On March 9, 2024, the date of birth
of Ornette Coleman, WKCR will broadcast all day for 24 hours (12.00 A.M. –
11.59 P.M.) the incredible music of the alto saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter,
composer and music theorist. Born in Forth Worth, Texas, in 1930, Ornette
Coleman revolutionized jazz starting from a cubist vision of bebop up to
harmolodics, his innovative music theory in which sounds are no more linked to a
tonal centre but free to develop themselves and progress according to the taste, culture and sensitivity of
the musicians.
Since the very beginning of his
career, despite the singability of the compositions included into his first
album Something Else!!!! (Contemporary, 1958), Coleman performances were
perceived as shocking by the jazz community, provoking event violent reactions
of rejection in other musicians. Drummer Max Roach as an example stated that
Ornette Coleman was ruining jazz, even if he played, later on, with musicians
associated with the free jazz revolution such as Cecil Taylor.
But Coleman, who played for his
entire career a plastic alto saxophone because of its microtones even if it was
more difficult to play than one made of brass, and his collaborators Don
Cherry, Scott La Faro, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins, were
convinced about the righteousness of their music vision, and decided to go on.
It was with Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (Atlantic, 1961) that the
shock widened thanks to the use of a double quartet, one led by Coleman and the
other by Eric Dolphy.
Coleman career and discography are
full of such moments of redefinition of a musical genre such as jazz. From the
percussions of the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Dancing in Your Head
(Horizon, 1977), to the orchestrations of Skies of America (Columbia, 1972)
featuring a long composition played by the London Symphony Orchestra, from Song
X (Geffen, 1096) realized with the help of Pat Metheny to the experimentations
on behalf of Yoko Ono, Lou Reed and The Grateful Dead, the music of Ornette
Coleman is under the sign of experimentation and adventure.
Those willing to celebrate, next
Saturday, the anniversary of Coleman birthday, would certainly connect to WKCR in order to enjoy a full day of
incredible music.
“It’s time to feel what’s really happening” is
what you can find written on the inside cover of Anohni’s last album. Produced
by Jimmy Hogarth – James Blunt, Duffy, Amy Winehouse – and with the features of
a fully defined soul or r’n’b record – with the notable exception of the noisy
Hendrixian guitars of Go Ahead – this new album, the first in seven years and
the first published by Rough Trade, is possibly the transgender people’s What’s
Going On.
If Marvin Gaye with his materpiece in 1971 gave
voice to a generation of African Americans who were coping with the Vietnam
War, social injustice and the then rising ecological consciousness, this album
by Anohni is the transgender version of it all, starting from the image put on
the cover, a beautiful and intense portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, one of the
very first hystorical transgender activists along with Sylvia Rivera and a few
others.
Marsha ‘Pay No Mind’ Johnson was a gender
non-conforming activist for her entire life. She was defining herself as ‘drag
queen’, and she fought for the rights of the LGBTQIAP+ community. One of the
pivotal figures of the famous Stonewall riots in 1969, she subsequently gave
life to the STAR, the ‘Street Transvestite, Action Revolutionaries’
association. Openly keen on decriminalising sex work and raising awareness on
the problem of AIDS disease, she was found finally dead on the Hudson river in
1992.
Police labeled her death as suicide, but the
investigation opened in 2012 by pressure of the activist Maria Lopez led to a
sentence of ‘possible homicide’. Since 2017 you can view a documentary by
Victoria Cruz titled The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. Having her
potrait as cover for this album is one of the strongest, political act you’ll
find by every artist this year.
Anohni, discovered as an artist by Lou Reed and
hosted first in his album The Raven (Sire, 2003) with other important guests
such as saxophonist Ornette Coleman, rose in popularity thanks to her first
albums issued by the label Secretly Canadian such as I’m a Bird Now (2005) and
The Crying Light (2009). Lately involved in rediscovering electronic and disco
music for such a project as Hopelessness (2016), her new passage to classical
soul music shows us a mature and reliable artist.
It Must Change can be taken as a call to arms
as the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece, with its determined rhythm and
the voice that spreads the wings of a confrontational but sympathetic singing.
Go Ahead is reminiscent of Hendrix’ Star Spangled Banner version at Woodstock,
another invitation to the good fight, while Sliver of Ice, the album first
single, is a classical, touchy torch song – the political and the private, they
said in those days.
Can’t sees electric guitars again at the
forefront, with a sympathetic orchestration in the background, with Anohny and
her voice just in the middle of it all and a nice horn section becoming
preeminent with the progressing of the song, all completed by a nice clarinet
solo intertwined in the song’s structure. Scapegoat is possibly the emotional
center of the album, a song about people being hated and victimised for no
personal reasons but only because they’re born as such, better said because of
patriarchy rules in the end.
Cymbals baste a fragile rhythm while electric
guitars give life to a frail and subsequenlty hymnodic melody. Being a
scapegoat can be liberating for many people misusing you. It’s My Fault is the
prosecution, emotionally speaking, and it talks about when you feel guilty for
being harrassed or hit even not phisically by the strokes of life, as it were
what you deserve, or maybe it’s only about when you feel guilty for the end of
a relationship. Maybe both things. Guitar mimicks the vocal inflections here.
Rest is another slow and long, touchy ballad, full of an epic tinge.
There Wasn’ Enough is another arpeggioed guitar
and voice (there are two different voice layers superimposed the one to the
other) ballad about the end of a relationship, with the invitation to ‘move
forward into gray’, while Why I Am Alive Now? is a
melody for piano, with the guitar creating a gentle rhythm over the hinted
percussions and Anohni’s voice complaining about the harshness of the world
both from a romantic and a political point of view.
You Be Free is finally, after the
orchestrations reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s album, the last ballad, in which
Anohni poses her life as a bridge for other people to cross and live a freer
life. In a moment in which history seem to become excluded in our lives for an
eternal present, mutuated by commercials and the social networks, Anohni in a
way has, as African Americans like James Baldwin and other minorities’
intellectuals like Paul B. Preciado, the sensation of being part of a community
and a well determined history. And that’s one of the reason we love her and her
beautiful music.
“[...]
Being connected with children as I have in my life, I feel that it’s important
to keep this alive, this fantasy. [...]What is reality? What is fantasy?” Don Cherry, March 12, 1970
Born in Oklahoma City (Oklahoma) in 1936,
Don Cherry is well known as the trumpet player of Ornette Coleman during his
successful attempts to revolutionize jazz music. Mind, my readers: we won’t
discuss here the principles of harmolodics, thing we hope we’ll face in the
future, even if we’ll talk diffusely about the records our two heroes gave life
together. For the moment it is important to stress that, if Coleman played a
plastic saxophone in order to utilize the microtones – do you remember what we
were discussing some
months ago when talking about soprano saxophones and straight horns? – to
create a freer music in comparison to bebop and the previous jazz music, Cherry
used a pocket trumpet, an instrument with a nasal and a less chrystalline sound
than an usual trumpet.
One thing that always hit me when I think about
Coleman and Cherry’s instrumental choices, and an example I want to use to
explain myself better, is that of those photographers who, in the digital i.e.
in an extremely precise era, go back to Polaroids and toy cameras. Leaving some
processes to the accident, to a form of creative chaos – as the saturation of
colors, the impossibility to control contrast through different films and papers
or, in the case of music, the difficulty in controlling instruments that are
not thought to be heavily precise – is a good way to play a music in which
there is no wrong note in a given process since it depends from what will
follow.
So, what Coleman and Cherry were trying to
obtain was an extreme freedom starting from extreme constrictions. If Something
Else!!!, the first album by Ornette Coleman (Contemporary, 1958) shocked the
audience of that time for its extreme freedom, it is true that it is an album
full of beautiful, recognizable and memorable melodies. Mind about Jayne, third
track of the album: trumpet and alto go at a nice unison before soloing, with
Coleman producing himself in his typical ‘laughters’ before playing a melody
with an undefined and mocking tonal center.
Things change a little with the following album
Tomorrow is The Question! (Contemporary, 1959) where piano is excluded from the
palette, which increases in tonal and harmonic freedom. Coleman is taking bebop
revolution to its extreme. If Charlie Parker and his peers were playing with
dissonances resolution trying to give life to a more and more complex game,
defying the listener and the other musicians involved, the music of Ornette
Coleman instead is prone to give into new directions.
Once John Coltrane, a Parker’s enthousiast
during his younger age and a contemporary of Coleman,told an interviewer that he was, during his ‘sheets of sound
period’, trying to express one sentence going in two different directions at
once; Coleman himself wanted to reach with his music every possible direction.
What we have here is a conscious attempt to go beyond the limits of an
intellectual experience as bebop became in the end, trying to open new paths to
the musicians who wanted to follow this new road even if at risk of not being
understood.
There’s in fact a huge tradition of musicians
who not only did not dig Ornette Coleman’s idea and practice of music, but also
a great quantity of musicians who imagined the jazz Coleman and Cherry were
creating was only a sum of incoherent, unrepeteable melodic lines in which
dissonance had the effect of destroying the musicians ability to change chords
and play with different intonations. Coleman music was taken by many – by
Charles Mingus as an example: take for instance his interviews contained into
the book Mingus Speaks by John F. Goodman where the bassist and composer talks
diffusely about the music of Albert Ayler and others – as an attack to the
seriousness and complexity of music itself.
If we try to observe better how things
happened, we will notice, instead, that a huge amount of musicians from the end
of the 1950s until the end of the following decade dedicated their energies to
sort out of the shallows of a more and more intellectual drift in order to
obtain always more freedom of expression. Albery Ayler with his ‘speaking in
tongues’ melodies, Coltrane with his ‘sheets of sound’ and then with his
collaboration with Pharoah Sanders in order to obtain the unpredictability of a
music driven by two different musicians instead of one, Archie Shepp with his
rawness and fierceness, and so on.
Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry gave life to a
music that conveyed different emotions, as one can feel listening to his most
known composition, Lonely Woman, that opens his third album The Shape of Jazz
To Come (Atlantic, 1959) where a simple and again memorable melody is played
through a rough and raucous style in order to create some anguish, as in the
famous picture The Scream by Edvard Munch. A nightmarish urban solitude is what
we can approach through Coleman way of playing. Don Cherry, on the other hand,
with his graspy and anti-crystalline sound is the perfect, crackling partner
for the altoist and composer.
And even if tracks like Peace and Focus on
Sanity are less anguishing, the unpredictability of where the horns will go was
leaving the linstener of that time with a potent sense of disorientation.
Things are going even worse – but we prefer to say: even deeper – with Free
Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), an album where two quartets, one led by Coleman and the
other led by his friend and pivotal figure of that time Eric
Dolphy, are intersecting each other in a disorientating stream of
consciousness of about 37 minutes.
Notably, the previous album This is Our Music
(Atlantic, 1960) features a Coleman composition titled Beauty is a Rare Thing
that in a way anticipates the trumpeter’s future enterprises as you can hear
through Mu, a collection of two LPs issued by Actuel in 1969. But let’s keep on
following the tracks in the right order. Obviously Ornette Coleman’s music not
only encountered solid oppositions, but also arose curiosity at a point in which
another contrasted innovator, the above nominated John Coltrane, in 1961 wanted
to record an entire album of Coleman compositions alongside with his partners
Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Percy Heath and Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed
Blackwell on drums.
Listening to the album The Avant Garde released
by Atlantic is a strange experience. One can hear Coltrane trying to fit
Coleman melodies with his peculiar style, not following harmolodic rules –
harmolodics is the name of the music theory Coleman gave shape through his
playing and thinking – but his own path. In a way this is comprehensible since
no jazz musician can play as someone else and everybody has to stay as close as
possible to his or her world of reference, but in another way this album seem to
me as a wasted opportunity since there is not a real encounter between Coleman
and Coltrane worlds, only a juxtaposition of compositions and styles into one
album.
Anyway, soon Don Cherry started figuring out
how his own music would sound, and soon he signed a contract with Blue Note
producing his own trilogy in which one can hear how playing with two giants
saxophonists helped him developing his own conception of art. Cherry’s trilogy
embodying Complete Communion (Blue Note, 1965), Symphony for Improvisers (1966)
and Where is Brooklyn? (1967) is one of the most accomplished statements in the
realm of improvised music.
The concept is similar for each of the three
records: there is a theme introducing a ‘tutti’, a unison, and then there is
place for every soloist in order to express himself. If Complete Communion,
featuring Gato Barbieri on tenor, Henry Grimes (from Albert Ayler combos) on
bass and Ed Blackwell on drums, divided into two different parts, one for each
LP side, it’s the most airy and catchy, relatively speaking, while the ending
of the trilogy is left to the most newyorican, groovy and nervous Where is
Brooklin?, where Cherry is supported by Pharoah Sanders, increasing his debt
with Trane idea of sound and music.
Symphony for Improvisers, the album that stays
in the middle of the trilogy, is possibly the most complex. The line up is
comprised of Cherry on pocket trumpet, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri, Henry
Grimes, Karl Berger on piano and vibraphone – possibly after the removal of
these melodic instruments from the Coleman groups Cherry would love to know how
they could be reintegrated into the music without loosing that peculiar stream
of consciousness his pal gave life to – and the resulting music is aggressive,
intimate and fluent at the same time.
Another couple of collaborations we have to
mention are Charlie Haden project of the Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse!,
1969), where Cherry is present with both his pocket trumpet and a flute, giving
life to a melange between the songs the Hispanic anarchists were singing
between their courageous battles against the army of Francisco Franco and more
free jazz oriented parts, and the previous album recorded by the New York
Contemporary Five with Archie Shepp (Sonet, 1964), where Cherry, Shepp on
tenor, altoist John Tchicai, bassist Don Moore and drummer J.C. Moses give life
to a music devoted to Coleman’s and Monk’s heritage.
But Cherry is the kind of person who don’t
sleep on other people’s music theories, and by 1968-69 he starts exploring new
territories in music, thanks also to a fruitful collaboration with Terry
Riley, giving life to a previously unheard mix of improvised, ethnic music,
art rock and psychedelia (not all the subgenres are always present together in
the same project, but they convey into Cherry’s music as far as their essence,
leaving every album and every project free to develop where the particular
moment and musicians involved can make the sound fluorish).
More theatrical than his previous music, as one
can see through different live performances recorded live and reproducible
online, Don Cherry’s new path will be harshly absorbed by jazz intellighentzja,
but important tracks will be visible in artists like Sergeij
Kuryiokhin, a musician we talked diffusely last year. Mu – First Part and
Mu – Second Part (BYG, 1969 and 1970) are possibly Cherry masterpieces,
together with Symphony for Improvisers. Featuring the trumpeter accompanied
only by Ed Blackwell on drums in a series of beautiful duets where Don Cherry
plays time after time his pocket trumpet, a bamboo flute, piano, his own voice
and a series of small percussions, this couple of records helped the musician
in finding his own most personal voice.
Not ascribable exclusively to the realm of
improvised music nor to that of exotic or world music but living a life of its
own somewhere in the middle, this music is the higher point in Cherry’s career,
not easily replicable as the less accomplished El Corazon (ECM, 1982) will show
and an inspirational source for musicians to come, as the double CD Piercing
The Veil (AUM Fidelity, 2007) by Cherry’s enthousiasts bassist William Parker
and drummer Hamid Drake will show you.
Don Cherry’s releases at this point in his
career become discontinuous and sometimes repetitive even if in a way
fascinating. Orient and Blue Lake (both BYG, 1971) are attempts to broaden the
landscape adding tampoura – played by his wife Moqi Cherry – and other
instruments to the palette of the two Mu, but partly for the repetition of some
formulas partly because of a lesser compelling inspiration the result is
discontinuous.
A fascinating result is, instead, Brown Rice
(Horizon, 1975) where Cherry, at his own pocket trumpet and also at Yamaha
keyboards is accompanied by Frank Lowe on tenor saxophone, Charlie Haden on
bass, Billy Higgins on drums and Ricky Cherry at acoustic and electric piano,
giving live to a music similar to the so called krautrock explored in the same
years by Can – raised by Irmin Schmidt, a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen,
where psychedelia and trance are scratched by Lowe’s statements and sweetened
by Don’s caressing but at the same time determined voice.
During his last years, Cherry’s music was
issued by Manfred Eicher’s ECM, a label famous for his peculiar sound design:
Cherry encountered old friends like Charlie Haden and new accolites like
percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, producing a less adventuros but better recorded
music coherently in line with his Theatre of Eternal Music idea. Passed away on
October 19, 1995, Cherry’s music is one of the most intriguing and personal statements
of one of the most creative of XX Century.
Sufi poetry and music has a noble and
long tradition. Sufism is the exstatic and mystic faction of Islam. Few decades
ago, Syrian poet Adonis wrote an intriguing essay titled On Sufism and
Surrealsim where he compared the twos, assuming that the poems of Rumi and
those of Bréton have many things in common. It is not my intention to summarize
the essay here, but I want only you to be conscious about the fact that letting
our inner self speak is not easy but important, since our rational part is only
a small percentage of our abilities.
Having composed a little surrealistic poems
myself and for myself, I can deeply understand that, even if our science is
nowadays criticizing the idea of a ‘subconscious’ that psychoanalisis posed as
angular rock of its exploration of the mind, there’s something hidden into
ourselves that social life and rationality try sometimes to hide from our
conscience. This hidden part is strictly related to our desires. I remember, as
an example, that sensation of hunger and sexual desire I felt before I ended my
first painting (horrible as it was, being my first attempt, but this is not the
point). Gentle feelinga, not related to the phenomenon of craving as it happens
to you when smoking a joint.
Obviously Sufi music is not related to desire,
but if you read Rumi poems, being near to God is quite often comparted to be
near a beautiful lover, or to being drunk from love. Sufi music, instead, is varied
and you can find different kind of music with different kind of intent. Sufi
music from Morocco, called Jbala, is a particular style whose goal is to induce
into the listener, with performances during many days, a state of trance, in
particular related to the loss of the sense of time.
The psychedelic qualities of the music of the
Sufi from Joujouka hit for sure the first journalists that from the 1950s on
started to testify their existance. At the same time, the following decade, the
same qualities attracted both Brian Jones from The Rolling Stones and Beat
poets like Paul Bowles, William S. Burrooughs and Bryon Gysin. After being
introduced to the world by Jones himself who issued the album Brian Jones
Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971) and their following collavoration
with Ornette Coleman for the album Dancing In Your Head (1977), the group of
musicians started to being recognized all around the world.
In a way anticipating the so called ‘world
music’ along with other pioneers discovered in the Flower Power era as Ravi
Shankar, the Master Musicians of Joujouka recorded many record and toured
throughout the entire world before splitting. In fact, in the early 1990s two
groups were nowadays residing in the small village of Joujouka: the ‘original’
Master Musicians of Joujouka and the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir
Attar, the son of the leader of the band during the 1960. Obviously it is harsh
to understand what is the original or the best band from the twos.
In fact, both contaminated themselves with the
world of contemporary music: the “Joujouka” masters played with Jarvis Cocker
and The Orb, while the “Jajouka” were produced at least in one of their albums
by Bill Laswell. So in this post we’re gonna describe last album issued, this
year, by the second combo, titled “Dancing Under The Moon”. Produced by Jacopo
Andreini, drummer of the post punk Italian-French band L’Enfance Rouge (one of
my favourite groups ever apart from jazz music), and featuring a booklet full
of photos from the sessions and liner notes by the famous journalist Stephen
Davis, author of books about Led Zeppelin and Jim Morrison, the album foresee
sessions recorded on November 2019.
The band is comprised of seven members playing
different instruments as ghaita (a double-reed flute), guinbri (a large plucked half-spike lute), lira (a crossbar lute) ,
violin, and different types of percussions. There are pieces of music where the
percussions are widely spreaded as in Dancing In Your Mind, or where a sweet
flute and the lutes introduce a crescendo as in The Bird Prays For Allah, and
other where singing is on the foreground as in Yes, Yes, Be Patient My Heart.
As I can understand through the titles of the pieces, the themes are the
classic sufi themes: the love of God, the chant of love from nature, being
‘intoxicated’ or exaltedby the love of
God himself.
Don’t be surprised to read about such music in
a blog related to jazz and improvised music. On one hand, these musicians
played with a jazz master like Ornette Coleman in one of his most beautiful
records, on the other hand this music deserves to be recognized since I truly
believe that music can root all human beings into another dimension from where
we can go back with new tools and skills in order to improve our world. You
don’t need to believe in God for that, it is enough to look at the climate
change and the war to get how much we need a new way of thinking.
Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane at the Village Gate 1961
"Whatever I'd say
would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by
knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever
known, as a man, a friend, and a musician." (John Coltrane)
48 years after his death, Eric
Dolphy’s discography is available almost in its entirety, and if his first
wide appearance on a book is possibly an interview reported on
1971 in Black
Nationalism and the Revolution in Music by American Marxist historian
Frank Kofsky, in 2008 Guillome Belhomme issued his Eric Dolphy (Le Mot et Le Reste, ser. Formes).
Four years
before Sardinian Festival ‘Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz’ issued, in
partnership with the cultural association Punta Giara, Tender
Warrior: L’eredità di Eric Dolphy, accompanied by a CD containing a
previously unissued Strenght and Unity
along with other tracks featuring Tim Berne, Tiziano Tononi’s Nexus, MatthewShipp and David S. Ware. Again, in 2006 Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz
Orchestra, featuring trumpeter Axel Doerner, sinewaver Sachiko M., baritonist
Mats Gustaffson, multireedist Alfred Harth and circuit bender Toshimaru
Nakamura ferried Dolphy’s last creative effort on a new perspective.
On the
other hand, as the record butifully testify, it seems that Los Angeles
multi-reedist’s music is badly suitable for a mere re-enactment: if you start to
listen to a record as Out There (Prestige,
1961) you’ll find out how much his concept and practice of music is far out, as we’ll see.
"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again." (Eric Dolphy)
Los Angeles, 1954. Saxophonist John Coltrane was
loosing his engagement with Johnny Hodges. Before the tenorist got rid of his
drugs habits later on in 1957, deeply involving himself in developing his new
music, he experienced the difficulties of handling a career between self
destructive pushes and more creative efforts, even way before being hired and
fired by Miles Davis more than once.
That was
the first occasion the saxophonist met Dolphy, who lented him enough money to leave and get
on the West Coast. On same year's September, Trane was playing again with the local Mop
Dudley and his Collates, at the cross of 13th and Poplar, Philadelphia, trying to
managing his musician’s career as a freelancer. In 1959 John’s cousin, Mary, moved to New York, being into a
relationship with trombonist Charles Greenlee. They lived in a house in
Brooklyn, on 245, Carlton Avenue, belonging to Slide Hampton.
In that
house lived for a while also trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, guitarist Wes
Montgomery, saxophonist Eric Dolphy and Richard ‘The Prophet’ Jennings, a
painter responsible for Dolphy’s first albums surrealistic covers. Dolphy’s influence
on the more famous fellow became evident with time. At a certain
point, Coltrane stopped playing soprano, and started playing flute (as on the
album Expressions, Impulse!, 1965) so
to enrich his palette of colours.
But
influences and relationships between Coltrane and Dolphy, despite their strong
friendship, reciprocal esteem and artistic partnership, were of a different
nature in comparison with the coherent flowing of one’s music into the other
that had place with Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus with the altoist. Nonetheless,
they were important and rich of fully enjoyable results. Trane and Dolphy first
session was on May 23, 1961, for the tenor first Impulse! album, Africa/Brass.
An attempt
to epithomize Trane’s efforts to date with his new quartet, with Jones polyrhythms,
the bass of Reggie Workman doubled by Paul Chambers and Art Davis on the Africa takes, and the orchestra (featuring
trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little, trombonist Julian Priester, Eric
Dolphy on alto, flute and bass clarinet, and Pat Patrick on baritone saxophone)
enriching the quartet sound with a brassy, warm touch, it was followed by
another pair of records that same year.
On the
original Africa/Brass sleeve notes,
the arrangements provided for Greensleeves
were attributed to Dolphy, but, as McCoy Tyner explained (R. Coleman, The Real McCoy, Melody Maker, Jul. 18,
1964), Coltrane asked the pianist to write them down, while Dolphy was ‘copying my voicings’. All the arrangements were
coming out of Tyner’s compings.
John
Coltrane himself confirmed this last version (Clouzet/Delorme, Entretien avec John Coltrane, 1963). In
fact, as Eric himself reported, “John
thought of this sound. He wanted brass, he wanted baritone horns, he wanted that
mellow sound and power”. But the only soloists on the sessions recorded by Creed Taylor at the Rudy
Van Gelder studios were the quartet members, with the brass section (including
Dolphy) limited to orchestral accompaniment on the background.
The second
take of Africa
is provided by some counterpoint going towards a more expressionistic attitude;
even the double basses are underlining some passages with strong bowed
interventions. The piece, focused entirely on a pedal point bass, more than on
the beat and the classical 4/4 propulsion, was given a different
plasticity, and is part of the constant evolution of Coltrane’s music.
Miles Davis and Gil Evans in Columbia Studios, 1959
This
evolution will lead Coltrane around 1964 and 1965 to a constant decreasing of the use of chord
progressions, while the use of bass pedal points was becoming the most part of the music structure. This direction is a consequence of Trane’s partnership with
Miles Davis since 1958 – producing notably records like Milestones (Columbia, 1959) and Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Here, the trumpeter and the pianist/composer were
developing modality, in short a way to get out of the bebop harmonic complexity
and to enjoy a new, wider and freer melodic framing, using modes instead of
chord changes as a framework for the compositions.
While
further developments of music led free jazz to focus towards polyphony as far
as approaching the melody, Davis’ Kind of
Blue and Trane’s Impressions (Impulse!,
1961)are considered the first
accomplished results of the modal approach, and even if the concept was firstly developed by pianist
George Russell, with whom Davis had some discussions even before his 1949
sessions for the album Birth of the Cool,
it’s interesting that, if Miles Davis from 1968 onwards pushed forward the use of
rhythmic patterns and colors shifting of On
The Corner, working also extensively on pedal points as Coltrane from 1961
on, the music of Eric Dolphy moves from different territories.
This is
clearly audible trough a listening to Coltrane’s India,
recorded live at the Village Vanguard on November 3, 1961, and released on the
album Impressions. While
Garrison, Tyner and Workman are providing sparse punctuations centered around a
G major, echoing a tampoura-like drone, Trane solo on soprano is following a
modal-rooted horizontal development, in some way forcing Dolphy to let off his
intervallic practice on his bass clarinet.
Unluckily,
Dolphy interventions with Coltrane’s quartet as also on the Live at the Village Vanguard
rendition of Spiritual, opening track
for the album recorded on the NY club, taste more or less like sketches, if taken
on their own complex. Dolphy was gifted with a beautiful, rough and warm voice,
making out of him the perfect partner for the likes of Charles Mingus and
Ornette Coleman, but Trane’s music, even if their meetings are fully enjoyable
and organic, having nothing of a pure mashup, they are far from a full,
complete integration of their directions and further developments of composition and improvisation.
Elvin Jones and Eric Dolphy
“That's got to be Eric Dolphy - nobody else could sound that bad! The next time I see him I'm going to step on his foot. You print that. I think he's ridiculous. He's a sad motherfucker. […] It's a sad record, and it's the record company's fault again. I didn't like the trumpet player's tone, and he don't do nothing. The running is all right if you're going to play that way, like Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan; but you've got to inject something, and you've got to have the rhythm section along; you just can't keep on playing all eighth notes. The piano player's sad. You have to think when you play; you have to help each other - you just can't play for yourself. You've got to play with whomever you're playing. If I'm playing with Basie, I'm going to try to help what he's doing - that particular feeling.”
(Miles Davis on Eric Dolphy Mary Ann, from the album Far Cry - Blindfold test by Leonard Feather, on Downbeat, June 1964)
Miles Davis with Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums
It is
improper to say that Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy never met musically, or that
they were two complete different worlds. Ron Carter, Davis bassist on his second quintet, played
cello on Out There. On Dolphy’s
recognized masterpiece Out To Lunch!
(Blue Note, 1964), the drummer is Tony Williams – as on Andrew Hill Point of Departure, another recognized
milestone of Bue Note's mid-'60s modernistic approach to post-bop. And Herbie Hancock
is on piano on the previous year live album The
Illinois Concert (Blue Note, 1963).
Thelonious Monk at the Town Hall, NY, 1959
On a book
published in Italy on 2004 (“Tender
Warrior – L’eredità di Eric Dolphy”, 2004), Italian journalist Claudio Sessa made a brilliant
comparison between Dolphy and Thelonious Monk: “Monk is for bebop what Dolphy was to free jazz; both are
substantially foreigners to the ‘genres’ they are generally associated with,
even if they use some grammar elements and above all they love to work side by
side with their major representative figures, recognizing their instrumental
and expressive abilities, compatibles with their difficult aesthetics.”.
Miles Davis reenactment of ‘Round About Midnight’ on his first 1954 Columbia record testify a similar effort to push himself ahead of the common bebop aesthetics and chops, a common ground that is really helpful to understand, through a
comparison of the way Davis and Dolphy were using the same sidemen, their further
developments.
Take for
instance Eighty One, from Miles Davis
E.S.P. album (Columbia, 1965), that is also the starting
point for Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage
composition. At this moment in time, Davis’ music is developing involving rhythm shiftings, and if on Nefertiti, a
couple of years later, his trumpet and Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone are repeating the melody, while drums, piano and bass are drawing
continuously changing layers of different colors, anticipating the innovations
that will lead him to develop a music in which rhythm patterns and their
permutations will definitely replace harmony and melody as its primal coordinates the same way
composer Karlheinz Stockhausen did with his Telemusik
and Mixtur, on this 1965 piece Tony
Williams rhythmic shiftings between bogaloo and swing, over which Davis draw
his statements passing sinuously through them, are an anticipation of those further
developments.
Five years
before, on August 15, 1960, Eric Dolphy, Ron Carter on cello, bassist George
Duvivier and drummer Roy Haynes recorded at Van Gelder Studio Out There, second Dolphy’s album as a
leader. While the previous Outward Bound (Prestige,
1960) was still featuring the standard bebop line up (two horns, bass, drums
and piano), containing also some standards as On Green Dolphin Street and Glad
to be Unhappy, its follow up features four original compositions, mingusian
Eclipse, Out There composed by both multireedist and bassist, Randy Weston’s
Sketches of Melba and Hale Smith’s –
a composer Dolphy was particularly impressed with since when playing with Chico
Hamilton – Feathers, gifted by a
guitar-like cello accompanying the flute.
If with the
previous record Dolphy still showed to own a practice of harmonic intervals that is a
full octave wider than Charlie Parker’s, gaining because of his restructuralist attitude comparisons by music journalists with Ornette Coleman he would be bug with very soon, Out There sees Cuernavaca’s born bassist influence becoming heavy,
without the album balance being compromise. One month before, on July 13,
Dolphy was playing at the Antibes Jazz Festival in Juan-Les-Pins, France, with a quintet featuring Mingus, Ted Curson on trumpet, Booker Ervin on tenor, Dennie Richmond on drums and featuring Bud Powell on piano as special guest, anticipating with
his bass clarinet solo on What Love his
spectacularly fitting, abstract, harsh, abrasive and almost humorous approach
to the October 20 sessions issued by Candid on Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus.
Clifford Jordan, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Dannie Richmond, 1964
Sparse
tracks of this approach are available through second Dolphy’s effort as a
leader on The Baron, a composition
dedicated to the fellow, with Haynes and Duvivier pulsing around a vamp figure while Eric’s bass
clarinet and Carter’s arco are following each other. Eclipse, a composition Mingus recorded for the first time on a 1953
Debut album, was originally written for Billie Holiday as a response to Strange Fruit; refused by the
singer, the piece is melodically convoluted, and reminds of Schoenberg’s chromaticisms.
In his entirety, Out There is a
fearless and atypical exploration of tonality since the opening, daring
title-track thorugh the lyrical, gritty harshness of Feathers’ intro.
“There is so much to be gained by examining
Eric Dolphy specifically as a composer. […] Certainly, his efforts as an
improviser and instrumental performer are interwoven, and ultimately
inseparable, with his activities in composition. […] he worked with a
remarkably broad vocabulary, […] His compositions show arguably a greater
interest the potential of form and structure than that of non-structured
environments.”
(Graham Connah, Eric Dolphy, The Composer)
Born in Los Angeles, a city that
since the end of WWII hosted composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinskji,
in his youth Eric Dolphy shared a junior college bandstand with minimalist
composer La Monte Young.
In his compositions he was taking the classic blues and AABA forms together
with twelve-tone row and odd metered repeating vamps. G.W., from Outward Bound
(Prestige, 1960) opens with a major 7th interval, resulting from a
combination of an A-flat in the bass with a G played by alto sax and a F-sharp
played by trumpet.
A
polychord, or a standard major chord with an extra dissonant note, an
exploration of unorthodox harmonies putting him on the same level of George Russell and Don Ellis in a period in which Ornette Coleman was putting the
stress on the primacy of melody. Dolphy on his own, as Graham Connah underlined
in his writing, is something of an ‘expansionist’, using intervals paying
attention to their invertability and multifunctionality, and at the same time
an indicator of his interest in the sounds of nature, as clearly audible by the
way he plays the flute.
Influenced also
by Italian contemporary flutist Severino Gazzelloni, met during Darmstadt summer
courses and one of the favorite interpreters of composer Luciano
Berio – we’re on the ground of post-serialism, with Berio’s 1958 Sequenza for solo flute as one of its
accomplished, virtuosistic examples – Dolphy’s interest in free jazz,
orchestral development of modality – see Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth (Impulse!, 1961), and contemporary avant garde music shows a restless and
feverish research for the right instrument to express his music in the most proper way: “I want to say more on my
horn, than I ever could through ordinary speech”.
Founded in
NYC in 1960 as subsidiary of Cadence, and featuring writer and civil libertarian NatHenthoff as A&R manager and co-designer for the album covers with
photographer Frank Gauna, Candid Label was the pure expression of the jazz
avant-garde and of the civil right movements of the decade. Max Roach’s We Insist: Freedom Now! Suite, Cecil
Taylor and Steve Lacy important albums were documented as Abbey Lincoln, Booker
Little, Booker Ervin efforts, before Candid’s closing in 1961. Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (Candid, 1960) can be considered as
an important, accomplished step ahead in the development of bassist approach to small combos as Atlantic 1956 Pithecanthropus Erectus.
While the
latter was characterized by altoist Jackie Mc Lean as Mingus creative and
fulfilling alter ego, listening to the former is clearly evident that Eric
Dolphy changed over; if the
transfiguration of a classic Gershwin tune as A Foggy Day (In San Francisco) on the 1956 record features the two
horns mimicking the traffic of the Big Apple, on the independently recorded new
album the standard What is this Thing
called Love becomes What Love,
whose pairing melody by Ted Curson and Dolphy develops into a meditative,
Spanish-tiged lyrical trumpet solo, surrounded by bass and alto clarinet
counterpoint, before being driven into one of the Mingus' favorite treatments.
Tempo suddenly fastens and then freezes, or stops, leaving the soloists free in turn to insert diverting phrases, short, ironic quotes out of different songs, or affordances typical of
Mingus modus operandi in which some phrases are taken from one section into
another, and one of the most vivid dialogues between Dolphy and Mingus, both trying to
imitate the human voice.
Folk Forms, at his second recording after the three
months before performance featured on Live
at the Antibes (posthumously issued by Atlantic in 1979 and presenting a still progressing integration between the two musicians moods and characters), makes clear Mingus
idea of polyphony, that similarly to the New Orleans’ doesn’t have a primary
reference voice and is overflowing straight to the solos, always developed as a
dialogue or having another instrument on the background. Not by chance the twos were so much similar that with time their performances together will be more and more deeply marked by an almost telepathic feeling and aim sharing.
Two months
after this sessions, and Eric Dolphy is taking part, accompanied by Don Cherry
and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, bassists Scott La Faro and Charlie Haden, and
with Ed Backwell and Billy Higgins behind the drums, to the A&R Studio terms that will lead to Ornette Coleman’s
masterpiece Free Jazz, issued by
Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun brothers label on September 1961.
Originally
provided by a beautiful clapper cover containing a reproduction of Jackson
Pollock’s White Light, the 37 minutes
of collective improvisation on the record have more than a similarity with the painter’s
dripping techniques. Pollock used to let the colors flow directly from the
brushes on the canvas layed down to the floor, trying to give a balance to what
was under his direct control – his body, and the dripping itself, the gravity
and the way the canvas was soaking the color.
During the
sessions, Ornette Coleman divided the musicians in two quartets, taking Cherry,
LaFaro and Higgins by his side, while prividing before playing the musicians some reference points through which let the music flow.
As Gunther Schuller explains in his liner notes for the 1998 reissue of the
record, Free Jazz is composed by six
major sections flowing without interruption. Coleman, in order to lead each
section, devised three types of ideas: “1)
a brassy, atonal polyphonic flourish, heard at the very beginning of the
performance and again several times toward the end; 2) a sustained atonal,
multivoiced choralelike series of notes; 3) a unison ensemble line […] the
musicians were admonished to avoid any recognizable elements sneaking in – tune
fragments, quotations, tonal reminiscences, familiar riffs”.
Don Cherry with Ornette Coleman at the Five Spots, November 1959
While every
musician is at the same time leading and supporting the music – what Ornette
referred to as ‘harmonic unison’ – with the bassist walking on the middle (LaFaro)
and low (Haden) registries, listening to the first take of the recording it is
clearly audible that, after the collective entry, Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet
is more coherent with his usual harmonic and timbric clichés, as we heard through
his previous works. Listening to the master take after that, it is almost
surprising how much his inflections and tonalities have become almost
‘harmolodic’. His journey through music shows how much his penetrability to his
partners music can easily and amazingly turn into suppleness without any lack
of personal expressivity.
It’s time
to get back some months. It is July 16, and Rudy Van Gelder is about to record
live, at the Five Spot – the same club that in 1957 hosted Thelonious Monk with
John Coltrane, and first NY meetings of Don Cherry with Ornette in 1959 – a quintet featuring Eric Dolphy with Booker Little on trumpet,
Mal Waldron on piano, Richard Davis on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums.
Dolphy had
left Mingus groups some months before, while his sharing the lights with Coltrane led both to be in charge with Down Beat columnist Leonard Feather of being ‘anti-jazz’. And if the two musicians will answer directly from the
columns of April 1962 issue of the magazine, this summer 1961’s was Dolphy’s
first regular enlistment since then. Shared through three different records by
Prestige (At the Five Spot Voll. 1 & 2, and Memorial Album), the music contained here is an attempt to
summarize Dolphy’s previous experiences nowadays.
Booker
Little, that sadly died on October that same year and is present with Dolphy
on his Candid’s Out Front (1961) release,
was recognized, also for the efforts of Nat Hentoff, as an innovator on his instrument, through a practice of dissonance as a device
to widen the boundaries of the sound itself, in that a huge influence on contemporary players like Roy Campbell. Mal Waldron, a long time associate
with Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, and later on widely appreciated as the
perfect partner for Steve Lacy’s angular soprano saxophone, is playing here in
a way that, since the opening Fire Waltz,
a composition of his own, put him directly on the same lineage of Monk –
another proof of his mastery is the piano itself, mostly out of tune, Mal ran
into the club, but that through the decades has become one of the many delights of
this recordings.
Ed Blackwell with Charlie Haden
Richard
Davis (Ahmad Jamal, Don Shirley, Sarah Vaughan) will be present moreover on Dolphy’s masterpiece, Out To
Lunch! and Andrew Hill’s Point of
Departure (Blue Note, 1964). If his presence outside of the jazz world is
guarantee through providing ‘the greatest bass ever hear on a rock album’
(Greil Marcus) to Van Morrison’s Astral
Weeks, his activity will lead him to be teacher of William Parker, a solid
reality of today’s avant garde jazz world. Through tracks like The Prophet, a composition from Dolphy’s
first record as a leader – interesting the comparison with Roy Haynes melodic
rendition of rhythms, and Little’s Aggression,
Blackwell particular melting of African polyrhithms, New Orleans and bebop gives reason to Ornette Coleman in choosing him as first pulse of his arson records The Shape of Jazz to Come and This is Our Music (both Atlantic, 1960)and to trumpeter Don Cherry for the beautiful duet albums Mu 1st & 2nd part (BYG Actuel, 1969), in which the drummer deepend his coloristic approach to melody and rhythm through a broader use of small and ethnic percussions.
“Dolphy pursued freedom through a run in with a
structure to prowl, to climb over, to shatter. The same with the rhythm” (Marcello Piras)
Related Discogarphy
John
Coltrane, Africa/Brass (Impulse!,
1961)
John
Coltrane, Impressions (Impulse!,
1961)
John
Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard
(Impulse!, 1961)
Eric
Dolphy, Outward Bound (Prestige,
1960)
Eric
Dolphy, Out There (Prestige, 1961)
Eric
Dolphy, At the Five Spot, Vol.1
(Prestige, 1961)
Eric
Dolphy, At the Five Spot, Vol. 2
(Prestige, 1961)
Eric Dolphy
and Booker Little, Memorial Album
(Prestige, 1961)
Ornette
Coleman Double Quartet, Free Jazz
(Atlantic, 1961)
Charles
Mingus, Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic, 1956)
Charles
Mingus, Charles Mingus presents Charles
Mingus (Candid, 1960)
Charles
Mingus, Mingus at Antibes
(Atlantic, 1979)
Miles
Davis, E.S.P. (Columbia, 1965)
Miles
Davis, Nefertiti (Columbia, 1967)
Related Bibliography
Lewis
Porter, John Coltrane His Life and Music
(The Michigan American Music Series, 1998)
VA, Tender Warrior
L’eredità Musicale di Eric Dolphy (Associazione Culturale Punta Giara, 2005)
Stefano Zenni, Charles
Mingus Polifonie dell’Universo Afroamericano (Stampa Alternativa Nuovi
Equilibri, 2002)
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.
