Bill Smith : imagine the sound

PAUL BLEY

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Smith) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:52:00 +0000

The 2nd in a series of Interview/Essays of Canadian Musicians

On February 6th, 1979, at Town Hall in Toronto, a really surprising occasion took place. Great Black Music Productions presented a concert by two soloists, Roscoe Mitchell and Paul Bley. Apart from the excellent music that was performed, the surprise was that Paul Bley, a returning Canadian, had not performed in Toronto for nearly twenty years.

Although Paul and I had often corresponded, by letter and by telephone, we had met only once, when he was working with the Charles Mingus group at the Five Spot in the early 1960s. I was however not to hear him play on that night because the “legendary” Five Spot piano was in its “normal” state of untune and Paul refused to perform. And so after nearly two decades of experiencing him on recordings, it was eventually in Toronto that I was to really hear his music.

Part of his program was a tribute to the late Charles Mingus, a wonderful recitation of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”. In his introduction to this piece he had said something that I had not realised, that Charles Mingus was the person who had abducted him, when very young, from Montreal.

PAUL BLEY: Oh yes! When I first went to Juilliard I encountered something called The New Jazz Society in New York City. It was a group of people who met at a club on West 54th Street that Charlie Parker played at. Barry Ulanov organised it, he was working for a magazine called Jazz. Mingus was also working at this club on certain nights, Bird would work weekends and Mingus would work other nights. I had occasion to sit in at the club. Mingus was very friendly and when I went back to Montreal for one of the holidays I was offered two jobs in Montreal, which meant that I was making a great deal of money, as I was living at home, and it seemed that I was never going to get back to New York. The phone rang one day and there it was — Charlie Mingus was on the other end of the phone, saying, “Paul, you’ve got to help me out, I need a conductor for an octet.” It was quite complex and he felt that he wasn’t able to do the conducting and would I do that, and “by the way would I also do a trio date with him and Art Blakey?” Which was my first record.

That was a hell of a phone call. And I said, “Just tell me where to be when. I’ll be there!” I caught a plane and there I was. We did a date for his own Debut label with a singer and an octet, baritone sax, one or two horns, trombone — Jimmy Knepper, if I remember correctly. I’d done my first year of conducting at Juilliard. He had this large score and we ran through it and we got through the day I was extremely nervous (laughter).

Then early one morning a few days later Art Blakey showed up and just my luck, good luck I should say, the date was scheduled for 9:00am in the morning and I had for some reason to be back in Montreal at 3 o’clock that afternoon, and so I told Charlie I was hoping to get through in time to catch the plane. Art Blakey came in, some band boy was carrying his drums. He was so sleepy that morning that he played very quietly, very quietly, keeping beautiful time! It was just perfect, because at that stage of my career I wasn’t really ready to override him, his power, so I had a chance to be heard and be felt. He’s a monster drummer. Mingus played beautifully. And I went back to Montreal. This is just out of the clear blue, I said, “Well, now that I have all this activity in New York I’d better quit all these good paying jobs”. I think my mother was banking $350.00 a week for me in Montreal, clear. In the early ‘50s that was a great deal of money. It must have been equal to a thousand dollars. Clear! It seemed like an endless job, and I was looking forward to a great deal of income. But it was a wonderful opportunity. Mingus’ offer plucked me out of the liability of this seduction, the lure of heavy money.

I was already enjoying a considerable reputation in Montreal before I went to Juilliard. My early bio includes a film with Stan Kenton, jazz workshops at the Chez Paris, we ran our own club, we produced a weekly show for CBC television, of which over a period of time we promoted Canadian groups as well as Americans; Brew Moore, AIan Eager, Dick Garcia, Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker. This was for CBC and for our own jazz workshops. As a matter of fact I invented the name “Jazz Workshop”, although I’d never tell Charlie Mingus that. I shouldn’t say I invented it. It was taken directly from the drama workshops that existed.

One of the other things that happened was, during my final year of high school, (Norman) Granz came and literally plucked Oscar Peterson out of Montreal, leaving behind him Clarence Jones and Ozzie Davis. Ozzie Davis was the bassist and Clarence Jones was the drummer, both from New York, whom Oscar had invited up to Montreal to work over a year or two period at a place called the Alberta Lounge which was just opposite the CNR station in downtown Montreal. I sat in there occasionally So when Oscar was invited to leave, the other two members of the trio invited me to replace him. I was there for about six or seven months Which was another wonderful opportunity. It didn’t do anything for my final year of high school though.

When I eventually went to the United States, everything was as wonderful as that first opportunity, the music was really going on. There was a little bit left of 52nd Street. Can you imagine one of the first nights that I remember arriving in New York, Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz, Billy Bauer and one or two other players were working on 52nd Street. Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Miles Davis and whoever were working on 54th Street. Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra was working in Birdland. Billy Eckstine’s orchestra was working upstairs, Be Bop City! And that was just in a four-block radius. If you wanted to go a little farther there was other music to be heard Incredible! All finished, very professional, very deeply into it, as into their act as Ellington was into his. Finished, fully professional, fully formed bands. All playing Misteriosos as far as I was concerned. To hear this level of accomplishment, of diversity! Can you imagine the bridge of some of those Lennie Tristano tunes, at four times the tempo, this gorgeous harmony? It was incredible, it was really an oasis. A garden of Eden musically.

My mother was really a wonderful woman. When I was 14 she put 500 bucks in my hand and said “go to New York for a few days and see if you like it.” I checked into the Taft Hotel and kept my head upwards for the whole weekend. And I said, “I definitely like it.” So while I had a band in Montreal there was a girl singer from New York to whom I explained my hidden secret desire to go to Juilliard. The moment I said that, she was convinced that there was nothing else I could possibly do, except that. She was generous enough to invite me to her family’s home in Brooklyn and I slept in an apartment with her and her three brothers, and we kept rifles for Israel under the beds. And cooked main courses, dinner was chicken, and steak and roast beef and six vegetables, I mean we really cooked a dinner. It was like a restaurant.

What I mean to say is, there was an awful lot of generosity extended my way. When you try to leave your home country at age 15, 16, 17, there’s an incredible amount of magnetism pulling you to stay where you are. You have to be wrenched out of your environment.

When I arrived in New York I was definitely the worst player in town! It was just a measure of how far I had to go. It took years, while I was at Juilliard I worked different weekends with different people. One of those experiences, one particular weekend, I worked early in the evening in Brooklyn with the Pete Brown quartet, and the same night I went to do a gig with Dick Garcia and Charlie Parker at the Armoury, around 168th or whatever, it was up in Harlem. The gig was supposedly at 1:00am, which Bird showed up for at 3:00am, and to hear the two horn players juxtaposed over three hours, to be on the bandstand with both of them was to see the incredible similarity rhythmically, and the way they projected their sounds. They were very very close. Pete was considered a blues player and Charlie Parker of course was bebop and there was a great deal more complexity, but rhythmically they ran eighth notes the same way. A jump band.

Beautiful. Beautiful. His favourite idea was to be playing Brooklyn in January and it would be very cold and for the first number he’d play “52nd Street Theme” as fast as he could play it. Willie Jones was the drummer. Willie Jones would say, “Man, give me a chance to warm up you know, why do you want to hit with that for the opening tune?” He would say, “If you can play this tune you’ll have no more problems for the rest of the night.”

BILL SMITH: Was it possible for you to make a living playing this music?

PAUL BLEY: No I don’t think you could say that you could make a living. For one thing, I wasn’t ready to go and jump on the bandstand with the groups that existed. There’s a tradition in New York that for twelve months you’re supposed to be seen and not heard. It’s very presumptuous to think that you can come in being the hot flash from Cleveland and expect to impress anybody in New York. So you’re supposed to just very quietly make friends and do a great deal of listening. It took me four years of listening before I was really ready to jump on a great deal of the bandstands. At Juilliard Phil Woods was a student, Teo Macero was a student, there was a band there I had an opportunity to play for John Higgins’ class. I had a chance to do a lot of work as a leader at that time.

I worked in all the black clubs in Long Island and Brooklyn. I’ve had some wonderful bands that have never been written about. I had a quintet, which was a very well-known quintet but it was mine. It was Jackie McLean, Donald Byrd, Arthur Taylor and Doug Watkins. It played a place called Copa City in the early ‘50s. Those guys were really funny. To drive out with those guys in the car was hilarious, they were like a bunch of porpoises, you know, constantly roughing each other up physically, verbally, for me it was an incredible education I copped for six weeks or so while I found out what they were doing. I was always the poorest player in every band and that situation existed for years. As a matter of fact I didn’t make a record that I could say, “check this one out” until about 1962 or ‘63, which was the Savoy record with Pete LaRoca and Steve Swallow. I think that record took ten or twelve years of listening and trying to play, just to catch up. Because Americans had all kinds of power, all kinds of forward momentum, all kinds of aggressiveness, all kinds of balls, all kinds of lack of inhibition These were personality traits, it’s nothing you can practise in a room by yourself.

And then there were the giants, the monsters. The Sonny Rollins’ with the super volume. These people were giants. And for us practising our standards and sitting in and playing well and whatever, it just wasn’t the same breed of animal. You couldn’t tell from records. You thought you were playing jazz by comparing your playing to records, but when you heard the amount of wind that came off these stands you realised you would have to totally lose your reticent Canadian personality before you could even expect to keep up. That was the shock.

That incredible power and confidence. And that very confidence is what I tell people, this is where the Canadian artist’s function to Canadian society is. The problem in Canada is that… just reading your newspapers… that one doesn’t have the confidence to be objectionable, as a Canadian one doesn’t have the confidence to subject someone to your inadequacies. I learned to tip my hat in elevators in Canada, to defer whenever possible, almost Japanese like. Canadian behaviour is very Japanese-like in social relationships and that. Japanese might be a multiplication of Canadian behaviour, but the good-byes and the hellos take a tremendous amount of time in Japanese, the full bows back and forth, almost ad absurdum.

For example, you have a two-way television system here that has to be sold to the rest of the world in a very short period of time, before the ideas are co-opted by some other country and introduced as their original invention. And given that time deadline it’s still — according to the headline of your local paper the other day — the recommendation that Canada would not be able to sell this two-way television idea to the rest of the world unless it already had a system in place in Canada. Well, that’s just looking for an out. If you only have a year or two to sell it according to the article. And you’re certainly not going to put a system in place by then. What you have done is say, “let’s not sell it because it’s not time yet”. If you had a good sales person out there, because you do have a superior product that no one else has, you wouldn’t have to have everything in place to make the perfect sale. It’s just that type of mentality: “Let’s not do it now, do it later because we’re not ready yet.”

BILL SMITH: There’s so much incredible natural wealth here. Why do you think Canadians are like this? Now that you aren’t actually part of Canadian society anymore.

PAUL BLEY: Oh, I’m a Canadian who’s left and had a chance to observe society all over the world. Lived in different societies all over the world. Why is the Canadian personality this way?”

BILL SMITH: Well it seems to be two steps back from the front. You know, you stand back when you knock on the door instead of opening it. That seems very prevalent in Canadians.

PAUL BLEY: Perhaps its our British tradition, perhaps it’s our French tradition. The English are also extremely polite, mannered. I’m not sure why. All I know is that I think that generalisation is accurate. Now as jazz musicians we’re saying for this society, you can free up your imagination. You can proceed in an area without much information and you can function in an area without much information. You can, I told a class at York University just yesterday, that one has to be the greatest salesperson in the world to sell something to somebody that they have no idea that they need or want. These are all characteristics that artists are faced with because of the difficulty of their situation and they can serve as a model to the rest of society as to where society is in its own personal development. You have to have something to be proud of. Nationally, federally, locally, and the type of people who are willing to take on several layers of impossibilities, and yet be able to function. Artists always predict the future, the social future. Blue jeans were the dress of the painters. It wasn’t the paintings that influenced society, it was their pants!”

BILL SMITH: In this period here in Toronto, I don’t know about the rest of Canada, there’s a very powerful new music thing happening which is not at all like the bulk Canadian music attitude. Always the jazz players here are imitating someone else, learning in that kind of process which is not very healthy in my opinion. There have not been very many original players that I know of in Canada, and when there are they do seem to leave. It’s almost a joke in Canada, that leaving thing. So I hope your prediction’s right, that it does socially follow the occurrence that takes place in the environment. Music now in Canada is coming to the point where there are perhaps a dozen players who are becoming quite powerful. So theoretically your idea means we’re looking to a good future socially. I don’t know if that’s true...

It’s an indicator, absolutely. One of the many indicators at least that should be taken seriously.

BILL SMITH: Returning, do you feel like a Canadian anymore?

PAUL BLEY: Absolutely! Always have I have a Canadian passport, a Canadian mother, all my school friends are Canadian. I grew up here for the first 15, 16 years. So that’s fully formed, that’s Canadian. As a musician one doesn’t want to disinherit oneself from any ethnic background. The more ethnic backgrounds the better.

BILL SMITH: So in spite of all your reservations about the character of Canada you still feel very strongly that you are one of us.

PAUL BLEY: Absolutely! I tip my hat in elevators to ladies.

BILL SMITH: You said that you didn’t really make a record that you felt was an important statement until about 1963 or ‘63. Yet by that time you had already had a band that was so controversial that it had nothing to do with those records. You know, the band with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. There’s been so much talk about Hillcrest that we have to talk about Hillcrest. Do you mind talking about Hillcrest?

PAUL BLEY: I don’t mind talking about anything that happened.

The Hillcrest Club was a club on Washington Boulevard, which is in the black section of Los Angeles, right in the middle of it. That area had a tradition of live performance. Les McCann played our Monday night jam sessions. When I arrived in Los Angeles after along college tour with a trio that I brought from New York we added the vibraphone player, Dave Pike, and went into the Hillcrest Club and stayed roughly close to two years; six nights a week. (This is the band that made the record Solemn Meditation - Gene Norman GNP 31). And over that period of time some of the players went back east and were replaced. Billy Higgins replaced Lennie McBrowne, Charlie Haden replaced Hal Gaylor, the Montreal bassist.

One night Billy Higgins said, “a friend of mine, Don Cherry, brought a saxophone player and wants to sit in”. I normally never let anybody sit in, we sent them all to Monday night and gave them to Les McCann, but because it was somebody in the band and they almost never made any recommendations for somebody to sit in we said “no problem”. After playing one set with them Charlie and I went out in the back yard and had a confrontation. We said. “Look, we have been working in this club for a long time and most probably could stay here as long as we wanted. If we fire Dave Pike and hire Don and Ornette we won’t last the week. We’ll be lucky to last the night. What shall we do?” And we looked at each other and said — “Fire Dave Pike!” (Laughter)

Well a good relationship with the owner allowed us to stay another three or four weeks on that job. It was historically amazing. And socially, in the club it was hilarious. Look at the situation. A quartet that is a house band, very successful in a club, making money for the club, all of a sudden changes its policy and hire’s two horn players in place of a vibist. The music in 1957 was certainly a lot more dramatic and revolutionary than Albert Ayler when he first came out, and he created a tremendous stir. It was really similar to some jokes, I’ve told jokes about it. When you were driving down Washington Boulevard and you looked at the Hillcrest Club you always knew whether the band was on the bandstand or not. If the street was full of audience in front of the club, the band was playing.

Every set we’d go up and we’d play and the club would totally empty out, they’d leave their drinks on the bar and everything. Totally empty out, it’s socially possible in California, there’s warm weather and it’s very friendly there. So everyone would be out on the street. And as soon as the band stopped they would all come back in and drink, talk and shout and be happy and be merry and then we’d go back on and they would empty out and wait on the street. They really loved the place, loved the band. Loved what they thought the band used to be. That’s what the situation was.

Musically it was incredible. Ornette had a bag of compositions that was so deep that we rehearsed every day of the job for the three weeks or the month of the job. Every single afternoon all day. And every night we played an entire new book from the night before. So, I’d say ten or twenty new tunes were added to the band’s repertoire daily. That’s a rate of growth that’s stimulating to say the least.

I spent 3/4 of the time tuning Ornette up to see if I could get him to play A44O. He could play A44O, A444 or A436 or any A you wanted. Unfortunately I didn’t have the flexibility that he had when it came to hitting A. From a musical point of view it was extremely stimulating.

I told the class yesterday at the university that all you’ll ever be hired for as an artist, as a musician, is your judgement. When you hit one note, the next note starts involving your judgement. We talked about personal habits and things like that to improve your judgement. Well, who you play with is certainly important. Who you think plays well, who you think can offer you something. All these decisions. Geographical decisions, musical decisions. They’re all judgement, over and over and over again.

Up until the time that those two fellows had sat in with this group, there had been a great deal of thought as to how to break the bondage of chord structures over meter. Ornette was so early that Coltrane was an interim step which coexisted with Ornette, whereas historically it should have preceded Ornette.

BILL SMITH: A friend of mine here told me once about visiting New York. He liked Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, that kind of music. While he was there he went to the Three Deuces and the shock of Bird and Gillespie, and I think people like Duke Jordan and Max Roach. I mean he was a real jazz fan, but the shock of Parker… he’d heard it on record but it was only 2-1/2 minutes long and in the club it was 22-1/2 minutes long. You know, chorus after chorus after chorus.

PAUL BLEY: That was the normal length. An LP length was normal club time, and longer if there were more horn players. But I think the shock of Ornette was much more severe because bebop didn’t use micro-tonality. You were just talking about a new arrangement of well tempered notes. When Ornette introduced the idea of erasure phrases, where you’d have some phrases that were tonal and well tempered and then some phrases that were deliberately meant so that there was no way you could transcribe this onto paper easily. Then the music was suspect. That interfered with the enjoyment or the evaluation of the music. The technical ability was suspect. If Ornette had not been a composer, it would have taken him a great deal longer to get those erudite critics, who by the way performed a yeoman service in quickly identifying Ornette’s validity to the sceptics, the New York musicians who were sceptical. It was the critics who did more than their job of acquainting the public with the music. They acquainted the musicians with the music. They acted as liaisons between the avant garde and the musical community. Benny Golson was the band opposite Ornette at the Five Spot when he came in.

After the Hillcrest I formed another band with Scotty LaFaro and Bobby Hutcherson just down the street from the Hillcrest and we went in there and played for an open-ended contract. Ornette and Don had gone to Lennox School of Jazz and I’d done a couple of months at this club. I’d heard that they were at Lennox and that this was the final year of Lennox and I thought it was a very exciting idea. So one night around 9:30 I told the band that I was going to say goodbye to them right now, and that they could finish the year without me. I just walked out of the club, got in a car with Carla and we drove directly non-stop to Lennox. We realised that if we drove non-stop we would get there for the last day of Lennox and we thought that it was extremely important to do this.

After the Hillcrest job I was in the process of taking in this new information and playing with other musicians in Los Angeles. At the same time as working steadily I would go on my night off and sit in with everybody to see how I could relate what I’d learned with other players. After being offered every job in Los Angeles as well as having my own job, it was another case of having to leave. It was Montreal all over again. There was nothing left to accomplish.

We drove to Lennox. Got there at 10 or 11 o’clock at night. Got to the jam session of the final night. This was the last jam session of the last night of the final year of Lennox. Everything was the last. The last set and the last tune. The car was still sweating from the trip. We left everything in the car, came in and I tapped Ran Blake on the shoulder, introduced myself to him and said “May I sit in”. Ran is an extremely social, wonderful person, and said yes. I had a chance to play with whoever it was. Sort of an all-star line-up. Everybody was there. Jimmy Giuffre was there, Ornette, everybody was there. I had a chance once again to see if I could relate what I’d learned. Because I was playing a tempered instrument, you see, so that if anybody was to ask what was going on in free music I was in a perfect position to tell them something that they could relate to, because they could not relate to any information regarding microtonal music. But they could relate to everything involving the well tempered scale. I had one tune to play and I played like my life depended on it. I’ve only done that about four times in my life, where you play one song where your life depended on it And in fact it did. That last tune on the last set led to my next four years employment in New York. I got the job with Jimmy Giuffre based on that set. I got the job with George Russell based on that set; the two piano album. There was a phone call directly from his being in the audience that night. For Jazz in the Space Age with Bill Evans and myself and the orchestra. I got reinvited to play with Mingus as a direct result of that set. Everything but the Sonny Rollins job was all out of that set. If a traffic light had been red instead of green at one intersection across the country it would have been too late. We slept under John Lewis’ piano that night and headed for New York the next morning.”

BILL SMITH: I remember all that controversy around Ornette in that period. I mean all the quotes and stuff in the press, all these different critics. This camp saying, “It’s okay because Leonard Bernstein said it’s okay, John Lewis said it was okay” and on this side, this critic says, “This is rubbish”.

PAUL BLEY: “Right. The terms were really hostile. The groups that didn’t like the music just couldn’t face it, never mind discuss it. And the enthusiasts said it was the messiah. It was that extreme. Anyway, Ornette opened at the Five Spot and played there for months.

BILL SMITH: Did you play with that band?

PAUL BLEY: No, never. That’s another story, involving Charlie Haden and myself. Ornette wasn’t sure whether he was going to continue with Charlie Haden. I said “You’ve got to be kidding!” Charlie had some personal problems. I said “I know a lot about rhythm sections. It’s been my life study”… I could get into that sometimes as to thin bassists and fat drummers or fat bassists and thin drummers. I mean, I made a study of time playing. I said “There’s no one on the globe who will be able to accompany you” and no one ever did. Scotty was playing atonally and certainly Ornette was not an atonal player. Jimmy Garrison was a tonal player. He wasn’t even polytonal or atonal. Most bass players could only play a fifth of the areas that Ornette could enter.

BILL SMITH: Charlie Haden heard it all the way through didn’t he?

PAUL BLEY: All the way through. Played all the wrong notes and made everything sound right.

BILL SMITH: When I think about it now those early records, on Atlantic for example, they never sounded very strange to me at the time. We thought that they were very funky.

PAUL BLEY: Because of the bassist! The Atlantic records, once again, were shortened performances, six or seven minutes, which involved a lot of writing.

BILL SMITH: And those wonderful tunes. That people actually whistled.

PAUL BLEY: But in the club… those few Hillcrest tapes that managed to come out, with a great deal of duress at one time or another, they’re presently withdrawn from our catalogue. I withdrew that album shortly after it came out. Those Hillcrest tapes are 15 minutes, 21 minutes a tune, as the bebop lengths were. It was a lot harder to listen to microtonal music at length than it was squeezed together between some very friendly songs.

BILL SMITH: In this period, you’re moving quite a way from bebop music and this microtonal music is making you investigate other concepts of piano. Or were you always developing into that? You play a much more open, spacy way, whereas bebop players have a tendency to accompany themselves. You don’t do that, you have another way of playing.

PAUL BLEY: Yes, use of space is a separate discussion. In terms of what I personally thought was the way to play the piano. Leaving space out for the moment, I’ve always loved every period that I’ve played in. I’ve never been interested in one as opposed to another.

I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late ‘50s there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats. I participated on several of them, the albums with Don Ellis in the early ‘60s were part of that problem/ solution, some of Mingus’ compositions, some of George Russell’s compositions, these were things that were handled by composers and therein lay the problem. It was an improvising problem, over and above a composition problem. So a composer could write something that wasn’t 32 bars. But as soon as he let someone take a solo on it, it would become metrical, an 8 bar system or what have you.

BILL SMITH: George Russell almost succeeded with that concept of improvisation.

PAUL BLEY: Almost, yes, absolutely. But don’t forget Ornette took on rhythmically the loosening up of the dominance of the single meter beat so that you’d have multi-rhythms happening. Or something that wasn’t even considered rhythm, just slower or faster than the beat. That type of rhythmic suppleness was unheard of prior to him. For me, it was a question of techniques. I could play on simple triads, I could play on complex chord changes. I could play modally, now — could I play free? It was a question of stretching your consciousness, to allow yourself to be fearless in the fact that you could get back correctly. Could you go to a place that had relevance to the history of jazz? You could always sit and rumble around on an instrument but would it mean something to a perspective based on, say, King Oliver? As well as who else was around the scene. These were techniques so I didn’t hold one style over another. I didn’t have to give up anything to acquire something. It was my specific interest in being able to weave a seamless thread through the history of jazz, involving any and all of what I thought were valid and future mainstream pursuits. So the ability to recognise this music when it happened. To know and to work with Albert Ayler early on. John Gilmore (this was Gary’s band, actually. I was the pianist in Gary Peacock’s band), Sunny Murray and Paul Motian. It was like a double band.

I just released the album with Gilmore and Motian, Gary and myself. But in fact the second group of players that worked that job were Albert Ayler taking John Gilmore’s place and Sunny Murray taking Paul Motian’s place. To be able to recognise and seek out what I thought were important players the moment they appeared was sort of a voracious appetite, for the scientific pursuit of advancing the art of improvising.

BILL SMITH: So this is an incredibly different New York City to when you came as a young man from Montreal?

PAUL BLEY: Well after doing a great deal of listening in New York, I went to Los Angeles in 1957, because I had done enough listening and I was interested in putting a band together and trying out some of the ideas I had. When Ornette and Don came along it wasn’t a shock to me, I was ready for it.

BILL SMITH: In this period in New York there was some communication, for example, between musicians and artists and writers? Was there a community thing like that? Did painters and poets and writers come to the music?

PAUL BLEY: In the ‘60s, yes. There was a really nice situation. Mike Snow from Toronto lived in a downtown loft. Paul Haines was somebody I discovered in the audience of a Charlie Mingus performance that I participated in in the early ‘60s. We became fast friends, so he introduced me to a group of writers who were exploring the English language as opposed to a straight prose style, and making analogies there with free jazz and regular jazz. Michael Snow visually was dealing with certain abstractions of real images that had something to do with his trumpet playing. The walking woman album as you well know is a Michael Snow painting. There was a lot of talk. A lot of wonderful talk going on. Sitting around at tables with wine and candles and talking for six, seven, eight hours about the implications of what had happened, what was going to happen, how it affected the other arts, what type of work needed to be done. The Jazz Composers Guild Orchestra was an idea of mine. A very practical idea because there was the Jazz Composers Guild which had everything, all of the eleven or twelve groups had a fully formed instrumentalist as leader: Archie Shepp, Sun Ra. And Carla and Mike Mantler both were not fully formed instrumentalists and we were very competitive. Because we played ten bands a night, quickly, one set after another, so that, being adjacent on a bandstand, you were very competitive. I said that the obvious thing to do was, since you were not able to compete with these fully formed instrumentalists, was to hire them, because you’re both composers and this way you can wipe out everybody by playing your music. And you got a name as well, just take the name of the organisation. Which is exactly what happened.

It was too good of an idea. It required their full time attention to do it and I lost a wonderful lady in the process.

So ideas were very important. Gary Peacock came to New York in the early ‘60s and was a participant with Annette and Carla and myself and Michael Snow and Paul Haines, this was sort of an intellectual nucleus that spent a great deal of time fully working out problems. For instance we could solve a problem real quickly. For this Gary Peacock job, we had Albert Ayler as I mentioned. Carla approached us with a set of tunes that were in meter, had time to them. Not four beats to a bar, but steady time. As soon as the tune was over the band began to play free time, so that you had tick-tick-tick-tick for the piece and then whatever for the solo. We did this for one whole night and I got back at around two in the morning, I said to Carla, “Look, I can’t go tick-tick-tick-tick for your pieces, and go free for the solo because your pieces make the soloist sound wrong or the soloist makes your pieces sound wrong. Would you please write me a new book that’s in free time.” …so it would make the soloist sound right, for example I worked on Sunny Murray. I said, “Sunny, we’re gonna play a Latin tune, you got it?” “Don’t worry Paul, I got it.” I said, “One two three four.” Then he would play open (laughter). I said, “Sonny, now it’s in time, right?” “Right!” “One two three four, ready?” Then out he’d go, he’d play free. So I had to change the book, because I couldn’t change the drummer.

Well by the next night Carla had a dozen or two dozen tunes all set up, that were totally free. We quickly called the band in and by 8:30 or 9:00 started. There was no more steady meter. The history of instrumental music changed in 24 hours as a result of our meeting.

It was done that quickly. By the way it was a very fine situation. Every time I’ve had the chance of some historical, musical job some other very attractive offer has come up. Gary said, “Paul, I’ve got a gig at the Take 3 with Albert and Sunny and John. It pays $3.00 a night.” I said “Fine, I’ll take it.” Just as soon as I put the phone down Edgar Bateman, a former Miles Davis drummer, called me from Jamaica, saying that he had this wonderful bebop band in Jamaica and would I catch the plane on Friday. This is in the dead of winter. It paid hundreds of dollars a week. “Edgar”, I said, “I’m sorry, I wish you had called me last week. I’ve got a $3.00 a night job on Bleecker Street that I can’t say no to” (laughter) So there’s always the temptation to not do the historically important job.

BILL SMITH: Did you really know that you were changing the face of the planet?

PAUL BLEY: Absolutely! These things don’t happen accidentally.

BILL SMITH: I feel that way too. All the processes that I’ve been involved in were definitely not accidents. I work very hard to make all these things occur in Toronto. People, in books and things, sometimes throw away history and say, “well, it naturally evolved”.

PAUL BLEY: Naturally I would have been in Jamaica.

BILL SMITH: That’s right, you would actually be wearing a three piece suit, sitting in a lounge in Jamaica (laughter).

PAUL BLEY: Edgar Bateman was no slouch. That would have been a great deal of fun. He was a wonderful drummer.

BILL SMITH: In this same period are musicians beginning to think about being in control of their own music? Through recordings I mean.

PAUL BLEY: “No. The ‘60s still had the gangster element in the record business. There’s a story about Woody Herman. In 1952 he formed Mars Records, one of the first artist’s labels. He had just come off a CBS contract and a Capitol recording contract. He and his manager decided to form their own company. I’ve read a couple of stories about what he said had happened. He said that he was in business for perhaps a year or two, and they distributed the records all over the world. They put out about six or seven Woody Herman orchestra records. A very successful band at that time. Anyway, he said that looking over the books after doing all this business over that length of time they realised that no one, anywhere, ever paid them any money at any time for anything. No distributor ever paid them. Not a nickel. Not foreign, not domestic, not local, no one ever paid them. There wasn’t a distributor on the globe who had ever paid them. Period.

When I started in the record business I asked somebody in the business. I said, “I’ve got this buyer’s guide with maybe five or six thousand names of distributors world wide. Who shall I sell the records to?”

He said, “You’ve got to beware of them. There’s quite a few people who are slow or non-existent to pay.”

I said, “Well, there’s thousands of them in the book. How many pay?”

He said, “Six”.

The ‘60s was not really the time to form a label. Like ESP, the little talking I’ve done lately with Bernard Stollman, because he’s totally dropped out of sight. He tells horror stories about being pirated. Can you imagine somebody wanting to rip off Albert Ayler discs. That there was nobody else on the globe that they could make more money with? I didn’t get the full story, it was just a telephone conversation. But he had horror stories that made me very glad that I hadn’t tried to start a label in the ‘60s. That wasn’t the time yet for a musician-controlled enterprise. But it was the time for music to be directly controlled by musicians. A lot of upheavals, coming very quickly. And through all of this was John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. A big controversy was as to whether Dolphy played as well as Ornette. Well, as we said, the two historical movements overlapped and they shouldn’t have. In the past they each would have taken a decade, There would have been a decade of Trane and Dolphy and then a decade of Ornette and then a decade of Albert Ayler and then a decade of electronics perhaps. In fact, they all telescoped, reverse-telescoped into a ten-year period. It created a great deal of unnecessary controversy.

BILL SMITH: The controversy at least actually got everybody’s name in the paper.

PAUL BLEY: Well, not really because of the type of controversy, the hostility. And at the same time, the English-revived blues music with electric guitars took all the press. The Beatles came and everybody forgot about everything else. That was a friendly, together, hip interpersonal music, introducing electric sustain, and it captured the imagination of everybody. So improvising, even though it was in a very rich period in terms of impact on the public, the ‘6Os were very hard times on players financially. The ‘5Os, and the ‘7Os have been better. The ‘6Os were lousy for players. The music was fantastic but don’t expect to make more than hundreds of dollars a year. There were very small opportunities financially. But improvising players had steeled themselves against these things by developing very simple life habits, so that they were fully prepared to spend a whole year with no income if that was the case.

BILL SMITH: So when in actual fact in that period when you read about somebody like Cecil Taylor saying that he never made enough money to pay income tax, it’s not bravado, it was very definitely what was happening to everyone in New York.

PAUL BLEY: Absolutely. Now Cecil can make enough money on a single performance, if it’s recorded, to equal a year’s income.

BILL SMITH: Do you feel in a strange position now? I mean, you’re a musician who has a record company recording other people’s music, Is this an awkward situation for you?

PAUL BLEY: A very natural situation. I think all record companies should be run by a musician. Just as you wouldn’t trust your health to an electrician. You’d want someone who knew a great deal about the body and its functions. Musicians who trust in your brain, your aural senses, to somebody who doesn’t know anything about music, this is not really right, So it seems quite natural for somebody who spends all of his life carefully considering the relative merits of one musician to another, for that person to form a record company.

BILL SMITH: Are you recording friends? Or is it more businesslike than that?

PAUL BLEY: For me a label has to have a definite philosophical continuity. The continuity of this label is contained in the name, Improvising Artists. I had a point to make. Both my ladies have been composers who just happened to be women. The label is called Improvising Artists, therefore what I’m doing is saying philosophically or posing the question philosophically, which is something of a soap opera question. “Can a label that doesn’t require its participants to bring written music make a series of recordings so that the listener won’t know the difference or will find that those recordings in fact sound totally written, as opposed to partially written?” It’s certainly, from a practical point of view, more seamless to have a piece of music that’s totally improvised from beginning to end than to have one that’s written for a period of time, improvised for a period of time and then written for a period of time. So what we were doing is asking these players, who are composers, “Can you compose in real time for the entire length of a performance, as opposed to having something written?” The first record, the Jimmy Giuffre/ Bill Connors record called Quiet Song, won the Prix du Jazz. It was great, I’d never won a prize before so for me that was important.

BILL SMITH: This continuity of a certain kind of style, not just the fact that you’re saying it’s improvised music, but you take your attitude into the concept of record jacket design, quality of pressing, the kind of artist. Do you think it’s perhaps dangerous to create an image that could become a very singular thing?

PAUL BLEY: No. On the contrary. We’re dealing again with ideas. Improvising Artists is one idea for one label. I’ve written a list of fifty ideas for fifty labels, all of which I would be interested in doing. I.A.I. was just one idea. I’m hoping to get to the other forty-nine labels eventually.

BILL SMITH: Do you enjoy being a record producer? Do you enjoy that as much as the music?

PAUL BLEY: Well, anything to do with the making of music is very exciting. There are a lot of people in the world who want to be in recording studios as producers, as artists, as technicians, whatever. The actual making of music on record is a very exciting process. So of course I enjoy it. The ability to pre-decide things without discussing them with other players, you see all the planning and everything can’t ever be verbalised. In music you can only exert your ideas musically. Not verbally. You can discuss them later. After the fact verbally but it’s very gauche to sit down with players and discuss “my ideas musically”. It was never done. Mingus never sat down and said, “look, Paul, this is what’s going to happen.” All the information that was necessary was contained in the music and in the mode of performance. So that’s just some more of the same. I bring a group of players together, and it’s the playing experience itself that tells them what’s going to happen. I don’t write them a couple of paragraphs telling them what it is I’m trying to do.

BILL SMITH: There’s some problems in the kind of business that we’re in, having this kind of music efficiently distributed. We talked a little bit about this last night. Do you think it’s possible there should be some other way for people who are interested specifically in improvised music, that perhaps we could make more of an impact if we all formed a new group?

PAUL BLEY: Well, we can’t produce each other’s records. That wouldn’t be fair, and I don’t think we should collect revenues for each other. We certainly could collect credit references together. Share imminent bankruptcy information with each other. So we won’t have a shipment of 2,500 records going to a foreign country when one of us has heard that this man has just left the office and locked the door behind him. You don’t want to send him a plane-load of records just because you haven’t been informed that he was leaving the active business world. So by sharing this credit information we can save ourselves some time and money. There’s a lot of information we can share. I think certainly a meeting of the concerned individuals, realising that we’re competitive, but that there are more people in the world against us than ourselves, and so because we are a minority we have to be together and see if there’s something we can do for our own specialised interest. We’re different from a folk label or a blues label, a vocal label, a boogie label, we’re interested in improvised music, whether it’s ragtime, free music or electronic music. We do share a common musical basis.

As for the difficulties of starting a record company, remember that as a band-leader you go into business every time you talk to a person you don’t know and ask him for a live performance job, whereas in the record business you go into business only once with each distributor. You may have the distributor for 25 years. So you only have to ask half a hundred people for a relationship once and they continue those relationships forever. In the live performance business you could ask half a hundred people to start a relationship, but those relationships are only one day long and then you have to ask another half a hundred people. You’re constantly going into business in live performance. Record companies are much easier than live performance. There’s nothing harder than live performance.

BILL SMITH: I recently read, I think it was in Coda, about you putting the music in a visual context as well. Where you would buy video tapes that went with the records. That kind of thing. Are you seriously contemplating doing this?

PAUL BLEY: We’ve already done it. The catalogue lists the last four recordings, which have been visually recorded as well. The fidelity of the future is no longer the needle in the groove. It’s lasers reading through discs. Right now we get somewhere around 55 to 65 DBs in high fidelity. The video disc gets 90 to 95 DBs. In a single technical innovation we’ve almost doubled the level of fidelity. The only problem, they say, is that when listening to 90 to 95 DBs you can’t tell it’s loud because the background noise is so low. You might hurt your ear drums and not know that the music was loud to begin with. What you hear as loud is the background noise being loud. That’s how you can tell music is loud. This new fidelity level takes the background noise all the way down. Therefore it doesn’t seem loud to you, where in fact it’s injuring your ear drums.

To get back to why visuals; this was just an experience. Somebody about five or ten years ago played me a black & white video tape of a concert by Miles Davis in a theatre in Philadelphia. It was Coltrane, Cannonball, Bill Evans, whoever. This was a single camera on the first balcony, that just turned to the left for the piano solo, to the centre for the trumpet and saxophone solos, and to the right for rhythm section solos. The concert lasted an hour and a half. They used a long lens so that you could bring in close-ups and this was the most revealing innovation for me. In that visual information is five million bits, audio information is twenty thousand bits. As a player trying to absorb a performance, with the aid of the visual, I was getting five million bits of information, whereas in the past, listening to a record, I was only getting twenty thousand. It didn’t matter if the fidelity was high or low, audio-wise I was getting more of what was happening because of this tremendous amount of visual information. It was a very compelling performance, and historically very important. I realised that now we had a medium to replicate visual musical performances cheaply and efficiently. It was very important for us to preserve what existed on film from an archivist point of view. And in fact to preserve those performances by players who are perhaps still around, but not for much longer, on film as an archivist. I understand that there’s not more than half an hour or so of Charlie Parker on film.

We have players among us right now who, if they could be captured just in the process of recording their audio portions… like Joe Venuti for instance, was a tremendous live performer who captivated large audiences. Their should be several hours of video tape on this man, high fidelity colour videotape; well, he passed away. Lennie Tristano passed away. As an archivist I’m beginning to face this dual problem of whether nor not I want to continue my other 49 labels, or face the tremendous need for preserving some of these performances visually, because your record collection for certain is going to go the way of the wax cylinder. It will be audio, and as such it will not survive into the 21st century.

BILL SMITH: I have thousands of them Paul. Don’t say that.

PAUL BLEY: Save them, they’ll all be worth something whether the music on them is good or not.

BILL SMITH: You know I collect jazz films. I don’t have an enormous amount of them but I have quite a few. I have a 45 minute reel of shorts that were called “kinnies’. I watch them often; it’s fantastic to see Cab Calloway and Fats Waller, just to see them on film.

PAUL BLEY: Right, and you’re speaking of something that was transmuted through Hollywood’s idea of what was theatrical. We just bring a camera in and let the music go on for an hour, and show the players playing it. There’s visually a totally different story than dealing with the visual imaginations of people in Hollywood films. Also it’s a question of duration. Video tape can go on for hours. Film is a very expensive medium, it does minutes.

I think that’s probably one of the most important works that anybody can do today, is make colour video tape of the important artists that are still alive.

BILL SMITH: And everyone does have a TV. I mean they won’t just be documents. There are imaginative video people who can also make the image creative too.

PAUL BLEY: There will be as many ideas in the visual as there are musical. We found that a very nice format is to do a real time concert. Which has a natural beginning, a natural pause, a natural ending, a natural recapitulation and the encores. It makes a nice dramatic balance. It’s a theatre piece already just in the form of the structure and so it makes a good film. It’s not a television program because, number one, you’re not broadcast over the air. The visual fidelity is much higher than you could expect to receive off the tube over the air. So much so that it does begin to resemble a film in its fidelity.

BILL SMITH: In conversation it’s becoming apparent that you are somehow consuming, in your personality, all the aspects of this music. Not just a piano player, you’re producing records, you’re interested in visuals, you give lectures at universities…

PAUL BLEY: This was the first one. I make it a point not to teach. Ever. Partially because I’m very fearful of somebody coming under the influence of a teacher. It’s better to get information oneself from a myriad of sources as opposed to from a student-teacher association. I object very strongly to those relationships. So whenever anyone’s asked me to teach I’ve said, ‘Yes, but only by telephone.’

KENNY WHEELER - Windmill Tilter

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Smith) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 16:58:00 +0000

The 1st in a series of Interview/Essays of Canadian Musicians

That was some summer in London in 1966. The jazz scene, which I had left three years previously had changed so much. A new identity had occurred. The old heroes, who relied so much on the American system of jazz for inspiration, had been superseded by a new, original and vibrant music. In this period the information that was available in the international media, was acclaiming a flowering of a new jazz, an extension of Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, but for the most part this same media was focusing on music that was coming from the United States. Not such an unusual situation considering the circumstances of all new attitudes pertaining to jazz. In Europe however a parallel force was occurring, the likes of Gunter Hampel, Willem Breuker, Peter Brötzmann, Peter Kowald, Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink were redefining the concept of improvised music. In England a similar situation was developing, and like the Europeans they were beginning to process their new identity, that although inspired by the music of Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, was a decidedly non-American music. The trumpet player that seemed to be involved in a great number of these ensembles was Kenny Wheeler.

Kenny Wheeler was born in Toronto in January 1930, and as a teenager moved to St. Catharines, a small town close to Toronto. “It wasn’t long before I met some of the young local guys. Sounds like there was a lot of them, but there were maybe half a dozen. They were probably complete outcasts in St. Catharines, but the thing that they knew about was bebop, and at that time I was listening more to people like Buck Clayton (I still love that music) and they turned me on to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles… bebop.”

By 1952 Kenny Wheeler was ready to move on, so he headed for Montreal.

“It was wanderlust really I guess. I was supposed to go to Montreal, to McGill University to take a course which would make me a high school teacher. I just realised that I wouldn’t be able to make that. So I thought I can’t go back to St. Catharines with my tail between my legs, which I had done a few times. So I just (headed out), being very daring.”

The winter of 1952 saw Kenny Wheeler arriving in England for the beginning of a long career in music.

“I’ve lived there (London) longer than I’ve lived in Canada. At that time when I arrived, it was still the big band era in England, so that’s what everybody worked in. I was young, and you know you don’t care so much about things. I only had a certain amount of money, and I didn’t really know anybody. But I wasn’t worried. Now of course I would never dare try anything like that.”

Eventually in 1959 he began to perform with the famous England orchestra of Johnny Dankworth, and with that orchestra he would later compose his first major recorded work, “Windmill Tilter”. A suite based on the book Don Quixote.

“I went through quite a lot of the slightly more commercial big bands before that. The first one was Roy Fox, who was an American (more famous in the 1930s, who was residing in London), and Vic Lewis.

“The first thing I did, of course, was head for the local jazz clubs. The one I looked for was the bebop club (Club 7), which was the style of music I was into by then. I thought I was pretty hot, so I stupidly went up and asked to sit in. They let me sit in, but they never took any notice of me whatsoever. So that sent me into a shell for a long time. When my money ran out I got myself a day job. At Christmas time they used to take on a lot of extra people in the post office. Eventually I found out about a street where all the musicians used to go on a Monday afternoon, which was like a market place for work, called Archer Street. So I started going down there. I couldn’t believe this place, there were hundreds of musicians standing around, and jobs would come up. I got to talk to people and know who they were. Finally somebody said — Roy Fox needs a fourth trumpet player, would you do it. I said sure, I’ll do it.”

From those humble beginnings the career of Kenny Wheeler has taken a long and varied path, which included studies in counterpoint with Bill Russo, composition with Rodney Bennett and performance with almost every major English jazz artist, including bebop musicians of the calibre of Joe Harriott, Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott.

But my real experience with him begins in 1966. The Little Theatre Club was situated in Central London, up four flights of narrow stairs, a small bar in the lobby, and a performance space that often had as many musicians performing in it as there was audience. This was where the legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble gave regular concerts, and introduced me to the amazing music that was developing in London. The band often included John Stevens, its organiser and drummer, saxophonists Trevor Watts and Evan Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey, trombonist Paul Rutherford, bassists Jeff Clyne and David Holland and of course Kenny Wheeler. In this period and indeed right up until now, he has been involved in a number of adventurous and original groups of artists.

Did it feel, in the sixties, that John Stevens and the others you were involved with were creating anew music form?

“I don ‘t think I was consciously aware of that at the time, for me it was something that was completely different. But it is different from American free music. It did have a different sound. I never heard any American player that sounded like Evan (Parker), certainly not then. I think he has influenced a lot of younger people.”

Evan Parker was to be one of Kenny’s long time associates, and due to Evan Parker’s more radical concept towards improvised music, I was curious about the public reaction to the two of them in performance together.

“I don’t think either of us ever thought about it, we just play together and usually enjoy it. Whatever the situation was. We even played on several lucky occasions, just duets together. It has worked out great. I suppose for those members of the audience who feel more comfortable with pigeon holes there would seem some unbalance. I must admit that most of the people that would come to hear us would be more interested in Evan than me, it wouldn’t be some of the more conventional people. Perhaps if they saw Evan’s name on the bill, they might stay away. You know what I mean.”

Evan Parker has also been involved with Kenny in the Globe Unity Orchestra, an orchestra that for several years has had a very high profile in new music circles in Europe, and in the winter of 1983 toured America and Canada.

In recent times not much has been said about this orchestra. Does it still exist? Do you still play in it?

“Yes, when we do work, but it seems rarer and rarer, the chance to work. We used to work quite a lot, maybe five or six times a year over a period of a week or two at a time. Which is quite a lot. But not anymore. It’s strange, because the last few years the band was as good if not better than it had ever been, and you know for 12 - 13 people to walk on a stage, with no music, and no preconceived idea about what they are going to do, it was getting so that a lot of the time it was coming off, and some really great music was being played. There was also a period when Alex Schlippenbach did use quite a lot of written material. He loves Monk.”

In the 60s another orchestra descended upon London to add to the power that already existed there. The orchestra, under the direction of pianist Chris McGregor, was called The Brotherhood of Breath, and originated from South Africa. England became a haven for them, away from the racist environment of Apartheid. Kenny Wheeler was one of the English musicians that played with them.

“I did a couple of gigs with the Brotherhood. They brought a lot of great energy with them to London, it was just a great period in London anyway, there were so many different kinds of music happening, but somehow it and the musicians were crossing over into different things. There wasn’t a barrier. There was the Brotherhood, there was the Little Theatre Club, there was John Stevens, there was John Surman, Mike Gibbs, somehow in a strange way it was all meshing together. At least from my point of view. I think it was also in that time a lot of people in the pop world were keeping an ear to what was going on in all this movement in the jazz world. If that is what you want to call it. Also the Brotherhood of Breath were a completely different musical culture which had arrived in London. It was quite different to what was already there, and it was gratefully accepted by everybody.”

Another major aspect of Kenny Wheeler’s life has been his association with ECM, which began in 1975 with the recording entitled “Gnu High”. A more recent example of his music for this label would be “Around 6” (ECM 1156), and this brings to light another peculiarity about working in Europe in comparison to North America. All six players are from different countries. Evan Parker (England), J.F. Jenny Clark (France), Edward Vesala (Norway), Tom Van Der Geld (Holland) and Eje Thelin (Sweden). How could such an eclectic group of people be assembled. How would you meet such a group of players?

“Europe is small compared to Canada, and you go through many different cultures in a short time of travelling, so you do meet a lot of players from all different countries and festivals.”

That’s still very active in Europe, the festival circuit, so that you can move about quite readily?

“Well, maybe I’m one of the lucky ones, but I seem to keep working.”

Is this one of the advantages of the Common Market, that your passport is open in every country. That you can travel freely?

“No — there never was, as far as musicians go, at least for English people going to Europe to work. You don’t need work permits like in Canada and America to move from country to country. So the Common Market didn’t really affect musicians. Maybe other kinds of people it did.”

One of the most fruitful periods of Kenny’s life, at least musically, was in the middle seventies, when he became associated with Anthony Braxton. A period that brought about the quartet of Braxton, Wheeler, David Holland and Barry Altschul. From 1974, for another two years he worked continually with Anthony Braxton on numerous projects, which took him all over Europe, to the United States and on several occasions back to his native Canada. Those years were for me, as Kenny himself describes, also my most fruitful. My family lived for one whole summer in Woodstock, NY, when that marvelous quartet was developing. Attended the rehearsals and the recording sessions of the great Arista records, and helped to bring that quartet to Toronto. Kenny has returned often to Canada in the last ten years, not only to perform with Anthony Braxton but also with my band, Ron AlIen, an orchestra project with young Toronto players, to make records for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and also recently with his old friend from those wonderful days some twenty years ago in London, Dave Holland, who is now the musical director of the Banff Summer School.

“I started teaching at Banff five years ago, Dave Holland asked me to come out there originally. For me it’s hard — I’m not a born teacher, but the students do seem to get a lot out of it… Quite a lot of the students come back again, some for two or even three years.”

Kenny Wheeler is a gentle man, reserved and serious about his art. That he has succeeded is sometimes a surprise, because he is not part of the world of musical hype, not in any way a hustler. He is, who he is, based entirely on talent. I leave you with a feeling for him as he talks of his first meeting with Anthony Braxton, that clearly illustrates my point.

“He (Braxton) came to London and brought some music, and I think he was quite impressed by the fact that I attempted to get through it, and made something of this black music, which was running all over the page. It was really hard music. I think he remembered my brave attempt so he kept my name in the back of his head.”

Information sources include Toronto writer Mark Miller, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada and the quotes are from an interview on CKLN radio.

On the Road Again

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Smith) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:38:00 +0000

Toronto & Havana
Travelling with Colston and Essjay

It’s November, the weather conditions on the west coast unpredictable with frequent storms presenting the possibility of being stranded even before beginning, making it necessary to start the journey a day earlier than had been planned. I promised myself I would not do this any more, this travelling about the planet in search of music, it’s like a disease, a brain impregnated wanderlust, but here I am, still curious, still longing for pleasurable possibilities.

Aging brings about the unwanted deterioration of body parts, in this case an attack of Bursitis seemingly acquired at the previous day’s hanging of my photographic show of Jerry Pethick’s Time Top journey; a show running throughout December at Joe King Clubhouse back on the island. This painful condition (a fluid swelling above the knee cap) that induces hobbling, is a malady commonly called Housemaid’s Knee but is being jokingly referred to by intimates as Curator’s Knee.

The journey is a multi-functional affair, the first destination being Toronto for a family visit and to attend a book launch which includes David Lee’s The BATTLE of the FIVE SPOT - Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field, a Master’s thesis dissertation, and Mark Miller’s collection of selected writings from 1980-2005 titled A Certain Respect for Tradition. And then on to the 23rd Edition of the Havana Jazz Festival.

Since GeoDubya introduction of colour coded paranoia and the country-wide undemocratic smoking ban, airports have taken on a tedious self righteous attitude, removing for me any joy that may have previously existed. By chance we meet songstress Jackie Zbirun, an old island friend, at the entrance to the Comox Airport, who is also travelling the first stage of our journey to Calgary where we will change aeroplanes and she will disembark. The purpose of her trip, it seems, is to sell, to a prospective customer, her daughter’s quarter-size violin — now of a certain value as it has been autographed by a famous personality — to be replaced by a size more suitable for her growing offspring. There is a kerfuffle at the security check, the officials confused by what could well be a weapon of mass destruction in the bottom of her bag. The suspicious object she is transporting is a pitch pipe, which seemingly none of the officials had ever seen before. “Let me demonstrate its purpose” sez Jackie. The officials step back, warily observing, as Jackie toots a simple tune, accompanying herself as she does with a lively little jig. Once through the security check the traveller is confronted with a bare bones waiting room decorated in the style of a McDonald’s; bland, lifeless, devoid of any personality, and serviced entirely by corporate mediocrity. The 50¢ bottle of water that has been confiscated can now be replaced, purchased from the Coca Cola sponsored coin operated machine for a mere $2.00. Hope you have the correct change.

The wait in Cowtown’s terminal is minimal, just time for a glass of wine and a cigarette. Ah, yes, in Calgary airport, unlike elsewhere in Canada, there are numerous lounges where it is possible to enjoy a relaxing smoke. How civilized. Even the cowhide decor of the bar, echoing imagined sympathy for my slowly rotting gamey leg, seems friendly. Perhaps it’s true that Alberta is an independent state and should be recognized as such. On to Hog Town. Such nicknames our cities have. Animals being led to slaughter.

We have double-packed our bags, two sets of attire, knowing as we do that Toronto will be at the beginning of its remembered winter and Havana balmy at the very least. Surprise! Surprise! The following day we awake to a temperature in Toronto of 15°C. The mail man, whistling away a happy tune, is sporting a cotton shirt and shorts. Quite unseasonable. We are ensconced in the house of an old friend on Brunswick Avenue just a few blocks north of the venue in Kensington Market where the Mercury Press book launch will take place; a hip, and to us new club named the Supermarket which in recollection was a Portuguese pool room where gentlemen of sundry generations could be observed lounging about its front porch; socialising, enjoying a cigarette, gossiping neighbourhood stories, or daydreaming villages back home.

Circumstances have concocted what could be considered a dream band from a past history: I have travelled, as noted, from the west coast with my sopranino saxophone, David Lee has travelled in from Hamilton to promote his new book and brought a bass, Arthur Bull journeying west from Digby Neck — here on some mysterious government business — has brought his guitar, and violinist David Prentice with previous knowledge of this unlikely gathering has come down from Flesherton to join the party. Shazam! — as Billy Batson would shout when he wanted to be transformed into Captain Marvel — and we have the resurrection of the Bill Smith Ensemble. And as if this were not enough we are joined by Stuart Broomer enlarging the ensemble with a second guitar. The out-of-towners congregate, with my two daughters, across the street from the club at a small Mexican family restaurant where we satisfy our hunger with a variety of fine spicy food and a couple of beers (each) and catch up on old times.

The Supermarket turns out to be a large venue with its back-half secluded from the main space by a set of sliding doors, creating an intimate room complete with a small stage, possibly suitable for fifty listeners. Perfect for a book launch. Each of the writers (six in all) are allocated seven minutes to promote their work, and when David Lee’s turn arrives he relinquishes his chat so that the band can perform a brief (seven minute) version of Ornette’s Beauty Is A Rare Thing. In keeping with his learned tome. The audience, for the most part, are overjoyed with the addition of this unexpected music; an acoustic old fashioned avant garde music rarely heard in these parts anymore, its practitioners having fled this metropolis over the past twenty years for more rural climes. The story, the whole evening, is a much bigger affair, so I’ll just stick with the musical interludes. Mark chose to read a piece on John Zorn entitled Shivers - John Zorn’s Naked City (1989):

“Note #5. To mix things that don’t traditionally match. The bass line of Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman, for example, running under an atypically fractious version of Ornette Coleman’s usually serene Lonely Woman. Zorn dresses in that manner, too. His footwear comes in singles, not pairs. One white running shoe, one black. One red sock, one green.”

An inspiration for this rare gathering of musicians to conclude the evening with another Ornette tune. The sliding doors were then parted, opening up the whole space for the ensuing six hip-hop DJs to strut their stuff for the ever increasing younger crowd coming to dance. ‘Round midnight — time for us oldsters to retire.

The weather remains clement throughout our stay, no need to unpack our Eddie Bauer thermal long-johns or thick socks, a chance to wander about our home town, participate in lunch and dinner with family and friends, check out the used book shops, and casually prepare for the journey south to the Havana festival.

For the past half-century I have attended hundreds of jazz festivals, including almost every edition of the Vancouver event since its inception in 1986, so many that the novelty (is that the word?) or excitement is wearing thin. The repetition of the venues, traipsing every day from one to the other, and even to a certain extent the music, far too much to digest, is not so interesting as it all once seemed. Time for a change. With the assistance of Ginny Harrison, our travel consultant at White Rock Travel, we have discovered what is purported to be an all inclusive package to the Havana Jazz Festival where we expect to hear a variety of Latin-based music not usually a part of our auditory spectrum. The package includes transport on Cubana Air, all the transfers, airport taxes, accommodation, which includes a buffet breakfast, in the five star Hotel Nacional de Cuba, and a pass and transport to all the festival events. However we soon discover that once we leave the orderly uncluttered world of Canada and change to Cuban time all is not as it seems. Perhaps the makings of an absurd, mostly humorous Marx Brothers film produced by Karl and directed by Groucho, with us participating as bit-part players.

Hola Sun of Richmond Hill, “THE CUBA SPECIALISTS”, through whom we have booked this package, turn out to be an inefficient organisation. The aeroplane journey is long-winded, landing as it does first in Camagüey in central Cuba where the majority of passengers disembark, and after an hour stop-over continuing on to Havana. We are met at the Jose Marti International Airport by a representative of Havanatur, the official Cuban travel agency, to be shuttled into the city. As the bus trundles through the darkness, the guide — compulsory on every package tour — delivers his welcome speech, explains such details as the currency, safety, hustlers etc., and it soon becomes obvious that he has no idea that a jazz festival is taking place, even though this is the reason that all the passengers on the bus are visiting his city. By the time we arrive at our hotel it is 10 o’clock at night, too late to attend the Gala de Inaugaracion del Festival, and there is no representative in the lobby to supply us with our “included” festival passes anyway. No matter, the Nacional is a grand affair, built in 1930 and since rejuvenated to its former glory, the ghosts of its fascist history still wandering the passageways, from a time when it was linked to Italian American mobsters, the likes of Lucky Luciano, Santos Traficante, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, the chosen accommodation of the rich and famous including Hollywood legends Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Keaton, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, the writer Ernest Hemmingway, the Duke & Duchess of Windsor. Even my old nemesis Winston Churchill could be imagined waddling about the tropical gardens sucking on a fat pungent cigar. Dump the bags in our spacious room and investigate the sumptuous facilities, flop down in a comfy couch and relax our first night away sipping a mojito while listening to a trio of Cuban musicians at the outdoor Bar Galeria which looks out over the beautiful tropical gardens complete with strutting peacocks. Here we meet an English representative of Cubana Air who describes the Nacional as being a ***** hotel with *** star accommodation. Out there, past the edge of the gardens is the Malecón, the joyous sounds of singers could be clearly heard, and upon investigation we find that thousands of people are enjoying the opening celebrations of Fidel’s 80th birthday and the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the revolutionaries from Mexico to begin the overthrow of the American controlled puppet dictator Fulgnecio Batista. The stage at the Plaza de la Dignidad with its 138 flags crackingly flapping, honouring Cubans that have been incarcerated and murdered by the American’s, hosts a variety of artists giving us our first taste of the plethora of music yet to come.

Friday: The information package supplied by Hola Sun provides two contact numbers, both of which are discontinued, but with a little detective work we locate our Havanatur hostess — whose cell phone it seems is also out of commission — and by mid-afternoon manage to procure the elusive passes. At last we are set to attend our first concert at Teatro Amadeo Roldan. Or so its seems. The starting time is advertised as 5:30pm, and as we are running a little behind schedule we jump into one of the taxis that constantly pull up to the entrance of the hotel. After being driven around for about 15 minutes, up and down unknown streets, the driver purportedly receives a call over his radio informing him that he has to return to the hotel as our papers appear not to be in order. We are now late for the concert. Suspecting that the cab driver, in co-operation with the hotel door attendant, is into some tourist scam we exit his vehicle without paying, walk down to the main street and procure a cocotaxi, a small three-wheeled, two-stroke powered scooter that has the look of a large scooped out orange.

For the rest of our stay we will use these taxis on a regular basis, as the near to the ground experience, the up-close intimate view of kerbside culture adds to the thrill of being in this magnificent, albeit somewhat dilapidated, city. The driver is a chatty fellow, who informs us that the Opus Bar, one of the most popular bars in the city, is on the top floor of our destination. A disgruntled crowd is gathered outside of the theatre and we soon discover that the concert has been cancelled due to a power grid failure. Strike two. Never mind, we aren’t in a hurry, the temperature is a balmy 28°C, and the next concert, beginning at 8:30pm is just a few blocks away at Teatro Mella. Time to sample one of the legendary pizzas in the restaurant of the luxurious modern Hotel Meliá Cohiba.

What a grand old theatre Teatro Mella turns out to be, much like the remembered theatres of my youth, its Gaudí-esque interior complete with a meringue-shaped wrapped around balcony, the 1500 comfortable seats all but full of expectant fans. Unfortunately, although enamoured by its suitably seedy character, the smell of decay and the stench of the toilets wafting through the lobby soon become apparent. Plus we appear to have been followed on our journey by yet another deaf soundman whose intention, it appears, is to erase the subtle complexity inherent in this naturally rhythmic music. The names of the artists are unfamiliar as I have little or no knowledge of Cuban musicians, but judging by the opening band of Orlando Sánchez we are in for a treat, his brawny tenor saxophone overpowering the inadequate sound system, introducing us to the excitement that is generated by Cuban music, extending into daring forays often missing from the current batch of “schooled” retro-jazz players. The second treat was provided by bassist Jorge Reyes whose prodigious technique has been utilised by Arturo Sandoval, the Afro Cuban All Stars, Irakere, Roy Hargrove & David Murray. The third combination features a boring female singer. Time to head outside for a self-imposed intermission. The transport (guaranteed as part of our package) to return us to our hotel is waiting, engine running, even though it is only 10:30pm and the show is but half-way through. The driver is unwilling to wait. Oh well — it’s been a long day so let’s go “home” and once more lounge in the hotel garden with another mojito.

Saturday: We have awakened too late to attend the celebrations at the Plaza de la Revolution that have begun at an early hour to avoid the heat of the mid-day sun, and anyway the ailing Fidel has been replaced by his brother Raúl. So after a sumptuous breakfast we set off on foot to investigate the city. Beginning our journey with a casual stroll along the Malecón, a sea wall stretching the entire length of the city’s north side, protecting the coast from the occasional fury of the Straits of Florida, we head in the general direction of La Habana Vieja (Old Havana) which in 1982 was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, and could be thought of as a 500 year old history lesson into Cuba’s glorious past, with its buildings and passageways, hotels and cafes, renovated to their former splendour, an illusion for the tourist trade. Just a step to the left into the surrounding dilapidated streets reveals the decay and squalor of the crumbling collapse of this once magnificent city, the disintegrating rutted and pocked streets, the facades and balconies of once grand dwellings, the homes of the hoi polloi, sadly in need of repair. It must be said though that these friendly people have a joyful air about them, healthy and happy, their smiles shining bright, clothing clean, neat and tidy, and unlike most Canadian cities, there is not a panhandler or bum in sight. Music is just about everywhere, not only in bars and cafes but in the street where groups of young people gather to sing, dance and accompany themselves with complex hand-clapped rhythm patterns. It is slowly beginning to become apparent that it is not necessary to search out the music at the jazz festival, that it is not a precious isolated commodity but the indigenous voice of the people.

There is still the curiosity of the pre-revolution American cars that abound, some in barely usable condition commandeered by locals as people’s taxis, and others called Gran Cars which are renovated and beautifully maintained for the pleasure of tourists. The city abounds in the noise and smell of automobiles, the left-over Ladas of the abandoned Russian occupation readily apparent, rattly old vehicles of every description, their honking horns the most apparent sound next to the plentiful music. 24 hours a day they sound, timed on an average of nine-second intervals, warning the lackadaisical wandering pedestrians walking about unconcerned, or when creeping from the side streets sidling into the constant stream of traffic; any excuse to participate in this cacophonous symphony.

The La Mina restaurant (which boasts more — although unseen — wandering peacocks) is situated on the edge of the charming park of Plaza de Armas, and has been recommended by a previous visitor. After we enjoy a delicious tuna salad and are entertained by yet one more superb band with the unlikely line-up of violin, flute accompanied by the customary Latin rhythm section, we return once again to the Teatro Amadeo Roldan for that evening’s concert.

This venue, the home of the National Symphony, is of a much higher quality than Teatro Mella, the decor modern and the sound system no longer an intrusion. First up is the spectacular Costa Rican quartet of pianist Luis Monge featuring the technical wizardry of clarinetist Vinicio Meza, repeatedly bringing the enthusiastic audience to their feet. “Swing en 4”, as the group was called, utilised a mixture of classical, folkloric and jazz forms to great effect, and could be conveniently described as a most energetic Latin chamber music ensemble. A palpable tremor of excitement was apparent as the brilliant pianist Hilario Durán was introduced, and although he has been a Canadian resident for the past decade, performing and recording with our very own Jane Bunnett, who in many ways is responsible for our awareness of Cuban music, his return to his homeland is obviously a special event. His importance, alongside Chucho Valdés and Gonzálo Rubalcaba, as one of Cuba’s most spectacular musicians, became immediately apparent as his trio launched into the first evidence of bebop with a composition by one of his old bosses — Dizzy Gillespie — with the appropriately titled jazz standard Hot House. Attired in a radiant white suit he led the energetic trio through a series of delightful compositions, the bassist and drummer joined at the hip, their collective ideology and joyful exuberance perhaps inspired by the socialist doctrine from which they evolved, contradicting the conditions observed in our walk-about earlier that day. Three strikes and you’re out would be a fair description of the Swiss band that followed, akin to suddenly falling down an open manhole, dull and predictable after the vibrant vivaciousness that had preceded them. Time to join the exiting audience for a beer in the roof-top Opus Bar.

Sunday: A change of pace is needed, time to participate in an action that takes us among the Cuban people, away from the tourist rigmarole, and what better way than to attend the opening game of the baseball season. Our five-star concierge is not a baseball fan, perhaps the only person in Cuba not interested in their national sport: “Ask a bellhop” she suggests. It’s like a code-word — baseball, even though we are unable to speak more than a few words in Spanish just uttering this word will open the door to all the information we need, the multi-lingual bellhop immediately informing us of the starting time and directing us to the Estadio Latinoamericano the 55,000 seat stadium known locally as El Latino. It a simple enough 45 minute walk south down Calzada de Infanta (Avenue of the Children), introducing us as we go to a number of neighbourhoods, skirting the University area, passing a bakery, a library, numerous local shops and cafes, and soon the huge stadium becomes apparent as we join the crowds streaming toward it. There are thousands of expectant fans, forty thousand in all, queuing up at the main entrance and before we can join them we are approached by an elderly gentlemen who accompanies us to one of the numerous policemen in evidence. After a short conversation — ah if we only understood Spanish — he then takes us to a tiny ticket wicket, almost invisible in the gigantic wall of the stadium, where foreigners can acquire a ticket for the measly price of 3 CUC’s (suitably pronounced coup). We are then directed to another less crowded entrance where another elderly gentleman takes over and leads us to our seats in the enclosure directly behind home plate. There are more foreign visitors among the chosen few, one sporting a tee-shirt with the logo of the Burnaby Fire Department. As with all opening games there is a grand show, young people bearing flags of the different provinces stretching from one base to the next, and then a mighty roar welcomes the two teams, the Havana Industriales attired in their blue shirts and Santiago de Cuba in red. The home team of “Los Azules” have a reputation similar to that of the New York Yankees in that they have fans from all over the country, and every one of their actions is greeted by raucous cheering and the sounding of horns. Such a grand spectacle with patriotic songs, revolutionary speeches, a minute’s silence for an unknown hero (if only we could understand Spanish), two dance troupes and the teams’ warm-up exercises accompanied by boisterous Latin music booming out from the stadium’s speaker system. Halfway through the fourth inning a flu bug caught from one of my grandchildren back in Toronto begins to overpower my energy, forcing us to leave, but all is not lost as we speed back to the hotel in one of the ever available taxis and watch the rest of the game on television. The Havana Industriales lost 6-2.

That evening’s concert is the closing event of the jazz festival (Gala de Clausura del Festival) once again at Teatro Amadeo Roldan, but as I am unwell Essjay sets off, with unwarranted optimism, on her own as transport to the event is guaranteed. She waits for an hour in the hotel lobby but the bus once again does not show.

In spite of all the chaos I cannot remember ever being at a “jazz” festival which generated so much genuine excitement, and for the second half of our stay we simply wandered about the city, visited art galleries, museums and parks, relaxed with a cool drink on one of the numerous patios of the grander hotels, and enjoyed the local music that was in abundance throughout Havana.

DEREK BAILEY (1930 - 2005)

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Smith) — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 17:52:00 +0000

Christmas Day again. The e-mail from Martin Davidson simply read - "Derek Bailey died aged 75 in London in the early hours of December 25. He had motor neurone disease". I had been thinking of him, knowing that he was ill, but still the finality of this sad news came as a shock. He had for some time suffered from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, crippling his hands to such a degree that he was forced to develop a whole new system of playing, utilizing his thumb to strike the strings. With his usual dry wit he titled his last recording "Carpal Tunnel".

My companion had cautioned me on occasion of the tendency to over familiarize, to use the description friend in much too casual a manner, and so I would be more inclined to describe my close-on 40 year association with Derek Bailey as a comrade in improvised music. In many ways I barely knew him: a luncheon once on a visit to London at a vegetarian restaurant on Greater Newport Street, which had, long ago in my youth, been the premises of Studio 51, the first jazz club I ever visited; the occasional letter, one suggesting that we both lived on islands, he in Hackney and me on Hornby; several meetings at various musical events, a rare e-mail, but little actual personal connection between us. Ultimately it was the music that had drawn us together.

As with all original artists his music required serious investigation, an attentiveness to the new details he was proposing, especially as the concept he was putting forward was relatively unknown territory. A concept that he would describe as non-idiomatic music. Improvisation, when considered in the environment of an evolving music has, in certain situations, not remained as a part of a process, such as in the traditional concept of jazz music, but has become the music in total. The reference point of playing tunes, which must be considered an art in its own way, has been shed, and in doing so has immediately made, for the listener, a more difficult task. The composition was always a recognizable familiarity that could readily attract the more simplistic portions of our mind. But it has always been improvisation that was the predominant strength of jazz music. Its musical structure has other rigid systems, or recognizable identities such as chords, time signatures, and the legendary idea of swing. In the process of Derek Bailey, all these elements were not separated, not ignored, but rather brought together in a most personal way and utilized, in the way history can be, into a unique and original art.

There has always been a system of judgement placed upon art that has introduced innovation to a previously occupied position, often hindering the acceptance of a new genius. Intimating that it is not yet a completed form, that there are not enough discernible historical directives on which to base an opinion, and suggesting that it can be a process that is simply self-indulgent. As it is completely based in new technical areas, far removed from previous improvised standards, there is no clear pathway to critical analysis. I found after continuous listenings, that Derek Bailey became a most unique phenomenon in that what he presented was very open and sensitive, a sharing of a personal idea that was never quite the same. Surely something that all intelligent people strive for. Because he presented each event as a situation that was not predetermined, the experience of listening became more focused on the idea of the system of structure he employed. There was the possibility of hearing his logical attitudes to improvisation as an infinitely detailed ongoing process, so successive recitals had the feeling of having occurred in a logical sequence. This indicated that there was indeed a quite clear structure, it just belonged to a new, more personal system of performance, a performance that because of its lack of connection with the past, required, on the part of the player, a most positive attitude, a necessity to be totally confident in the realization that what he had discovered was truly unique. In some ways, it is not possible to judge Derek Bailey’s music as it is totally improvised, so perhaps there is no good or bad performance, just different situations, and all you really have to do is be open to enjoy whatever you can take from it.

Although his early history includes dance bands, studio work, and theatre work with the likes of Gracie Fields and the comedy team of Morecambe & Wise, his reputation is as an improviser performing and promoting the concept of non-idiomatic music. From his earliest recording in 1965 with Tony Oxley and Gavin Bryars with the group they called Joseph Holbrooke (a 10-1/2 minute rendition of John Coltrane's composition "Miles Mode" on an Incus single) until the 2002 release of "Ballads" on the Tzadik label, he rarely if ever played tunes.

By 1966 he was visiting the Little Theatre Club at 23 Garrick Street in London's West End theatre district, a venue which was organized by drummer John Stevens. There he was able to develop his unique ideas with the likes of Trevor Watts, Paul Rutherford, Evan Parker, Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler, Barry Guy etc., many of whom played in various combinations over the ensuing years as the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, the Tony Oxley Quintet & Sextet, the Music Improvisation Company and Iskra. In 1970 Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley and Evan Parker would form Incus Records, the first independent musician-owned record company in Britain. A 1974 series of radio interviews with musicians from various idioms, resulted in the publication, in 1980, of his influential book "Improvisation - its nature and practice in music". From 1976 until 1994 he organized his Company projects in London and various outreach locations — including Vancouver — where he invited a stylistically wide-ranging group of players to improvise together. A list too long to note, but including players that would normally be considered outside of the world of improvisation.

His devotion to pure improvised music led him down many and varied paths including interaction with American legends as conventional as Lee Konitz, as inventive as Steve Lacy and as avant garde as Cecil Taylor; the historic tap dancer Will Gaines, with whom he made a video, fusion jazzer Pat Metheny, noise rockers and anything else that tickled his fancy. There will never be another like him.

Recommended Recordings:
Spontaneous Music Ensemble (1968) – Karyobin – Chronoscope CPE2001-2
Tony Oxley Quintet (1969) – The Baptised Traveller – Columbia 494438
Anthony Braxton & Derek Bailey (1974) – First Duo Concert – Emanem 4006
Derek Bailey solo (2002) – Ballads – Tzadik TZ-7607

Anthony Braxton & Leo Records

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Smith) — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 21:26:00 +0000

A Continuum

Anthony Braxton and Leo Feigin share a certain persistent determination to document creative music. Leo, as a producer releasing numerous important recordings, beginning in 1979, and Anthony documenting his own music any way he could, starting with “Three Compositions of New Jazz” on the Chicago based label Delmark in 1968. Much has happened for both of them in the ensuing years including a partnership that has continued for the past 18 years starting with the release of the 3 record set – “Anthony Braxton Quartet (London) 1985”. Since that time Leo has released no less than 30 CDs of Braxton’s music. When asked why he was so interested in Anthony Braxton's music he replied:

“I am convinced that Braxton is, first and foremost, a visionary, and only then a musician. When you deal with a visionary everything must be recorded. We, simple/ordinary folks, may not understand what he is doing, and the meaning of some of his works will become clear in about 30 or 50 years from now. So when I get the material for a release from Braxton I don't question the artistic merits of the work and I don't have to like it. I am convinced that his every work is important. That's why I see my task in presenting the material in the best possible way, to find the best writers to write liner notes, etc.”

“I am enjoying wonderful working and business relationship with Braxton. He is a person of great generosity and tremendous magnanimity, and I think we have a very good rapport. It's easy to work with him. We have many things to discuss and he always listens, and a horrifying thing for me is that he probably trusts me, for very often he gives me a free hand with his material.”

Leo Feigin was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and found his way to England via Israel in 1974, where he worked with the Russian service of the BBC — broadcasting, producing programs, and presenting a weekly jazz show. In 1979, a friend sent him a concert tape with music of the Ganelin Trio, which was smuggled out of Russia by a friendly tourist. And so the idea of creating the Leo label was conceived. As no one had heard of Russian new music Leo decided to start off with two other more "viable" recordings, the first by Chicago pianist Amina Claudine Myers and then saxophonist Keshavan Maslak. The third release was the concert tape from East Berlin, and so the Leo legend began, joining forces with other like minded labels such as Emanem, Ogun, FMP and Intakt.

My relationship with Braxton began in 1973, an important year for the jazz intelligentsia of Toronto. A small group of us, loosely associated with Coda Magazine, had become aware of the activities, through recordings being produced by the likes of Chuck Nessa, that were taking place in Chicago, activities that included saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton. Both of them were performing solo saxophone in concert, an art form although not unknown in the jazz world — Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins and Eric Dolphy had already recorded solo pieces — had not been presented as a complete concept. We had found a perfect venue, the 130 seat hall at the St. Clair Music Library, where we decided to present a series of solo concerts. The three artists were Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim). And so began an important personal epoch that would lead me along paths of investigation as yet not imagined. Initially there was no idea that we were involved in the direction that jazz would take, unaware of the importance of our actions, mostly it was a selfish desire to hear this new developing music live.

The primary reason that had induced Braxton to agree to play in this series, was that he was desperately poor and attempting to raise enough money for a return air ticket to Paris where apparently he and his fellow pioneers were more welcome. The concert in Toronto took place on June 16th. Fortuitously he was able to spend a week as my house guest, which allowed me time to interview him. The first major interview that I had ever done with an artist of such importance. The following year, on October 7th, in co-operation with York University we presented him with Richard Teitelbaum, Leo Smith, Roscoe Mitchell, Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland and Jerome Cooper. From this visit came the Sackville recording “Trio & Duet”. The trio with Teitelbaum and Smith, and the duets of standards with Holland are currently available as Sackville SKCD2-3007. He visited Toronto numerous times over the ensuing years, with a variety of configurations.

The three recordings under consideration partially illustrate the scope of Braxton’s imagination, and eradicate any notions one might have that jazz music has stagnated into college-boy exercises. This of course will come as no surprise as it has always been obvious to modern jazz enthusiasts that his music was a natural extension of previous forms, his level of intelligence and perception unencumbered by populist rhetoric. One of his favourite words, continuum, fits this assertion perfectly.

It is no secret that he has been a massive influence on my life, both intellectually and musically, and that I have championed his music in Coda Magazine for much of the past three decades; but with this said I should point out that I have not always been enamoured by everything he has produced, his range of concepts often being outside my listening capacity. My preference, as I am still at heart a jazz fan, has been for his more “jazz inclined” — if that be the description — projects.

The 4 CD live set of “20 Standards (Quartet) 2003” (Leo CD LR 431/434) is the second project with this marvellous quartet of guitarist Kevin O’Neil, bassist Andy Eulau and percussionist Kevin Norton; its predecessor being “23 Standards (Quartet) 2003 (Leo CD LR 402/405). The chosen material is a jazz fan’s delight, with almost half of the compositions coming from popular show tunes penned by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein, Vernon Duke, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and the like, and the remainder by jazz legends as diverse as Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Paul Desmond and Eddie Harris.

I can’t help but allow history to influence my thoughts, that the quartets of Lee Konitz with Billy Bauer rise up as spectres, as half-century old sentiments; or the Bird-like flights of fancy that emerge when Braxton’s alto saxophone soars above O’Neil’s fleet spikey guitar, this young man’s technique laced with jazz slurs and inflections; or in the more gentle moments Jimmy Guiffre coming to mind, because it is clearly from this past that their music comes. However I should clarify that this is not a copyist homage, but rather a Braxtonian perspective taking from this past information and reassembling it in a most personal and original way. A continuum so to speak.

In recent years I have lost interest in much of what passes as jazz, in the pathetically lethargic recreations of the youthful imitators who have done little to expand the ongoing construct of its form, so it is wonderful to once again reclaim the energetic originality that was the beacon of American jazz music in this set of four exceptional CDs.

“Quintet (London) 2004” (Leo CD LR 449), presents one Braxton original - “Composition 343”, in two parts, with yet another group of “unknown” young players: Taylor Ho Bynum (trumpet), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Chris Dahlgren (bass) and Satoshi Takeishi (percussion). Once again it is recorded live, this time by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) at the Royal Festival Hall.

As I’ve already said, I cannot help but refer to the past, and in this instance it is Braxton’s system of composition. From his very earliest recordings, from the late sixties on the Delmark label, it is apparent that he had already devised a compositional system to be developed and catalogued, and this recording in any number of ways harkens back to that system. Once again clarifying the idea of a continuum. Not only does the structure of “Composition 343” remind one of his earlier work, but the principles of improvisation employed by the players suggest that the tutoring of this new assemblage is also based in a developed procedure. Here we get an illustration of his uniqueness, his amazing ability to invent strength in any process he chooses, making each into a distinct project. As with the preceding CD that strength lies in the organization of the complete whole, the landscape being a movable terrain contained within the composition itself, and the ability of the participants to identify the signals that often only subtly insinuate themselves. The composition has the readily identifiable, somewhat peculiar sense of rhythm that makes Braxton’s music so personal, the sonic drama of a story unfolding with the characters in place, conversing with overlapping dialogue, making his intentions, after all these years, crystal clear. The improvisations, mostly collective, float out of the charts each time into a different territory, shape shifting, varying from gently abstracted sound poems to ferocious alto attacks, the energy changing pace but never flagging. Halfway through “Part 1” himself segues momentarily into a melodic, almost balladic song. With this group trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum seems to occupy a prominent role, his muted horn talking, Bubbering as in a jungle band, with Lester Bowie and Leo Smith apparent heroes. Braxton also appears, once again, to have a penchant for brittle guitar textures.

At 49 minutes & 17 seconds “Part 1” ends abruptly with a reading of the composition and Braxton rapidly introduces the band members. Thunderous applause from what sounds like a very large audience. And then there is what appears to be a freely improvised encore. A bonus. More thunderous applause. What a difference a year makes.

The final recording in this dissertation, “TrioTone” (Leo CD LR 416) is once again a live performance from 2003, and is a co-operative trio project with Hungarian pianist György Szabados and Russian percussionist Vladimir Tarasov of Ganelin Trio fame. The latter was featured on Leo’s first Russian release. The three share a political stance when its definition is thought of as the support of particular ideas, principles or commitments. For Braxton the journey was a difficult one as the general attitude toward his music by the jazz press was negative, and it was apparent, even 30 years ago, that many detractors would come to him in his life. As for György Szabados and Vladimir Tarasov their music was developed in a world fraught with government control and political chaos.

In the two previous CD sets Braxton is surrounded by moldable youth, but here we have him working with his peers in a trio of international unity. All three of them of an age group that is hovering on each side of sixty. All three of them with substantial experience in a variety of music forms. Both of the Europeans are actively involved in composed music; Szabados who is an admirer of Bartok and his reinterpretation of Hungarian folk traditions has created the Royal Hungarian Court Orchestra as a format for that country’s evolving musicians. Tarasov is a regular soloist with the Vilniuis State Philharmonic, and in addition to composing music for film, theatre and orchestras, is a visual artist.

The first two of the five pieces are composed by Szabados, with the latter three being short collective explorations. “Trioton”, at 32’ 28”, begins with a delicate bell tone centering and gradually generates a rhythmic motion benefiting from the subtle contributions of Braxton and Tarasov, with the clear and relatively straightforward composed sections forming what could be described as a suite. The second half accelerates the content into an intense brawny power. “Black Toots” comes off as a sprightly, boppy, somewhat old fashioned sounding jazz tune complete with a dazzling sopranino solo and a very jazzy piano section. The first of the three improvised pieces has Braxton setting the stage with a gruff growling alto that his companions poke and probe at until they find their way into an abstracted reality; the second has the piano conjuring up a spatial melodic mood with Braxton at his most gracious, and finally the trio boogie-ing together with vague quotations from an imaginary standard into the final emphatic chord. Throughout this recording the trio bring to the music a level of listening, response and interaction that generates a rarely experienced intelligence.

I have chosen the above recordings to illustrate Anthony Braxton’s genius partly because they are all “live” events, giving the listener the possibility to experience what it may have been like to have attended these events. Nowadays with recording techniques at such a sophisticated level, the quality of sound is equivalent to that of a studio, and the musicians have the opportunity to capture their music in a more natural context, without the confines of a studio or the opinions of a producer hampering the result.

These three examples of Braxton are but a small selection from the 30 CDs that Leo Feigin has produced, and a complete catalogue can be discovered at www.leorecords.com