on improvisation, mostly
Interview by Alex Varty
The first thing I'd like to know is how you came
to be performing with Masa John Anzai, and what the parameters of this
concert are going to be. How did you hook up? Have you performed before?
What is it about Masa's music that made you interested in working with
him If you haven't played with him before, how will you approach the
situation and, for that matter, what skills as an improviser do you
bring to a situation in which the musicians are making the music up out
of thin air?
I was booked in the first instance to perform solo with the electrified
kit; adding someone for a second set was the Western Front's suggestion
and the choice of co-improviser was theirs. I don't do this all that
often there are different approaches to improvisation and they don't
all fit comfortably together. But equally, if you never move beyond what
or who you know, you never discover anything new. So I was happy to
accept their proposal.
How will I approach the situation? With a mind as blank as possible. I
never plan anything or have strategies or safety nets. The work is to
set up the performing conditions, make sure the instrument is in tune
and then forget about the concert. At showtime I try to start playing
before I can think about what the initial sound or gesture is going to
be - and go from there.
As an improviser the main skill one brings to such an encounter, I
think, is creative stupidity, and a measure of amnesia I mean the
ability not to think about what you are playing, and not to listen to
what the other person is playing - but rather to be conscious of the
whole sound and interfere only when necessary. A concert where one has
continually to think about a subsequent action is usually in my
experience one that is not going too well. Amnesia prevents play-it-safe
repetition of things that have worked on previous occasions and also
allows repetition that embarrassment would otherwise have blocked.
Can you describe the quality of attentiveness you seem to bring to improvised music?
A generous observation, but in a way I think engaged abstraction might
have been more apposite - if less flattering; half the mind is certainly
preternaturally attentive, but it's the half that isn't properly
conscious.
Has there been any particular situation that has taught you about how to be an effective improviser?
Maybe, but not that I can remember; there seems to be more of a
cumulative effect: I make mistakes and learn from them. The more
concerts I do, statistically, the more mistakes I make and the more I
learn. So I can say that I learned not to be afraid of playing badly;
that it's always better to take risks and fail than be safe but boring;
that I always learn fast when having to negotiate unfamiliar territory
or deal with disaster on the fly. One of the great aspects of
improvisation is that there is an expectant public, a start time and no
chance to stop to reconsider: for 50 minutes it's sink or swim. That
concentrates the mind. And of course I learn by watching. I saw Fred
[Frith] once completely restrain his own playing in order to help
someone else to find their way into a concert.It was an education.
Concerts are real human events; not opportunities for self
aggrandisement.
Any theoreticians e.g. Derek Bailey whose writings have informed your approach?
No. I learned to improvise by improvising, and I learned it always in
the company of other people. So I learned as a team player rather than
as a soloist. Theories of self expression continue to baffle me.
Derek's book is a rarity a sustained meditation, backed with good
research, on the many varieties and applications of improvising, but I
read it long after I had found my own way as an improviser. As I said,
for me it's the whole sound I am playing or which is playing me - and
my thinking comes from there, not from within myself. So I don't
subscribe to the "be free, do what you want so long as you don't impede
someone else's freedom to do what they want' philosophy often advanced
by early 70's British Free Improvisers; a creed that always seemed more
political than musical to me - and rather dubiously free-market. By
contrast, Henry Cow had learned very much as an interacting ensemble
where it was less a matter of not impeding other people's freedom than
of finding freedom with and through the individuals with whom you were
playing. So when I play with other people, I often find myself having to
negotiate with approaches to improvising that are very different from
my own.It's one of the marvels of improvising that this actually often
works.
Are you involved in real-time sampling and looping
(a common concern with the Vancouver musicians Masa is often allied
with)? If so, do you use looping as a means of removing the "grunt work"
from playing the drums, so that you can concentrate on a more
sculptural approach? Do you generally start by building upon a basic
rhythm, or are you more likely to view your percussive improvisations as
layered constructions of parallel streams? (In other words, are there
any particular architectural models you tend to work from, or do you
approach each concert individually, depending on your state of mind and
the feeling in the room?)
These are big questions, and good questions. I am not involved in any
way with sampling, I started electrifying my kit in the early 70's -
pre-sampling - and when pads and samples came onto the market, I did
experiment with them briefly (Cassiber was a group very deep in
exploration of that territory: in fact Heiner bought the first Mirage
delivered to the Frankfurt trade fair). But I found samples inert and
dead and unresponsive compared to the infinite subtlety of sounds made
in real time using acoustic and electric devices - where every tiny
gesture or change striking or struck material makes a difference to the
sound.
I do have a primitive 8 second delay unit, but I only use it
occasionally and it's set up not to reproduce the finished sound, but an
unprocessed version of it. I never use loops as a foundation and add
detail over the top. In fact I am supremely uninterested in loops as
riffs or sound carpets; to me they all sound like prison bars, the very
bars I want to escape. I know that since the sixties there has been an
increasing trend toward drones and riffs as musical ground as opposed
to harmonic or rhythmic structure, thematic development, conflict,
argument because as a procedure relying on repetition or carpet drones
does solve a pressing structural problem. But it doesn't solve my
problem because I want to open up the structure, not nail it down. I
want to leave the tracks and nose around capricious trails. Working with
loops for me is rather like going for a walk with one foot nailed to
the floor.
Architectural models? Maybe Frank Gehry. Very much non modular. I see a
concert as partly analogous to a narrative or conversation, and partly
as the construction of a complex set of lines, points and planes that
mutate, unfold and dissolve - forming temporary, virtual structures -
but nothing solid or straightforwardly linear.
I hate to ask the "influences' question too often,
but I suspect that both 20th-century through-composed percussion music à
la Edgar Varèse and Eddie Prévost's work with AMM have been significant
for you. True, false, or irrelevant?
Varèse absolutely a primary influence for me. The concept of organised
sound; a theory of composition that uses blocks of sound, timbre shifts,
dynamic curves and spatial movement rather than the old triad melody,
rhythm and harmony as its core; the liberation of percussion into full
instrument-hood·all his. Eddie is a great drummer and AMM a seminal
group, but I was more influenced by Sun Ra's rhythm sections, Motown,
Mitch Mitchell, Robert Wyatt and Elvin Jones than Eddie or any of the
extended-kit, extended technique free improvising percussionists.
Stockhausen's Mikrophonie 1 was the indicator for me in that field.
I'm particularly fascinated by what seems to be an
emerging union between songwriters and improvisers (and in fact I'm in a
band of that kind right now: Resin, with a songwriter named Julie Vik
and two of Masa's frequent collaborators, bassist Travis Baker and
drummer Joel Lower). You've obviously been involved in this kind of work
since the Cow/Slapp days: what of your experiences as a solo improviser
do you bring back to working with artists such as David Thomas or Peter
Blegvad? (And vice versa: does working in the relatively contained
sphere of the singer-songwriter help bring structure to your improvised
music?)
That's right in a way the two disciplines: negotiating arrangements and
written material and open improvisation do inform and modify one
another, but in fairly subtle ways. Playing is rather like acting: the
question is not 'what can I do here?' but 'what does the music need
here?' One is looking for the character. So playing with David Thomas or
Peter Blegvad does demand the application of different aspects of a
total musical thinking. It's why I still work in different fields - to
keep my various musical muscles in tone; because at the unlikeliest
times they could come in useful somewhere where they were not
prefigured. Songs and compositions sink structural ideas deep into your
head and demand technical precision - skills that come in handy for
improvising. On the other hand, improvising forces you to think fast and
react instinctively - useful for opening up interpretations of written
music. And Cassiber, of course, was a band predicated on the apparently
paradoxical idea of improvising fully arranged songs from scratch.
Finally, for now, what's the current state of your
thinking as regards music as a political force? This, of course, is an
area that can be open to considerable misinterpretation. My basic and
perhaps not-terribly-well-considered position is that the act of making
music is
inherently political, insofar as it is a way of seizing the means of
production AND of liberating oneself from the consumerist agenda, but
that music is of limited utility in terms of organizing any kind of
political change. In other words, I see music as a transformative force
(with improvisation being particularly useful in that sense) but one
that is really only effective when it involves direct engagement. Your
thoughts?
I pretty much agree. It's political but not Political. If the relations
of music are a model of the ideal relations of communities (an
interesting notion advanced by Christopher Small) then music is
political especially when it's makers claim it isn't. The claim not to
be political is itself political, and if meant seriously is usually a
symptom of unconscious support for the status quo: to escape co-option
requires consciousness of the realities - but this is too complex an
issue for a short answer. I do think that there is more to life than
politics.
A couple of last-minute thoughts: what projects will you be undertaking once you return from this tour?
A week after I get back to London I go to Corsica for 10 days for a
project with 7 other musicians from various European countries to
prepare a contemporary interpretation of Cornelius Cardew's historic
graphic score "Treatise'. Then a couple of solo concerts and some work
with the Peter Blegvad Trio with guest Karen Mantler. I'm also trying to
finish a new song cycle and complete a solo CD.
And in your position of ReR head, can you identify any emerging directions in the RIO area?
Not really. And I have to confess that RIO for me is something that happened nearly 25 years ago.