Music as a matter of personality - Part 1

Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter, Feb. 2011

It’s the beginning of May, and I’m in Bologna just to follow the first AngelicA weekend. The night before my trip there, I was in O’ following an exhibition of Gak Sato and Steve Piccolo, part of the MiLand Festival. Filippo Grieco, who’s part of MiLand and TRoK! team, asks me if on Sunday morning very early I could go on Malpensa airport, just to take Peter Broetzmann, that at night will play with Gianni Mimmo on reeds, Xabier Iriondo on guitar, and Cristiano Calacagnile on drums, so to drive him at his hotel. Then, there would be a couple of hours, time to prepare a room for Mr. Machine Gun, for a talk. I rapidly mind at what will occur me, from Bologna to Milano in Sunday, and then back after the interview (I’ll miss the concert but I just planned yet to see Wadada Leo Smith and Roscoe Mitchell playing) and give my positive answer. I’ll not go to take Peter Broetzmann with my car, since I don’t have one; another guy will lead him there, but it’s still ok for the interview. Me and Peter met at 9.30 a.m. in the hotel room. We met yet in Oslo, when he played with pianist Masahiko Satoh; there, I asked him just to sign up a copy of one of FMP last output, but at the end of that concert, outside Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter doors, me and my friends widely greeted him for their astounding performance. We had a couple of hours, sat in the hotel little garden inside, smoking and talking freely. This is the almost unedited transcription, in which Brotezmann talked to me about his entire career: the beginning as a painter, Nam June Paik, the Fluxus movement; his fellow musicians Toshinori Kondo, Peter Kowald, Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustaffson; politics, art and music world; the past and future of music business, and the meaning of it all, as a matter of personal view, the one he built up in almost 50 years of career. A very relaxed chat, a good environment in which to talk openly. After the interview, he told me that the day before his performance in Milano he would fly in Istanbul just to play with konstruKt fellows, about which there would be material coming on Complete Communion within few days. But our chat begins with him complaining about not getting in touch anymore with the Italian improv music scene of the present times.

The Berkshires, Watercolor on paper, 2005

So you are more aware of the older generation of musicians, like Tiziano Tononi maybe … the drummer from Italian Instabile Orchestra …

Yes, but there’s not any much to play for us in Italy, so there’s not really a contact to Italian musicians. Only guy I’m working with is Massimo Pupillo, and you don’t see them in the other parts of Europe, you don’t see them in Germany …

Pupillo played in the U.S. because his last record was published by Mike Patton, Zorn’s fellow … so they made a little tour there … I was talking with Wadada Leo Smith and he was telling me that in the last ten years there weren’t that much musicians trying to make things from anew, some new forms of music or of art, and he was prompting that no one in this moment has the courage of doing something different, of going outside the mainstream, be it improvisation or other styles of music … maybe, there were times in which lots of people were doing new things, like Ornette out of the Sixties, but there are times in which you have only to try and understand what people do, and this is satisfying …

Oh, I don’t believe in these new forms of music, new forms in arts. It all develops, and if you’re listening now to Ornette Coleman, to the music out of the Sixties, it’s very nice reed music, not the revolutionary thing we thought in those years. You do hear Coltrane nowadays in every fucking diner in the U.S. I would complain that there is very little of ideas, of new organisation coming from the very young ones; in the Fifties we were dealing with the same problem: in Berklee School of music, or in Cologne Music Highschool, it’s all the same shit they learn, it’s everywhere the same, it’s all boring music, and it’s so bad music actually; out of this schools nothing will come, I think. And another point also very important is, even the young guys want to make some money, and you can’t make money if you’re out of the mainstream, on the edges. And the mainstream, as I can see in our northern part of Europe from Germany to Scandinavia, is getting narrow, more and more, and what is on the side of it doesn’t count anymore. So lot of the young people of course they want to make money, I understand that truly well.

But when you started your career, it was the same?

It’s always the same, the problems look a little bit different, but of course music industry nowadays is much more narrow, focused on money making than it was in the Sixties when I started. And the whole music scene was much more spread out and there was space for everybody, but nowadays it’s really this money making mainstream. If you want to do something different, you have to be strong, very patient, you have to know what you want, and you can’t forget about making money, so you have to look for some other sources, which I did in my early years too: I did all kind of jobs to survive. But I’m missing ideas of the young people … it’s my seventy years, and I’m still avant-garde, then something is wrong. That is the point.

I didn’t see people asking you so much about you being a painter … In your first years, you started with Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys …

I had the great chance to work for Nam June Paik for a couple of his exhibitions, and I of course did know Beuys, and the guys from the Fluxus movement, which was for me of course very important and very encouraging too, because these was the only people that always said, ’Brotzmann, do your thing’: in the early Sixties the musicians around me they all said ‘oh no, come on ..’; if I showed up some, people started to laugh or to run away …

Before other musicians like Carla Bley, Don Cherry, or artists like Nam June Paik, people like that …

The Americans were very helpful to me, people like Carla, but much more people like Steve Lacy: he was living already in Paris these years, and he toured in Germany quite a bit, solo or with his trio and quintet, and I met Steve very very early, and he was always very very helpful, he made the connections to Don Cherry, to Carla Bley. I would say, from musicians side, Don Cherry and Steve Lacy were not really influent but good people behind me, a good background, good friends.

And that maybe it’s more important than making money, at some point, to have people near you …

Yeah, it’s very funny when Don Cherry invited me for a weekend to come to Paris and join his quintet with Gato, Karl Berger …

… Aldo Romano …

… or this young Danish guy, I can’t remember. When I came back home then, people respected me, you see how the trouble goes, stupid as it did; soon after that, Carla invited me, and the first time I met Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Lyons, and Andrew Cyrille, with whom I later worked quite a bit together with. So I must say even a man like Lee Konitz when he heard me the first time, came to me and said ‘hey Brotzmann, don’t worry’ …

Landscape, 1959, Tar paper and earth on canvas

… he was more open minded …

… oh yeah, that’s sometimes a good thing with Americans …

… maybe because being a musician he was able to understand you directly, usually criticians have more boundaries …

Yeah, but Americans in general, and American musicians, compared to Europeans. Europeans always like to put things in boxes: you as a free, and you as a bebop, and you as a big band … all bullshits: if you look at American jazz history, the best music just appeared when, for example, Rollins played with Coleman Hawkins, and Paul Bley was in the band: these guys are much more open.

Like yesterday night, in Bologna, with John Tilbury playing with Leo Smith … after the concert, a friend told to me that Wadada was the one who was improvising, but in the end the thing is, the music is working, so, who cares …

If it’s working is fine. I played before he died with Walter Perkins, a drummer who started with Robert Barry together in the early Sun Ra band in Chicago, and then he went through all the bebop times, he was long time member of Sarah Bonds and Lou Donaldson. A real bebop guy, and I met him while William Parker and him decided to do a little tour in the States. That was so fine, to be together with this old experienced man, we played exactly the same what he ever did. Coming together was one of the best times of my life, and then he soon planned a European tour but he died of cancer and very quickly. So, it’s all bullshit to put things in boxes, you just have to listen. American music history is full of very strange combinations, people in Europe shouldn’t be so afraid of each other, it’s nonsense.

So when we usually look at the United States thinking about those guys with war paranoia, it’s the same for us, culturally speaking …

[thinking about it, then really convinced]  … yes …

Maybe they are more pragmatic, that’s why they feel free to play with people and mix things, never mind about being, for example, an improviser that has to play with a contemporary musician …

I see the music I’m doing, the history of jazz music as a history of personalities, much more than of styles. I’m interested in finding, even if I look among the younger ones, personalities that know what they want to do without getting disturbed by anything, so I found, my friends in Chicago, of course because I’m quite free in it, but I found in Europe Mats Gustaffson and Paal Nilssen-Love, a great drummer in its young years … I need people who can pursue something, and then I can respond, and then music starts to develop … in my band, the Tentet, or in the smaller bands I never tell people what to do, I do my thing and I try to do it very clearly, but I wait and I see what respose I get, and all the things converge together …

As far as self-expression, Peter Kowald said that when he was playing the bass, he could express every aspects of his personality, that maybe socially he couldn’t, like, using his words, “I can cry on the bass, and people can feel that, whereas, going on the street, I really can’t start crying” … as a matter of being true with yourself, in some way, to what you feel …

That’s what in general art is about … writers sit and write their bullshits, and we as musicians are trying to do the same in our language. I see music as a kind of language too, and of course standing in front of an audience, if you want or not, that’s the way it goes, you have to open yourself and give some pieces and parts and thoughts and feelings a way … when I was very young and listened first times to jazz music I always wanted to be a singer but I was not courageous enough, so I needed a horn …

Music as a matter of personality - Part 2

Fluxus, art, fellow musicians: taking the risky way 
Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter, Feb., 2011

Did you try to sing sometimes?

No, not really … but jazz horn, as how I see the music, has a kind of very personal voice, and a voice is telling stories, is telling about yourself, and your problems, your feelings, it forever belongs to you …

Working with Fluxus artists have you ever …

Fluxus movement was completely unfairy to, it had nothing to do with feeling, it was very contractive. These guys understood that very well at that time, they didn’t want any kind of big expression, they wanted all this stupid art get rid from; they organized very simple pieces, there is this famous Olivetti piece from Maciunas, or Bill Higgins, I can’t remember …

It was George Maciunas …

He performed a couple of times, and you just got it … you know, that Olivetti count machine …

Yes …

… of course you do … they produce that kind of little paper and so everybody got a piece of this paper and the number set different meanings, so everybody was reading papers and whenever there was a fight when you had to do this, so it was very mechanical way of producing things, away from the arts, away from the art business, away from the human. But it was a very understandable reaction from what was going on in the arts. So that was for me a good piece to learn, of course it was not my way of doing things, but it was good to know that things like that can work and we had fun, we had really some nice performances, and I had learned a lot from that …

… as an example? …

… mmm

… something you brought in your expression with the saxophone …

… you know, there was a piece, I think I brought from a piece of Paik he performed and it was called Piece for Violin. We had a guy who was actually our driver, he was a trumpet player, so we didn’t have a violin to do something, but he had his trumpet, he went onstage, he opened up the trumpet case, showed a little the trumpet to the audience and that was the violin piece. To lead things up ad absurdum, sometimes is a very good idea. So this kind of things I learned from the Fluxus guys, but from Paik I learned, in his early times, how to make prepared pianos, out of Cage pianos. He made it his way, with much more fun, much more Butoh …

Less Zen, maybe …  

Paik had very explicit meaning about Zen: “you can forget all the books written in Europe about Zen”. I did a piece, I was sitting on the toilet reading the newspaper; that was for him very much Zen. Paik started with his first television things, well far away from the very technical business he did in the last years, so just, for example, an empty TV wooden case, old fashioned, and the Buddha on it … So he was sitting there, and  the audience came in sometimes, things like that …

He was working on images; image as a language, something that comes before language, something that’s right there, like … this cup of coffee …

Yes, That’s true …

Sirene, 1979, Metal, wood

And when you play, I mean, I was listening to your old Die Like a Dog records; maybe that’s something coming from my side, but I feel a strong connection with painting … listening to you, Toshinori, William and Hamid, there are some references to music, to Ayler’s music, there’s  Toshinori playing some blues lines right in the middle of the flux of the music, but it’s more related to painting …

As a painter, I’m very connected with landscapes; whatever I do I see as a kind of landscape; I think I do in a way that’s the same in music, kind of picture that flows from one valley from the next mountain, and, especially this collaboration with Kondo, I mean, we are old friends, he’s one of my first Japanese friends, we still work together, and even if we’re not walking together we see each other. We are quite very close together ….

How would you describe him, as a person?

He’s very much as a Japanese of the ancient times, a samurai. The good thing with Paik was the same: when he got famous with the first day to business, when everybody was done and he has his six pack of beer and he opened up his Korean food in tins … so radish and all stinking shit … [we both laugh] … so we were sitting there after everybody was gone and in the night he was telling stories, usually laughing. With Kondo it’s the same, as much as we take what we are doing serious, but you always have to keep distance to it, and look at it from a little far away. You always quest on things, then you try next case, different and better, or going somewhere else.

I was reading an old interview in which you were talking about yourself and this ‘illusion’ that were in the Sixties, to change the world … [he laughs] … but it was an illusion because nobody changed the world, but artistically there were lots of things that were put on the table and that were really new … not because ‘new’ is something good by itself, but maybe, thinking that you can really change your situation, and the situation of other people around you, can help you to do something, really …

You can imagine, it was happening in Italy too, it was happening in France even; but for us Germans, born in the bore and cooling up in the afterwar times, in the first time of our government there was all the old Nazis in. Of course we didn’t want that, we didn’t want a new army, we said ‘Never again!’, that was what we really believed: we wanted to have a much more open society, a much more free society, and we though that music can be a part of that and make things possible, and of course we were on the loan. In the theater it was the same, and in the art world, we were trying to change really everything, get away from the all shit. But as it goes, no politics thought to drove money to rule the buck, and to fight against that is so think of impossibility but, what you can do? I still believe that and I’m sure about that, you can change with the music people’s mind, you can open people’s mind, you can give them a chance to see things differently; after a concert and before, and so you can work on that in very little steps.

So it’s a matter of working on your feelings and refining them, also?

That’s my fee, yes … I worked a lot in the last years since the East block opened up in Poland again, in Ucraina, sometimes in Russia, in Israel or in the Middle East, so to go especially to Poland, for example, as a German, with that history on my back, it’s not my fault but it’s my shame I carry around; and to go in Israel, and find there people of my age or even older speaking German to me, with a blue number on the arm, and they’re still friendly to me, that you can reach in music, a very deep experience. I had long discussions in my last trip to Ukraina, not in the big cities, to smaller places, and of course there was a lot to discuss but people were frontly open. I like being in my studio doing my painting and my artwork, it’s a nice place, and I like to work, to smoke, paint and to handle all kind of shit I’m working with. Sometimes I stay a longer period, let’s say four weeks at home, but then I have to go out, and play somewhere. Because with music the good thing is, you can get really very direct to the people. Just at the moment, and you can’t run away, it’s a very direct confrontation. I need that, I need that response, to convince an audience, at least one in the audience.

Workshop Freie Musik, 1972, Silk-screen print/DIN A1

So, you were saying to me before that when you usually play you don’t mind about the structure of music, so I think that is stupid to ask you how much composition and how much improvisation there were in Globe Unity Orchestra or there is in the Tentet now … the music changes because there are other musicians involved …

There’s thousand ways to make music, and for everybody it looks different, but I just can talk about my way, my understanding on which you’d work. I think you mentioned the Globe Unity since the best years of the Globe Unity have been when the orchestra decided just to improvise and forget about pieces and zones, and Kowald and I left after a concert we played in Montreux or somewhere. Because the Orchestra came back to very old fashioned structures, back the bebop business, back to all the things we had thrown away, and to come back to such things that didn’t make sense for us, so we left the band; and the way my Tentet works, not my Tentet but our Chicago Tentet works started because I was asking whoever wants to bring in pieces, ideas, little pieces of paper; people like Ken Vandermark, that like to write scores, really old fashioned then. In the first years it was a good way of getting close together, but then there was a moment after about five years I set around a rehearsal and said ‘ok, let’s throw away all the papers, forget them, tonight we’ll play just improvising’. 

You got to a point in which you knew each other so well …

I had the feeling that everybody knows how to find his way, and since we do that way, we were quite successful; we just set a fourteen days tour, and had three days in London, three days in my hometown, and that was looking so really fantastic, really great. So if I see that there is always a little more potential, more things to reach, more directions to go, and everybody contribute and everybody feels responsible and everybody takes his duties and works for the band and for the music, than it is really a very good feeling, and just the music for the very beginning was not only music for me, it was kind of a social experience too; and I think jazz music is the only music that still has that possibilities and abilities, and there’s a fascinating thing. As I said before, I never was kind of a bandleader, that tells ‘ok, I want this here and that there’, and ‘you play this and … ‘, no I always use my little ideas to get the people playing and finding their own ways to make things happen and this is a kind of risky way, because you can fall deep down [laughs] but I like that, the risk is very is important for art …

Music as a matter of personality - Part 3

The politics of time. FMP and the music business: art, revolution, responsibilities.

Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy (public photo archive)

For human life …

For human life anyway, yeah, people don’t like it, but our society is so fucking boring because everything …

… it doesn’t work either …

It doesn’t work at all, no … I mean look at your country, look at my country, and look at all that they call democracy, and that’s a joke …

… think about Europe …

… man, what’s happening in Europe nowadays, it’s a joke …

People always talk about planning things, but actually I don’t know what they’re planning to cope with that situation; not before the so-called ‘crisis’, nor after, in order to sort out of it …

Yes, and for sure politics developed in this ways, none of these guys we call Government care about people anyway …

No, they care about money …

It’s about money, it’s about … I don’t know …

They care about power …

For sure not about normal people in the streets, not at all anymore …

You know, one of the things about power is that you can be, in a way, distant from yourself … we were talking about responsibilities in music: having power is kind of the opposite maybe … I don’t want to talk about Berlusconi, because it’s silly … [Peter laughs] … yes, because it’s an easy target to shoot at … but the thing is, why he likes living like that, and why he is admired? Because maybe people around him will ever say that it’s ok, nobody can criticize you … and troubles, they always come from left-wing … so it’s a way to avoid to manage with yourself, personally …

Yeah, yeah. We will not talk about Berlusconi, but you know, I remember times in Italy, the first years I came down here to play all the big festivals organized by L’Unità, by the Socialists. Italy was a different country in these times. Berlusconi’s just one stupid guy, but look at my government there … Madam Merkel’s so fucking stupid … she’s kind of clever, but she has no idea what to do and what is going on. And the same if you look around …

Maybe she’s able to manage with things, but …

Yes, she’s administrating things, she has abilities to build up networks just to sustain power, that is her. Look at this little Napoleon there … man, what a crooky he is… And so on, you can name them all, and is everywhere the same. Look at the development: when I was young, my first front country was Holland and Amsterdam, because it was very close and through the art business I had connections very early. It was for me always great to go to Amsterdarm, because there’s much more openness, breath a much more open air; but it’s such a racist society nowadays, it’s just about money and power, and underdogs have such a bad hard time; same in Denmark, that was always a country that welcomed everybody, frankly opened with good social ideas on building up a community; nowadays all government are moving more and more to the right-wing. I wouldn’t call them fascists, but they’re on the way; and so, anyway what’s going on on the Balkans, that’s what we would see later. So the whole idea of this Europe, even in the very beginning might have had some good sources, but it doesn’t takes people in to work for the whole thing, it just excludes people, and it’s just something up there, and there being interested in money, dealing with money, means having power, and that’s what they like. And I’m very often in the States, and I stay sometimes longer, I left Chicago as a town. I remember it was the election days, when Obama was elected I was in town, and I remember what kind of hopes people had. Now he’s doing worse than Mr. Bush ….

When he tried to change the welfare system, there was a huge right-wing campaign against Obama, using those images, like KKK, and nobody talked really about what he really wanted to do with insurance companies. In some ways, political communication is a kind of perversion of art. Republicans was using the same elements that Fluxus was using, images: the face of Obama and the triple K under his face, but in order to prevent people to have the possibility to analyze things; so it’s really the opposite of a form of art. As far as Obama himself, maybe even some Democrats were thinking that having a good black guy as a flag, could be good in the election times …

… but the black guy had to learn very fast that he depends on other powers, and other powers is money, and they said ‘no’, then he has no chance, and on the other hand I know people who went to school with him, and all of them said that he always was like an anchorman, a good actor. If you listen to his speeches, they are perfect; but at least what he says, it’s fucking nothing all the time …

If, as you said before, the stream is narrowing, and if you want to take part of that, you have to proof that you will be faithful, when the decisions will be taken, so it’s very difficult to try to change things … and on the other hand, it’s difficult to stay outside and mind doing your own thing, so alone, because all things other people would do, will have a feedback on your life, so as a single person you can only try to find and share resources, use your mind and keep yourself informed … and try to share all of this with other people, in order to build something better …

That’s very interesting. Travelling through the States, sometimes by car, and not taking just the big highways, driving so the country and the smaller town, you always find very interesting people who do that. They get out of the society, and they do whatever they want: they make their own farms, their own art communities, whatever, but I don’t think I could do that.

No?

No, I mean, my business, if we talk about music, I have to travel, I depend on support money, not for myself but the clubs need money; if clubs disappear, we do not work anymore. I’m in the middle of this shit and I have, willing or not, to deal, because I want to work with my guys, and running away it’s not my cup of tea.

FMP Box accompanying book

So, FMP starts working again, after having some difficulties …

That’s a long difficult story. After George Cables decided to give part to FMP, to some other persons, these other persons fucked the whole thing up …

Really?

Yes, and then, he always was working in Berlin as a social worker, and yet FMP was his sight business, but at the time he had to go in sanktionen and then he moved away from Berlin, then the other persons really have fucked up what he left … he started again, but he had to realize that working in the music business nowadays, without any support, is so difficult. You have no functioning distribution anymore, you have here small things, you have there small things, and the market, because producing cds is so easy and relatively cheap, is small but overcrowded, and the ninety per cent of it mostly is shit. And so, it doesn’t function anymore, and now he decided a year ago that I would do my last thing, my box with tapes out of the archives, and things like that. I’ll make a nice book and that’s the end of FMP. The box is out, and it is not only beautiful, it is a great document, the book is fantastic with all the last 40 years of European improvised music in there, it’s really great. But to get into business again, nowadays it’s impossible.

How if someone would like to know about that music in the next, say, forty years? The risk is not to have really a continuum, and I don’t talk only about FMP, but about all people making something in their own right, with a vision to realize and other people experiences on their back. Because, usually, behind an artistic development there is a human development; so the risk is to break with the relationship between generations … what will happen in the next fifty years?

But there we come back to the younger people, it’s really up to them to develop other ways of doing things. I think the guys around me, like Ken or Mats, all of them are trying to continue that thing together, it has to work in other ways I think. One of the good things of the development of the last twenty years is that the domination of American music is not there anymore; European brought in a lot of new ideas, a lot of ways of doing things, and if you look at the developments in America, there’s not coming very much; I mean you have some good guys, some good players, and you have the same in Europe too …

There are many in other parts of the world, like in Israel …

I have a couple of friends traveling a lot going to far away places, in the Middle East, in the West Sahara and in countries where now a little kind of revolution takes place, in the Northern African countries; there’s a strong new music scene going on to it, from Lebanon to Algier to Egypt to everywhere, but it will take time to develop, and of course it has not very much to do with what I was growing up, which is jazz music. But I like to go to the Middle East very much, I had set in Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt … It’s another way of doing things, on Marocco, a lot of good musicians. The danger is, beside of that moment for them music is a kind of tool of making some part of freedom for them, or contributing to all development in this countries too, to open up things, but of course if there is really something good going on, I’m afraid that the music business will come and fix it in.

Maybe it’s not only a matter of money. Sometimes when I go to exhibitions, and I see works of people like Shirin Neshat, as an example, I think: ok, she’s talking about Iranian women, here in Europe; we allow her to talk about it, so at first sight we feel more liberal than governments in that country, and maybe this feeling is delivering us from taking care of the real situation, as a matter of self-excuse, and this is part of the problem. I can invite the Master Musicians of Joujouka or Tinariwen to play here, and it’s good for them, because they earn money, but at the same time we can feel ourselves as free from our duties …

I see what you mean, yes …

So we have to be aware of that and discuss about that also … I mean people like me that write about music … you are doing your own thing playing, that’s your duty, but I have this feeling … There is an Israeli documentarist, Eyal Sivan, who drew back his last documentary about Jaffa and Israel politics through the advertising imagery from Cannes Film Festival, because he doesn’t wanted to risk to legitimate Israel democracy, as liberal, because it allows a moviemaker to show a movie that is 'in opposition'. So, he opted for talking about that issue instead of presenting his documentary … it’s a matter of being aware of the contradictions that are taking place …

Yes …

Music as a matter of personality - Part 4

Modus operandi: self expression and the past as a legacy 
Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Black Split, 1964, wood and oil on canvas

Now, would you like to talk about or describe some of your works I took from your website? Because not that much people usually ask you about this other aspect of your art, and I want you to talk about it, freely …

[he takes in his hands the pages I printed from his website, with his artworks and pictures, and smiles] These are really early works …

If you want, we can talk about more recent pictures or sculptures, and then I’ll look for them on the internet, to put them together with the interview …

Well, what can I say? It doesn’t matter if it’s older or newer stuff. Before I started to see the music as a kind of a profession, my main goal and target was being a painter. And very early, when I was still studying at the art school had my first exhibitions, in Germany and Holland, and at that time I didn’t like the people I had to deal with, the people coming to my exhibitions, all art business; I always was glad when I could go on the road with the guys, playing music, away from that; so, in all these years between the very early Sixties and let’s say until I started exhibitions in, let’s say 1974 or something, the first big one, there was not a break in producing, but I didn’t do exhibitions and all that because I was much more happy with the music, being on the road, seeing other countries, finding a much more interesting and open audience than in the art business. Art business, if you take it serious, it has lot to do with money, with this personality shows and things like that, and that’s what I hate, I hate personality shows, really, I like to work, we can talk about that, but all that producing yourself … I don’t understand … And that’s why I could develop my little art production independent from all this influences. I’m famous enough with music, I don’t have to care about anything that’s happening in the art business, I have a gallery, not an important one but one in Chicago, Corbett vs. Dampsey, they let me do what I want to do, they get me no pressure at all, and so I’m at the point or I always was at the point where I just did the things that I wanted to do, and that includes very normal oil paintings, it comes to objects, it comes to woodcuts again, what I did as a schoolboy, and so on. I have had an exhibition in my hometown running, we just had a meeting a couple of days ago, and as far as I can see, there’s a huge interesting people that are coming really. From far away, maybe connected with the music too, but that’s interested there, so I’m just happy when the things on the wall or in the room they just look good. I like them, and I’m very happy if I hear from people, "oh I like that, or that, or liked all". So, I will continue … time is my problem, being on the road, on tour, leaves you very last time.

To develop your own things …

Yes, but it has to do with getting older a bit; I would like to spend a bit more time in my studio and just do what I like to do, and yes … what I hate with the art is that is really a business for the galleries and for the big artists. For the rest is suffering. I mean, all the names you know, because I’m the same generation as Georg Baselitz, Edward Lupper, the famous Germans at the moment, I quite rank in the top ten, and they make millions, and sometimes I think, ‘shit, if I would have a little part for it for the Tentet, for the music, it would be nice’. On the other hand, we are just living always on the edge, always trying to survive, always fighting for a little progress keeps music alive, and that’s why I still want the music, and I need the music for myself too. It’s not the same on the art sight, I would say, but it’s just another facet of what I like to do. I think is quite a good equivalent between being on the road and being alone in your studio and have kind of a quite good time and get free of troubles travelling, stucking the cello and the bass in to the aeroplanes and shit like that; the two hours on stage, it’s a whole days just trouble. In the field of music, just improvised music, you have a couple of guys even a little older than I am, like Ornette, that is just ten years older, I really admire and respect him; or Sonny Rollins, I saw him last summer again, and played great music, the band was not so good but he himself was great, and he has physical problems with his body. Next morning we had the same flight to Oslo, and he was in the wheelchair … and Ornette this summer cancelled some European engages because he’s not in his best shape, but I have this feeling that the music of those, let’s call them heroes, are dying out, it’s just people like me, like the young ones, it’s just artwork …

It’s music you can’t develop staying on your own … You can work on your own style, you can work on saxophones sound, but without a human exchange, is very difficult to develop thing. To see people like Sonny Rollins playing … it’s a shame for the younger musicians; but maybe, not developing things being inspired by him, they will also develop in other ways …

I mean, whenever I talk to Ken .. Ken is thirty years younger than I, or twenty five or so, and I tell him stories about the old times; I have seen all the bands: all Miles Davis bands, Coltrane with Dolphy, I spent a night with Dolphy in a bar in Wuppertal, and Charlie Mingus with all these guys, I met Coleman Hawkins and Bud Powell, and the young guys even can’t imagine was that was, was that meant to me …

… and what could that mean to them, also …

Yes. In the Tentet I had to tell, ‘man, listen to Sidney Bechet’, or ‘listen to some good old Louis Armstrong records’. I mean, these guys was playing crazy shit, it was really incredible …

… or Billie Holiday that, as far as singing, can be compared to an avant-garde artist …

.. for example. At that time you have some voices too, and you don’t … I could name any important voice, I think the last one that was connected with all music was Jeanne Lee …

… there is one record out now, by Anthony Braxton, from 1972, issued by HatOlogy, it’s good too have her back again …

… yes, she was a great singer; at the times I was working with Last Exit, I did know there was Diamanda Galàs in these years ..

… yeah …

But since she brought her tight to Aids, since that time, she’s just back to very meditative solo shows, I don’t think she’s interested in playing again with all the guys.

In this moment she’s very busy with her recital, voice and piano.

But she has a voice, I mean, that Greek scraming woman, that was really … I like her very much.

In her very early years she was experimenting with voice and microphones, and did very great things …

Yes, and so, about musical perspectives, I don’t think about myself too much, I’m thinking about the development, and the scene, the situation for the younger musicians, it’s not getting better …

Do you think that people is working hard on what to do, but not that much about the meaning of what they are doing?

Yeah, and I know these guys coming out of these music schools, of course they can play on, of course they know about counterpoint, harmonies and scales; whatever you have to know, they know; but I have the feeling that most of them don’t know what to do with it, they just organise some nice aesthetic images and works: I miss personalities. I was one of the first to play with Peter Evans, the trumpet player, when he wasn’t famous at all: a strong guy, a strong horn, and it’s a difficult horn, that’s why you don’t find many of them. But I think he’s getting too fast in a kind of night after night step success. That’s fine because I’m making money with that, but if there is no time to find out what you want for yourself, if all this business around put you further and further, the danger is at least that you’ll never find out what you really want to do … for me music is not the same in five or ten years, music is a lifelong story, and at the end you’re still not where you want to get … I think that people should make experience, and best experience is that connection between yourself, the audience, being on the road, and bands don’t tour so much anymore, because have no chances to play anymore. One summer I was on the road with Gunther Sommer in Italy, we started somewhere in Imola and we ended up in Bari and we played in little Unità festivals and people were so fantastic, the food anyway was unbelievably good, and it was communication, in the best sense. That’s what I’m missing for the young guys. Look at Germany, the number of clubs I’m playing there from time to time.

Usually the clubs, in Germany or elsewhere, are looking for a wide range of music styles, or are they close and faithful to a particular style, in order to be recognized?

I’d say that the good ones, and still the working ones, are working on quite a wide range of music; the other ones, very narrow minded, that put on one music, they don’t work after a while. The point is of course to run such a place you need support, culture without support doesn’t exist anymore.

Related links:

Peter Brotzmann official website

Catalytic Sound Peter Broetzmann, Mats Gustaffson, Ken Vandemark and Paal Nilssen-Love new cooperative resource

Understanding music as a matter of intelligence and love

Interview with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

Bologna, 7/5/2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Panic Jazz Café, Chiostri S. Corona, Vicenza, May 13, 2011

I followed directly Wadada Leo Smith in various live performances since Vitry-Sur-Seine in February. Since then, the trumpet player toured massively through North of Italy: in March he was in Milano with his Organic band (I put a review on Mescalina webzine in my native language), than he played in May (6 to 9) at Angelica Festival, solo, and in a duo with pianist John Tilbury, and finally both of them were in a quartet featuring Pauline Oliveros and Roscoe Mitchell (my photos). Astounding was his quartet performance, with all the musicians taking their parts as main soloist in turn, and the other ones following their stream in answer: very essential, and very fluid at the same time. Then again, one of his most beautiful performances: a duo with Gunther ‘Baby’ Sommer on May, 12 in Padova, in which Wadada played completely acoustic but with a mastery on his sound that would get him out of the boundaries of a trumpet player, even if no effects nor pedals were used, whereas Gunther made his drumset sound sometimes properly as a piano or a melodic instrument, working notably also on layering fore and background with his fellow. The day after, in Vicenza the couple played with Italian pianist Antonello Salis. Though the Italian musician is a master on his own (he played also with Cecil Taylor along with Tony Oxley), that was a harshly nervous performance, with serious interaction problems between the musicians; only in the end they finally played together all at the same time, giving shape to a melancholic, pointillistic and oblique blues … This is part of our conversation at the hotel he stayed in Bologna, followed by an open explanation of his Ankhrasmation musical system, that I deepened a little, as he suggested to me when we had the talk. Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith is a great teller, and his ideas could seem simple, but they are amongst those that need an entire life to be developed. It’s a pleasure to listen to him talking as it is hearing him play. I thanks both the musician and his Italian manager Alberto LoFoco for their kindness and support.

I’d like to start our conversation talking about your first compositions, like The Bells and Light of the Dalta, that were on Anthony Braxton’s records [The Bells appears on Delmark’s Three Compositions of New Jazz, whereas Light of the Dalta was issued on Byg’s B-Xo/N-0-1-47a or Composition 6g] … Light of the Dalta is an open reference to the blues, and I was thinking about the fact that the first free jazz players, like Ornette Coleman, developed melodically the references to the blues … you were more kind of giving to sound itself, silence and timbre a major relevance … you know, if I have to think about a blues composition that can remind me of your music, that piece would be Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground [a Blind Willie Johnson piece, that inspired also musicians as diverse as Ry Cooder, Marc Ribot, Loren Connors and moviemakers like Wim Wenders], where you can hear this guitar chord very prolonged and repeated; so I think that there is also a spiritual aspect, if you will, in developing music that way from the blues … so I wanted to ask you about your references in music, blues, and spirituality, in developing your style with the trumpet …

Teatro San Leonardo, Bologna, May 7, 2011

Ok, the song that you’ve mentioned I don’t really know it, but the blues is a very complex music, that has alternation between a 1/4 and a 5/4, and most people take that to be kind of a progression, but it’s not. A progression has to be at least three of four relationships to a chord, and blues has this alternation between those two relevances that is time to get a dam. Now, what makes that so important is that the blues itself has already built inside of it a notion about freedom, most sentence look tells like that: ‘no refuse, make some happen, or call some to change, all you need is to part to what to change’, I mean, until that part happens. So the blues masters figured out that the most natural relationship between events and objects and humans is true; that for example, if you have a child, he needs a woman; man and woman make appear that from the form; so there’s another phenomenon, of sunrise and sunset; both of them do the same things: sunrise it brings for light, sunset it brings for dawn; so out of both of them it quills like new conditions. So the blues is based off of that, a natural relationship between events, abrupt and hint. Now, my music doesn’t come out quickly as the blues, that little piece, Light of the Dalta, does have motion between the one in the bar, you see … [sings] … dabadabadabadabada–bang-da … [shifts singing of a major] dabadabadabadabada–bang-da … but, that’s an illusion, is not really blues … I made music like that because of the notion about the Delta, you see, the South, Mississippi has the most famous Delta in America. So Light of the Delta has to do with the way the sun rise in Mississippi where in the Delta, it comes about and it warm, when it rise. And at certain points you as a human being as you’re stand and watch sunrise you tell of being that. And at another point, it comes up midway left by, it comes up to your head; you even look so, and at some point, it passes by your head and move forward, and you know how it moves, you see, and, he goes on like that; it can shatters, an the sunset never it reduce the light; so, that’s what The Light of the Dalta means, it has to do with sunrise, and it’s not really a blues, it has relationship that’s … spiritually, is attempt to the blues, ok?

Ok, so, it has to do with the sun rising on the Dalta, and not with a progression of chords …

No, has nothing to do with chords … y’know, lot of people look at how music should be organised, they reduce to notions about chords and their function…

Yeah, this is a big problem, if we talk about so-called avant-garde jazz, even for people like Charles Mingus, they took many years to understand how his music was working, because musicologists were thinking more about the developing of music in notational terms, more than studying directly his compositions, as we European think about music from 18^th century on … I read a good essay on Mingus written in Italy kind of six years ago, by Stefano Zenni [Charles Mingus: Polifonie dell’Universo Afroamericano, Nuovi Equilibri/Stampa Alternativa, 2002], because he was trying to use a different approach, starting from what he wrote on the lines of his records … but maybe, if you want to understand really music, you have to be an artist, like a poet, or a painter …

No!

No?

No, no … I would say that to understand music, it’s a head and a heart, intelligence and love, that’s all it takes …

The most simply things…

Padova, Cinema Teatro Torresino, May 12, 2011

But the most simple is the most complex, and everytime we do comes through those two things: a head, that is intelligence, and a heart, which is really the one’s request to be loved … so really when Mingus remembers whatever they were doing they would come from the same point, basically a head and a heart, and to understand that is all it takes, now artists, and journalists, and poets, and painters, in any kind of profession, they did kind of a special relationship with, but what works not so fair is that relationship that one understands from the head and the heart… Like for example, if I put another photo wide on it it’s still wide but maybe a little bit lighter and a little bit dumb in his right, but it’s still … still wide, you know, so … when people look at music and they took it and put it a way it shows some other view of value, like for example some other who wants to show a relationship between American music and European music, and they take out people like Charles Mingus or anybody, like Roscoe Mitchell, or Anthony Braxton, or Anthony Davis, they take them as if they use the same light, and they use the same kind of head and heart to analyze them, but that has only information from the eighteen, nineteen century, or even twentieth century, now they gonna miss, you totally miss it, you completely miss it, and if you look a fantastic book that is nice to read, but when you get to the conclusion of what it has wrong you made a value mistake, that most of people … that jazz created music, blues … anything that’s in America, the same bop, it came out of the euro century, with some stuff amassed; and that’s a lost, that’s completely lost, because, look at it like this: this is Africa, this is Europe, right? And those people that came from Africa when they came to America they already had knowledge of art, culture, music and count … how do have they had that? As slaves: because those people loved, when they were slaves, they composed music when they were slaves, and they thought about the situation which made them culturally conscious of what they were doing; so when they came that they had this homost that was actually equal to the European homes; and then this blend that happened that was the first melting pot, that’s when you can talk about the euro-century and the afro-century thing, but the moment that a scratch happened, the more you wrote that picture on ragtime, it was all over … and that moment, it had changed completely from this European and this African merge it became stuff on that, it would be no Europe nor Africa to realise, it became creating what the music is, all jazz, all ragtime music, all American music, all this tons of main zones, but the best man for the American music, you know, it’s people like Stockhausen, or Pierre Boulez, it’s all you can mean, not baroque or classical music, or this stuff ...

So the thing is, putting down too much boundaries between styles of music can’t be useful to understand music truly…

I think that … you see, writers write for the same audience, stylists write of the people that are stylists, they don’t write on normal people, you see? Artists that write about music they write for artists. Sometime the individualist economic stand it comes to a pure standpoint and so an artistic standpoint and so much a stylistic standpoint, but they’re not allowed to do it, it’s just those people count on brilliance, so to speak; but in all near places they have better to view wide music than anybody does, because brilliance doesn’t bring another reflection of what they could find among things; but they have in some way to have a way to peep inside of it; they look directly from their heart to your hart, from their head to your head, and they did it. I mean, I can’t burglarize you, because it’s not mean. Don’t mean to burglarize you, and they didn’t. And the most important dime about it is that when they do connect, it transform their life. What it does is to make that point to make it more aware, make it more conscious, and give them more feeling about a human being; that’s the profound change. And how it goes notice this is beautiful? That’s why the spiritual maze is like this, make it so that … spirit don’t have to know when you connect, like, when you came onstage and you’re making that music come out and make happen that feeling in contest connecting with people and the people in the audience they feel it and get connecting with it and sound out feelings and don’t get connecting with it, and sound do feels part of it, like just connecting some of them just with the head, some of them just with the heart, some just connect with even one of them, but the pushing to connect with both the head and the heart and this put intelligence to feel love … they made it, and they don’t even know it. That’s beautiful. I don’t know it; Roscoe doesn’t know it, you know, Miles Davis didn’t know it, nobody knew it, but … you can feel something happened. That’s beautiful. That’s what we call beauty.

An Ankhrasmation score example

Ankhrasmation

Spanning through his career, Wadada Leo Smith not only produced an important amount of recorded works; he also gave shape to a notation system called Ankhrasmation, which merges the idea of composition, improvisation and performance into a single construction. As the trumpet player would say, working on an Ankhrasmation score, every musician has to do a personal research, far from the ensemble playing. As an example, a red half triangle in the score could be taken as a velocity unit. So, every player will determine how fast or slow this unit would be, and nobody will determine it the same way: onstage there will be nine different realisations of that notion. Same with color: red could be a reference for blood, or for cherry, and this reference has to be developed in music; if nine musicians are playing that red, all musicians will have different references about that. And also, the cherry has a skin that’s red, a pin inside of it, and stems coming out of its center. Every player has to develop every part of the cherry. When finally the musicians play together, they have to rehearsal in order to find the right balance, the level of creativity coming out.

Wadada Leo Smith started developing his Ankhrasmation (from "Ankh", the Egyptian word meaning vital life force, "Ras", the Amharic or Northern Ethiopian word for Father, and "Ma", the conventional word for Mother: its sense, is that when Father and Mother procreate, they embody a vital and seminal life force) since his very first composition, “The Bells”, with his work on Rhythm-Units, a concept he started explaining after his residence in Europe since 1967, when he issued the booklet Rhythm: a study in rhythm units in creative music, and then formalized through his following activity as a musician and through his first self-published book notes (8 pieces)/sources of a new/workd/music/music: creative music in 1969. Improvisation #4, from Creative Music No. 1, first issue on Kabell in 1073, paved the way for Ankhrasmation. For full information about Wadada Leo Smith philosophy of music, scores and concepts, check his official website.