Being a part of the whole (when I play it, I mean it): Bill Dixon [pt. 4]

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Cover of 'Bill DIxon 1982', Ferrary Gallery, 1982

Time to get a little deeper into Dixon’s discography from 1980. As reported in the previous post in this blog, about all the material of the period was issued by Italian label Soul Note, with a couple of exceptions. The Lp Bill Dixon 1982 was released as a limited edition - probably 450 copies – as accompaniment to an exhibition catalogue of the trumpeter’s paintings in Verona at the Ferrari Gallery. While a couple of trumpet solos will feature in 1996 Odyssey box set, the three part Relay was written in collaboration with improviser dancer Judith Dunn, whose collaboration with Dixon is extensively narrated in Ben Young Dixonia – A bio-discography of Bill Dixon with a small excerpt on part 2 of this article.

The relationship and reciprocal influence between Dixon painting and music is complex. English journalist Graham Lock provided a full exploration with Dixon himself for an online interview on Point of Departure, added with a beautiful photo gallery, and while my strong advice is to enjoy it in its entirety, the following lines can be a good introduction for the curious listener:

GL: Do you see any similarities in the way you prepare and perform your music and the way you prepare and present your artwork?

BD: Not now. Perhaps at one time. Don’t forget, in the performance of music now, for me, the whole preparation is being able to play the instrument. If I was going to play tomorrow, whether solo or with a trio or quartet, I will practice the instrument based upon trying to maintain flexibility, so if in the process of playing I need to execute something, I will have traveled that route before and I can execute it. I don't try to practice things that I can play. I don’t try to practice sequences. When it’s time for me to play, I don’t know what I’m going to do until the minute I play the first note, and the first note I play will dictate what I’m going to do. What I try to do is be a blank slate upon which things can be imprinted.

With painting, with the other artwork, I can work on something and it can be finished; but I can look at it again the next day and if I don’t like the way it looks, I’ll take a part and move it around. I move things around when I write music.

In 1981, photo by Hans Kump

With this in mind, try to listen, again or for the first time, recordings such near in time as Bill Dixon 1982 and Bill Dixon in Italy vol. 1 - on Soul Note, 1980. One thing that is really clear to me as a listener, is that the solo exhibitions on the first record, as the excerpts from previous recordings you can get to at the end of my previous post, were realized using the same idea of space, of abstraction, than in the Soul Note’s, while at the same time the timbres and echoes are here more raucous, dissonant; since this is a characteristic of the material featured in the Odyssey box, one can think at first sight about an expressive shift at the turn of the eighties, while this 1982 record shows that possibly, Dixon changes of nuances both on trumpet and piano can be assigned to the different temperature of playing completely alone – even if with overdubbed parts - or with a group of musicians.

It is difficult to say if this shift was conscious or unconscious, while the effect is that of a musician that, in solitude, try to occupy the background space and shift on the foreground, and viceversa, by himself, whereas while accompanied by another musician or a more or less extended group, the levels shifting is realized through superimpositions from the different players.

Firenze piano introduction on the 1980 Soul Note release has brighter nuances, while Arthur Brooke and Stephen Haynes trumpets, Alan Silva’s double bass nods, Stephen Horenstein’s small, dark strips on baritone saxophone, and Freddie Waits’ interventions on drums are all creating a constantly fluctuating pattern that gives the music its pulse shifting, in an exchange of rhythms and colors. This is a constant in Bill Dixon works or that period, and we can extrapolate the wider meaning of his work as a composer and instrumentalist from that.

Bill Dixon on 'Jazz Hot', December 1973

Something Clifford Allen well noticed on his AAJ comprehensive article on the musician, as quoted on part one of this series, but now’s the time to go a little further. If Dixon, as some of his contemporaries and next generation followers, worked extensively on both the aural and visual paradigm – as an example, Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith do this, as clearly evident even from the interview the AACM-rooted trumpeter gave me last year, and as will be from my following writings on the multi-instrumentalist, composer and ‘tri-axium’ writer, it is also true that in this he was only making the same effort of many contemporary artists, which is to go beyond the divisions in the world of the art we suffer in Western culture since the separation of music from other arts and disciplines, as from the half of 1700 on.

While inviting to read Davide Sparti’s writings on the subject, I’d love to contextualize more Dixon’s place in the evolution of Black Creative Music. If, as Bill Dixon openly suggested to Graham Lock, music is the less segregated of the forms of art disposable to self expression, and if in New York in the Sixties there were complex relationships between Black and White artistic milieux, involving notions of race, gender, identities, political visions, ideals, Dixon attempts to create a music able to incorporate improvisation, contemporary composition, dance and painting, was possibly the only alternative attempt to the post-modern collagistic and interpenetretional strategies that in the Seventies took ground from the Chicago-based AACM migrations on the NY ‘loft’ scene.

As much an outsider as sopranist Steve Lacy, possibly the nearest figure, since both were working ‘on the border’ – of sound, on the most imperfect of the reeds instrument family Lacy; of music, painting and teaching/composing Dixon - the trumpeters’ was one of the most vivid efforts to create an organic expression and artistic vision. Going on in listening to his Soul Note recordings, this will become irremediably clear.

Bill Dixon in Italy, Soul Note 1980

Both the volumes od Bill Dixon in Italy stress the continuity and the constant progress from his 1967 masterpiece Intents and Purposes. Three trumpets - while Dixon sometimes passes on piano, tenor or baritone saxophone, double bass, and drums. This ensemble of musicians, and the music as its result, is an evolution of the attempt to both transfigure a brass palette echoing the ‘third stream’ orchestras and transform the original free-jazz pantonal polyphonies into a multi-layered plane-shifting.

Alan Silva was taking part of Dixon environment since their Cecil Taylor Unit and Jazz Composers Guild days, and if you listen to his ESP and BYG records, Silva’s – also a painter, as Dixon - conductions, inspired by the history of the African-American music from Louis Armstrong to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler, with whom he directly collaborated, passing through his teaching, go into a similar direction – the use of permutations so to create structures out of notes, his love for Xenakis’ steps ahead in written music and his clashes with Pierre Boulez’ IRCAM after creating his own IACP school.

Cornetist, trumpeter and composer Stephen Haynes, is still today the direct witness and creative legacy-sharer of Dixon’s inheritance, through both his music and writings. Defining himself ‘a product of the historic and fertile Black Music Division at Bennington College directed by Bill Dixon’, he’s responsible of a continuity that through records as Parrhesia (Engine, 2010) with bassist/guitarist Joe Morris and drummer Warren Smith is still enjoyable in the very present.

Back cover of Bill Dixon in Italy vol. 1
L-R: Stephen Horenstein, Stephen Haynes, Bill Dixon,
Freddie Waits, Alan Silva, Arthur Brooks

Arthur Brooks, former student at Antioch College in the Sixties, is another undervalued hero of the Taylor-Dixon-October Revolution connection. Also a Bennington teacher until 1997, his music is inspired by both painting and Sufi mystics – the sound as an element coming from the soul, a direct reflection of the natural environment as a stream of energy.

Freddie Waits, father of drummer Nasheet Waits, is well known for having played with Max Roach and his M’Boom Collective, pianist Andrew Hill, and a theory of post-bop, modernistic Blue Note-based acolytes as Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. Stephen Horenstein, composer and multi-reed player, born in Boston but at the time of those recordings migrating in Israel to study at the Music and Dance department of Tel-Aviv University, and Dixon’s student at Bennington, was active in many festivals both in Italy and New York, and recorded with German drummer Gunther ‘Baby’ Soemmer between many others.

If the music on this couple of record can be described as ‘pastoral’, in a way that reflects another similarity between personalities as different as Bill Dixon and Miles Davis, the following November 1981 (Soul Note, 1981), featuring a quartet composed by Dixon, Silva, double bassist Mario Pavone and drummer Laurence Cook, push the music into a more nervous, nocturne flow. One of Dixon’s grooviest outputs, and possibly the nearest to what we can expect from a NY-rooted musician, is in some way extended by his follower Thoughts (Soul Note, 1985), with the double basses of Peter Kowald, William Parker and again Mario Pavone, while the reed section is completed by Marco Eneidi on alto and John Buckigham on tuba.

Bill Dixon, Thoughts, Soul Note, 1985

It features a photo shot by Dixon himself of a trumpet near a window, with its reflections on the standing wall, while on the back cover one of Dixon painting is exposed on a semi-opened bathroom door, with the column of what can maybe be taken as a fireplace at the other side of the image, in a sort of triptych emanating directly from the division of the space. The music on this record is kind of a sum of Dixon’s small ensembles previous experiences, with the sinuous pulsing of Thoughts, the meditating layers of piano and horns of Windows, the contemporary dialogue of silence and sound in For Nelson and Winnie (a Suite in Four Parts), with Eneidi as the proper inheritor of Robin Kenyatta and Byrd Lancaster and a wider use of spacey extensions of sound as always in Dixon’s music.

Son of Sysiphus (Soul Note, 1988) is possibly the most ‘classical’ Dixon of the 1980s. Again a quartet, composed by Dixon with John Buckingham on tuba, Mario Pavone on double bass, and Laurence Cook on drums, while the paintings on the cover mark a shift from the isolated, naked figures on the front to the ‘target’ painting on the back. Among the compostions, Mandala for Mandela, with Dixon typical short statements/brushes strenghtened by tuba’s lumpy support, and Sumi-e, dedicated to Dixon’s mother, featuring a piano that, as quite as usual, use its projections through space in a way similar to Mal Waldron, even if enjoying shorter, direct statements.

But none of Dixon’s records or compositions are ‘classic’ in any way. The two volumes under the title of Vade Mecum (both Soul Note, 1993), introducing drummer Tony Oxley as one of the last, long-time trumpeter partners – it will be featured again on the following volumes released by the Italian Label, and on a trio performance with Cecil Taylor, certificating a continuity between American and European improvised music. I suggest the reader to give an eye to the important Derek Bailey book “Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music”, firstly published in 1980, revisited and expanded in 1993, where the UK guitarist provided the reader with an enlightening interview with Oxley himself and its evolution as a musician.

Drummer Tony Oxley

Vade Mecum sees also the double basses of William Parker and Barry Guy, reaffirming a practice of music in which, as in Anamorphosis, the trumpet, surrounded by the two bass pulses and the particular Oxley’s drumkit, his playing acquires an extended use of both lighter and lower tones, while the two following volumes of Papyrus (Soul Note, 1998) see Dixon’s piano, as on Silver Point: Jeanne Phillips, as both melodic and rhythmic instrument, even if the texture of the compositions is always far from both dramatic, Eurocentric constructions, and African American percussive references; while since Papyrus # 2, the trumpet gains a more pre-eminent role through space as never before on a record. And if Oxley percussions are more environmental than ever, with a consistency that reminds of the contemporary evolution of electronic music, what both the musicians give life here is something not that far from Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening project for music and arts.

Gillo Dorfles, one of the most important and interesting art critics in Italy, wrote in 2006 about the ‘lost interval’ in contemporary art, meaning "the gradual disappearance of the traditional elements of separation, interruption and pause that have been present in literary and artistic creation since time immemorial...". This couple of Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley releases can be seen as an indirect, but important attempt, to put the listener in a space in which he can finally gain his ability to restore his proper, personal perspective on what he’s listening.

As part of Cage/postmodern heredity, as a link between discovery, spontaneity and memory, Oxley self built set of percussions and Dixon half-valves, and sometimes electrified and manipulated extensions of sound through space, are one of the most important and conscious attempts coming from improvised music to put together an idea of expression related to the notion of individuality and self-discovery. Their album released in 2002 through label Victo featuring Cecil Taylor on piano, is one of the most delicate, intimate recordings featuring the pianist, in some way also destabilizing and uncanny, as reported in Kurt Gottshalk review of the record on AAJ website linked here above.

Related discography:

Bill Dixon in Italy - Vol. 1 (Black Saint, 1980)

Bill Dixon in Italy - Vol. 2 (Black Saint, 1980)

November 1981 (Black Saint, 1981)

Bill Dixon 1982 (Ferrari Gallery, 1982)

Thoughts (Black Saint, 1985)

Son of Sisyphus (Black Saint, 1988)

Vade Mecum (Black Saint, 1993)

Vade Mecum II (Black Saint, 1993)

Odyssey (self issued, 6 cd Box, 1996)

Papyrus - Vol. 1 (Black Saint, 1998)

Papyrus - Vol. 2 (Black Saint, 1998)

Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley (Victo, 2002)

[Part one, two and three. Fifth part coming soon]

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 …

Gunther 'Baby' Soemmer

Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Since I've Interviewed Matthew Shipp  two weeks ago, but not his partner for that date (which I also listened to in Paris last February, but I didn't reviewed on this blog), I want to spend some lines in presenting Mr. Gunther 'Baby' Soemmer, born in Dresden in 1943 where he's currently teaching drums and percussions. At the concert I bought some records (that aren't easily available in Italy where I'm currently living) that showed me, along with his live performances, an extremely multi-faceted musician.

But, let's start from the beginning. Gunther starts playing behind the Iron Courtain, in the Communist Era. His musical apprenticeship is partly influenced from an older friend with whom he listens to the BBC Radio broadcasts. So he listens to Art Blakey, Max Roach and Philly Joe Jones amongst others. 

In 1961 he starts a class of dance music and plays as much as he can. In the 1980's he join Western Europe, where Jost Gebers, who run the FMP Label, begin to document his music and collaborations. In 1988 Soemmer plays in Atalanta at a National Black Arts Festival with bassist Peter Kowald and trombonist Konrad Bauer; the trio also plays in Victoriaville Festival in 1992.

But 'Baby' (named after 'Baby' Face Willette) starts playing solo drums since the 1970s, crossing the path of the likes of Peter Brotzmann, Alexander Von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, Derek Bailey, Wilhelm Brueker, Han Bennink, and Misha Mengelberg, and also Cecil Taylor, and also Italian improvisers like Gianni Gebbia and Mario Schiano.

'Hörmusik' (from German, 'music to listen to'), is a set that Gunter plays behind a courtain (another one) in theater, as a matter of pure listening to music. The drums are invisible to the public and that is the concept that stays behind, as he states:

“As for the solo playing, I don’t feel like just a timekeeper percussionist, I’m listening to so many different types of music. For me the musical world is a global village and sometimes when I’m listening to an interesting music it remains in my body and then comes out transformed. So when I play real long solo concerts, sometimes I take you to Africa or somewhere else. It’s not the real original, but it’s something of this. I think about how to start them, how to end, and to have certain points I’m going to and from, that point to go in another direction. But what happens in between is up to the moment. I really try to bring in an order in terms of composition. Because this way improvisation is also a sort of ‘instant composing.’ You are playing and composing when you do it and you have to pay attention to all these things, like counterpoints, dynamics, slow & fast, to keep the whole thing in the right balance.”  (see the complete interview on Gongtopia Website)

Gunter 'Baby' Sommer has also collaborated with Nobel Prize winner Gunter Grass, the author of "The Tin Drum", kind of a surrealistic long novel that metaforically overlooks the entire history of Germany through the rise of Nazist dictatorship until the end of WWII. There is a double CD made of Gunter Grass reading chapters of The Tin Drum and  The Fish (another novel shorter than the first one) with Soemmer accompanying him on drums. 

Some Records:

Zentralquartett - 11 songs - Aus Teutschen Landen (Intakt Records, 2006)

Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky (alto, flute, clarinet); Conrad Bauer (trombone); Ulrich Gumpert (pian); Günter Sommer (drums, percussions).
This album proposes 11 Volkslieder, pupular songs from XV Century, plus a couple of Gumpert's originals (the pianist is responsible also for picking up and arranging the repertorie). Improvising over this kind of traditional structures gives the record a joyous and higly ironical tinge, along with pieces immersed in a meditative mood.


01. Der Alte Thüringer - 4:30; 02. Es Fiel Ein Reif - 7:44; 03. Kiekbush - 5:15; 04. Dat Du Min Leevsten Büst - 4:30; 05. Der Maie, Der Maie - 5:56; 06. Tanz Mir Nicht Mit Meiner Jungfer Käthen - 3:53; 07. Es Sass Ein Schneeweiss Vögelein - 2:18; 08. Kommt, Ihr G'spielen - 5:39; 09. Es Ritten Drei Reiter Zum Tore Hinaus - 4:22; 10. Conference At Conny's - 2:21; 11. Es War Ein König In Thule - 5:07



Gunter 'Baby' Sommer - Live in Jerusalem (Kadima Collective Recordings, 2009)

Gunter Baby Sommer (drums); Steve Horenstein (baritone, and soprano sax); Jean Claude Jones (bass); Assif Tsahar (tenor sax, bass clarinet); Yoni Silver (bass clarinet); Yonatan Albalak (guitar); Yonatan Kretzmer (tenor sax).

In 2004, bassist JC Jones, born in Sfax, Tunisia, founded Kadima Collective Recordings, in order to document new Israelian jazz movement. In this record, Gunter leads improavant most know israeli stars, including tenor saxophonist Assif Tsahar, in various lineups d(uos, trios and quartets). Thundering, challenging, and extroverted performances. Sommer solos on Sommertime, inspiring through the recordings (made at Kalima Music Salon in Jerusalem) the musicians playing with him. 

01. Bojoh - 6:02; 02. Jassek - 10:40; 03. Sommertime - 5:52; 04. Bast - 13.12; 05. Yo Yo Yo - 7:48; 06. Sababa - 6:20.


Gunter 'Baby' Sommer percussion & strings - Whispering Eurasia (Neos Jazz, 2010)

Gunda Gottschalk (violin); Xu Fengxia (guzheng/sanxian/voice); Akira Ando (double bass); Gunter Baby Sommer (percussion)

Xu Fengxia started playing traditional Chinese music on various intruments since when she was 5; during her career she joined the Shanghai Orchestra of Chinese Music, but spanning throughout the years, she played also pop and rock music as a bassist and, since 1990's she started playing jazz and improvisation, touring with Peter Kowald. This record is a beautiful example of mixing  tinges taken from different traditions in improvisational textures.

01. Jing Ye Si - ester Gedanke - 06:09 - 02. Cubus - 02:17 - 03. Stelline - 03:40 - 04: Inside - Outside - 04:20 - 05. Snack I - 01:15 - 06. Qui Ye Luo Ting - 07:50 - 07. Snack II - 01:38 - 08. Netzballe - 06.15 - 09. Snack III - 01:13 - 10. Silenda - 03:34 - 11. Snack - 01:05 - 12. Warabe Sobi - 02:13 - 13. Rumba Saxonia 05:31 - 14 Jing Ye Si - zweiter Gedanke - 05:23