From Francis Bacon to Free Improvisation (and beyond)

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Francis Bacon, Three Studies of the Male Back, 1970

I started Gilles Deleuze's "The Logic of Sensation" this winter, and when I read the pages related to the concept of "histeresis", and its application to modern painting - the blurring of the boundaries between object and subject, the use of color as rhythmic pattern - by the French philosopher, I found out that what he put on the table was in fact embracing many of the artistic tides developed since the second half of the 20^th century. Deleuze's book is about Francis Bacon's painting, but, as many of the philosophers writings, it tries to be inclusive and to track a sort of 'minor' history of the most vital artistic statements of the time, and back. But, far from what Gilles Deleuze embodies in his text - Francis Bacon, Vincent Van Gogh, Eadweard Muybridge, Diego Velasquez, Paul Cézanne, as long as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust literary masterpieces -, I was thinking first and foremost about Antonin Artaud - on which Deleuze himsepf came back in many of his essays, from The Logic of Sense to A Thousand Plateaus - and performance arts, from Vito Acconci to Marina Abramovic. And, obviously, to music.

I was listening to Roscoe Mitchell's No Side Effect (RogueArt, 2006) in those days. So in a certain way improvised music (Albert Ayler, the AACM) was implied in surrounding the impressions Deleuze's book gave me, but, in my effort to articulate a more extended analysis, I have to imply also Demetrio Stratos' and Sainkho Namtchylak's studies on voice, that are related to some techniques many post-bop horn players developed, starting with John Coltrane. Maybe the proper field for this study would probably be European contemporary music, with Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen as examples of what was then called 'post-serialism', and the so-called 'Industrial music' - this definition in Europe doesn't include music related to heavy metal, but forms of music developed first as accompaniment for performances, and then risen to a proper authonomy with Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten and Maurizio Bianchi -, and the Sound Art, as a matter of how the sound can influence the perception of the space. 

In this article I want to give some tools that can be useful for a first approach with a discussion on how the French philosopher's essay fits with music, and to what extent, skimming through genres and styles. Deleuze was very influent in the 1960s here in Europe and then in South America, where he still is. David Toop in his Ocean of Sound talks diffusely about Deleuze's concept of 'rhizome' - a root without a proper original branch, metaphor for a way of thinking without relating reality to a unique and univocal meaning - as a strategy to reach a 'nomadic' way - a way not based on given, i.e. 'sedentary', structure of language, of signifying - to approach creation; that's what Sun Ra's and other jazzmen were doing: issuing their own records on their own labels, and so avoiding artistic compromises, and then giving some of their artefacts to some major or independent labels. That's what the avant-garde pianist did, as an example, with Space is the place, issued on Impulse!, or with Nuclear War, published on Mark Stewart's On-U Sound.

Francis Bacon Study for the Head of George Dyer

Hysteresis, so. It's difficult to undesrtand it correctly if you are not aware of some cornerstones of the structuralism. In particular it would be interesting to focus on Jacques Lacan's seminars about psychoanalisis and the concept of 'hysteria', that he, as structuralist, considers as the refusal to apply the language of Power to the body, as the proper feeling of the hysteric subject. And this, because power refuses to give desire his proper place in the world of language and in the word of the Law. As far as desire, for Lacan, "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need." So desire can never be satisfied, as Slavoj Žižek says: "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."

A good part of the Deleuze's thinking is based on the opposition between power and desire. The concept of power is taken from Hegel and seen as something - the dialectics - that comes from, and produces, dissociation - thesis versus antithesis. "Petrolio", a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, or his Salò movie, are good literary translations of that concept. Desire is all that remains when the structures of the speech as a form of power on reality - the presumption to give order to reality with words - collapse. Again, Pasolini's 'Teorema' is a good picture of that idea. At the center of the paintings of Bacon there is a work of removal, an ethic work that leads precisely to abandon power for desire. Bacon take away the figure, the shape and the filling is blurring, so there are no more specified subjects - man and animal, subject and object, figure and environment, and so on.

And again, movement in Bacon is always double, systolic and diastolic at the same time. An abject athleticism - from latin 'ab-jectus', something that remains beyond the sub-jectus, which is the subject - leading from the figurative pattern that imprisons the figure into being only in this movement - the sink, the mirror - and filled to the figure - the body as Plexus / spasm, hysterical scene: escape through any body prostheses: syringes, umbrellas, mouth / scream ... -. Extraction and isolation, as opposed to the intelligible narrative relations of classical figurativeness. The butchered meat, the zone of indiscernibility between man and animal. The bones will rise from the flesh, as the flesh descended from the bones. Acrobatics of the flesh, an extension of athletics in the body. Face, head, cry escapes the body through the mouth, like blood from a severed artery. Spiritual movement.

Place created by those forms of art is similar to the anthropologist Victor Turner concept of 'liminarity' in his 'Rite of passage', and a good picture of it can be considered the way a Tibetan singer uses his throat in order to produce a double sound, positioning his tounge and glottis as if he is passing from 'l' letter to 'm' letter. This is a 'middle' position, but one that produces a double sound. Hysteresis, so, is the 'rhythmic' eye. The eye becomes ear: it feels time, as does the ear when you listen to music. And so becomes 'schizophrenic', says Deleuze, but not in the usual sense of dissociation. Schizophrenia as music is, because music disembodied bodies, the place (not the concept) of vanishing lines that cross the bodies themselves, but that are consistent elsewhere, hysterized through the introduction of color. How can we not recognize in that description the timbre, old fetish of improvisers, but also the use of a certain layering of sound even in analog and digital electronics, or in some contemporary composers, as in Karlheinz Stockhausen or Iannis Xenakis? How about electronic music, be it Miles Davis electrified trumpet, or the first contemporary composers in producing music through ring modulators?

The body draws on its new organs, like Antonin Artaud had predicted in 'Pour en finir avec le jujement de dieu'. It's a metaphor for multiculturalism, in the sense of the crossing of two different cultures, that usually produces something completely new: the 'african-american' music isn't a mere adding of two cultural forms of art: it is a totally new music. The 'hysterized eye' ceases to perceive the figures arranged in space according to a scan or narrative perspective, and through the articulation of three elements - material structure / set position / area and contour as the unfocused limit of both - creates a structure of rhythm / feeling. The body is thus the zone of indiscernibility between subject and object, between sentient and heard. Pure affection. The feeling acts as an agent deformating the body, and creates a gap in which it is organized through a sequence, a spasmic passage from a level to the other. 

So let's go back to music, to the rhythm given through the use of color. It's something similar to the dyplophonies used in Tibetan singing, or to the resonances of certain Arab, Middle or Eastern instruments - qanun, sitar -. But the same is with the way a musician like Roscoe Mitchell sometimes uses triplophonies on his horns. Same with Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, their use of tritones: they aren't a mere addition of a sound to another, but a new form of vibration. And the same is with the bass lines Henry Grimes give shape as a matter of texturizing different colors, different layers of sound.

Surely, if we think about avant garde jazz, its roots aren't in Western philosophy, but in a practice that is more confident with other concepts, like sound as vibration, as an example. Quoting Sufism and his mysticism can be a better idea. But since the 19th Century European thinkers - e.g. Schopenhauer or Nietzsche were both enthousiasts readers of the Bhagavad Gita- were looking at the Eastern World as a new model, less related to the division between reason - the self-consciousness as the result of the ego seeing himself - and the irrational - all that can't be explained with scientific measures. Psychology and anthropology - Carl G. Jung ideas on Symbols and Collective Unconscious, as Victor Turner idea of Experience - are more related to an Olistic approach to the human mind than Freud's idea of the Ego and Hegel's concept of dialectics. A more fluid approach to things, and a reflection of that knowledge parameters change can be seen in Antonin Artaud's 'The theater and its double', or in Jerzy Grotowski's Toward a poor theater; the same is with Francis Bacon and, to some extent, Jackson Pollock's paintings, and music after the middle of the last century. 

A music heritage: Mario Schiano

Hyperfragmentation of today's music business sometimes doesn't help that much, if you want to give the right value to people, movements, or even moments in the history of a particular style. In 2003, manifestolibri published a little but important book (138 pp. only) titled "Un cielo di stelle - parole e musicadi Mario Schiano". His author, Pierpaolo Faggiano, is a journalist, that writes also for the italian All About Jazz site. The book, conceived as a long interview with Italian saxophonist Mario Schiano, is accompanied by the CD "Apollon - Una fabbrica occupata". Recorded in 1968 by Schiano himself with bassist Marcello Melis and drummer Marco Cristofolini, the music, never available before in its entirety, is the soundtrack for Ugo Gregoretti's movie with the same title.

Apollon was in fact a typography placed in Rome. In 1968 employees took it up for one entire year; Gregoretti made a documentary with squatting images, and superimposed the voice of actor Gian Maria Volonté (a famous icon of Italian social consciousness and political commitment through artistic expression) as a narrator. Some fragments of the music from this records were put throughout the scenes, but they were in fact very short pieces: in fact, the record was issued with this book for the very first time. It's really a pity that this book and CD were no longer reissued after their first press, but they are actually easily available through the publishing house or in Italian reminders bookstore.

One of the pivotal figure in the development of free improvisation in Italy, Mario Schiano, born in 1933 in Naples, crossed his career with the likes of Marcello Melis, Bruno Tommaso, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Giorgio Gaslini in Italy, and with internationally recognized artists such as Joelle Léandre, Fred Van Hove, Paul Lovens, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Mark Dresser, Dave Holland, and Sam Rivers. He started playing with his Gruppo Romano Free Jazz in 1966 in Rome, after shorts and criticized experiences in his homeland. The trio was Schiano on alto, bassist Marcello Melis and drummer Franco Pecori. In those years Rome was the base for internationally acclaimed musicians like Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, and Steve Lacy.

Gruppo Romano Free Jazz, Folkstudio, Roma 1967 - Photo: Pierpaolo Faggiano

 

"Apollon" is only a small, but highly interesting, part of that reciprocal involvement between musicians, movie directors, writers, intellectuals, with the politics of that time and creativity in an attempt to suggest a more open and deeper look on what was going on in society and in the world. Marcello Melis, just to name another important collaboration of this period, was involved in Pier Paolo Pasolini's movie "Appunti per un'orestiade africana". For the soundtrack, he worked on Sardinian ethnic traditions, mixing them with African-American music, as he did also in his "Perdas de fogu" (RCA, 1975, featuring Don Pullen on piano, Sheila Jordan on voice, Bruce Johnson on guitar and Jerome Cooper on drums) and "The new village on the left" (Black Saint, 1977, with Roswell Rudd on trombone and Enrico Rava on trumpet) records. That was the environment, with musicians merging different levels and shapes of both innovation and tradition.

Schiano himself was heavily involved in mixing free improvisation with various ethnic forms of music, often misunderstood by producers, but nonetheless keeping on pushing his creativity. Further, after the hot season of political and social protests was drowned under terrorism and international conspiracies, fermented in order to put Leftists apart from Italian government, Mario Schiano won't give up. He worked hard on experimental music: a solo saxophone record produced by Gianni Sassi (that in those days was trying to disclose to a large audience John Cage's aesthetics and Demetrio Stratos' experimentations on voice diplophonies along with Nanni Balestrini post-Gruppo '63 writings, just to name his most famous attempts in disclosing avant-garde to a most popular and young audience), and a series of attempts to mix creative jazz and cabaret structures, with a notable record such as "Un cielo di stelle" (Cramps, 1979, co-titled with Tommaso Vittorini)

The heritage of Mario Schiano is now shared and preserved between his closest collaborators. The most important is the experience of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, in which he played for many years, spanning through a career culminating in a record with pianist Cecil Taylor ("The owner of the river bank", Enja, 2003), that gave the orchestra one of his typically short, but relevant, appreciation: "The Instabile can play". The book is closed by three short writings composed between 1979 and 1982. Three ironic portraits of the environment of the time, and of the world and attitude related to the music business. I personally hope not only for a new reissue of the book, but also for an English translation of it. In the meantime, for all who wants to enjoy the music, at the addresses mentioned in this article the book+CD is all still available, and for a very cheap price.

Related Links:

Pierpaolo Faggiano at AllAboutJazz Italy

 Italian movie director Ugo Gregoretti

talks about the making of "Apollon"

A shamanic workshop: Sainkho Namtchylak Feat. Arto Lindsay

Music Workshop 2011

Milano, May 31, 2011

Triennale di Milano, Teatro dell'Arte

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Even if you're not cynic, it's nevertheless difficult to pull apart how you have to be tough if you want to strive your goals in the music business today, and try to share your own personal achievements with a large audience. While tonight two veterans of experimental languages like Sainkho Namtchylak and Arto Lindsay are playing in an almost full theater near the center of the city, in a quiet and cool place like the Triennale Museum and its surrounding and almost natural environment, lots of musicians are harshly strieving for places to play in and people to play with. Those last six months were demanding for experimental music (and beyond) hard-ons. Milano will surely be a better place in September, when the MITO Festival will bring us a series of events related to Haiti music and culture, and the likes of Diamanda Galàs, Louaka Kanza, Omar Souleiman, Christian Fennesz.

But since January, people here had the possibility to see only a bunch of important happenings: bassist Joelle Léandre playing with poet and performer Nanni Balestrini, Peter Brotzmann accompanied by Steve Lacy's devotee and fellow Gianni Mimmo, with friends Xabier Iriondo on guitar and self- built instruments and Cristiano Calcagnile on drums, plus the Organic project led by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, veteran of the AACM Association. Only the last one was promoted by a theater, being the others settled in a couple of self-administered social structures, Cox 18 and Torchiera. As far as going 'underground', a good mention is for Attila Favarelli, a musician that since the beginning of this month is organizing in The Lift, his private recording studio, public exhibitions of young French composer Kassel Jaeger and Echtzeitmusik's duo Mat Pogo/Ignaz Schick, and for O' - Artoteca, a place devoted to both installation/performances/contemporary art and electronic music.

Far away from matters related to scheduling, on 31 May at La Triennale di Milano, Sainkho Namtchylak and Arto Lindsay shared with the audience the result of a two-day workshop in which they gave shape to an amazing mix of tuva/tibetan deep throath singing, lullabies and no-wave slights, or, better said, clouds of coal and sound. It's impossible not to recognize the distinctiveness of this couple of prime movers in their own fields, and breathing the result of two creators of musical nuances working together is always a wave of freshness in the middle of that part of today's cultural scenery that fixed quest and personality as the most important values.

Two different sets: a solo performance by Namtchylak, that you can see as a good introduction to her last output Cyberia, a record related to oytulaask chants and shamanic experience that takes the stock of the singer's multi-faceted vocal technique, spanning from open melody through improvised singing; and the duo with Lindsay's nervous but well balanced mix of rapid slashes and distorted and surrounding effetcs. If the firts part of the concert is remarkable because you won't find elsewhere a singer able to combine multi-tones chant with the wide spectrum range she's gifted, the second part is the real surprise. Guitar plunges vocal textures, opening then to lead us into a dark, misty and surrounding environment.

And even if Lindsay and Namtchylak together were playing what seemed to be a bunch of eccentric, vaguely melancholic and noisy ballads, the twos showed a coherence of inspiration and of result. Lindsay accompanied with nervous but fluid movements his playing, while Namtchylak mastery with more structured song forms, combined with her ability to improvise, gave her the possibility to weave a texture around which her partner worked more with his characteristic sound dynamics, from minimal gestures to loud fillings.

It's a matter of fact that music is also a playing field in which moods and colors loose the tracks we usually relate to common and everyday feelings and sensations just to elevate themselves, and you as a listener, to a wider range of emotions and suggestions. This is a big part of shamanic cultures, not that apart from their most direct social function: broadening the stream, opening to a meditative emotional setting in which the number and the value of hues and shades increase and overtake the boundaries of directness, just to take time and place in which to experience a much open perspective. That's what people in the audience tonight took part of, and this is a good reason to push forward with that and all related musical occurrences.

See Also:

My photo gallery

Arto Lindsay official website

Sainkho Namtchylak official website

Precious Soul: Charles Gayle

Solo Saxophone

Novara Jazz, Cascina Picchetti, 12.00 a.m.

Solo Piano

Conservatorio Cantelli, Novara, 20.00 p.m.

June 2, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Charles Gayle, Cascina Picchetti, June 2, 2011

This year's edition of Novara Jazz will stand up for a couple of remarkable highlights: Ebo Taylor, who played in Piazza Duomo on May 27 with his Afrobeat hot-flavored call-up, and a couple of exhibitions, in the same day, by Charles Gayle. New York based saxophone and piano player is truly achieving Coltrane's and Ayler's legacy, both on a stylistic and personal level. Gayle is part of a post-bop world that, even before the so-called new thing started harassing the scene as a demanding music-to-listen-to right in the middle of the '60s, waving on his flags statements like Spiritual Unity, wasn't completely feeling at ease with tricky chord changes and bebop jumping out of diminished 7th, even if that was, at the time, the most fashionable way to express yourself. 

In fact, while jazzmen, after Parker and Gillespie more orthodox followers, tried to warm and cool music with always excellent but as different results, as the likes of Miles Davis, George Russell, Oliver Nelson, there was an unprecedented and parallel world of, mostly, unsung heroes, that were trying to go back to their gospel and church roots. Charles Gayle, as his more succesfull, posthumously speaking, fellow Albert Ayler, drew heavily on chants and prayers. Picking up a record like Forgiveness (Not Two, 2008), and skimming through the titles, like 'Living Waters', 'Glory, Glory, Glory', 'Forgiveness', makes widely noticeable their being coherently in line with 'The Bells', 'Holy, Holy, Holy', 'Initiation'. 

Surprisingly enough, Gayle's voice on alto is very related to Ayler's. But while the latter's phrasing was shakey, nervous, confrontational, the former's more gentle, chubby, and in some way more devoted to the way another tenor master, John Coltrane, was usually binding together his statements, at least in a period of his career: starting a line, developing, then coming back to a previous point and going ahead again from that. More spacey, less torrential. Check out his version of 'Giant Steps' to feel what coming from a demanding development of a coherent tought back to his straight essence would mean.

Charles Gayle, Conservatorio Cantelli, Novara, June 2, 2011

Being an open space the ideal venue for a solo alto saxophone or not, Gayle's set was warm, confidential, friendly. The night, in Novara's Academy of Music, a gorgeously fixed old Steinway embellished with full and rich resonances his curling, striding, deep, dissonant, but utterly melodic playing. Whereas he so often layered the bottom to the peak, using even his full arm on the keyboard, or chuckling gently his fingers, the lightness of his touch in both those gestures and in all the possible ranges in between remains a constant, and maybe Gayle's proper, excited but jaunty and bright signature. 

Clusters and melodies are both interspersed the one with the other, bulding up a language that openly moves from jazz tradition but that evolves in a personal statement in which what can seems apparently fuzzy is, in fact, a grooving, hazy network of cross-references, from Thelonious Monk to Art Tatum, from James P. Johnson to Cecil Taylor. Charles Gayle lived for many years following his highly personal options, and as a result he is truly suitable for speaking not only for himself but for a rich and full tradition of inside track shapers.

See Also:

My photo galleries [on alto] [on piano]

Howard Mandel interview to Charles Gayle on The Wire

James Lindbloom interview to Charles Gayle on Perfect Sound Forever

Music as a matter of personality - Part 1

Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter, Feb. 2011

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

The Berkshires, Watercolor on paper, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… Aldo Romano …

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

Landscape, 1959, Tar paper and earth on canvas

… he was more open minded …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music as a matter of personality - Part 2

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

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter, Feb., 2011

Did you try to sing sometimes?

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

Working with Fluxus artists have you ever …

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

It was George Maciunas …

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

Yes …

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

… as an example? …

… mmm

… something you brought in your expression with the saxophone …

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

Less Zen, maybe …  

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

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

Yes, That’s true …

Sirene, 1979, Metal, wood

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

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

How would you describe him, as a person?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music as a matter of personality - Part 3

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

Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy (public photo archive)

For human life …

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

… it doesn’t work either …

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

… think about Europe …

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

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

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

No, they care about money …

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

They care about power …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No?

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

FMP Box accompanying book

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

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

Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see what you mean, yes …

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

Yes …