sounds; Katie has always led the way in terms of shaping things, and guiding it becoming a piece.”

Prepared string instrument

Photo by Doyle Armbrust

The collaborative process revealed exciting new territory for Young as well. “It’s been really exciting to be able to spend this much time with sounds that I am not responsible for producing in the moment,” she said, referring to her work as a performing bassoonist. “I’ve been able to get outside of the closeness of having this instrument that [I’m] so connected to. I can say, ‘What if you do this thing, Austin?’ It’s hard to ask yourself those questions in terms of your own instrument. You feel it’s not possible. You think you know what’s possible, with your own instrument. It’s been exciting and has freed me up to think more about structure.”

The result of this collaboration, revealed September 27 at Defibrillator Gallery, was a subtle, sensual performance that enveloped the audience in an ever-changing ecosystem of sound and color. Many moments of Diligence were surprising, even revelatory: Wulliman tearing into a growling prepared G string with cadenza-like fervor, blending hushed bridge sounds with the surrounding tape part, or turning wild pizzicato textures into a virtuosic anti-caprice.

What made Diligence so satisfying was that it brought the greatest strengths of both composer and performer into bold relief. Young’s compositional hallmarks—her visceral approach to sound; her organic use of repetition, structure, and pacing; her attentiveness to the smallest details of timbre; her adventurousness in using instruments in unexpected ways—made the work feel like a living thing, breathing and unfolding as the evening progressed. And Wulliman’s strongest characteristics as a performer—his intensity of focus, his absolute commitment to each musical gesture—made listeners feel that the pair’s collaborative vision was being fully embodied in each moment.

As the performance ended and the packed gallery gave a series of enthusiastic ovations, an unexpected quote came to mind: Mother Teresa’s adage that “we can do no great things; only small things with great love.” In our contemporary music landscape, long-term collaborations can be logistically and financially difficult to achieve. We live in a culture where bigger is better, where more is more. Composers and performers are often required to write, learn, and perform music on tight timetables, and without a great deal of time for inquiry and reflection. Diligence, then, was a particularly rare treat: the chance to enter a sonic world created by two gifted musicians over a long period of time; the chance to hear sounds that were crafted intentionally, gradually, and with great love.

Copy Rites

Posted on August 16, 2013 by - Columns

Madison Building, LoC

The James Madison Building in Washington, D.C., which houses the U.S. Copyright Office.
Photo credit: Matt H. Wade from Wikipedia
(CC-BY-SA-3.0)

My post last week about preparing oneself to improvise as a performance technique (or practicing improvisation sotospeak) inspired several reader comments. One of them began an exchange that I believe warrants further dialogue on the subject. A reader described improvisation as a way to find new ideas for compositions, which I countered as not practicing (in the sense of preparing oneself for performance) as much as a process of composing, which is different from the “creation of music in the course of performance” (“Improvisation,” New Harvard Dictionary of Music, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1986; p. 392). I then asked the reader if he used improvisation in performance and how he practiced in preparation for that. He described two methods he used to prepare to play trumpet in his school jazz band. One, arpeggiating chord progressions and inserting passing tones to create “licks,” is a good way to practice applied harmony in a jazz setting. His second method, though—to “imitate the solos in recordings”—profoundly goes to a comment that was sent to me privately from someone who “thought there could have been more … about finding your own voice and improvising in a new music as well as jazz context.”

Imitation is the first and possibly most important step in finding one’s own musical voice. In every genre and culture, long before we become musically literate, we learn music by ear, mimicking the sounds others make. Even formal musical pedagogy requires that students imitate what their teachers demonstrate as essential to proper technique and interpretation. “No, that’s not right; do it like this” is an indispensible part of the music instructor’s teaching repertoire. But once the lessons have been mastered and are over, an autodidactic process takes place whereby everything learned can be ignored. Then the core value of the lesson remains while the student’s innate philosophical aesthetic takes over to supply insight and guidance. I remember a time long ago when I was hired to play with saxophonist Bill Evans, his teacher Dave Liebman, and drummer John Riley at Michael’s Pub in Boston. It was Evans’s “coming out” concert after he had been placed in the saxophone chair of Miles Davis’s newly reformed group. (He’s no relation to the pianist Bill Evans, who played with Davis’ band in the 1950s.) It also marked the official end of Evans’s apprenticeship with Liebman. I don’t remember much from that particular date. None of the music stayed in my head. But I do recall Evans making strange announcements on his CB radio on our way to Boston. Also, that we all stayed at the same apartment that night and listened to a recording of the gig. While Liebman honored Riley and me by sharing his candid thoughts about what he heard, Evans fell asleep. Because Evans was, for all intents and purposes, taking over the spot in Davis’ band once held by Liebman, there was a bit of a textural similarity in their playing. But Evans, like another of Liebman’s students, Joe Lovano, was striking out in his own direction. The music we played was nothing like what Davis was doing at the time. We were, in a sense, putting our own stamp on the two-saxophone and pianoless group that Elvin Jones had formed with Liebman, Steve Grossman (another Miles Davis alumni), and bassist Gene Perla. Davis, on the other hand, was playing his own brand of funk that would mark his coming out of “retirement” with the Grammy-winning album We Want Miles (Columbia Records, 1982). While Davis’s sound has informed the greater part of Evans’s music making since then, his music doesn’t sound at all like Davis’s or Liebman’s.
Dave Liebman’s Svengali-like influence on his students brings us to another comment from last week which was meant as a tongue-in-cheek reference to instructors who are allowed to dominate their students to the point of inhibiting them. My post included the first of a three-part YouTube extravaganza called Tristano Robots which is a satirical look at the so-called “Tristano-ites” who seem to worship everything about pianist-composer-educator Lennie Tristano. Tristano practiced a famously stringent teaching method that required his students to memorize key solos of the recorded output of Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker. They were also restricted in the amount of chord progressions they could practice and were instructed to learn complicated “lines” that were composed and recorded by Tristano and his principle colleagues: Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz. The chord progressions used were lifted from popular songs like: “All The Things You Are” (“Ablution”), “All of Me” (“Line Up”), and “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To” (“G Minor Complex”). The fact is that many of the students of Tristano’s methods are highly original performers. Pianists Connie Crothers and Kazzrie Jaxen are two examples that come to mind. It is interesting to note that Dave Liebman, who also studied with Tristano, requires his students to write a “line” on the chord progression to John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” a tune that the more traditional members of the Tristano school prefer to eschew.

All satire, though, exaggerates the truth and the comment from last week reflects this with, “[Are] you sure the NSA didn’t have an eavesdropping program on me back when I was studying? I think that was me.” I can assure you that this was not the case because I know the person who invented the Tristano Robots and he explained that he was using humor to help process his experience of studying with one of Tristano’s students, pianist Sal Mosca. While not everyone involved with the Tristano milieu feels frustrated by their pedagogical regimen, there is a certain uniformity of approach that permeates the school. I discovered quite a bit about my own music making while playing with Connie Crothers that I truly believe was a result of a quest for artistic purity and integrity. But Charlie Parker composed original melodies over the changes to popular songs, so a precedent was set. And, although Parker did this primarily to avoid paying licensing fees on the tunes, his “lines,” like “Ornithology” (“How High the Moon”), “Ko Ko” (“Cherokee”), and “Donna Lee” (actually composed by Miles Davis over the changes to “Back Home Again in Indiana”) are highly memorable and have become bebop classics.

The reader’s choice of words emphasized an issue at the core of this phenomenon: the U.S. Copyright Office, like the NSA, was established to protect certain dimensions of society but often falls short of achieving its goal. Copyright regulations are intended to entitle the creator of a work exclusive rights for a period of time; currently 70 years beyond the life of the composer. Unfortunately, loopholes exist that obfuscate authorship; notably the “work for hire” provision that designates music created by a staff composer as belonging to his or her employer. So a bandleader might claim authorship of the works of his or her sidemen or a record company might demand the publishing rights in return for recording and distributing an artist’s music. Furthermore, artists aren’t given copyright protection for a work’s title, a chord progression or, in many cases, an improvisation. The case of a work’s title makes sense to me (imagine the backlog of infringement disputes over works named after their forms: Symphony in C, Concerto for Piano). Chord progressions are less obvious. Should John Coltrane be given copyright protection for “Giant Steps”? If so, what then of the 12-bar blues—public domain? However, to my way of thinking, an improvisation is a work that should be copyrightable. As it stands now, the only way to copyright an improvisation is to record it or write it onto paper. [1]
Current Federal copyright regulations, however, only cover the recording of the improvisation, not a recreation of it by someone else. So, while John Coltrane’s estate would only be allowed the mechanical fees for the recordings of his many highly original versions of “My Favorite Things” (with the composer royalties going to the estates of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II), [2] it could be denied royalties for someone else’s vocalise interpretation of his improvised solos on it. State regulations like California’s Civil Code § 980 offer a modicum of protection vis-à-vis legal argument, but not much. The situation makes me appreciate the genius behind Louis Armstrong’s copyrighting his part for “Cornet Chop Suey” before he recorded it. It smacks of a guerilla tactic in the arts that that supports a Deleuzean view of how American music, by and large, can be considered the creation of subaltern communities looking for assimilation and appropriation by the Great American Culture Machine.

*

1. California Civil Code § 980(a)(1), however, presents an interesting provision among its statutes: “The author of any original work of authorship that is not fixed in any tangible medium of expression has an exclusive ownership in the representation or expression thereof as against all persons except one who originally and independently creates the same or similar work.” Sounds like someone is optimistically concerned about an infinite number of monkeys at their typewriters.
2. To be sure, the links provided all point to clips on YouTube, where, for the time being, equitable royalties are being denied to Rodgers and Hammerstein as well.

Delay Is Denial

Posted on August 9, 2013 by - Columns

While it is a fact that most of the discussion on NewMusicBox is about composed music, the subject of improvised music isn’t new to its readers and one that shouldn’t be avoided or ignored. A well-rounded musician should be able to improvise as well as compose and/or perform music; it’s a matter of being able to speak as well as listen! So, in short order, I’d like to offer my observations on the subject by first coming to an understanding of what improvisation is and isn’t.

There is a philosophy of looking at the performance of ornamentation as a kind of improvisation. But I don’t believe that choosing between historical examples of mordents and appoggiaturi can really be called an act of improvisation. (But I do think that the practice of performing a passage as written once and repeating it with free ornamentation can meet the requirement for being, or at least including, improvisation.) So, while Yo-Yo Ma’s interpretations of J. S. Bach’s Suites for Solo Violoncello are noticeably different from those of Pablo Casals, neither can be called improvisations.

The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1986) says that “[i]n Western art music, which is heavily dependent on notation for transmission, improvisation includes phenomena such as the addition of extemporized ornaments as well as special improvised genres.” So, to me, an ornament, to be improvised, cannot be taken from a list of historically accurate referents. (A truly improvised mordent would be one that is performed “incorrectly”; the closer one comes to playing them right, the farther away from improvisation it becomes.) I think that Harvard hits the nail on the head in the opening sentence of its definition of improvisation: “The creation of music in the course of performance.” This offers a difference between “performing” music and “creating” it as well as a context for improvising.

Probably one of the hardest things to accept about improvisation is that learning how to improvise is done by improvising. One doesn’t learn how to do it, only how to do it better. So the first step is simply to decide to start improvising. Singers can do it as soon as they wake up, instrumentalists have a little more preparation to do: pick up, or sit down at, their instrument. One just starts.

With this in mind, the next step is to decide what it is one will be improvising. This sounds almost antithetical to the idea of improvisation. Certainly, if improvisation is the extemporaneous creation of music in performance, how can one decide what one will create beforehand? But improvisation, for the most part, occurs inside a framework of genre, form, harmonic/melodic content, and context that make it vital to preconceive not necessarily what one will play, but necessarily what one will not play. To illustrate this, imagine a trumpet player who only plays jazz and doesn’t know what any of the elements of Indian music are (e.g. raga, tala, or shruti), yet is improvising in a group playing traditional Indian music, say Raag Bhairav. No matter how closely our trumpet player listens to the rest of the musicians for guidance during the performance, his or her improvisation will not be in sync with the intent of the music. (Unless, of course, the intent of the performance is to juxtapose the trumpeter’s lack of ability to perform the music that the rest of the group has mastered.) Conversely, a sitar player thoroughly versed in the Hindustani classical music tradition, but with no knowledge of the blues form will not be able to improvise a convincing solo on Charlie Parker’s “Au Privave.” These two examples illustrate, in the broadest terms, what one should not do in musical improvisation.
A large part of what to improvise on in the jazz genre is tunes from the Great American Songbook. So the most important—albeit tedious—thing to do is to listen to a lot of jazz artists perform specific tunes, as much and as often as possible, with the goal of being able to at least identify any of what was heard on subsequent listening, if not recreate it. One has to be prepared to agree that this is something that one would have to do for as long as one wants to improvise jazz. This never-ending step informs the rubric of what one will do in musical improvisation. It doesn’t matter what genre of music one applies this step to, and it doesn’t matter how many different genres of music it’s applied to; one can compartmentalize according to genre. What does matter, though, is that one does this step a lot.

Next comes an even more tedious, but rewarding, step: practice. One must practice improvisation. But practicing improvisation is not the same as improvising. One practices major and minor scales, but rarely does a performance consist of major and minor scales (and improvisation is done “in the course of performance”). So one practices repertoire, the tunes from the Great American Songbook one has been listening to others perform, while trying out ideas that come to mind. Maybe change some of the notes, or fill in the spaces between phrases. But, this must be practiced critically. If a phrase or fill is done incorrectly, stop and do it again correctly. And then do it again until it isn’t done incorrectly at least ten times in a row. While this can be frustrating at first, it gets better with practice. I think the hardest part of this is making the time to do it; but, once it’s done, it’s done. And it’s like riding a bike, you never really forget. You just get out of practice. So, practice! There are many ways to practice and one should use as many of them as possible: One can practice alone, to an imagined accompaniment. (Accompanists can practice to an imagined soloist. One can practice with a metronome, using its click as different beats. One can play or sing along with what one is practicing. One can practice with a recording or with ambient music, such as the radio or TV. Finally, one can practice with others. The last offers a great way to get critical feedback about one’s progress.
Practice for 8/5 - 8/9
Then there is the taking of lessons. While listening to someone else’s performance is studying and can be a lesson in itself, setting up a session with someone where teacher-student role-playing is agreed upon can save a lot of time and offer valuable insight into what one is doing. The role-play can go on for as long as one wishes. There are several individuals who, even though I might have only taken one lesson from them, I will always consider as my teachers. But there are also some whom I don’t consider as such so much, even though I might have taken several lessons from them and the information they imparted to me was invaluable. Generally, though, I find myself revisiting the lessons I have taken in the past and still gain new insights from them. I still go to lectures and workshops whenever possible and still take a private lesson when the mood strikes. Of course, one can improvise a lesson when the situation is right, but I’d have to teach you how to do that!

Then comes the scary part: creating music in performance. Some teachers will want to control that. But my belief is that when it’s time to do it, do it. Otherwise, you could find yourself in the same situation as this:


The first time is nerve-wracking, but it gets better every time.

Katherine Young: Notes of Collaboration

Posted on March 20, 2013 by - Conversations, Spotlight


Composer, improviser, and bassoonist Katherine Young takes an adventurous, creative, and extremely hardworking approach to her career. She seems at home in a variety of musical communities: from the DIY band scene in Brooklyn to the improvised-music scene in Chicago to the academic composition department at Northwestern where she now studies. To help me prepare for our interview, Young handed me an impressive stack of CDs. Most were released on small boutique labels; one cover was beautifully hand-stitched by Young herself. Each of the represented projects—Young as solo bassoonist, her improvising duo project Architeuthis Walks on Land, her rock/experimental quartet Pretty Monsters—has toured in the United States and in Europe.
Young cites Anthony Braxton, with whom she studied at Wesleyan, as a profound influence on how she has developed a body of work. “Working with Anthony was very influential in this ethos of how you see a project through,” she says. “He both demonstrated, and would explicitly say: you write a piece, you get it performed, you make a record, you tour it, and then you’ve done the project. You don’t write a piece, get it performed once, and call it a day. This comes from the idea of being a performer, and getting your music out in the world.”

Young’s approach to the bassoon, which is on fascinating display in her 2009 solo record Further Secret Origins, is as physical as it is conceptual.  With this record, it’s clear that Young’s years of work as an improviser have led to a highly detailed and expressive map of the bassoon’s sonic possibilities. The percussive clacks of the keys, the multiphonic capacities of the reed, the resonance of breath—Young deploys these varied colors like a great orchestrator. Being an active bassoonist not only helps Young “keep [her] feet on the ground,” but also provides a place to experiment with sound. “Developing the sounds that I use on the bassoon, especially with amplification and pedals, is really informing my current interests as a composer,” she explains. “Teasing out these small sounds and making them big. Maintaining an active relationship with an instrument gives you a laboratory to explore sounds very immediately.”

In some of her current work, Young is experimenting with how extra-musical elements—like a collection of photographs, a poetic text, or even the opening scene of Once Upon A Time in the West—can be a “foundational part” of the composition process. In two upcoming large-scale collaborations with violinist Austin Wulliman and artist Deniz Gul, Young is experimenting with how to make these elements “not just this inspirational flash at the beginning of the process of composing, but rather, [something that] informs the whole piece.”

Her collaboration with Gul, a Turkish artist, is allowing Young to explore a long-standing interest in transcription. The piece began with a series of found interviews which Gul then transcribed into a poetic text and then used as the basis for a sculptural installation. Now, the installation will be the inspiration for Young’s improvised sound.

Although Young’s growing profile as a composer means that she is working more within traditional commissioning structures—including upcoming pieces for Northwestern’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, Fonema Consort, and Distractfold—working directly with the musicians she’s writing for continues to be of primary importance for her. “I think the collaborative ethos of being a performer is still incredibly important to my process of composition,” Young explained. “Working closely with other people, involving multiple perspectives—a lot of my current work is very collaborative.”

For a composer like Young, who often allows for improvisation and somewhat open parameters in her work, this relationship is particularly essential. “Part of the goal for me is finding the right balance between specificity and openness, for whatever group it is, whatever the performance practice will be. When you’re working with a group of people, different structures and different specificity will work better than others.” In each project, Young is renegotiating the boundaries between performance and composition. “In some ways,” she says, “it’s just about getting to know people.”

No Idea Festival 2013: Improv Anywhere

Posted on March 6, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Chris Cogburn
Chris Cogburn recently curated the 10th annual No Idea Festival with six concerts in Austin and San Antonio. Hailed by the Paris Transatlantic as “one of the finest improvised festivals in the world,” this year’s gathering featured performances by nineteen musicians who made domestic treks from Austin, Houston, Jackson, and New York, as well as those who braved customs with loads of arcane gear from New Zealand, Germany, France, and Mexico. Grizzled veterans were joined by new players in a variety of collaborative efforts over the six-day event, one in which new relationships were formed and existing relationships were strengthened through brief but intense rehearsals to facilitate “free improvisations, composition, noise, and sonic interventions.”
A free show on the Pfluger pedestrian bridge served as a somewhat casual pre-festival opener. Hailing from the streets of Mexico City by way of New Zealand and Spain, Misha Marks was joined by Austinite Ralph White for a bit of off-the-cuff busking on a spectacular Saturday afternoon. The Pfluger pedestrian bridge is quite well traveled on any given day and even more so on the weekend, so there was no shortage of people passing and pausing to hear Marks, and White trade fours. The second set featured Cogburn and Dafne Vincente-Sandoval in musical conversation. Their interaction was somewhat more sparse and introverted, but still quite communicative and expressive. Perhaps the most compelling thing about these sets was the fact that the audience had no frame of reference. Some walked by without so much as a turn of the head while others stopped and soaked in every nuance, not necessarily realizing that this was a planned show and not another Austin oddity. Children had some of the most interesting reactions, eyes big with wonder when the sounds would come together in a recognizable form, invisible worlds forming in those little craniums.

Dafne Vicente-Sandoval and Chris Cogburn

Dafne Vicente-Sandoval and Chris Cogburn

I headed to the Salvage Vanguard Theater for the opening event where Cogburn, Vincente-Sandoval, and her fellow Parisian laptop artist Xavier Lopez performed a set of live improvisation. Among the goals of the festival is to bring artists together not only for one-off shows but also to build multi-year relationships; relationships that serve to more fully develop the depth of communication in each improvisation. Immediately following a brief introduction by Cogburn, a siren dopplered its way down the street outside as if to signal entry into a world in which every sound is musically fair game. Vincente-Sandoval began with chirps and clicks on her bassoon reed as Lopez invoked punches of static from the laptop. Cogburn placed a cymbal on the snare, creating resonance with friction from a dowel placed in its center, which combined cleanly with a rising (and piercing) set of frequencies from Lopez’s laptop. Something about the level of volume and the particular frequencies, all quite high in pitch, filled the room and got into my head, which while not painful was a bit scary. I kept thinking, “One false move with that dial and we’re all toast.” As the work progressed, Vincente-Sandoval gradually assembled her bassoon, continuing to coax sounds that had more body and resonance while retaining the short, sharp character of the opening. The players clearly had respect for each other’s space which resulted in clear background and foreground during the performance with very little stepping on one another’s toes. This was made all the more clear by the very different palettes utilized by each player. Lopez’s static and wholly electronic world played out in stark contrast to the others. Cogburn was able to create long tones which had characteristics in common with elements of Lopez’s world, though they were timbrally distinctive. Vincente-Sandoval’s staccato arsenal could at times echo the static of Lopez but also had an organic quality that served to contrast with those electronics and while blending well with Cogburn’s offerings. Very cool.

The No Idea performance I attended last year was at The Broken Neck, a large warehouse on the east side. In a marked contrast to that visceral space, I found myself at The Performance Loft, an uber-swanky venue in the heart of downtown Austin. I was initially unsure about whether to even go in, thinking I must be in the wrong place, but when I saw Bonnie I knew all was well. I arrived several minutes before Bob Hoffnar (on pedal steel) and Aaron Allen (on upright bass) began their set. Hoffnar and Allen performed a commission by Catherine Lamb, one that involved an unorthodox tuning designed to correspond with the 60 cycle hum generated by standard US voltage as well as the 50 cycle European standard. Bowed harmonics on the bass shared space with low pedal swells, the two combining to form resultant tones that echoed bells with no attack. As Hoffnar swelled up and down in volume, the hum from the pickups lent a body to the sound not unlike what you might hear when walking under a lamppost. It struck me that it didn’t seem incongruous to the work, and Hoffnar mentioned afterward that because the piece was based on voltage cycles, the pickup hum actually fit right in.

Chris Cogburn played a piece written by Bryan Eubanks which was not only the brightest spot among many that evening, but one of the simplest and most compelling pieces I’ve heard in a long time. It’s so simple that I’m not sure how to convey the impact to you, but here it goes. Cogburn began with a roll on the snare, near the rim. Over the course of five or six minutes he gradually increased in volume, though his overall dynamic journey was essentially from mf to f. I suppose that Eubanks borrowed a bit from a magician’s sleight of hand-book, because as I was intently listening to what essentially appeared to be a drum roll I began to hear something else. Or did I? I thought I was hearing some kind of very quiet hiss or static and figured it must be my brain reacting to the prolonged roll. I began to turn my head a bit to “feel” the sound and realized that many people were doing the same thing; looking around the room trying to figure out if that “other” sound was a real thing or some crazy artifact of the roll. I should at this point tell you that the Performance Loft has a very involved surround sound speaker system (360+ speakers!) that is carefully integrated into the walls such that you hardly notice it, and it was from these speakers that a gradually increasing white noise signal was emanating. Maybe it was the shared “A-ha!” moment with other audience members, or the simplicity of the sort of 21st-century Bolero vibe that the piece had, but when the Cogburn and the static reached critical mass, held it, and cut off abruptly to end the work, the place went nuts. It was simply awesome and everyone was excitedly talking about it. I’m not sure if it would have the same impact the second time around or if it would suffer as the movie “Sixth Sense” can on a second viewing because you know what’s coming, but that first time…whoa.

Remi Álvarez, Damon Smith, and Alvin Fielder

Remi Álvarez, Damon Smith, and Alvin Fielder

The last set of the evening featured Alvin Fielder on drums and percussion, Damon Smith on upright bass, and Remi Álvarez on saxophone. On a night with static lurking in the darkness and pedal steel guitars tuned to electric sockets, this final set was arguably the most conventional, though I don’t use that term pejoratively. Fielder set up delicate textures with bells, shakers, and other hand percussion while Álvarez comped harmonics. Damon Smith pulled out all the stops, coaxing a wide variety of sounds and attacks from the bass. Clearly part of the conventionality was that the drums/bass/sax setup has a long and storied history which informs any performance, even if that performance strives to be something completely different. However, these players were clearly above all that and spent their set as the other improvisers had at the festival; focusing on each moment and event as they assembled them into a new work of art.

I was struck by this year’s festival—not only by the music, but also by the diversity of audience and venue. Presenting this music in typical concert halls will only go so far and connect with so many. Outdoor afternoon bridge concerts with kids and dogs in attendance, an evening show in otherwise private performance space populated by the usual suspects, and shows in hidden museums all speak to the need to put this music in as many different places as possible so the largest number of people can find it. Cogburn is ten years into this journey, and in that time he has done a great deal to bring the diverse world of improv to the experienced as well as uninitiated in central Texas.

New England’s Prospect: Movietone

Posted on February 7, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Brando Noir

Students of the New England Conservatory Contemporary Improvisation department in “Brando Noir,” January 29, 2013.

Near the beginning of The Wild One, biker gang leader Johnny Strabler (played by Marlon Brando) pays a visit to Wrightsville’s local diner, where Kathie (played by Mary Murphy) is working behind the counter. If you’ve ever wondered what the big deal about Brando was—if, for instance, you only know him from some of the more baroque extravagances of his late career—this little scene will get you up to speed. Brando lays down a rhythmic track of amazing fluidity: he swerves, he swaggers, he dances; his dialogue has laconic syncopation; he uses props—gloves, money—to provide his own punctuation, his own percussive fills. Everything he does—the way he swirls the chairs, the way he glides away from the bar, even the way he uncurls his fingers after digging in his pocket for jukebox change—is insistently musical. He’s a bit of jazz dressed in leather and moving through space.
I suppose that’s why “Brando Noir,” the concert mounted on January 29 by the New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation department, seemed so promising on paper. But that scene—one of the few from the concert’s anthology of Brando moments that was screened with its original soundtrack—had what about half the music on the program, as fine as much of it was, lacked: a sense of engaging with the music and cadence that’s already present in a film. The evening bounced in and out of sync with the cinematic dynamic.

The concert, produced by Boston jazz hero (and co-founder of the Contemporary Improvisation department) Ran Blake and Aaron Hartley, took the form of a four-act suite. After opening remarks by current department chair Hankus Netsky (which I missed—thanks, Boston parking) and NEC President Tony Woodcock, selected scenes from four Brando films—The Wild One, the World War II drama The Young Lions, the method Western The Appaloosa, and the kidnapping thriller The Night of the Following Day—were projected on a screen at the back of the Jordan Hall stage while various collections, large and small, of student musicians played live accompaniment.

The Wild One opened at the source: Leith Stevens’s original score, in a brawny arrangement by Ken Schaphorst, conducting a performance by the NEC Jazz Orchestra that hung just out of swinging focus. A later cue, Schaphorst again arranging Stevens’s music for a sequence where the gang ominously yet balletically circles Murphy’s character, was tighter. And—especially in that second scene—it scaffolded the mood and action better than the contributions of Full Tang, a student quartet (Eric Lane, Ryan Dugre, Adam Clark, and Danilo Henriquez) that provided blocks of genre: a jazz-funk ostinato and a stylized ’50s-rock beat that, while confidently done, mostly sat alongside the images for a while. But for the vigilante-mob action sequence that sends the film to its final denouement, violinist Yasmine Azaiez and accordionist Cory Pesaturo went to the opposite extreme: free improvisation, both instruments distorted and amplified, the music shadowing the action—sometimes a bit too closely, but fully engaged with the movie’s own rhythm, not trying to impose a rhythm from outside.

The sequence of scenes from The Young Lions, stylistically varied, was the most consistently solid. Survivors Breakfast, a 16-player improvisation loosely directed by Anthony Coleman, started out promising—an out-of-focus Biedermeier dance band—then turned to soft clouds of extended techniques that tracked dialogue between Barbara Rush’s American tourist and Brando’s German ski instructor (later to become an ambivalent Wehrmacht soldier). Tim Leinhard, conducting vocalist Sara Serpa and an 11-piece ensemble, scored a couple scenes with the most conventional film music of the night, but did it with skill: dark, romantic, vaguely jazzy, with a sweep calibrated to the movie’s shifting moods. Two other sequences, one with percussionist Jeremy Barnett, the other a duet between Jussi Reijonen (on bass) and Nima Jannmohammadi (on kamancheh), went back to avant-garde improvisation, layering austere unease over the film while following its contours.

The second half of the concert had moments like that, but also a number of incongruous set pieces. After an opening vocal solo by Serpa that set the mood but failed to shift into storytelling, Dylan McKinstry and Robin Lohrey offered a similarly moody mandolin-and-piano piece of songwriting that nevertheless ignored the slippery shifts of power and mood in their scene from The Appaloosa—a bit of witty, treacherous byplay between Brando’s wandering cowboy and John Saxon’s deliciously villainous pistolere chieftain. And while a bluesy cue from Ilya Portonov, Anna Patton, Daniel Pencer, and Andria Nicodemou pleasantly set up another confrontation between the two characters, the confrontation itself took place alongside a Spanish/English version of “What a Difference a Day Makes” that (however nicely sung by Natalie Cadet and Greta DiGiorgio) grew more ill-matched as it went. (It was partially redeemed by a showdown scored—by Nedelka Prescod, Amir Milstein, Brad Barrett, and Jerry Peake—with understatedly fractious ruminations, Leake clouding the scene with a haze of soft cymbals and bells.)

The Night of the Following Day had the full gamut of the concert’s ups and downs. It opened with a lovely, deft piece of pure illustration: Rachel Panitch, Abigale Reisman, Valerie Thompson, and Vessela Stoyanova followed a landing airliner with a baleful pizzicato-and-vibraphone aleatory, then shifted into a Parisian cafe waltz, foreshadowing the establishment shot of the Orly airport, and then—just when one was starting to wonder how earnest or satirical such a musical cliché was meant to be—swiftly, ruthlessly deconstructed it as the kidnapping plot kicked into gear. The movie’s other, most improvisatory accompaniments were similarly effective: Hui Weng, on guzheng, producing a host of strumming effects for varied punctuation; Tal Zilber with a lurking piano, overlaid with electronic processing that neatly traced the dramatic thread.

But those were interspersed with sequences that seemed more like blind dates. Deepti Navaratna and Sonny Lalchandani chaperoned a bad guy exposition scene with lovely voice-and-sitar ragas, but it felt like a disconnected notion. Eden MacAdam-Somer, on voice and violin, was accompanied by Netsky on piano in a charming, accomplished original cabaret tune, “Cocktails at 4,” but the ironic distance was simply too far from the violence of their scene to register even as commentary. In fact, it was a double distraction—the music pulling attention away from the film while the film pulled attention away from the music. That figured in the finale, too, the film’s beachfront standoff scored by the Sail Away Ladies (MacAdam-Somer, Mia Friedman, Sarah Jarosz, and Ari Friedman) with a bewitching cover of Joanna Newsom’s “The Book of Right-On” that nevertheless seemed to cancel out the on-screen suspense. (The ironic record-collection curation technique of a Kubrick or a Tarantino is harder than it looks—and requires a director willing to relinquish the cinematic rhythm to the music.)

Film music is weird and alchemical, no matter how it’s produced. The familiar tradition is through-composed, precise, timed, the vein that Leinhard effectively mined for The Young Lions. But otherwise, it was the groups that hewed to an older tradition, the silent-movie tradition of organists and pianists in every theatre—improvising—that best served the films, using the structure and flow of film to spark unexpected sounds that, in turn, sparked a different perception of the filmed image. That was Brando’s method, anyway, at his best: distilling the energy of a scene or a film and then amplifying it into something a little more outlandish, a little more subtle, a little more dangerous.

Matana Roberts: Creative Defiance

Posted on February 1, 2013 by - Conversations, Cover


Conducted at the artist’s home in New York City
January 4, 2013—2 p.m.
Filmed, condensed, and edited by Molly Sheridan
Poster image by B. Abrams
Transcribed by Julia Lu

If there is any way to distill the wide-ranging artistry of Matana Roberts, it might be to focus on the ways in which she eludes definitions. Where the weight of other people’s expectations—of her instrument, her genre, even her race and her gender—might have fenced her in, she has instead pushed off these bounding walls into new areas of exploration, both sonic and narrative. The Chicago-raised composer, improviser, and alto saxophonist offers a friendly yet confidant smile as she explains, “Basically, I don’t like being told what to do, or who I am, or what I am by other people. I prefer to make those statements myself.”

For Roberts, that kind of self-definition seems to flow hand-in-hand with a certain creative restlessness. While the influence of jazz in her music is apparent, she has expanded her creative palette to encompass a broader world of improvisation, experimentalism, and theatrical storytelling. This drive is perhaps most clearly showcased under the heading of her work Coin Coin, which she began developing in 2006. Divided into 12 “chapters,” the project includes multiple ensemble configurations, graphic notation, and explorations both compositional and historical. It is a work that is intensely personal and yet strikingly universal, incorporating her general interests in ritual, spirits, and genealogy alongside a more exacting trace of her own bloodlines and the stories of her ancestors. Like much family history, the path is circuitous and the narrative open to interpretation. Whether she and her flexible band are whispering intimate secrets into the ears in the audience, cajoling them into joining in, or screaming at their side, however, the result is a piece of transfixing emotional power.

In her artist statement, Roberts includes a line which has inspired the title of this profile, “Through my life’s work, I stand creatively in defiance.” In the course of our talk, she celebrated what sets her apart and the vital role art can play when taken outside of its usual hallways. And while certainly there are outside forces that can try to hamper her artistry, she has also come to realize that sometimes the most forbidding barriers are the ones that can build up inside. “I have all these things that I want to try creatively,” she acknowledged, “and for a long time, I didn’t understand that there was nothing standing in my way.”

***

Molly Sheridan: It’s maybe too easy to label a saxophonist a jazz artist even if the genre relationship is not particularly strong. I know you often find yourself pushed in this direction, but is that where you feel most rooted or where you have been placed by others?
Matana Roberts: I try to push myself away from that word, though I will always have a love for that music and for a lot of those people. But for what I’m trying to do, I find it really confining on so many different levels—not just musical, but also in terms of the culture and certain types of generalizations that come with that word that I don’t like. I was a clarinet player first, playing classical music, but in terms of really dealing with the saxophone, it came from dealing with jazz music. There is an influence of jazz in my music, and there’s always going to be, but I feel like I’m more of a hybrid. Real jazz musicians to me are people who are deeply dealing with the traditional aspects of that music. I’m considering those aspects, but I’m not dealing with them in the way that they are. It partly has a little bit to do with gender, a little bit to do with race, and just at my core there’s a certain sense of punk aesthetic that I will always ascribe to. Basically, I don’t like being told what to do, or who I am, or what I am by other people. I prefer to make those statements myself.
MS: So there’s both a social and an aesthetic tension there?
MR: Yeah. African American jazz musicians have to deal with certain sorts of generalizations that I find really uncomfortable, and I get to feel a little bit of that when I travel, especially outside of the United States. I’ve learned a lot about how global my bloodline really is, and I want to live in a way where I’m not ignoring all those different segments. Then, I try to not really jump in on the gender thing, but I’m tired of having my work and my music or any sort of artistic output judged by men. The jazz world is still is a very male world. In order to be a part of that world—when I was really thickly a part of that world—I had to ignore certain aspects of my gender that made me, in the end, really uncomfortable. So I’m trying to chart something that takes in my love of old American traditions—not just jazz, but jazz is one of them.
MS: You made a move from Chicago to New York in 2002, and the way I’ve heard you speak about The Chicago Project, the album you released in 2008, and the artists you worked with while making that recording, it sounds like it represented a kind of graduation in a sense. Is that an accurate impression?
MR: When I was asked by Barry Adamson to make a record where I could pay the musicians well and bring on a producer that I trusted, I just felt that I needed to use that first recording as a way to honor the people who had really helped me. I was already living in New York at that time, and I could have used that opportunity to solidify one of my New York bands, but all those guys on that record—especially Josh Abrams, Jeff Parker, and Fred Anderson—they brothered and uncled and fathered me through this music when I first starting playing in Chicago. So I don’t know if it was a graduation, but that record is a document of things. I don’t think I’ve ever told them that, but I hope they understand. That record and the music on that record is my thank you to them.
MS: We’ve spoken some about what you do take from jazz, but even in an “end of genre” age, you have integrated various streams of influence in a particularly rich and personal way—and not just multigenre but multidisciplinary. What experiences or instincts pushed that side of your work? Who was influential to you in that regard?
MR: I’m highly influenced by visual art, more than sound. I’m influenced by those people and traditions that are not considered high art, that wouldn’t be let into some places because they come from more of an emotional place rather than an intellectual place. They come from more of a folk place, more a place of the heart, than some other traditions. I’m attracted to ghosts and spirits and spooks and these things. The graphic notation comes from my love of visual art. But also I have a learning disorder and the way I understand music or just understand logic is sometimes a lot different than other people. It took me a long time to understand that I wasn’t stupid, that it’s a different kind of intelligence that I have. I still don’t understand how it’s worked out the way that it has, but luckily, I’ve been able to use a lot of those things in the way that I deal with music.
I’ve always been interested in theater. When I was kid, I wanted to be a playwright, and I grew up going to the opera. We were one of the few black families with season tickets. My grandmother would save up for that and drag us. I hated it at the time, and now I feel really privileged that I got to experience that. Growing up in a classic Chicago African-American neighborhood, where you are constantly exposed to ideas of signification, to ideas of ritual—even going to black churches and seeing how black American people deal with that—used to really rub my punk side the wrong way. But now I’m able to look back at that and see how culture deals with the idea of spectacle. I really want to use my work as a way to explore those different themes that are not necessarily just related to the African American experience, but related to just the experience of peoples. There are common themes that run through all cultures in terms of ritual and presentation—ideas of pain, joy, sadness, gladness, and these traditions that get passed down, that don’t necessarily get documented, or commercialized, or valued. I’m interested in placing my own value on those things.
MS: Your piece Coin Coin, which is kind of a poster child for this type of exploration and multidisciplinary artistic integration, is obviously a huge project, so there’s a lot to unpack. Let’s start by speaking just about some of the big concepts and the structure of the work, and then we’ll dig into the details.
MR: Coin Coin is my interest in history and folklore. Some parts of it have to do with research that I’ve been doing on my own ancestry, and I use some of that information to dig deeper into ideas of narrative. Right now, Coin Coin is very much about the African American experience in America in some ways, but the whole overarching thing is about just exploring these human universals. My mother used to call it the musical monument to the human experience, and that’s how I pretty much like to explain it. It’s a multimedia sound project about my love of history. There was never enough time in the day to be a hobbyist in that and also deal with the music. When I realized I could put them together, that’s kind of the whole overarching theme.
I wanted to create a project that would allow me to challenge myself as a composer in terms of dealing with different ensemble configurations. I had so much narrative that I could break down into so many segments that I realized I could also apply that to different ensemble configurations. Each segment deals with the same kind of graphic framework and some similar ideas so that when I’m finally done with it, perhaps I can link them all together.
There are ten ensemble chapters and two solo chapters that bookend the project in my head. It’s all formulated, but the solo chapters are still under development. I just came off tour working on those. Five of the ensemble segments have been performed, and now what I’ve been doing is having these Coin Coin experiments where they’re not full chapters, but they’re ideas that I’m trying to consider in the work. I don’t have the kind of money where I can just have a lab ensemble. I have to plug them into a performance to fund them. But each chapter is structured and written out and there’s a narrative for each one. I just have to get to them.


MS: Considering the financial challenges that might hamper work of this scope, can you tell me more about how the development and composition process for these pieces has worked?
MR: Before I started the project, it was very rare that I could sit down and write a song. The one thing that I’ve always loved about jazz is melody and that will always be a hallmark of all of my work. But I also grew up during some of the best eras of hip hop and also was really heavily influenced by riot grrrl and punk, and so I would try and write and I could never finish a song. Every now and then a song would come out from beginning to end, but usually they would come in snippets, and I’d have just these pieces. For a while I felt like a real failure. Then I started weaving the snippets together and understanding that maybe they are all part of the same thing or, if they aren’t, I can make them part of the same thing. I also became more and more interested in graphic notation and the ways in which musicians see sound.
So I just started weaving things together in that way. I remember the first score I put together. I thought I was going to get laughed out of New York City. But we did it and it was like magic. I was like, wow, this kind of composition is possible if you make sure you do it from your heart. Every piece of graphic notation that you have on a piece of paper, you should be able to really break down and really minutely explain, so that it’s honest. When I went in that direction, it all started to make sense.
MS: What made you question that initially? You mentioned that you thought you were going to be laughed out of New York City.
MR: I went to jazz schools and had some really negative experiences. Those places sometimes will make you feel like anything that you have to offer is not good enough—not just jazz schools, any institution can do that to you. So I really let that undermine me. I had a professor in college that told me the only way that I was ever going to get a gig was to marry a musician. And at the time, I believed him because he was the professional and I was the student. So, I still had all these little scars from that. It almost seemed too playful and too imaginary for anyone else to understand. I found out later that that was not true, but I needed to go through that process.
MS: Can you describe the graphic score/notation system that you are using in the work?
MR: To be honest with you, I’m not sure I can really break it down because it’s work that I’m still trying to develop. Things have changed. That has been the interesting thing about it, and what has slowed it down somewhat, too. I thought I would be done with all 12 chapters by 2011. Ha! No.
To start, I had a really deep interest in sacred geometry and symbolism. I was using some Native American and African symbolism. Then, looking at these different locales that I’m dealing with—Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi by way of Africa, Ireland, England, France, Scotland—and looking at how these different places throughout their history have dealt with symbolism, and what symbols have remained. Oftentimes, I would pull symbols from that, that I could draw. I think partly this is also because I wish I could draw. So I would look at a shape or scribble and imagine how I could interpret that in sound: what someone could ask of me in terms of how to interpret that and, most importantly, how I could use it to not really create melody but how it could create texture. So that is the direction that I’ve always taken the graphic scoring. Also, people always accuse me of having a really personal sound, or a really personal approach, which is a nice accusation, but I also wanted to figure out a way that I could create but still have the performers’ own personalities come through. The first chapter of Coin Coin I actually put together partly because I wanted to play music with my friends who couldn’t read music—a lot of Canadian folk that I really loved who are amazing improvisers, but weren’t readers. Then sometimes I would do some of this work with people who were amazing readers, but not good improvisers, and there’s a definite difference in that. So, I just wanted to figure out a way to create the scores where I could find these little textures that I was interested in. Now, even with re-renderings of chapters that have already been recorded or that I’m still performing, there are still new textures that I’m looking for that I haven’t heard yet. So I’m trying to push that into the next segment of scores.

Matana Roberts: Coin Coin

Courtesy Constellation Records

MS: It seems like you would need to be both particular about who you involved in performing the project, and then also decide how much control you wanted to have over the sounds they eventually produce. How have you picked those people, and then how much do you try to control them?
MR: Well, one day I sat down and made a list of all the musicians I knew in New York by instrument—so overwhelming!—and all the musicians that I really like to play with that I just could never pull into my regular quartet or trio. It was a way that I could experiment with the graphic notation that I still needed to formulate and understand, but could do it repeated times with different groups of people. That’s one of the reasons I’ve taken the score to different cities—to play with different musicians in different places. Now there are some core people that I always call on any chance that I get. One of them I would say is the drummer Tomas Fujiwara, who has played on pretty much every incarnation of the project since I started it. But I look for a certain kind of person. Their heart matters to me more than some sort of technical execution. I’ve not always been successful in that—sometimes you just don’t know what you’re about to step into and some musicians are just not comfortable in the directives.
There is an incredible amount of control that goes on though, still, because I do utilize different systems of conduction and conducting improvisers. It’s something that I learned from watching Butch Morris and from the days that I used to be in this band called Burnt Sugar that also uses Butch’s conduction system. Then, going back and hearing old Sun Ra recordings—Sun Ra also used conduction. So even in recorded material that people hear, I’m trying to sculpt the sound within the framework of the score. There is some open improvisation in there, but I never liked open improvisation for the sake of open improvisation. It’s always bothered me. So within the Coin Coin scores, I try to dissect things and put them back together and cut them down and push them back up. Just trying all sorts of things.
MS: I love how the first chapter you recorded, Gens de Couler Libres, is such a completely enveloping piece and I was interested to read how many other commenters felt motivated to point out that your work here was “not alienating.” And yet you’re not afraid to seriously scream in the course of things. In a sense, it feels like you’re both embracing and emotionally punching the listener within the same work. It’s just a pretty aggressive thing. So I’m curious about your decision to do that. Did you hesitate at all? How has this felt to you in performance?
MR: First off, I highly recommend it! It’s incredibly therapeutic, though it’s not something I can really do on the regular and I don’t—that chapter does not get regular performances for that reason. It really wears the body down. When I first started doing that chapter in New York, after it was over, I felt like I needed to be carried off on a stretcher.
My whole thing about dealing with this history and dealing with these ideas and themes is I want some sort of experiential feeling of it. I wanted to know what it felt like to do that. Most of the things that I’m into are things that are experiential in nature. I want to know what pain feels like, I want to know what the depths of misery feel like, and that’s a hard way to live. But within those scream-sings, there’s a lot of joy there, too. There’s a level of life and living and experience. Those screams on that record were incredibly difficult for me because my mother had just passed away maybe ten days before that was recorded, so those screams were therapeutic in a different kind of way. But there’s a welcoming to them, too: We’re here. I’m alive. Let’s celebrate what we do have.
The other thing about the Coin Coin work is there are things that the work has told me I had to do that I did not want to do. That has been the speaking. That has been the singing. That has been the screaming. Those are the things that when I was putting that first chapter together, it was like, “Ahhh, I don’t really want to deal with that! Why do I have to do that? Why can’t I put an ensemble together and make them do that?” But I felt that I needed to have an understanding and experience of those ideas.
MS: Screaming in pieces usually only elicits a kind of nails on chalkboard reaction in me, but I didn’t get that sense from this piece so it intrigued me. There’s an intimacy to it.
MR: There’s an intimacy, but that’s the other thing where gender jumps in. As an African American female performer, there’s a certain sort of fetishization that goes on that has been around since the beginning. I’ve had to deal with that a little bit in ways that have been surprising to me. Sometimes people will still take it to a base level—oh, she’s just trying to get attention by putting that in there. Or they’ll define what that scream is. They’ll listen to the narrative and assume exactly what it is that’s being screamed about. There’s a power to those scream-sings. That’s why I think more people should do it.
MS: Do they mistakenly ascribe it to a certain “character” or something in the narrative?
MR: They ascribe it to a character. They ascribe it to violence. It’s automatically ascribed to a certain kind of violence. And yes, there was a certain amount of violence in slave history, but there’s also so much more than that. Why can’t those screams be screams of joy and perseverance? Why do the screams have to be whittled down? This one person I was dealing with last year was whittling it down to sexual violence. And okay, well sure. But have you been listening? It’s something that I just have to remember that I can’t care about. You do it. You put it out there. Whatever people want to do with it, they do with it. You move on to the next thing that you’re doing.
MS: As a woman journalist who often finds herself interviewing other women in a field that still has serious parity issues, I feel a constant tension as to whether or not to include the subject in interviews. But here it seems particularly relevant, considering the context of Coin Coin and the experience of hearing women’s voices and stories, to make sure that’s fostered and presented.
MR: I used to avoid these questions. There was a time when I used to try to talk about them, and then, maybe about ten years ago, I just stopped because I felt like it was pulling me down instead of pushing me up. As a black musician, I’m already focusing on a certain kind of difference. My parents were black radicals. So, growing up in this environment, it was constantly pounded into you: difference and what you have to do because of this difference. Then having to deal with the gender things was a whole other deal. Now, I feel a bit more open to talking about it because even though I try not to get on the soap box, I think it’s important to just talk about the importance of women’s voices. That’s one of the reasons, when putting that first chapter of Coin Coin together, that speaking was demanded, that singing and that screaming was demanded—it was a certain kind of statement of womanhood, too.
I’m at a point now ten years later or so where I’m a bit troubled by the way in which women musicians and women composers still are not heard of or still not supported. I’m tired of having to deal with “business and industry issues” that are highly male. I’ve loosened up a little bit, but on my website, there are no pictures of myself. That is purposeful, that was a feminist statement to me to say, you know, my body is not for sale. My person is not for sale. The sound is what I deal with. Now, I’m about to change it a little bit because I feel more comfortable in the statement of who I am, and I think it’s obvious. But there was a period there where I just felt like I was really being boxed around by men. I’ve made some changes also in the past couple of years to ground myself a little bit more in the difference that I have and that I represent, but not allowed it to close me off or create new ideas of hatred of men, who I love. I’ve gotten a lot of support from a lot of really wonderful men.
The question of women in this music has a lot also to do with just the question of women in society and what is expected of us and what is not expected of us. A lot of the male composers and male musicians I know who are working, and working steadily, are oftentimes able to do that because they have a wife or a girlfriend who is a breadwinner. They’re able to have families and to do these things because they have a partner who’s willing to take on those things. Most female musicians and composers that I know don’t have that. It doesn’t really happen in quite the same way, though I’m not convinced that it has to be that way. The issues that exist within this music have a lot to do, as always, with the issues that still exist in our society, which is highly patriarchal no matter how many different ways we want to slice it. I’ve talked to women musicians from other generations, and what has been crazy to me is the repeated stories. We can sit there and just compare stories by theme and just be like, “What? I thought the man of this generation was more enlightened than the man of that generation.” No. It’s just like this commonality, which can kind of bring you down. At the same time, my difference has also helped me, I think, and I feel a lot of gratitude for that—that I stand out in a sea of men. One of the reasons I moved to New York was because there were so many women saxophonists here who were amazing musicians and had very specific goals for themselves. I wanted to be in a city where that was going on. Now I’m not really as attracted to that as I used to be, but that was one of the impetuses for coming here rather than going back to Chicago or going somewhere else.
MS: I was going to say, how do you keep yourself motivated to fight that tide? It sounds like you came to New York for that kind of community, but now?
MR: I feel strong enough because I’ve also realized how multi-rich my own creative path is, and how it’s not just portioned off to music. I’ve been able to bring in all these other things that inspire me. My community is a community of not just musicians, but of artists of all kinds. I also really see my work as a form of community work. There’s a social conscience to the work that I’m trying to do, but in terms of the contribution that I really want to make on a social level, it’s not quite there yet.
MS: In what ways? Can you talk a little more about that?
MR: I just feel this music has allowed me to have a bit of a platform that I can use for positive influence and positive things for other people. If you’re being given a lot—I’m paraphrasing—it means that you need to give even more. Living this life, there have been some real difficulties, but I’ve been fairly lucky. My most satisfying work of service has been working with people for whom the arts can act as a kind of refuge and form of personal expression to deal with pain and societal pressures. Having more of an activism strain moving through my work is what I hope to do. I’m the product of a public school education. All that free arts stuff that I got—if that wasn’t there, there’s no way I’d be sitting here right now. I grew up in neighborhoods where I got to see what happened to people who didn’t have access to those things. So I hope to use the work more as a platform for bringing focus back to some of those ideas. But I still haven’t touched it quite yet.
MS: You were also up in Montreal doing a project with kids.
MR: Yeah. It was with at-risk native Canadian youth. I helped set up a music program at a drop-in center there. I did a few zine workshops with them. I’ve done a lot of community outreach over the years. I am not the type of person that could ever be a traditional educator or someone that people see every day, but I like infusing myself into these environments. I’ve done work at homeless shelters, and it’s the people that are really going through things, those are the people who can really be helped by art, more so than anybody that’s walking into MoMA or the Whitney. It’s those Chicago neighborhoods where there’s not quite that sense of hope, those are the places that really need art. I think about that a lot. But I come from a family of people who did a lot of community service, so I think that’s what that’s about as well. I feel I have to step up and be a part of that. Because what I’m doing being an artist, or being a musician, that is not a high enough vibration for my family line. There’s more I’m supposed to do.
MS: Do you feel like you take that onstage with you, too—that desire for connection and active community support and development?
MR: Yeah, that’s an aspect of my personality that has always kind of disturbed me a little bit. I have this intense desire to connect. Always. And oftentimes, the only way that I know how to do that is to come from a really personal place in terms of how I put the music together. I want my musical output to be an experience for all involved, not just the musicians but for everyone. I want us to be able to create sort of a womb together of possibility, which doesn’t necessarily transfer to always being positive. I don’t mind it if people come and don’t like it; that’s cool, too. It’s just creating kind of this moving organism together. This spontaneous way of connecting to strangers who are not really strangers because we’re really all in this together. That has always been really important to me, and it’s sometimes made me think I’m in the wrong profession. I need to go do something else where that is more immediate. But somehow, so far, I’ve been able to feel that a little bit in performance and the feedback that I get from people. I get really detailed feedback from people, and that used to scare me a little bit, too. [laughs] I’m okay with that now, because that is at the level that I want people to really engage.
MS: That makes me think specifically about some of the reactions to the first chapter of Coin Coin, because for everything that piece covers, it very clearly and very powerfully digs into racial issues and the history of slavery. How has working on and performing the piece impacted your own thinking when it comes to the issues you’re addressing in the work?
MR: It’s jumped through many different forms and there are many different ways in which it’s come back to me. On this last solo tour that I did, at every show I made each crowd sing with me the slave auction from the first chapter, and I forget how intense that is for some people. Mid-verse, I always have to stop and say, “Listen. This is a happy song. And I want you to understand that without the bidding of these people, I wouldn’t be here right now enjoying my life.” So that’s how I like to look at those things. I know from what I’ve experienced so far with the work that for reasons I don’t completely understand—but it makes me incredibly happy—that people are able to go into a deeper part of themselves and connect the story I’m telling to some story of their own. Oftentimes after shows, people will come up and share the most harrowing stories with me to let me know that they were able to connect even though the history is different for them. But I will say, the first time I started doing that sing-along with people, especially because there are rarely people of color in the audience, it took a moment. I’m like, “All right, I just sang a slave auction with a group of white people. I hope they understand.” Am I damning these people? No, I’m not damning anyone. But I want to share this. I think it’s really important to pay attention to history because it is constantly repeating itself. And there are so many beautiful stories within it that can teach us so much, so I will just continue to go in that direction.
MS: Not that we don’t all have our dark histories, but does audience reaction differ between Europe and America?
MR: The European audiences I’d say are a bit more political than the American audiences in some respects. I mean, singing this with a crowd of French, it’s interesting the spirit that comes through. The French were just on fire, because they have a particular understanding of the pain of that history because of the African influence in their own country. Singing this with a crowd of anarchists in Leipzig? Awesome. It’s about a spirit of survival more than it’s about race, class, or gender. Traveling through Germany recently and going through cities that were completely destroyed during the war and talking to people, hearing them recount stories in a way that they could attach to my own. I was in Poland telling some of these ancestral stories and feeling the pain in the room of people who couldn’t go back before 1945 because there was nothing left. There’s no record—there’s no anything!—just these stories. It just brings it full circle for me about the importance of sharing history and, most importantly, sharing the most painful parts, because that’s what people can plug into. Then, it allows you to deal with more avant-garde sounds that they might not be able to plug into otherwise. That’s another reason why there is narrative in the work.
MS: We actually have been very philosophical in our discussion about this piece, but we haven’t gotten into very much detail when it comes to its musical underpinnings. So let’s take a focused look at that.
MR: I’m heavily influenced by a lot of musicians that have come out of Chicago. Not just the avant people, but the more traditional people, too, because there’s a common theme running through that city—I don’t understand why it happened there—where it was always about original sound, and original voice, and original approach. That combined with the certain brand of black radicalism that I grew up in there. It was expected that you understood that you could do anything you wanted to do, and that you should always hold in suspicion anybody that tells you that you can’t. You should always hold in suspicion anyone that claims that your idea is not valid, no matter what color they are or what their gender is. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is an important organization in fostering that for a lot of people—myself and for other young musicians. So by the time I got here, I just always felt that my possibilities in terms of dealing with sound were pretty endless. Sometimes that’s actually really overwhelming, but that’s fine.
MS: I’ve heard you equate your composition process with quilting.
MR: When I started saying that, the feminist in me was like, “Why are you talking about quilting?” I don’t quilt, but that’s a tradition that is on my Mississippi side, and my grandmother, her mother, and her father, they used to quilt together. It was like a family thing, and it made me realize that the way that I was putting the scores together, with these segments intertwined with graphic notation, was a form of quilting. I think I actually wanted to create music in a way that my family might understand as well. I grew up around a lot of avant-garde music. My dad was a vinyl collector and into Sun Ra and Art Ensemble and Albert Ayler and all these people, and there’d be music on all the time. I remember having a really hard time trying to understand that music. The only way that I know how to understand these things is by dealing with narrative and story and how I can hoist my imagination onto the sound. So oftentimes I’m looking for sounds that evoke certain kinds of emotion. That’s really kind of the underpinning of a lot of the graphic notation, and this approach to texture.
MS: I think you can hear that as a listener, but it’s a very non-linear experience. More like a fever dream—you’re one place and then something else starts creeping out and all of a sudden you’re turned towards a whole new area.
MR: That’s so wonderful. I like that idea of the fever dream.
MS: What’s your relationship to the saxophone at this point in your career, then, now that you’re doing more composition?
MR: The saxophone is always going to be at the core of everything that I do because the saxophone taught me a lot about feeling and emotion and connection. The saxophone, the alto in particular, connects to people in a way that the other saxophones don’t sometimes. I remember Henry Threadgill talking about how he switched from tenor to alto. He was playing in church revivals and realized that the alto brought the Holy Ghost to people. I need the saxophone as an anchor. When I’ve tried to unanchor it, my life has gone insane. It is my tool to work through things, and when things get too overwhelming, I’m also able to shave down, and go right back to the alto, and it’s like, okay, this is the heart of everything. It’s the heart of everything that I do.
MS: Do you think there’s a point that will come when you’ll say Coin Coin is finished, or is it one of those works that will always be part of your life, that will go on, growing and changing, like a living thing?
MR: You know, originally there was a start, and there was an end. I had it broken down by years, by months. But then I would get through one segment of it and be like, okay, that was interesting, but what is it like if I do it like this? Or I could do it like that. And so now, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a living thing. And I will complete the chapters, but the idea—the work as a construct—will continue even beyond that. It feels like legacy work. I had no plans for that when I started, but that’s what it feels like now.


MS: Is there room left in your head for anything else?
MR: It’s difficult, but I refuse to just focus on Coin Coin. The history that I am dealing with is so heavy sometimes that I actually feel drowned by it. It’s important for me to have some other ways of opening. I have a new New York quartet, and my focus with them is to keep all the graphic notation out of that and just to deal with my love of themes and songs. And I still explore solo saxophone work that is just in the tradition of solo saxophone. No extra anything. I have all these things that I want to try creatively, and for a long time, I didn’t understand that there was nothing standing in my way. You can do anything you want to do.