Harmolodic Programmes, Vol. 2012
***harmolodic programmes is an ongoing collaborative project ***about and a testament to harmolodic experience/expression ***********************in sound <> music <> vibration and life ********published in hard copy (sold for cost) and online (free). ************************we have an open call for submissions *********************of any and all relevant texts and images ********************************from anyone on the planet. ******past volumes under the title the harmolodic manifesto *************are available for download at zinelibrary.info. *******please send submissions, comments and suggestions to: ********************************[email protected]. peace <3
put forth by jean-paul larosee & billy conde goldman
a f r e e s p i r i t c a n o n l y e x i s t i n a f r e e d b o d y
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Bottlecap Press has no ownership of writings/images. all rights are reserved for the creators. 2012 B o t t l e c a p P r e s s 2 Table of Contents
Cover painting by Bob Lordan and jean-paul larosee
explanatory knote, the editors ************************************ page 5 o delicate vibratories…, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) ***************** page 6 editoreal : the harmolodic now, jean-paul larosee ****************** page 7 Black Wadada, Jeff Schlanger, musicWitness® ********************* page 10 My Approach to Playing Music, Bill Cole ************************** page 11 Music was his life…, Harry Chapin ******************************* page 21 sounds and visions, Ben Kelley and billy conde goldman ************ page 22 free-form energies, billy conde goldman ************************** page 25 harmolodic workshop flyer (circa 2004) *************************** page 27 the harmolodic workshop 08252009 ******************************* page 28 The Loon <> Rival GTs Meet Mister Fig, Transcription ************** page 29 Inside, Outside by Geoffrey Oldmixon ***************************** page 30 I was with Sam Henry and Howard Gee…, SRB ******************** page 36 No matter how you listen to it JAZZ is…, Thurston Moore ********* page 37 Warm/Cool Color Flowers, Han-Busily Gotham Johnson ************** page 38 sprouts of the harmolodics ************************************** page 39 With Eyes Closed, Rachel Znerold ******************************** page 45 Lost Instrument, David Sirois ************************************ page 54 Albert Ayler, Eric Hoffman *************************************** page 55 Life is…, j.g. *************************************************** page 56 Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, Selections *************************** page 57 The Lefsetz Letter, Bob Lefsetz, Selections ************************ page 59 Anthony Braxton, Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979: Language Music (1967), Selections ***************************** page 60 Lady Decapus, Natasha Holmes *********************************** page 61 It’s a Small World: A Harmolodic Recollection, Bob Lordan ********* page 62 Autophysiopsychic Music, Yusef Lateef **************************** page 63 Quantum Music: Audience-Observer/Player, Dennis Warren *********** page 64 Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death…and Insects, Selections ********* page 65 Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs, Selections ** page 66 dark rhizomatics, billy conde goldman **************************** page 68 The 5000 Fingers of Ian Svenonius ******************************* page 69 Music is Misused, Ian Svenonius ********************************** page 71 Jandek on Corwood, Selections *********************************** page 72 We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen, Selections ************ page 73 Rain…Shapes, Yusef A. Lateef, Selections ************************** page 74 remove the caste system from sound, promotional material for Tone Dialing by Ornette Coleman & Prime Time ************* page 75 Ornette Coleman in Motion *************************************** page 76 maxims on improvisation, Patricia Ryan Madson ******************* page 77 Fishing Whole, Alexander Bingham ******************************** page 78 On Anarchy in Music, Th. v. Hartmann, Selections ***************** page 79 El Trovador after Remedios Varo, Zito **************************** page 80 the musician: harmolodic flows of desire, OR “this machine kills fascists,” jean-paul larosee ****************************** page 81 The Song’s Never Played the Same, Rob Aiman ******************** page 90 It Might Get Loud, Selections ************************************ page 92 3 Jim Dickinson, Artists House Music Video, Selections *************** page 94 Yo La Tengo, Electr-o-pura, back cover ************************** page 96 HARMOLODICS: thoughts this way and that, Andrew Poppy ********* page 97 Believe It or Not!, Daniel Fagereng ****************************** page 103 Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, Selections ********************** page 104 Patti Smith Wellsprings ***************************************** page 106 5 HAIKU, Mike McDonough ************************************** page 107 Zen Guitar, philip toshio sudo *********************************** page 108 Tom Dowd & The Language of Music, Selections ****************** page 109 No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Selections ************************ page 110 Visceral Music, Lawson Fusao Inada and Robert Kostka *********** page 111 In the Dirt, Bob Lordan **************************************** page 112 Burning Ambulance, Selections *********************************** page 114 light rhizomatics, billy conde goldman *************************** page 118 piccadilly, 1972, Simon Puxley ********************************** page 119 T. Monk’s Advice (1960), Steve Lacy ***************************** page 120 Wynton Marsalis Speaks **************************************** page 121 Call & Response ************************************************ page 122 Sound Levels, Phil Freeman, Selections *************************** page 123 The War Goes On, Daniel Fagereng ****************************** page 124 Royal Trux **************************************************** page 125 royal trux: cats and dogs, a harmolodic way of life, billy conde goldman ***************************************** page 128 Zapped, Rachel Znerold ***************************************** page 130 Zappa! is yes ************************************************** page 131 What is Music?, Frank Zappa and Peter Occhiogrosso ************* page 135 Sound, Visual Thesaurus **************************************** page 137 Ornette Coleman, Eric Hoffman ********************************** page 138 Harmolodic = Highest Instinct, Something to Think About, Ornette Coleman ******************************************** page 139 Fibonaci, Jeremy Langston, jeremylangston.com ******************* page 143 The Surest Way…, Hart Crane *********************************** page 144 participants/contributors **************************************** page 145 knotes ******************************************************** page 146 Either we restore…, Antonin Artaud ***************************** page 148
4 explanatory knote since its inception in 2003 this publication has been called ‘the harmolodic manifesto’ – Breton and other surrealists were hanging around with their manifestos, so it felt an obvious choice to attach to our declarations – recently, however, we’ve questioned if this title embodies the present dynamic of our mutual-becomings – in our enthusiasm at the time, we felt we were making clear distinctions of the differences between what we did, and what we felt most others did, in terms of collective sound-making – it never occurred to us that we might be acknowledging and addressing a larger group of players, than the handful, we were, in so many words, purporting were working with the ideas and practices of Harmolodics – it also never occurred to us that maybe Harmolodics, instead of describing something specific, specialized and narrowly determined, was really about the bigger picture, representing the root tendency and impetus to music in general, and that there’s more to musicality and sound-making than the hystory of so-called popular music leads people to believe – so as change would have it, perceptions and perspectives attuning to the polyvocal intensities of this life-becoming, what began seemingly as a one-time affirmation, has grown into an existent presence exhibiting the reality of connectivity, but a connectivity controlled by the unpredictability of variability – inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, we’ve decided to adopt their notion and description of programme – from the book “Dialogues II”: “On lines of flight there can no longer be but one thing, life-experimentation. One never knows in advance, since one no longer has future or past. ‘See me as I am’: all that stuff is over. There is no longer a phantasm, but only programmes of life, always modified in the process of coming into being, betrayed in the process of being hollowed out. No longer is there the infinite account of interpretations, but finished processes of experimentation, protocols of experience. Programmes are not manifestos – still less are they phantasms, but means of providing reference points for an experiment which exceeds our capacities to foresee.” we feel programmes to be a more than suitable replacement for manifesto, and in fact, the description Deleuze and Parnet present for programmes, “means of providing reference points for an experiment which exceeds our capacities to foresee,” describes Harmolodics most accurately – it should be mentioned that since the last volume in 2008, a computer search for ‘harmolodic manifesto’ brings up Ornette Coleman’s website, where his writings are presented in a section called “The Harmolodic Manifesto” – so, to avoid confusion, and to give Coleman his due as the originator of Harmolodics as it pertained to his music and more, this volume and all future volumes will be called, harmolodic programmes – the editors 5
6 editoreal : the harmolodic now a practice such as harmolodics is just that, a practice, a discipline, and can only be truly defined in the doing, all the words used to describe it notwithstanding – thing is, if a persyn doesn’t do it, specifically participate in the creation of harmolodic music, not to mention the spontaneous actions of living such a life, then one will never “get it” – a non-practitioner can appreciate it but will never completely understand it – that one persyn can have the correct harmolodic perspective over another is an idea inimical to the heart of harmolodics, never mind the practice itself: at its root, harmolodics is an infinitely sided sphere, the many faces and attitudes of its participants happening simultaneously beyond judgment, all sounds great in their manifest emotive character – that’s just it, harmolodics entails an attitude and an approach that exceeds viscerality into realms of the pure combination of intensities – yet, it is through the physicality of bodymind and all of its sense-bound consonance, that this becoming of vibrational communion is realized – surely, the similarities outnumber the differences when we’re speaking of great forms, the great budding chthonic dissonances, harnessing the power of which, nonetheless, is based in the acceptance and utility of individuated difference within the dance of size and scale, the interplay between microplicity and macroplicity – people who function in the realms of harmolodics necessarily do so in a very subjective way: it’s the intense experience of their individuated presences of bodymind in these terrestrial realms of desire, which afford them the opportunity and impetus to manifest sound from deep within the physical and spiritual realities of their endeavors and motivations, as they are regarded as living one’s persynal-truth – to play harmolodics is to add your unique sound and its many voices with regard to others offering their gifts of communion, the weave of collective musics – so the facts of the subjective, when they converge with the creation of original and authentic musical expression in the harmolodic way, brings with them a different definition of harmolodics for every player – of course there will be similarities in people’s criteria, like improvisation, freedom and the emotive stores of the creative process, but one’s unique sound will always resonate, even in the words one uses to describe it and it’s relationship to other people’s sound – harmolodics is inherently inclusive and accepting – there’s an understanding between the participants that 7 they’re playing together and not trying to show each other up, no matter how far afield the jam may go – and no doubt, there are the elements of an inspirational competitiveness operative toward the possibilities of further intensities of mutual expression, everyone getting there together, so to speak, the synergy of the collective forces of sound bringing everyone to new heights of harmolodic composition, regardless of the ranges of individual proficiency and energy levels or moods existing prior to and while the harmolodic discourse takes hold and becomes a life of it’s own – harmolodics is energy persynified as the creation of musical-sound through a free-flow of emotive production and simultaneous absorption and reflection between players – we’ve been publishing harmolodic programmes (previously the harmolodic manifesto) since 2003 and we’ve been playing music harmolodically much longer than that – what began as almost a secret declaration of intent and practice, has grown into a credible public entity – all volumes are now online for free download at zinelibrary.info and we’ve received some great feedback and acknowledgement since the last volume in 2008 – this current volume is different than previous ones in that it is a collaborative offering in the greater sense that some of it’s participants are from outside our pod – with the gathering of voices from seemingly endless directions expressing completely or in part the harmolodic ethos, the major insight this time around was that harmolodics can’t and shouldn’t be passed off as a fringe phenomena or a relic of some outdated avant-gardism, especially when compared with the glut of formalized directions in the creation of sound – this seemingly lopsided juxtaposition of ways of creating and playing music, in no way, however, detracts from the fact that harmolodic expression is the core, nomadic, root production of sound within moments of celebration and ritual, beauty and value found in the doing, and not what can be had in the process of doing so, and certainly not from some alleged end-product – harmolodic expression is the natural condition of musical endeavors, the pre-persynal flows of harmolodic genius, the lowest common denominator being the harmolodic vibrations and the infinite variability of desire produced as sound – harmolodic music has existed since people started gathering in groups, and has existed for much longer than that in the millennial soundtrack of the burgeoning earth – simply, harmolodics is nomad-music and gypsy-music and animal-music and lava-music – this 8 music has been, and continues to be, co-opted by the state in the creation of the axiomatics of popular music, the homogenization of sound and the ever-narrowing realms of what’s considered acceptable expression, increasingly marginalizing what it can’t turn a profit from – and so continues the history of civilization and it’s inherent need to exploit and control – but, this is getting political, and we’re supposed to be talking about music, right? – well, truth be known, any discussion of desiring-production, and especially one of its manifestations as a musical form based first and foremost in persynal liberty and mutual autonomy, will necessarily spill over into the questions and challenges of our present socio-hystorical situation – not that in any way does this predicate the use of harmolodic music as a revolutionary tool in the service of complete liberation from the yokes of capital-fascist domination – the acts of participating in your times are as variable as the modes of musical discourse – the spirit of harmolodics being much older than industrial civilization, doesn’t take away from the fact that certain hystorical and contemporary harmolodic expressions are simultaneously resultant and invalidation of prevalent modes of control and exploitation, i.e., harmolodics always takes into consideration the intricacies of humyn-living, nothing ever being cut-and-dry, absolute – sometimes, it’s the chaosmic blast off into incandescent sound and revelatory beyondnesses, and sometimes, it’s about the burden of racial hatred – sometimes, it’s about both and other things besides – it’s a complex world becoming increasingly more complex – harmolodics is the voice and vehicle for the now-transition to the predominate inter-relationary modes of society being based in acceptance and inclusion rather than isolation and fear – much thanks to the participants of this volume as well as all previous ones – our collective voices act to create this ongoing collaboration of harmolodic sympathies and beauty, a conversation as rich and diverse as the currents of humyn-livings – heart-felt gratitude to you and all those protecting the diversity of life by living the power of your persynal-truths –
jean-paul larosee, san francisco, 2011
9
Black Wadada. Jeff Schlanger, musicWitness® 10 MY APPROACH TO PLAYING MUSIC
In 1984 I took my first trip to Europe. My wife and I went to France to visit her extended family. I found myself in a country where I couldn’t speak the language, and for the first time I couldn’t understand the people who were speaking. Music is also a language. One’s ability to speak in that language is determined by his/her fluency on the instrument with which one is trying to speak. This is particularly true if one is an improvising player. One can master an instrument by learning to sight read but that doesn’t mean one can be a good improvising player. My daughter was studying the violin and her teacher once told me that she (the teacher) couldn’t play a note without sheet paper in front of her. However one can be a tremendous improvising player and also be a good sight reader. John Gilmore, the magnificent tenor saxophonist player in the Sun Ra orchestra, said in an interview that when he joined the orchestra he was a good sight reader because he had played in army bands where you had to know how to read music. It took him quite some time however to understand the structures that Sun Ra was developing for the players to improvise on.
Improvising is a spontaneous, creative act. Jazz is an improvising music developed in America. To play in the Jazz style one should understand how the music historically progressed in the melodic and harmonic structure dictated by the tempered instruments that were present. The piano, which until the 1950’s was the predominant instrument used to write melodies and harmonic structures, adheres to the diatonic scale and to western modal scales. However, by the middle 1950’s and through the 1960’s, some Jazz musicians began to abandon these systems because they had been totally explored. Every possible harmonic configuration had been utilized, so the style of bebop and hard bop was being replaced by free Jazz and fire Jazz. That is not to say that the bebop and hard bop styles disappeared. There are still many Jazz musicians playing beautiful music in those styles today. But in the 1950’s and 1960’s other innovations were taking hold. These innovations included free improvisations without any structure, using quarter tones, looking to the non‐western world for styles like India and Asian countries, and taking a much closer look at the traditional music of Africa. Many Jazz musicians began playing instruments from India, China, Japan, Australia, and Korea. This was obviously the way this music was evolving.
I once read a definition of the word Jazz. That dictionary defined it as a verb, meaning “to scrutinize, to find what is new in a familiar form”. The familiar form in Jazz is the blues. All the great innovative players in Jazz have been fantastic blues players. Not just knowing the 1‐1V‐V‐V7‐1 form, but the feeling that lies in this form. The late 1950’s and 1960’s, with the civil rights movement in America, the music called out for this feeling because of the pain and suffering so many
11 experienced. The music followed with a new feeling of liberation. The feeling of the blues became articulated in a new way. Much of it was aggressive, angry, in your face, using partials of notes. Musicians used their instruments to scream in an attempt to express the bitterness of being Americans, but not having the rights that most white Americans had.
In 1970 I was given two instruments by my mentor Clifford Thornton. One was an instrument from China called the sona. The other was from Korea, named the hojok. Both were double reed horns. Clifford told me to learn how to play them. He was a trumpet and valve trombone player but he also played the Indian shenai. The sound of that instrument intrigued me. The shenai is also a double reed horn. As I began to work on my two new instruments I recalled reading about the belief of Africans, practicing the traditional lifestyle, that sound has magical qualities. There was something about these new instruments’ sound that really inspired me to work hard to master them. At first I didn’t know that they took reeds or the type of reeds required. But I had tremendous desire to learn the instruments coupled with an intense will. These both served me well because by the time I received a visiting Professorship at Whitman College in January 1972 I had a pretty good working knowledge of how the instruments worked and their capabilities. Before I went to Whitman I had played in Sam River’s student orchestra at Wesleyan University where I was studying for my PhD. Not only was I playing in the orchestra but I was also watching Sam’s composition style. He had everyone in the orchestra write small parts, most not more than between 4 and 8 measures, and he would string these together separated by collective improvisational playing. I liked this style very much and chose to try it out with some students I met at Whitman.
Even though Whitman College was located in the southeastern corner of Washington State I was able to find 4 outstanding student musicians. The closest urban area is Spokane and that’s a good 200 miles from Walla Walla where Whitman resides. Seattle is over 400 miles away, so I was quite surprised to find these students, since Jazz has mostly thrived in urban areas. The five of us worked hard with very little written material except for directions, tempos, and rhythmic changes. The students listened to one another, played off of each other’s sounds and lines and began to understand how to make ONE music in a totally improvisational style. I thought this was quite an achievement, but learned that this was just the beginning of developing a style of playing that used musical language to create a music that I wanted.
Jazz is predominantly a linear music. It is controlled by tempos and rhythms. That means that players have to be aware of how they’re organizing space. Everyone has heard from time to time players who sound like they’re falling off the earth. They’re not playing in time or they have no sense of how the rhythms
12 are evolving. If the piece has cross rhythms they don’t seem to have a clue of how they want to handle that. During the late nineteen forties when Dizzy Gillespie brought Chano Pozo, the Cuban hand drummer, into his band a new problem took place for American Jazz musicians. Dizzy was a great rhythm player as were most of the master Jazz players of that era but how to handle several rhythms happening at the same time provided a challenge both positively and negatively. The bass players have an equal responsibility in their accompanying of soloists. On the late fifties recording of the composition “Sid’s Ahead,” Miles Davis begins his solo by slowing the tempo and bassist Paul Chambers slows it right there with Miles. Chambers was one of the great bass players of this era along with Charlie Mingus and Percy Heath. Paul listened intently to the players he was supporting and provided wonderful lines for them to play off. He was one of my favorite players, and sure made Miles sound good.
I returned to the east in the spring of 1972 after my Visiting Professorship at Whitman. Clifford Thornton had organized an African American Jubilee on the campus of Wesleyan University that included Jazz players, Gospel and Spiritual singers, Blues vocalists, Latin Orchestras, the whole spectrum of Black Music. It also included Musicologists who spoke about the history and development of Black music in the western hemisphere. One of those Musicologists was Professor Fela Sowande who was a musician, composer, and philosopher and who would have a profound impact on my life. At first, because he spoke English with a Nigerian dialect, it was hard for me to understand him. However, his spiritual energy was so strong that I felt a tremendous need to see what he was about. We began by just having conversations about his beliefs concerning the traditional life style of African people. When I took my first permanent position as a Music Professor in the fall of 1972 at Amherst College, I would bring him to the campus to speak to my students but mostly so we could continue our conversations. Finally, after about two years of ongoing conversations he began to give me his unpublished papers concerning the basis of the traditional lifestyles. The importance of these papers was that they represented the thinking of the African individuals who first came to the western hemisphere as enslaved persons. They reinforced what I intuitively believed but had no empirical information to support. They became the cornerstone of my dissertation on John Coltrane. The dissertation on Coltrane was passed at Wesleyan University with honors and later turned into a book.
It was not only the information I got from the papers that supported my dissertation and later the book on John Coltrane, but there was much information that began to formulate my musical ideas. For example, one of the papers had information about the reincarnation cycle of the Ibo of Nigeria. The Ibo believe that the soul reincarnates seven times and that there are three types of souls on earth: young souls, mature souls, and evil souls. I took this concept and from
13 1975 to 1982 produced seven major musical works which were performed at Dartmouth College where I was then a Professor of Music. I began small with a trio of improvisational music that included me, Sam Rivers, and the percussionist Warren Smith. That was in 1975. By the time I got to the Fourth Cycle there were 40 people in all including a Gospel Choir, a poet, and a singer who was Native American. My goal up until this point was to keep the people who were in the previous Cycles and add others. However the Fourth Cycle was 4 hours long and that was just too long so I gave the Cycle concept another thought to better understand what maturity meant in this context. I decided that it meant a more profoundly developed idea. That was how the fifth, sixth, and seventh Cycles were performed, smaller in numbers of performers but deeper in concept.
All of these pieces were performed orally. The only paper that was involved was the directions I used to indicate the feeling that was to be expressed at any certain point. The fourth Cycle was the most successful in terms of the creative effort involved. The musicians were Sam Rivers, tenor and soprano saxes, Julius Hemphill, alto sax and flute, Joe Daley , baritone horn, Abdul Wadud, cello, James “Blood” Ulmer, guitar, and me on Chinese sona and Indian shenai. There were four percussionists: Warren Smith, Abraham Adzinyah, Jerry Gonzalez, and Hafiz Shabazz. The poet was Jayne Cortez and the singer was Alanis Obomsawin. The piece began playing rhythmically the syllables of Fanny Lou Hamer’s name. Fanny Lou Hamer was a political activist during the 1960’s. Everyone played, spoke, and sang brilliantly. Sadly the only Cycle that was produced commercially was the first one by Dartmouth College.
Professor Sowande gave me two more gifts. One was a list of Proverbs that came from the Yorubas of Nigeria. This happened at the end of the 1970’s. I read them several times but it took years before I began to see the fruit of using them in my music. There are 500 Proverbs and since 1983 to the present I have created music for 100. The first came at a time when I was being attacked by an off campus newspaper run by right wing students. I found a Proverb that read “One man’s hatred cannot alter another man’s destiny.” I used the syllables of the Proverb to create a strident, in your face, blues. This was the beginning and I have never stopped using this material in my musical compositions. In 1986 I asked Julius Hemphill to write arrangements for several Proverbs that I had created lines for. His arrangements were beautiful and we performed the pieces at Symphony Space in New York City. Julius was one of the original members of the World Saxophone Quartet and their main composer and arranger. He had a brilliant musical mind and his feeling for saxophones had no peer. When he was asked to leave the Quartet the WSQ never sounded the same or as good. If you don’t know this group you should make an effort to pick up some CDs when Julius was in the band. He and I became good friends and he played in many of my music projects. It was a very sad moment for me when he died in 1994 at
14 age 56. It was another moment when an innovative, creative Jazz musician died too young.
At the beginning of the 1990’s I wanted to start my own group. It was the first time that I decided to lead a musical organization. The other times I presented my music I had hired players particularly for those events and I had the financial backing of Dartmouth College. I left Dartmouth in 1990 and I wanted to have musicians who understood my music and felt comfortable in how I presented it. By this time I was playing a wooden flute from Ghana, shenai and nagaswarm from India, several sizes of sonas from China, the piri and hojok from Korea, and I was working on developing cycle breathing so I could play the digeridoo from Australia. I had experienced hostile attitudes from many professional musicians who considered these instruments not suitable to play Jazz and I had to put up with this bias for quite some time. However, I had learned that Jazz is defined as “to scrutinize, to find what is new in a familiar form.” That definition says nothing about using just western instruments. One of the players I asked to join the group turned me down because of the instruments I play and the oral style of the compositions I created. So there were two players, Warren Smith and Joe Daley, and me as the Untempered Trio. “Untempered” because the instruments I play are not tempered instruments. Warren and Joe are still in my group today.
Warren and Joe are magnificent musicians because they are both skilled and experienced. They understand the importance of being both accompanists and soloists. They know how to support other musicians with sounds that make the soloist sound better. They always seem to place the ideal sound at the ideal time. They make the composition more creative because they intuitively bring something special to the event. They are both great listeners and want to make the performance special for everyone. They are also tremendous soloists because they have full facility on their instruments. That allows them to play anything at any time and sound great. They understand that sound is a force and should be used with that in mind. In the book “Conversations with Ogotomeli” Ogotomeli (a Hogan among the Dogan people of West Africa) tells the interviewer that the use of sound is like speaking in the ear of the NuMo (God) and people should always use sound carefully. I believe that Warren and Joe understand this intuitively.
In 1992 I produced my first CD, Untempered Trio. The compositions on the CD were three based on Proverbs, a piece for Clifford Thornton, one for my wife Sarah, and a piece by Warren. This CD, like most of my CDs, served as a document of my work as a musician and composer because I never saw myself as a “popular” artist. I have always wanted to leave my mark as an innovator on the music I have loved all my life, Jazz. I have earned three degrees in music plus an honorary degree for my teaching. However, my total interest has been to present
15 my music, teach about the beauty of Black music coming from this country, and to expose students to the wealth of music produced round the world. Since 95% of music in the world is produced orally, it has been important to me to teach about this process and to use it in my own music.
In the middle of the 1990’s I had the opportunity to see a performance by the bassist William Parker and the multi‐instrumentalist Cooper‐Moore. I was really taken by their playing and soon asked them to join my group. It seemed only natural because I wanted a bass player, and who was more skilled in the avant‐garde Jazz scene than William. Cooper‐Moore, who makes and plays his own home‐made instruments, fit in perfectly with the instruments I play. I wanted to have another horn sound in the Ensemble and I hired alto and flute player Sam Furnace, whom I first saw and heard with the saxophone sextet group of Julius Hemphill. By the end of the 1990’s I brought in my son Atticus Cole, a hand drummer, to support Warren Smith. This group stayed together until Sam died in January of 2004, and produced five CDs for Boxholder Records. All of the CDs came from live performances. I loved this group. Everyone was such an outstanding player and bought into my concepts and we made great music.
In the 1990’s I was contacted by Patricia Parker, the wife of William Parker, and asked to become a charter member of a new group called the Improvisers Collective. It was a group of musicians, visual artists, dancers, film makers, dramatists, and poets, most of whom came from the lower east side of New York City. The group met at the Context Studios on Avenue A in the lower east side of New York. Within a year the group had ballooned to 50 members and each member did one performance or presentation each year. It was a good place to meet other artists regardless of medium. But the economic system in America, which is based on capitalism, brings about envy and soon people who should have been part of the Collective were closed out. However, there was one outstanding event that grew out of the Collective and that was the Vision Festival. The Vision Festival is a Festival of progressive artists which has happened every year since 1995, thanks to the prodigious efforts of Patricia Parker. The Festival lasts anywhere from 7 to 10 days during the late spring and is held in different venues in the lower east side of New York. It is one of the few if not the only festival dedicated to progressive artists in this country. It became part of a non‐profit organization named Arts for Art with the help of my wife Sarah, who acted as the organization’s lawyer when Patricia incorporated it. The Untempered Ensemble played in the Festival every year for the first seven years.
In 1987 my mentor Professor Fela Sowande died. That was a very sad day for me. My father had died in 1961 and Fela was like a surrogate father to me. Our conversations and communications helped me grow as an artist but mostly as a
16 person. I felt profound love from him as did my children and my wife. He turned me onto and gave me many books, periodicals, and especially his own writings. Since my formal education was almost devoid of information about my descended past, as was my family’s, the education he gave me was invaluable. He also taught me how to interpret the I Ching which I found important in understanding my past and looking into my future. I’ve had two mentors during my musical life. Clifford Thornton not only gave me two instruments to learn to play but also taught me how to listen to music. He helped me learn how to focus not only on the soloist but also on the others in the band who were supporting the soloist. He said I should focus my energy away from the soloist and to the bass player or the drummer or the pianist in order to get a feeling for how the whole piece is evolving. When I was writing criticism for Down Beat in the early 70’s I found his teaching extremely valuable. Of course the other mentor was Fela and I studied with him for 15 years.
Before he died Professor Sowande gave me a treatise that he had been working on for the entire time I had known him. It was called The Learning Process and until this day it has not been published. The Learning Process is in two volumes and is an outgrowth of the Standard Rules for the Student which he wrote while he was teaching at Howard University and one summer at Dartmouth College. I was one of only three people to whom he gave a copy of the Learning Process. As I was looking quickly through the document I open the first page of the second volume and there in front of me was what he called the prologue to the epilogue. I read it and was so excited that I called William Parker and read it to him over the phone. He probably thought I was crazy. It is only a page long but I knew right away that I needed to create a musical event with his words as the central point. They are as follows:
The Living Lives Not Among the Dead. Why Seek Him There?
The moment one sets out to systematize the unceasing dynamism of the creative evolving LIFE which has for its unalterable goal the constant emergence and preservation of all possible possibilities in which alone can be no thing that lives not despite all the contradictions and confusions and planlessness and aimlessness and fruitlessness and goal–lessness that seem so unmistakably to hallmark every step that LIFE appears haltingly to take now forwards now backwards now sideways now up now down now nowhere in particular like a drunk on unsteady legs at all odds with unclear eyes…from the moment one begins to plan to turn that endless limitless profusion of ordered – chaos or chaotic – order into at least some semblance of one – lane macadamized super‐highway as smooth as a billiard table and as straight as the line joining the North to the South Pole on a map drawn with pen and ink on paper and left to dry without a
17 smudge…from that moment the human being or group of human beings becomes devoid of all spiritual insight and awareness and virtue and is as useless and productiveless and effectiveless for the discovery by man of the godhead in man as the systematized knowledge that one billiard ball and one billiard ball make two billiard balls. Deathly Organized Purposeless Existence – “D‐O‐P‐E” – is the trademark of the extra fine dust which then like the volcanic ash of a thousand synchronized Krakatoa eruptions blankets everything so well that man is now forced to create everything anew in his own image which however he is no longer able to see and his destiny is now inseparable from that of his own attempted creations. To have a right to LIFE requires that one must recognize and endorse and align one’s self to the right of LIFE to function as itself for itself by itself subject to the eternal laws of its own eternal Nature which guarantees the constant appearing preservation and maturation of all possible possibilities that contain all the “here” and the “not‐here” and the “there” and the “not‐there” and the “nowhere” and the “everything imaginable or unimaginable” wherein alone can be no thing that is not alive and through which goal‐lessness becomes the only goal that Life can have because it contains and transcends the totality of all possible possibilities and is itself LIFE and what else should the goal of LIFE be but LIFE?
On October 11, 2002, my 65th birthday, I took my Ensemble into the Weill Recital of Carnegie Hall in New York City to perform a composition based on the words above. We were helped by the poet Patricia Smith (I wanted to use Jayne Cortez but she was not available on that date) and the piece was about an hour long. It was recorded analog and that was at first a problem because I couldn’t make copies but I managed to get it transferred to a CD disc. With the exception of me telling the Ensemble how I wanted the piece to be played with written directions, the piece was totally improvised. The Ensemble was in its seventh year and everyone understood how we perform. After nine years I’m hoping to get the disc mastered and later make it available commercially. The words lend themselves to music. In fact, they are very musical in and of themselves. They also have a strong rhythmic feeling as you read them and this was a big help for the Ensemble. The members of the Ensemble all knew what it means to make ONE music; they listened and responded to one another in a very positive way. It was a joyful experience.
My brother died in 2003. He was a visual artist, a painter and sculptor. He was an inspiration to me my whole life. He was so dedicated to his art and worked tirelessly through his life creating. However, he loved alcohol and drugs too much and his body finally gave out. The next year Sam Furnace died. He was a very important person in the Ensemble. A brilliant musician with an outside
18 personality that always kept rehearsals light and easy going. You need a person like that in your group especially when you’re dealing with individuals who are so gifted in their art. It took me years to find a suitable replacement for Sam. Losing these two people in my life showed me how precious life is and that no matter what happens you have to keep living it.
In 2005 I was hired to be a Professor in the African American Studies Department at Syracuse University. I was suggested by Jayne Cortez and the Department took advantage of her suggestion. I had been black listed by colleges and universities for fifteen years because during my last seven years at Dartmouth I had been constantly attacked by an off campus newspaper published by some reactionary Dartmouth students. It’s funny, but in America if a Black professor is dragged through the mud by white students the Black professor always pays the price.
For the next five years I drove from right outside of New York City to Syracuse every week to teach at the University. While I was there I was able to produce some musical events, and my biggest accomplishment in that regard was to bring up the violinist Billy Bang. I had first heard Billy play at an Improvisers Collective meeting in the middle of the 1990’s where he came and did a solo performance. I was absolutely amazed at his facility on the violin. I knew from that moment that I wanted to somehow perform with him, and it took until 2007 for me to arrange and meet him at Syracuse. I wanted to play with Billy because we play instruments that are liberated from the tempered piano. This allows us to create quarter tones above and below the key. In doing this we can produce sounds that are dissonant in a very unique way.
When Billy first came to Syracuse University it was as part of a Symposium called Imagination. He gave two solo performances. Both included his personal way of dealing with the audience by telling stories about his life. He had been a soldier in the Viet Nam war and that experience affected him very much. The second time he came to Syracuse he played with my Ensemble again under the auspices of a Symposium, this one called Justice. Billy also performed with my Ensemble in 2008 at the Brecht Forum in New York City as part of a grant I received from Neus Kabarett. The next time was at the University of Virginia when we did a duet which was recorded. That was in April of 2009. The recording was later mastered and I produced it as a commercial CD that got very positive reviews. The last time we played together was with my Ensemble in the spring of 2010. That was the last performance I did at Syracuse University before I retired from there. Billy died on April 11, 2011 and I miss him tremendously. He was a very interesting person because his life was so compelling. He was great fun because he laughed quite often. He was a person whom I felt very comfortable being around.
19 In the spring of 2009 I got a call to have my Ensemble perform at that year’s Vision Festival. I had performed in the festival in 2007 in a group led by William Parker and also in a group led by Jayne Cortez, but this was the first time in 7 years that I had been asked to perform with my Ensemble. There was one stipulation: they wanted me to add a singer. So I added my daughter, Althea. She had been listening to my rehearsals of the Ensemble for years and knew how we performed. It was an easy addition and she’s been in the Ensemble ever since. Cooper‐Moore left the group in 2005. I had replaced Sam Furnace with the tenor saxophone and flute player, Ras Moshe. The last addition has been bassist Shayna Dulberger, who replaced William Parker. He works so often it’s hard to get performance dates with him that are not already taken by someone else. In the fall of 2009 the current Untempered Ensemble played a concert at Syracuse University which was recorded, mastered, and produced under the auspices of the non‐profit organization, of which my wife is President, called Shadrack Inc. The two members of the Ensemble who have been with me for the entire time the Ensemble has been in existence, Warren Smith and Joe Daley, are still there. I have enjoyed working with the current members very much. I hope we stay together for as long as I’m playing music.
I have stayed with the way that I want to create music from the very beginning. I wanted an improvisational organization playing off small motifs, controlled by rhythmic and tempo structures. I believe I have been successful in doing that. I wanted to impart my ideas orally and for the most part I have done that. I believe very strongly in the oral tradition as a way of communicating music, because music is sound. I’ve been involved in music for as long as I can remember. For me it has been a wonderful gift. It has filled my life with so many beautiful moments and has pulled me through the good and the bad times. I am very happy for that.
Peace,
Bill Cole, September 18, 2011
20
21 sounds and visions Wednesday, May 18, 2011 10:01 PM From: "bcg"
Re: sounds and visions Thursday, May 19, 2011 7:58 AM From: "!"
...perhaps an evolution of the sound over time as it goes from the original then becomes alive in our more lucid creative organic interpretations? as if the recorded voice were meant to take a living organism and capture it enough to continue a discussion with the larger universe - i'm absolutely certain some musicians become captivated by the notion of eternal life, or perhaps out of body experiences: hearing 22 our own voice speaking and the various strangeness of not channeling that through our throats allowing it to reverberate to our ears gives us a fraction of what we hear when actually speaking, and on top of that, a fraction of that fraction given spectral/digital/+ technological limitations in capturing our human spectrum of being in sound. we would have to simulate the air we breathe instead of having distortion. we would have to stand in the space where the microphone was placed relative to the musician - this might mean sitting in the room together up to our ear pressed to their face - or in some more avant-garde/throat singing scenarios our ears inside their necks, or in their stomach. wherever there is sound our ears vicariously travel, giving us an enhanced perspective of the greater sonic reality - secrets of the universe (but isn't all of the universe a great secret?) - we learn on our path to the stars in pursuit of the omniscient absolute perspective most personified by scientific and religious communities which seek to put this reality to rest by their own method of analysis. but the omniscient encompasses all of that and these views and paths in all dimensions and aspects and goes much farther than mere physical reality or spiritual musing can deliver, and i believe the closest thing we as humans have to something of this nature/stature lies within the musical experience. not only in the rhythms of our heart and breath and every sequence from DNA to dance moves, but also the ongoing noise you hear when running current through your fingers - the infinitesimal movement of single cells in unison - the noise music of our lives, the current that we naturally carry and the power we have to warm those around us. the bird sings the loudest to join together in a song a life, and truly a lot of industry/show playing musicians use that platform as their mating call, but whatever the sexual connotation, and sex is wonderful, it is beyond the sex and universal to the point of plants responding positively to certain sonic vibrations. this just may be fundamental in our architecture of the universe: a sonic-enhanced environment can produce physically resonant manifestations, and perhaps this is completely good and beneficial for our well-being. there is a flip side of every coin - the side of obsession, consumption, a lack of self-moderation where we become lost within the medium. this has happened to me in sound, coming from an isolated space of computers and headphones but then becoming reborn in a fire of harmolodic immediacy. since then i have grown as a musician out of the bedroom and generally standing up for my creativity in a face to face reality instead of merely living a secret agent virtual life among the wires and lights. it is also mandatory to consider the significance of silence. this is something john cage has explored with great success in his work. i believe his work is becoming increasingly relevant as our lives become more and more connected to data systems - he is credited with the first electronic music performance. he played
23 chess with duchamp. he loved mushrooms. he was a rare warm iconoclast of visionary forms few ever have a chance to or would conceive to detect. without silence there can be no rhythm, without space there can be no motion. i live in a house with four musicians, we have a simple studio - come visit us! boston area. though the styles are not always my favorite, to hear people engaging in music making on a regular basis is something i would rather have around me than not. and to jam with them, to be able to have nonverbal conversations with the house is something i wish every gathering did, and as often as possible. sing a song today, every day. and though i may only hum or drop a single verse some day and keep most of my musing to leg tapping rhythms the essence is always with us, the song our heart is beating, the song our breath is breathing, the spaces between in the night, the speeds of the day. we are instruments in this life of our own choosing. there is nothing too great that we cannot become if we set ourselves to it.
...this became my submission to the new harmolodic manifesto - i think we should just include the entire email trail here (your message, my response). it's a nice reference to the first art i made for the first (?) Paradise 29 Artel show, the door i wrote our first emails on after seeing your call for art on craigslist. that site has truly changed the social terrain in glorious and horrible ways, as has digital life. we need to encourage the analog, the drums, the local village jams to counterbalance the current currents. not to be against them, but to allow us to experience a fuller spectrum of reality. there is no reason why the realms have to be separate - personified by the four musicians i live with who come from more traditional/analog instrumental backgrounds. i feel living here is a great opportunity to experience and expand upon my existing sonic reality in a realm that is unknown to us all - the meeting of our journeys here will produce unknown quantities and that's the most interesting part of it all, where we are now, and what is possible now. even if i take the same route i try to see something new every day. it reminds me of our concept that still remains completely valid to travel the world for SOUND and document the sounds of various regions, peoples, the mechanics of the city that continue to speak throughout the night, the water, plants, animals, the sound we hear, now. now i hear a choir of leafblowers, a dumptruck, the click of my keys and the keys of kyle an amazing guitarist who plays with The Everyday Visuals. my breathing, the breathing of truck hydraulics. thankfully this is not the usual sonic experience for me, though i should get over to the pond across the street more often. i'm skateboarding cross country next year, take a walk with me for a day or more won't you? live in the places you travel through without glass between what you see that you can also feel... and hear... and more. happy trails 24 freeform energies
a harmolodic omniverse : what is weighed together h a r m o l o d i c
when harmolodic expression meets the emotional plague (The neurotic character in destructive action on the social scene— Wilhelm Reich)… when aliveness and the rational meets deadness and the irrational… when yes expansive meets no contractive… when the ruleless bump up against the ruled… when uncertainty confronts certainty… when its gotta be this way or not at all, or else—authority/judgment knocks…
~ (yelling) “you can’t play that during my song, you are ruining it!” ~ “you don’t know how to play trumpet do you?” ~ “we won’t play that song now because its too difficult for you.” ~ “i won’t play the song with you if you keep playing it like that.” to play music harmolodically is as challenging as to gather and love as action and feeling… to play music harmolodically when songs are at all places of formation from the first time debut to the last time finale… to play music harmolodically avoiding approaches to “perfection” defined by distorted ideals, morals, values, ethics…
25 writing from within the spiral swirling no eye of the storm stillness on the fly winging it call to gather horn in the valley shell on the water come in closer and louder raising the volume and riding the expression in dynamic swells and energetic arcs…
…beginning anew and again (continuing) where we left off and on in the ceaseless flow of the ever‐present harmolodic sounds and silences the natural hum of the universe the cosmic pulse of energy playing music <> playing with music when the push‐me pull‐you greeted the pull‐me push‐you in the now unfolding
some players feeling the harmolodics: B(e)ing brother jt cecil taylor dewey redman the loon <> rival gts rashied ali sun of monkey the velvet underground yo la tengo we can rock sensation ((((((((((((((((((((WE CAN ROCK SENSATION)))))))))))))))))))) 26
27 the harmolodic workshop 08252009
*) the five universal shapes: the circle, the cross, the triangle, the spiral, the square
*) the rhombus
*) exploring/adapting the grateful dead form of drums space
*) the color wheel primary colors (red, yellow, blue) cannot be separated into another color secondary colors (orange, green, violet) created when one primary color is mixed with another: orange = red + yellow; green = blue + yellow; violet = blue + red figure 1 color wheel using archetypal system of assigning pitch to color; knote: indigo (A)
yellow (E)
orange (D) green (F)
red (C) blue (G)
violet (B)
28 The Loon <> Rival GTs Meet Mister Fig, Transcription
Warm‐up in E? E’s not good for the sax? Warm‐up in…? You just do what you’re doing… C, D. Name a good warm‐up cord and we’ll go with it. No pop, give us a good key. You do your thing I’ll… Tell me what that… E’s not good for a B flat instrument you told me that before. Warm‐up in B flat. Is that alright, is that good? C, B. B flat. B flat. B flat it is. B flat. B flat to what? F. F, B flat, I never… B flat to F. What’s a B flat? Oh yeah, B flat… A sharp. …is A sharp, right? Yeah, yeah. Let’s go B flat to F, alright? B flat to F. B flat to F or F sharp? What’s the relative minor of F? F sharp minor. F sharp minor. F double sharp would be the relative minor… Whew! …or change. I don’t know what that is. Let’s go B flat to G. Just get it moving and I’ll jump on. Alright just get it moving. That’s what I say. B flat to G. Just start playing.
29 Inside, Outside Second-Edition Rewrite by Geoffrey Oldmixon
Inside There’s nothing real between them, but dull attention drawn to one by another working stiff, who wishes there were none.
Outside Brotherly love is said to violate His Word.
Inside It was funny … There were these people at the time, like, people you would never defend or support, and they, like, said something funny or nice, or whatever and they winked with a crinkle, and a smile came across your face, and they thanked you, and you welcomed them, somehow with, like, submission?
Outside Blue-veined arrogance wanders ‘cross the plains, legislating, as if to say, “No one’s right, not even you,” the ugliest of pricks.
Inside Love me; I’m human.
Outside Skip me; I’m poor.
Inside Although she’d never have me, I’d like her to, and my hopeless desires can be quite alluring, I daresay.
Outside When diamond-ringed promises have been traded for thick friendship-soles in barefoot lovers’ parks and dirty dollar bills for clever, common decency, tick-tock … the timepieces are a flute,
30 and the feather is a pendulum. And finally, man, finally, we’ve started something good.
Inside The gas is seen in smiling.
Outside Fear the macho monkey!
Inside Your flaws are curdled, and the bottle’s capped. The film of your flaws cover deep the back bend of your tongue, just tickled. You savor them so, your mind provoking further and further indulgence.
Outside The artifacts of your idol were fashioned prior to the magical renderings of utter incompetence and jealous fortune.
Inside Commit a crime, go to jail, feel sorry for yourself.
Outside The qualified suburban voter initiates action as a Senate of cloture bides an alibi.
Inside Whether a plant or a picture, there is something for sure that can say it subtly, more gently than you ever could, ever would, or would ever really want to.
31 Outside It’s not that they’re normal, you just are what you see. Each of our senses feel measured degrees of social invention, attention, debris. You favor your bottle; I favor my grasp. The ones that we’ve mentioned, they favor their pasts.
Inside When the light’s off and your pages, your pages, your pages … You’re worse, sick, dangerously writing your pages, your pages … All that work! And what for!? What for!? It’s too late; we’ve lost you, and it’s too dark to read.
Outside Dumpster-diving pacifist initiates the activist.
Inside You are me — the empty, flightless days of listless, lightweight fantasy. We are the endless, nothing-doing, nothing-planning, nothing-total sum of it all.
Outside Think back, dear mother, dear father and dream: Ask whatnots and who-knows, question reality and reason. Leave off; take under. I was empty, dying days, and you were an empty endless nothing, totally in love with it all.
Inside Fear of nothing sets me apart.
32 Outside Tomorrow never comes, but we listen for it forever.
Inside I tear up my wishes and tear up my life. I spit on these pieces I scatter in spite. I hate all my writing. I hate all my art. I hate all the wisdom I’ve tried to impart.
Outside Winter springs as summer falls; the sum is minus all additions.
Inside So outrageous is your monologue, and so tired is your excuse.
Outside Dusting the case in the corner, you wish against the worst.
Inside Accentuate the obvious.
Outside Let’s get up and walk to town. Let’s steal ourselves some cigarettes.
Inside Another 60-watt brother stares at mercury and a CFL nightmare.
Outside You’re worth eleven bucks and sliding.
Inside Piercing satisfaction blinds my sense of completion.
Outside Trifle pay and tepid accolades: my reward for a worthy welder’s job well done.
33 Inside Alright already with the pistons pounding on my mind, like radiator poison’s best, lubricating drive.
Outside Enough of clouded gnashing; I try to stay alive. Avoid the dark and dirty demons. Look at love and light and life.
Inside Sleepin’ ‘neath the shooting stars, miles back, it is, to Mars; forgetting skips and catching Zzzzz, hopping jumps and comet skies.
Outside Slippin’ ‘cross the mental merger, shelving furnace stoking blister, the wage slave’s placard, polished.
Inside Blame cries cruel lyrics … a crazy man’s last window for life.
Outside Wanting makes me laugh.
Inside Last week was a warm tum of lovely Mum.
Outside So, slide back and retrace tragedy.
Inside A chain-link cannon, balls flying, rusting. mind-altering substances bringing it all back down.
34 Outside My flapping anatomy remains my destiny.
Inside Thanks, but they’ve done it now already.
Outside Welcome, but why, then, did you bother?
Inside Trade hearts and thoughts, the love of truth, for tragic shovel-rust and 6-foot-deep and dying ditches.
Outside There are uninvited guests preparing to arrive.
Inside Be my day’s wonderlieve fulinterruption!
Outside View the author necessarily of the reflecting contents.
Inside A shoulder snaps attention (sharing, rejecting, inspecting, collecting); we just missed a colder map to escape us our pierced submission.
Outside Breast me offer some of that warm, molten churning.
Inside The sunny side’s apparent, but I still sit to shit.
35 I was with Sam Henry and Howard Gee, and I was playing something I made up. Sam said, "What are you playing?" I said, "I don't know it's just something I made up." And Sam said, "Play something in 4/4." I responded with, "What's 4/4? I don't know what that means." And he said, "You are going to have to learn to play in 4/4 if you want to play with other people."
I would like to add that I now know what 4/4 time is. It is also know as “common time”—most music is played is this time signature. Many musicians play in this time and don't even realize it. I know that a person does not need to know music theory to play music with others, but I have since learned about this stuff and I have to say it not only helped me as a musician, but it was a lot of fun to learn about. I recommend it to everyone.
—SRB
36 No matter how you listen to it JAZZ is ostensibly about FREEDOM.
FREEDOM and the MYSTERY surrounding it.
And, like MUSIC, it is an ABSTRACT.
It's SHAPES, FORMS (SOUNDS!) are DISTINCT and PERSONAL and SENSITIVE to each player's DESIRE.
And the DESIRE is INFINITE.
FREEDOM is not just another word for nothing left to lose.
We know this from MESSAGES beamed from the space-lantern of his cosmic highness SUN RA! The MESSAGE was clear:
"NOTHING IS."
—Thurston Moore
37
Warm/Cool Color Flowers. Han‐Busily Gotham Johnson
38 sprouts of the harmolodics
harmolodic branchings a musical seedbomb
Sound‐making is as natural as breathing—it’s our birthright and is as accessible to those with no musical background as it is to the most highly trained professional…If you can make one sound, on any instrument, you can be part of making free sound‐textures…Rediscover what you loved as children: being spontaneous together, a process full of joy, laughter, and fun. This isn’t a master class; it is a place to awaken and nurture your instincts for authentic expression…Discover the wisdom you already have, deep in your being, awakened by the resonances of vibrations from both sound‐making and deep listening. —Paul Winter, “Adventures in Sound Play: An Invitation from Paul Winter for Beginners, Amateurs, & Professionals”
I have always been possessed by the evocative qualities all sounds seem to have, whether natural or electronic. Sounds touch deeper levels of our inner life, layers that lie just beneath the visual world. All sounds are communicative ‐ sound as birth, life and death; sound as time and space; sound as object, environment or event. Audiences should feel sound as it bumps up against them, caresses, travels through, covers and enfolds them. —Stan Shaff
We’ve had requests to do tunes that came out of improvisation on the albums, and that requires us to learn them since we don’t know how we played or even what key we played in. —Djin
That’s probably why you create in the first place because of the freedom. You can do whatever you want. You can lay whatever you want on tape. But again commerce is involved. And as soon as it starts going through those channels, those money making channels, everything changes. —Eddie Vedder
I don’t like to say analog always sounds better than digital, but it definitely feels different. —Michael Hobson
39 If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good! —Duke Ellington
To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument. —Bill Evans
The woods are a song. That bird and that one and that one and that sound— that cracking, that scraping, that gentle thump in the dark, those crickets like guitars, the branches whipping the trees. —Kate Schatz
People would make these events where everyone was asked to participate and be an artist, suddenly somebody wanted you to be in their band and you never played an instrument before but you learned three chords and you were in a band. —Ann Magnuson
The spirit and the idea are of the greatest and essential importance, technique is going to be secondary, technique is an empty vessel, it has to be filled by a vision an idea a spirit an emotion. —Andy Schwartz
The thing that works for me in music is the emotional component, not the technical side. —Jerry Garcia
I was forced into set ways of playing that I didn’t really feel. I’d go somewhere and play the way I wanted, freely, and the guys I was playing with would look at me as though I were crazy. See, if I felt I wanted to honk once in a while, then I’d do it. I’d honk or squeal or do anything I felt like at that moment. But the other cats just didn’t accept it; they didn’t want to accept it. So I began to conform to the kind of playing that was acceptable and I fell into lethargy— and out of music. —Art Pepper
We’re four very distinct and very different people. But I think that push me/pull you has always been part of our indefinable chemistry. There’s an acceptance there. —Michael Stipe
40 The joy of making music belongs to everyone. —Community Music Center, San Francisco
What I look for in musicians is generosity. There is so much to learn from each other and about each other’s culture. Great creativity begins with tolerance. —Yo‐Yo Ma
People who are unpopular or aren’t successful are making great music all the time. —David Roback
When Charles Ives was at Harvard studying harmony he was going crazy the way you’re describing, and he wrote home to his father, saying, “This guy wants me to resolve my chords better,” and his father wrote him back and said, “Tell your professor some chords just don’t want to resolve.” —Don Menn
I have found, in my varied experience as a conductor, soloist with orchestra, and ordinary listener, that there is a general misuse of power all around, depending in whose hands it happens to repose in any given instance. —Oscar Levant
My band plays a different type of music than anybody else plays. We play distinctive rhythms that no other band can play. There are so many of my songs that have been rearranged at this point that I’ve lost track of them myself. We do keep the structures intact to some degree. But the dynamics of the song itself might change from one given night to another because the mathematical process we use allows that. As far as I know, no one else out there plays like this. Today, yesterday and probably tomorrow. —Bob Dylan
The trio’s unpolished musicianship and unregenerate ugliness owe indie’s DIY ethos big‐time. If Harvey snuck in the eccentric harmonies and extra beats you read about occasionally, she was no more aware of it than the country bluesmen who inspire the same kind of loose talk in ethnomusicologists—less, to hear her tell it. Sure she recognizes a chord when she hits on one, but that doesn’t mean she knows its name. She insists that what makes her music go is emotion. —Robert Christgau (on Polly Jean Harvey)
41 Music is a very spiritual thing. I let it happen and it happens. I can’t always make it happen—sometimes it does just come and it kind of dictates how it should be, so I’m not consciously steering it in one way or another. —Polly Jean Harvey
Music or visual arts are really just languages and shouldn’t exclude anyone. Anyone can speak them. It really upsets me sometimes when people think, “I don’t have talent to do music, or to make pictures, or to work with video.” Whatever it is, you don’t need talent. You only have to have something to express, some curiosity. And to go along with that, all you need is confidence. —Peter Gabriel
Bring something incomprehensible into the world! —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
When one is in a capitalist system, it seems folly to want to be working on collective compositions. —Bill Cole
There are as many justifications for free musical expression as there are musicians. —Jefferson Morley and Nathaniel Wice
The playing itself, to him, was not that important. It was more important to capture the feeling. We did mostly one or two takes. There’s a lot of mistakes on there and timing changes, but it was just like a pulse, exactly what John wanted. —Klaus Voormann (on recording John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon)
High energy does not necessarily mean fast. High energy has to do with heart. —Lou Reed
After two rock‐‘em‐sock‐‘em records, the Clash and Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the Clash slowed down just enough to learn how to play its instruments, how to use a recording studio and how to lighten up. —David Browne, Mark Coleman, Anthony DeCurtis, David Fricke, David Handelman, Kurt Loder, Steve Pond and David Wild
Listen more, play less. —Randall Colbourne
42 London Calling still stands tall on the thrilling precipice between energy and craft. —David Browne, Mark Coleman, Anthony DeCurtis, David Fricke, David Handelman, Kurt Loder, Steve Pond and David Wild
I asked him what he wanted me to play, and he said to play whatever I felt like playing. —Connie Kay (on recording Astral Weeks by Van Morrison)
Because the only three things you can’t fix are an average song, an average performance and a track that doesn’t fuckin’ move. —Andrew Loog Oldham
I used to go out in the studio and look at the music. There might be half a dozen notes, with a couple of chord symbols. But in his own head Miles knew where he wanted to go. And the people he had – Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea – they’d grab the bait. Wayne Shorter would be sitting there, and suddenly he’d start to play, and it was like magic. All of this out of three of four notes. —Teo Macero (on recording Bitches Brew by Miles Davis)
We love music like we love life. —Rob Aiman
Rock is rough around the edges. —Bob Lordan
In spite of the fact that I had listened to Soft Machine’s double album Third many times, the concerts at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Høvikodden was a life altering experience. The Art Centre removed all the chairs in the concert hall, so the audience sat and lay on the floor. It was such a total focus on listening to this great music. Both concerts were sold out, and a lot of people among the audience asked what it was that they had heard, because the band was not well known to many of them. They asked, “Is this Jazz? Rock? Progressive?” I answered, “No, it is Soft Machine!” —Hans Voigt, Soft Machine, Live at Henie Onstad Art Centre 1971 liner knotes
I think it’s a real mistake to try to make records that’ll cross over, because immediately you’re working out of your head, not out of your heart. Creatively, at that point, you’re lost. —Jamie O’Hara
43 Music is one small drop in the bucket of the water of life. If you live on music you are way out of kilter when it comes to everyday life. Everyday life is fuel that gives you music. —Wayne Shorter
Conspiracy means breathing together. Music is the ideal conspiracy—not just breathing, but in sync from the heartbeat, the lovebeat, all the way down to extremities deployed in the frug, the swim, the boogaloo, (acoustic or electric), the fly, the monkey, the hustle, the peace‐now. —Glenn O’Brien
Song is existence. —Rainer Maria Rilke
I’ll play just what I feel. —Donald Fagan and Walter Becker
I like to move in between the spaces; the spaces in between the notes are more important than the notes themselves. —Lucia Hwong
Sometimes to me notes have been secondary if there’s an emotion in the song that I feel as a singer is more important, I’m a dangerous singer in that sense, I’ll go for a note even if I know I can’t hit it, but my belief is that if the emotion and the intent is correct it doesn’t matter about the note so much. —Roger Daltry
When it starts to work we’re all in accord and we’re together and we’ve forgotten ourselves its very meditative anyway. —Pete Townshend
To a musician like me, music is what is ‘inside us all’. It represents experience, emotion and spiritual potential. —Pete Townshend
I’ve seen moments in Who concerts where the vibrations were becoming so pure that I thought the world was just going to stop, the whole thing was just becoming so unified. —Pete Townshend
And that’s what music is—emotion, feeling. —Andrew Hill 44
With Eyes Closed. Rachel Znerold
45 The inexperience of some of the players is a virtue rather than a drawback. There are fewer things to unlearn. My approach to the members of the band – which is similar to the kind of approach I use in the class that I teach – ‘Black Music from 1920 to the Present’ – constitutes a fundamental attack against the whole structure of the way music is given to people and also against how our parents taught us and what they thought was necessary and important to teach us. All of us intuitively knew the things young people know today, but we could not implement our intuitions because of the way we were taught. This is why people drop out of school. I don’t tell people in the band how to play. I just tell them: ‘Play.’ Then, by doing it, they begin to see how to play. I’ve dispensed with the idea of teaching notes as such. I play for them and they write down what they want to. We have someone in the band who has been playing only seven months. I confront him with possibilities around the one note he can play with ease and have him see how that one note relates to a living musical structure. —Cecil Taylor
If you feel like singing a song And you want other people to sing along Then just sing what you feel Don’t let anyone say it’s wrong —Wilco, “What Light”
I’m more interested in making music with people I can share with than give things to. —Jeff Tweedy
We generally go for a pretty straight definitive version of what the song sounds like it should be and then deconstruct it a little bit and see if there is some more exciting way to approach it. There is no reason at all not to destroy it. We made it so its ours to destroy. That’s liberating and exciting in a really creative way. —Jeff Tweedy
He responds well to suggestions but he doesn’t do anything you ask him to do. He did some organ stabs on “Raised Right Man.” I was trying to tell him where to put them. And he was looking at me, like, don’t tell me where to put the stabs, man. I could stab this myself. I’m the stab king. I’ve been stabbing since before you were born. It’s not like math where there’s one answer. There’s 100 answers. —Tom Waits (on Augie Meyers)
46 Perfection is not just about control. It’s also about letting go. Surprise yourself so you can surprise the audience. Transcendence. —“Black Swan”, screenplay by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin
It’s more like studying than composing; I research and seek and analyze music—or sound, rather, because sound precedes music itself—and things come up. —Muhal Richard Abrams
The individualistic view from 1‐9 to 0‐1 observes the relativity of all that is known regarding the infinite nature of the past and future when seen through the focal position of here and now.
Action, Action, Action…………………
Reciprocal, Reciprocal, Reciprocal………………… —Muhal Richard Abrams
All music is experimental. —Florian Schneider
I’m young now, I’m wild, and I’m free I’ve got the magic power of the music I’ve got the music in me —Triumph, “Magic Power”
To me, a big problem is that musicians don’t get together to just play as much as they used to. We’ve allowed promoters, record companies, critics and disc jockeys to separate us. So this group of musicians will say, “We’re too cool to play with them.” And this group says, “They’re not spiritual enough for us.” We’ve all got labels why we can’t get together with each other. But all that doesn’t stack up because we’re all playing the black and white notes of the instruments. —Rahsaan Roland Kirk
I like to collaborate with everybody, I don’t care who they are, like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll collaborate with you, absolutely. You can’t play? Oh, that’s perfect.” It’s the sound of mind’s juxtaposition of incongruities, or whatever. —Ariel Pink
47 The creative process and the creator go hand‐in‐hand. —Daniel Smith
But it’s too early for me to say what these songs are going to sound like in the end. I have no idea…It’s a very vulnerable place right now, it’s scary….Meanwhile as all the song parts are simmering on the grill, over on this side are the lyrics simmering. I kind of like the idea of having the parts and the words just sitting there and then they start kind of coming closer together and pointing to each other and then the puzzle begins. Getting myself out of the way of these songs being made so the lord can construct them himself, that’s the goal. Obviously I’m involved but I try to remain humbled and keep my ego, you know, out of the way. So in that sense I think it’s the most natural way to create, but it’s also humbling. I think it’s the most exciting way as well, cause you’re just watching things happen instead of like trying to, you know, pretend that I know better. Instead of going in there and I do struggle with that of course you wanna go in there ok this thing could go with this and this could go with this. And I do that sometimes but it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work for me. It’s best to just kind of wait and watch things point to each other. And I know it’s the holy spirit that does that work. But the holy spirit is a small still voice, and if i’m in a hurry, that’s the big one…I’m in the way if I’m in a hurry. And then the good songs don’t get written. But that’s extremely exciting to watch. So then I get to watch and participate, you know, the way a little kid kind of helps dad change the tire. He’s not really changing the tire. He gets to feel involved. Yeah I don’t know how else to explain it. And yes it is strange to think about it. It’s better to not even think about it I think. Just do it. —Daniel Smith
The emotion of every player is the most important thing, what stands behind this chord or this tone. If you leave that out, the music does not touch you. —Peter Wolf
The music has always evolved and it’s always been a serious music, from Blind Lemon Jefferson to John Coltrane. It’s always been a tremendous contribution to the culture…If you’re truly committed to the music, you can’t become complacent, or rest on your laurels. It’s a constant search for new possibilities. —Yusef Lateef
The highly sensitive musician must let their emotions live within each note of his/her musical expression. —Yusef Lateef 48 “Give a little take a little, “ is an adage of the old and such is the spiritual relationship of music to the performer. The performance of music with others gives an individual an opportunity to develop habits which lend themselves to spirituality, i.e., ritual, self‐discipline, sacrifice, selflessness, and empathy. The vitality of the music produced by a performer is dependent upon his level of spiritual development. Spirit, the highest aspect of man’s being, is an extension of nature’s divine energy which permeates the universe. As a musician becomes more and more aware of his need for nature’s divine energies, the more intense becomes his love, respect, reverence, and homage for that source of vital energy. —Robert Cunningham
Almost everything I've done, I've done through my own creativity. I don't think I ever had to listen to anyone else to learn how to play drums. I wish I could say that for about ten thousand other drummers. —Buddy Rich
Most bands, when they get to R.E.M.’s stature, wouldn’t even consider touring if they didn’t have an album to promote; and when they did get ‘round to treading the boards again, would take pains to make sure that every note and syllable of their new work was completely rehearsed down to the final bar of the final encore, pinned to a schedule by the lighting routines stored in the computer. Not so R.E.M. —Andy Gill, R.E.M., Live at the Olympia liner knotes
The key to humanity is in this music! The war of revenge and hatred must end! Improvisation is the art of the 21st Century. Improvisation contains the science of evolution and…demonstrates our ancient roots and our future communications, swirling through our biochemical spheres and igniting our souls for hope in the love of humanity. —Dennis Warren
A lot of people will say “You are not playing this way, you are playing wrong, therefore you are not playing music, therefore you do not exist. Stop!”…We just played the sound to see where it takes us. Playing for three, four hours takes you closer to the ancient spirit of drumming, playing the sound. Perpetuation of sound is the perpetuation of life. When the sound is alive, we’re alive; when the sound is gone, we’re gone. —Dennis Warren
49 No fear of the unknown—we are sonic explorers whose urgency is based “on the now via music.” —Dennis Warren
If the music gets to us, there is an instant sympathetic vibration through which we resonate and commune with it. —R. D. Laing
There is a resonance between the singer, the song, sung and heard, and the listener. A melody reverberates and regenerates feeling, mood, atmosphere, nuances of pathos…across widely different people, cultures, times and places. —R. D. Laing
Rock music had grown up to such an extent that it was no longer a fad, and it had lost its excitement and that nameless feeling that allowed you to get up and mess up. —Malcolm McLaren
I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well. Whether you were able to even know about rock ‘n’ roll to the extent that you were able to write songs properly wasn’t important any longer. —Malcolm McLaren
Let’s be undecided, let’s take our time And sooner or later, we will know our mind
Let's wake up the neighbors, let's turn up our amps The way we used to without a plan —Yo La Tengo, “Big Day Coming”
We have chosen this point in the show to play a song we have never played before. —Ira Kaplan, The Fillmore, San Francisco, California, April 4, 2010
As the music swells somehow stronger from adversity Our hero finds his inner peace —Yo La Tengo, “Tom Courtenay”
The members gathered around an omnidirectional microphone and played their parts live, adding group vocals after the music was laid down. Flaws were embraced. —Casey Jarman (on AgesandAges) 50 Young audiences can feel if you are alive or already mummified by tradition. Of course, the tradition should nourish today’s music—but as a humus, not as a power‐abusing museum with no connections to the street. The music should naturally develop out of our lives, not out of theory.” —Nik Bärtsch
We are interested in the musical strategy [in which] as a listener, you often don’t know what is composed, arranged, improvised or instantaneously composed in a performance. —Nik Bärtsch
The golden age of rock ‘n’ roll will never die, As long as children feel the need to laugh and cry. —Mott the Hoople, “The Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll”
Music is at its best when it carries you along at a level deeper than the music itself and forces you to live in its spaces as well as its notes.
Improvisation is at its best when everyone involved in the music is aware of an intent greater than his own; therefore more his own.
Neither of these are common occurrences. —Keith Jarrett
I don't read music. And my mom is this classically trained person, and I went the other way. And I think it's helped me write songs that I wouldn't have written if I were going at the technical way. Because they go, "Oh, you can't go from this chord to that chord. It's not the way you're supposed to do it." —Mariah Carey
I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time. —Charles Mingus
As always on a Mingus session, there were no written parts. Mingus gives his musicians oral guidelines, such as the scales they can use in a particular piece, and he tries to indicate the emotional essence of each number. “After that,” he points out, “as long as they start where I start and end where I end, the musicians can change the compositions if they feel like it. They add themselves, they add how they feel, while we’re playing.” —Nat Hentoff
51 “There once was a word used – swing. Swing went in one direction, it was linear, and everything had to be played with an obvious pulse and that’s very restrictive. But I use the term ‘rotary perception.’ If you get a mental picture of the beat existing within a circle you’re more free to improvise. People used to think that the notes had to fall on the center of the beats in the bar at intervals like a metronome, with three or four men in the rhythm section accentuating the same pulse. That’s like parade music or dance music. But imagine a circle surrounding each beat – each guy can play his beats anywhere in that circle and it gives him a feeling he has more space. The notes fall anywhere inside that circle but the original feeling for the beat isn’t changed. If one in the group loses confidence, somebody hits the beat again. The pulse is inside you. When you’re playing with musicians who think this way you can do anything. Anybody can stop and let the others go on. It’s called strolling. In the old days when we got arrogant players on the stand we’d do that – just stop playing and a bad musician would be thrown.” —Charles Mingus, “Beneath the Underdog”
And, of course, that is what all of this is—all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill‐writ, ill‐rhymed, and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs—that song, endlessly reincarnated—born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black‐hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket “88,” that Buick 6—same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness. —Nick Tosches, “Where Dead Voices Gather”
We wanted to take all our ideas about what’s exciting, put them into this rock ‘n’ roll band and just live our most extreme vision of what and how things could be. —Richard Hell
George had a touch with the guitar that I have not heard since he died. Everyone has their own unique touch; just like you have a fingerprint, we all have our own unique DNA…The weight of their hand, the pressure and speed, their touch, fingers. I hear one slide and to me it’s everything—everything that he is and was is in that sound. —Olivia Harrison (on George Harrison)
52 You see young people now who don’t consider themselves musicians pick up a guitar and play better than anyone you’ve ever heard. —Olivia Harrison
Anyone who wants to be a musician out there, just be one. Get an old amp and an old guitar. Don’t let anyone put you through a big payout. —Billy Childish
The melody was intricate; Morton’s left hand jumped and trembled all over the fingerboard while his bow see‐sawed madly. And right from the start he was making mistakes. This I must make clear, it is capital: the Rankin Concerto was poorly played. Even my uneducated ears could detect notes that were smudged or not quite right, or a slowing down in the playing because Morton couldn’t keep up. But it didn’t detract. On the contrary. The full force of the Rankin Concerto was expressed through Morton’s inept playing. His every false note hinted at impregnable perfection, his every falter was liberating. There was no robotic flawlessness here. Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error. —Yann Martel, “The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton”
The man told Henry that the only native talent needed to play music well was joy. —Yann Martel, “Beatrice and Virgil”
MAKE‐UP: “Gospel music”…”Sound verite”….” ”Liberation theology” or “vacant Yeh‐Yeh music”?..Spongers?..Parasites?..Con‐men (and ladies)? Bohemians? (To whom Diderot exclaimed “Oh madman, maddest of madmen, how does it happen that in your wretched head there are so many true ideas along with so many absurdities?”)…What the group mirrored, besides the loving mutuality, was a glance at the arcane, the hidden, the remote. The fashion, the tics, the fads, the vocabulary of the tribe, and what is more important, a sort of disgust or confusion as regards the outerworld, a secret refusal to leave their private domain. That place constructed with sound as the refuge against culture, That place where the assumptions of the outerworld are annihilated… —Unknown, Make‐Up, After Dark liner knotes
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Lost Instrument
Star‐shaped impression of half & half In once‐black coffee the day stirs Into noon dark heart pursuing The stillpoint at its center Loss is the language I speak too soon
I bend my back to tighten the strings Of my ribs lost instrument Sounding somnambulant melodies Stepping asleep into midday Holding nothing except air
Light sifts down through ethereal branches Something slips into my ear Words I can’t make out except “See you on the flipside!” I am Always tending toward the hollow space
Inside this place the inside
—David Sirois
54
Albert Ayler. Relief engraving print on paper. Eric Hoffman
55
Life is to be re learned a vessel to be re turned
The silent wheels diligently working attract no notice.
In reflection the day to day hauntingly stares back once again uncertain.
—j.g.
56 ”Herbie Hancock: Possibilities”, Selections
I feel that many of our systems that worked to encourage creativity are being challenged. And there is more encouragement to stay where you are. Don’t make a wave. I think the word that kind of captures the spirit of what I believe in and what I am really about and what I hope to achieve is the word possibilities. As children, we have that sense that anything is possible and we have that kind of openness, we’re not jaded. The older we get, the more closed in we get, the more frightened we get, the more set in our ways we get, because we’re afraid of the unknown. Whereas as a child, everything is unknown. What a beautiful place to reside in, you know, in your own being, you know, where you still have the wonder of a child.
I enjoy the process of collaborative effort, influence each other and share ideas and pick off energy from the vibe of each other.
There were so many things I learned from Miles, about standing up for what you believe in. And I learned a lot about listening from Miles. About turning whatever happens musically into something of value, that’s what you try to do rather than be judgmental about what some other guy is playing. Leave judgment out of the picture and just take what’s there and make something happen with it.
Jazz is of the moment. You play the moment and it has, you know, each moment is fresh. That’s not an easy thing to do. It takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of trust. And it takes a kind of nakedness to be able to accomplish that, at least to be able to approach it even.
I knew that Miles didn’t care how good you sounded. You know, he wasn’t about that. He only cared that you were working on something. Miles made us feel comfortable. He would never tell us what to play. Never. Never. He would give us something to figure out so we could figure out ourselves...That’s how a master teaches. A master doesn’t tell you what to do, because a master wants you to reveal yourself.
I mean this is real collaboration that we are doing here. None of the arrangements are just finished the night before or two or three nights before, completely done i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed, and everything is all planned, and everybody gets told what to do. None of this record so far has been done like that. Its all been really decided at the session.
57 What you just described, I can do that. That’s not why I’m here. You know what I mean. I’m here because of the stuff that I don’t know what to do.
Everybody kept getting more and more ideas about oh why don’t we try this, and put this track on, and try this track, how ‘bout if we put this on top and this on top. Pretty soon we buried the track. You know, you can’t even hear what we originally had.
As soon as they latch on to something where people will say ‘Hey that’s really good’, then they want to stay there because there’s security, there’s acceptance, there’s whatever there is, you know, and they feel comfortable. And they don’t want to move outside that comfort zone. But the hip stuff is outside the comfort zone.
There’s a discovery process of who you are as an individual. At the end of the day, nobody can take from you what’s created by your own being.
Music doesn’t just grow out of thin air. It comes from the life of the people that are playing it. The human spirit of the artist and not just from the notes and harmonies and from their musicality.
It really took my practice of Buddhism to help me to realize that those lessons that were taught to me about music, these lessons really apply to life. I mean isn’t it that human beings’ highest goal to be able to take whatever happens, whether its feast or famine, whether its pleasant things or unpleasant things, to take those things and somehow turn them into something of value.
58 “The Lefsetz Letter”, Bob Lefsetz, Selections
When I love an album, I study it…Staring at the artwork as the music played…I wanted to get closer and closer. I WANT to get closer and closer. I NEED TO GET CLOSER AND CLOSER!!
They tell us it’s about hits. But it’s not. It’s about ALBUM TRACKS! The songs that are not obvious, but penetrate and stay lodged in your gut, that make you get in touch with your humanity, that get your body moving involuntarily when you hear them.
Nothing wraps you like a blanket and soothes like music.
Life is about that singing sensation you get inside when you pluck that note on your guitar, when you achieve something new.
That’s what music does, it takes over your body, you’re no longer in control, YOU’RE POSSESSED!
Great music belongs to the populace, not the creator. We own it not by buying it, but by listening to it, having it deposited deep inside of us.
This focus on auto‐tuning, on getting everything exactly right in the studio is working against us. Live music disappears into the ether, that’s its magic. The key is to capture the inspiration, the energy of a great performance in the studio. Massage it too much and you miss it.
What is rock and roll? Maybe a mind‐set. Wherein those not beholden to a system test limits…A music that isn’t constrained, not made to formula, but writes its own rule book.
Rock and roll doesn’t only speak to your genitalia, it also speaks to your head and heart.
It’s about the music. Now more than ever.
59 Anthony Braxton, Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979: Language Music (1967), Selections
The progressional have not meant to construct a continuance of this period has wrong impression about my now seen the forming of a viewpoint. In the final new kind of creative analysis, I have chosen the musician—whose activity route which makes the most transcends any one criterion sense for me—which is to say, and whose scope cannot be my work has not solidified limited by superficial because the universe has boundaries concerning necessitated that I come forth whether or not a given to save the planet. Rather I participation is ‘correct’ or have moved, like all of us, ‘legitimate.’ towards that which is most real to me—with the hope I have chosen this route that something of positive because I believe that the value can also come from reality implications of what I am interested in. creativity are directly related to the progressional The challenge for the creative continuance of earth life— musician is to make a given and positive change. In other integration of elements ‘live.’ words creativity is about In other words, the primary something—and is not focus of the music is not on separated from the the ‘how’ but on the ‘is’—this fundamental laws that govern is true whether the approach the composite universe. The is perceived as traditional or nature of this period in time extended. has necessitated that this ‘something’ be investigated and vibrated to, on as many levels as possible; and yet I
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Lady Decapus. Natasha Holmes
61 It’s a Small World A Harmolodic Recollection by Bob Lordan
While out one evening for dinner at Bix, North Beach, San Francisco, my lady friend and I had the pleasure of catching a seasoned three-piece jazz trio, double-bass, drums and piano. From my vantage the players seemed to be older cats, maybe in their early 60’s. They went back and forth between jazz standards and Christmas songs, trading-off between listening and playing, all the sounds rising and falling, clinks of glasses and silverware and conversational tones dropping in and out of the sounds of the music from the stage. There’s a fine line between a restaurant successfully adding a band so that diners are free to converse without yelling over or drowning out the band and the band having the space to do their thing without feeling they’re too loud. The band stopped for a break and we decided to leave. While getting our coats at the coat check, I had the opportunity to speak with George the piano player and Sly the drummer. I expressed how great they sounded and how well they played together. It must have seemed like I played music by the way I was speaking because George asked me if I played. I said yes and explained briefly how my musical cohorts and I approach collective sound-making. I don’t remember exactly what I said, something about the people I play with and the people I could play with, the idea of being able to play knowingly or unknowingly with people for unbroken joyful hours, versus the herky-jerk of trying to jive with players who are controlling and unaccepting. Sly smiled and said, “Oh, I know what you’re on about. You play that Harmolodic music. I took a workshop once and Ornette Coleman was our teacher. He told us that it’s not just about playing music, but about the difference between playing music and playing musically. I said, yeah, I can see it that way.”
62 Autophysiopsychic Music: Music which comes from one’s A physical, mental and spiritual self. U
The autophysiopsychic T performer of music must endeavor to understand the O nature of sound in that it is P sounds that he/she is producing. Sound gives to the H consciousness an evidence of its existence, although it is in fact Y the active part of consciousness itself which turns into sound. S The consciousness bears witness to its own voice. It is in I this realization that sound appeals to man. Tone has either O a warm or cold effect according to its element, since all P elements are made of different degrees of vibrations. S Therefore, sound can produce an agreeable or disagreeable Y effect upon man’s mind and body. Every person has a sound C that is peculiarly unique; The musician should be aware of H his/her own sound. I
—Yusef Lateef C
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64 “Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death…and Insects”, Selections
If you’re working with open‐minded professionals, who like to leap on the angles of chance and see where it takes them, it’s fun, and I think it’s just ‘cause they’re so good that they like the risks and the excitement of going into something without preparing for it. —Robyn Hitchcock
I don’t always know what I’m on about. I just…sort of write the song first and then ask questions later. —Robyn Hitchcock
I’ve always worked really quickly and I like to work really spontaneously and I always think that your first thought or reaction is always your truest and best. —Peter Buck
Well I’m not really professional. See I never had any lessons. I think it’s this thing if you feel like playing something then you eventually are able to play it, you are able to then play in the way you feel. —Robyn Hitchcock
For me taking a year off from music would be like taking a year off from breathing. You know, I mean, it’s called death. I can’t do that. —Peter Buck
Playing music justifies existence. I often feel, you know, really shitty and poisonous and I think I’ve just got life wrong. And then I’m there with a guitar or there with my friends my musician colleagues we’re picking away and whoosh all that horrible toxic idiocy that seems to fuel human life is all transferred into fuel. —Robyn Hitchcock
65 “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung”, Lester Bangs, Selections
Why have they made three albums when so many great, talented, professional, musicianly bands get dumped unceremoniously after one? Because the Godz are brilliant, that’s why, and most talented professional musicianly bands are stupid and visionless and exactly alike. In Godz music, it’s almost impossible to play a wrong note. So what’s the point, you say, why can’t anybody play music like that, why can’t you or I? What makes them so special? Well, theoretically, anybody can play like that, but in actual practice it just ain’t so. Most people would be too stultified—after all, what’s the point in doing it if anybody can?—and as for you, you probably ain’t got the balls to do it, and even if you did, you’d never carry it through like a true Godzly musical maniac must to qualify. You’d just pick it up and tootle a few bars to prove something, and that’s entirely different. Me, I could do it because I have been for years, even before I heard of the Godz. All it takes is insane persistence and a total disregard for everything but getting that yawp out if you gotta howl at the moon, and obviously most folks aren’t gonna howl at the moon just to prove a point. But the Godz would! And not to prove a point, but because they like howling at the moon! Which is what sets them apart. You gotta dig it or it falls flat.
…Music is about feeling, passion, love, anger, joy, fear, hope, lust, EMOTION DELIVERED AT ITS MOST POWERFUL AND DIRECT IN WHATEVER FORM, rather than whether you hit a clinker in that third bar there.
And finally, the Stooges. The Stooges were the first young American group to acknowledge the influence of the Velvet Underground—and it shows heavily in their second album. The early Velvets had the good sense to realize that whatever your capabilities, music with a simple base was the best. Thus, “Sister Ray” evolved from a most basic funk riff seventeen minutes into stark sound structures of incredible complexity. The Stooges started out not being able to do anything else but play rock‐bottom simple—they formed the concept of the band before half of them knew how to play, which figures— probably just another bunch of disgruntled cats with ideas watching all the bullshit going down. Except that the Stooges decided to do something about it. None of them have been playing their instruments for more than two or three years, but that’s good—now they won’t have to unlearn any of the stuff which ruins so many other promising young musicians: flash blues, folk‐pickin’, Wes Montgomery‐style jazz, etc. Fuck that, said Asheton and Alexander, we can’t play it anyway, so why bother trying to learn? Especially 66 since even most of those styles’ virtuosos are so fucking boring you wonder how anyone with half a brain can listen to them. Cecil Taylor, in A. B. Spellman’s moving book Four Lives in the Bebop Business, once told a story about an experience he had in the mid‐fifties, when almost every club owner, jazz writer and listener in New York was turned off to his music because it was still so new and so advanced that they could not begin to grasp it yet. Well, one night he was playing in one of these clubs when in walked this dude off the street with a double bass and asked if he could sit in. Why not, said Taylor, even though the cat seemed very freaked out. So they jammed, and it soon became apparent to Taylor that the man had never had any formal training on bass, knew almost nothing about it beyond the basic rudiments, and probably couldn’t play one known song or chord progression. Nothing. The guy had just picked up the bass, decided he was going to play it, and a very short time later walked cold into a New York jazz club and bluffed his way onto the bandstand. He didn’t even know how to hold the instrument, so he just explored as a child would, pursuing songs or evocative sounds through the tangles of his ignorance. And after a while, Taylor said, he began to hear something coming out, something deeply felt and almost but never quite controlled, veering between a brand‐new type of song which cannot be taught because it comes from an unschooled innocence which cuts across known systems, and chaos, which playing the player and spilling garble, sometimes begins to write its own songs. Something was beginning to take shape which, though erratic, was unique in all this world. Quite abruptly, though, the man disappeared, most likely to freak himself into oblivion, because Taylor never saw or heard of him again. But he added that if the cat had kept on playing, he would have been one of the first great free bassists. The Stooges’ music is like that. It comes out of an illiterate chaos gradually taking shape as a uniquely personal style, emerges from a tradition of American music that runs from the wooly rags of backwoods string bands up to the magic promise eternally made and occasionally fulfilled by rock: that a band can start out bone‐primitive, untutored and uncertain, and evolve into a powerful and eloquent ensemble. It’s happened again and again: the Beatles, Kinks, Velvets, etc. But the Stooges are probably the first name group to actually form before they even knew how to play. This is possibly the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll story, because rock is mainly about beginnings, about youth and uncertainty and growing through and out of them. And asserting yourself way before you know what the fuck you’re doing.
67
dark rhizomatics, billy conde goldman
68 The 5000 Fingers of Ian Svenonius
People ask me a lot “Do you consider yourself a musician?”…I think it’s interesting. Would anyone ask Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly if they were an artist just because they don’t paint like Rubens or Salvador Dali? In music there is still a strange equation of technocracy. There is a special mantle of musicianhood. You can be like Christo and be called an artist now. You can be making art. You don’t have to have the technical expertise of an artist of bygone days. If a person can be called an artist despite their lack of artistic skills, why can’t a person be called a musician despite their lack of music proficiency? People ask me if I am a musician. Well, I make music.
I think the exciting thing about American pop music from the sixties or whatever is the garbage quality of it…Not that it sounds like garbage, it's really well done, but it has a tossed off quality to it. The problem with music is the "importance" of it. Who wants to hear Radiohead, or Pink Floyd, or Kanye West, or someone who's so important? "Oh, the record is seventy minutes long, and it's so important, it's such an event." And it's like, "No, good music is not an event." It feels organic. And when it's important, it's because of the narcissism of the star.
The whole problem with music is that people are thinking of it in this historical, sophisticated way. They're thinking about their place in history. And that's the problem with all this rock history crap. Where all we hear about is the "innovators." In actuality, those people are great, but there's thousands of people all making music all the time. That narrative of rock and the importance of these certain people and their place in history, that's bullshit. That's like, "Oh, this was a really important spaghetti dinner that this person made." As soon as people stop thinking that way, then maybe they can make some good music.
The important thing is this is not a career. We have been poor the whole time. People think that they are going to get theirs. People read these punk histories and they think they are the next chapter. That is not true. You can't live like that. You have to live in the time. You can't see it as a career and a commercial end. The Chinese have a saying: "After the mountain, more mountains." You have to set challenges for yourself. Only when you hit rock bottom, then you can create something new. You don't want to be Richard Diebenkorn and paint the same picture for fifty years because you know there will be a market.
It’s bizarre how everyone has to conform to one point of view. It's interesting to see how that affects music. So many groups now are formalists. They are practicing their vacant music to a defined plan or esthetic. There is all these 1980s bands now. They are copying very specific models and templates. You begin to wonder: is that a weird offshoot of the fascist times that we live in? There is a desire to conform to something that is considered totally kosher.
69 The beauty of collecting anything really is that you realize the scope of the movement that produced it, all the people that were involved and almost none of them were heralded, really; only a tiny fraction of people are heralded. It gives you a real great sense of what you're missing when you're listening to the Rolling Stone history of rock 'n' roll, or VH1's history of rock and roll. You have this in‐born expectation of being remembered, or that you need to be an innovator or important, or that you need to be the craziest guy who ever played the drums or something. But the more you listen to these old records, the more you explore music, the more you realize there's millions of records out there and they're almost all made by faceless nobodies.
Gospel music is inspirational in that it provides a non commodified example, an underground. There's a whole underground scene, network etc., that exists outside the whims of the market place. It's not on a timetable for success and planned obsolescence like capitalism, pop music or whatever. Gospel music, cathartic passion music, exists outside of time constraints or anything.
Gospel music seems the most internal linkimmediate, the most passionate and bendable form. We want to revitalize rock 'n' roll and make it a communicative thing, rather than an internal linkalienating theme; the rise of dance music seems to be because rock bands seem to be increasingly dropping the ball in terms of making their music internal linkrelevant to anyone but themselves; people listening to music feel resentment if they are not included because everyone wants to be able to create because they are implicitly involved in the relationship.
The whole idea of Frankenstein as the creator. We always use a lot of baby imagery. The baby is a metaphor of creation—creating something, harnessing our power, the power that a group has over the individual. That's all a part of our adulation, our exaltation of the community over the individual. That's always been one of our major themes—a dismissal of the capitalist individual idea. That exaltation of the individual in capitalist society, which is pro‐consumer—define yourself by what you own, define yourself against the community. That's why we've always been at odds with the rock 'n' roll tradition, and that's why we've always been fascinated by gospel music. Because this is all a part of our role here.
We've always talked about how we're against the bourgeois notion of the individual and rock 'n' roll as an individual expression. Our new anthem is Live At The Rhythm Hive and it's about hive‐life, drone‐life. The only expression people are allowed all over the world now is to buy things. The one thing about music that makes that different is that after you buy it, it's like an avenue, it's labyrinthian.
70 MUSIC IS MISUSED
A slave to the forces of evil, music is beaten, worked, misused, and serially abused. Once, music was a way for humans to engage with one another.
Music came from a human and was projected as a way to speak to and entertain other humans (or dolphins, if your name was Fred Neil). After the Industrial Revolution, however, when music was pressed onto a less temporal format called “records,” humans lost control of it. The record rang out the first stunning prophecy of our total enslavement by robots.
When one hears the shriek of James Brown on a record, it is not a joyful reminder of that man’s genius for performance and emoting: It is the ghost of an artist imprisoned by technology, a man who can never rest, whose art is being utilized day and night in multiple locations simultaneously to pound people into absolute submission.
One cannot escape the benighted rhythms of rock ’n’ roll no matter how far one strolls, chickens, mashed‐potatoes, hully‐gullies, and twists away from “where the action is.” And if one finally escapes its insidious snare, one has backed oneself into another sound system’s death zone to endure its own equally cynical mechanized cacophony.
As for the misuse of music? Every song that is any good was invented through the use of joy. This joy, however, has been inverted through the most despicable black magic imaginable. Music is utilized as a pacifier for potential customers in marketplaces. It’s used to hypnotize watchers of advertisements and the programs designed to showcase advertisements. It’s used as white noise in elevators, at parties, and in waiting rooms. It’s even blasted outside to groove the patrons using the gas pumps at filling stations. While the Christians once hated music and banned it, music is now enforced in the same way as sexual perversion and idiocy are in our society.
Maybe LA punk band the Weirdos were right when they beseeched us to DESTROY ALL MUSIC. Let’s start today!
Excerpt from “On the Misuse of Music” by Ian Svenonius 71 ”Jandek on Corwood”, Selections
It’s a kind of music you could play for somebody who would say ‘This is random. Anybody can do this.” Its an argument that goes back as soon as people started to make any kind of break from representational art, anywhere. When you can’t argue about the quality of technique. When you have to start saying this has a theoretical presence and this has an intellectual basis for it that has nothing to do with a measurable technique. There’s art that’s going on here that’s not representational and its not supposed to be beautiful and its not supposed to be attuned to any kind of standard in a commercial sense. —Byron Coley
As a guitar player, Jandek is like nobody else on the planet. This is not necessarily a good thing, but it’s a unique thing. He approaches the instrument in a way that nobody else does. Either he doesn’t really tune it or he puts it in some sort of tuning that’s not really anybody else’s tuning. —Douglas Wolk
Jandek has no need to learn how to play the guitar quote unquote because he has a guitar and its an extension of him. So if he writes a song and he’s mad that day or if he writes a song and he’s happy that day, he’ll pick up the guitar or the snare drum or sometimes nothing at all or a chair, and he’ll just bang on it. And if he bangs on it you get a percussion instrument. If its not in tune, he’s not singing about an event that has to be in tune. What better to accompany him being very upset and troubled over something than a guitar which is just as hard to listen to as his lyrics are to absorb. Its perfect. Its brilliant. —Gary Pig Gold
If you are willing to trust your ears and your emotions and you’re willing to let something like that in. In other words, if you’re willing to answer the door and open it without looking through the peephole first, then you can be a Jandek fan. —Gary Pig Gold
I just tune it so that it sounds the way I want it to sound. I don’t tune according to, you know, scales or things. —Jandek
72 “We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen”, Selections
We are into the freedom. One of the things that makes us a band is that we all choose our own destinies in what we want to put into the band. —D. Boon
He wasn’t drumming along he was drumming with. —Grant Hart (on George Hurley)
The point is just trying to get away with whatever you can. You don’t have to be part of any machine, except maybe your own. —Mike Watt
There should be more interaction with music and everyday people. ‘Cause that’s what we are. —D. Boon
When we came up on this new scene it wasn’t about spectators, it was more about totally being a participant. —Mike Watt
We play our music the way we wanna do it. —D. Boon
Everybody can’t be born at the same time. Some people are born before, some people are born during, some people are born after. A lot of that’s just circumstance. The question is what is to be done where you’re at and how you gonna do it. —Mike Watt
See, I don’t have D. Boon anymore, so I can’t ever be a Minuteman again. But I cherish our principles. I created bands for each tune using the Minutemen’s approach: Dig in, hold your ground, stand for what you believe in, but make sure everything is for the song. I felt like a Minuteman—y’know, we might never get to make another record: Let’s make one now! —Mike Watt
73 ”Rain…Shapes”, Yusef A. Lateef, Selections
K: I can say spiritually I’ve been able to project some of my emotions into the music …Emotionally, I’ve been able to feel the projection of the other three members of the organization and I’ve been able to project something myself from feeling their emotion and spirituality.
K: But I was speaking about 30 or 40 years ago when people played the blues in the south and they didn’t really know what key they were in and they didn’t know – things like that weren’t important. It was just some sounds that they made to express how they were feeling.
K: I’m in the Yusef Lateef quartet with Kenneth Barron and Bob Cunningham…I look at the whole group as one solo although I might play less than at other times. We all kind of play off of whatever happens. As you stated, you may inspire me to do something or I may inspire you to do something, we inspire each other.
Y: You say at some point it is possible for the sound coming from the quartet to be a big improvisational sound as opposed to one man playing a solo with accompaniment. Can you tell me how this point is arrived.
K: For me it’s a feeling I experience while playing. It reaches a point where I feel that whatever I do will be supported or whatever happens there’s support from the other three members of the group and that this feeling of support is shared.
Y: When the late great Charlie Parker played a fast passage it wasn’t recognized as a fast passage until it was analyzed. I think the reason was for the pure essence of what he was playing at the time was not to display a technical ability but it was an expression of inner feeling therefore it escaped one’s ear as being fast but it was accepted as a meaningful expression.
Y: What I listen for is the artistic message. Now what I mean by artistic message is the depth of being of the musicians. I listen to hear if they are expressing that which comes from the core of their souls and their minds.
Y: We had a discussion with Charles McPherson the alto saxophonist who plays with Mingus. He was relating his idea of improvisation. He was considering the cessation of the ego as a means of improvising uniquely and I thought that was highly interesting. He thought that the ego became like super critical at times and kept one from letting his art flow.
74
Promotional material for Tone Dialing by Ornette Coleman & Prime Time
75 Ornette Coleman in Motion
I play pure emotion. 9879879879879879879879879879879
Human existence exists on a multiple level, not just on a two‐dimensional level, not just having to be identified with what you do and what you say. Those things are the results of what people see and hear that you do. But the human beings themselves are living on a multiple level. That's how I have always wanted musicians to play with me: on a multiple level. I don't want them to follow me. I want them to follow themself, but to be with me. 987987987987987987987987
When I was 14, my mother told me to look under the bed and to my surprise, there was an alto saxophone. I put it together and played exactly what I heard and felt. To this day I still play that natural. 98798798798798798798798798
Your information may be limited, but the way you use the information doesn’t have to be limited. Your tone will cause you to change any note to the way you hear it. Your relationship to your tone is based on your emotions. If it wasn’t, everybody would sound the same. When you play something and you hear your own tone, that’s tone dialing. That’s you. If you create music just from the concept of your own tone, you will be doing something no one else has discovered. It’s not impossible. 987987
There is a term, swing or swinging, used in instrumental music called jazz. Its highest moment is when the performance has taken on the quality of the global heartbeat. The global heartbeat has the same meaning to everyone. That is why the word jazz means the same to all. It can he applied as a form of expression that does not need a racial or class title to support it. 98798798798798798798798798
The composed concept of the music I write and play is called Harmolodics. The packaged definition is a theoretical method not exclusively applied to music. Harmolodics is a noun that can be applied for the use of participating in any form of information equally without erasing or altering the information. 9879879879 76 maxims on improvisation
| the first maxim | say yes | the second maxim | don’t prepare | the third maxim | just show up | the fourth maxim | start anywhere | the fifth maxim | be average | the sixth maxim | pay attention | the seventh maxim | face the facts | the eighth maxim | stay on course | the ninth maxim | wake up to the gifts | the tenth maxim | make mistakes, please | the eleventh maxim | act now | the twelfth maxim | take care of each other | the thirteenth maxim | enjoy the ride
Excerpt from “Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up”, Patricia Ryan Madson, 2005
77 Fishing Whole
Reeling in experience sharp hook‐mind dangling above my moving flow of moments, I fish for fresh feelings: Sitting dry curled toes and hard heels gripping uneven dock‐boards, braced against contact Not realizing my body is bait hovering smugly over my emotions I fool myself that I can swim without getting wet
Suddenly my line runs out: my feet come loose unhooked from my past I am flung into the flow
Gripped by my sea once again I realize I have caught my own attention.
—Alexander Bingham
78 On Anarchy in Music, Th. v. Hartmann, Selections
In all the arts, and especially in music, every method that arises from an inner necessity is right. The composer wants to express what at the moment is the intention of his intuition. At this moment he might feel the need for a combination of sounds, which, according to present theory, is regarded as cacophonous. It is obvious that such a judgment of theory cannot be considered an obstacle in this case. The artist is compelled to use such a combination because its use was determined by his inner voice: the correspondence of the means of expression with inner necessity is the essence of beauty in a work.
The principle of anarchy in art should be welcomed. Only this principle can lead us to a glorious future, to a new Renaissance.
Excerpt from “The Blaue Reiter Almanac”, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Eds., 1912.
79
El Trovador after Remedios Varo. Enamel on plywood, Zito 80 the musician: harmolodic flows of desire, OR “this machine kills fascists”
--- the musician necessarily leads a momentary living because that is song, the harmolodic gestures of innocence, the life of sound, the arc-describing making manifest passing vibrations, always on the brink, on the verge, the elusive phenomenological distance, the hum and the whir and the glow and the textures of the world-becoming, the voices and inascribables sheeting off the human-animal, the transhuman-becoming of bolder strides in new lands buzzing with productive abandon --- listening and feeling, feeling and listening, with wholebody experience intact, allowing and influencing the here-and-now as the sole contributor to what at this moment we call knowledge and truth, the now-time determining what harmolodic-intensities are produced through the soundscape as focal-points and corollaries to the listening and feeling as sound, a direct lunge and a peripheral stance regarding the active-force revered and sometimes glimpsed behind or underneath making music in the now, live music --- what ripples of the flesh and swarming cells does this attention attenuate, as choral remnants of explosions of sound-machines gather and assemble anew, the moment to moment of music, discerning of and honoring the breaks and flows, on the road and in the field, on the stage or on the porch, laying low or striding with surety and confidence, a creature about town --- breaths of volition gathering in the silvery haze of now to make the tones and sounds of today, harboring new suns in the wheedle of creation, forming and expanding away in the most dangerous light of the occupations of the mad . . .
--- the musician crafts in the wake of all this hurtling fecundity, eyes moving across horizons inner and outer, the waves awash, the bob and fetch bringing one unto shores unknown, unfamiliar because of the prevalent emotional guidance there, feelings influencing the most important task of producing new languages, the herald and hark of combinations secretive for their power and influence regarding certain bioenergetic-becomings --- new words to designate new values, new rhythms for moving in the directions of wide-open spaces, new sounds and multiplicities of sounds used to commemorate the rituals and serve as notice of the whole-becoming joyfulness of this people, in the midst of the intense lights and darks of living in complete adaptability with what the flows of desire present, periods of extended calm and bouts of frenzy and expansions to and fro, the music
81 absorbing all and reflecting back the proper rejoinder, segues and refrains: the advantageous path of wedded knaves and backsliders, the branching river of dolomite --- lest we ease the transition from this to that, work with it and not against it, but of course our resistance is as necessary as it is fierce, and a certain thickness of skin, a certain ability to endure, so as to transform conditions unfavorable to full and healthy living, is necessary at this point where the winds of change are howling . . .
--- the musician reminds that each must stand for themselves and decide where they stand in context with the great turning, the purification, the tolling bosom and the reckoning: no one will carry anyone else to the other side and a certain honesty with oneself is needed now more than ever, that an uncommon strength is called for, yet a strength that is inherent to the human-animal, a strength not necessarily afforded by family and money, but certainly one blessed by crossings of line and mixings of blood, a strength and attitude whereby no action will be too malevolent when it comes to erasing forever all traces of the somber organization of the culture of death: oh yes, away with your burdened wings and heart-cranes, we’ve done with the free and the lawful --- we’re on about the return of the crows, call-and-response, the dive and careen of play and trickery, that we’re together NOW and that is love, the moon-crescent healing primordial now, living shades easing the passing of all in time, preternatural caterwaul speaking stones and animation’s mystery, the fascination with light and movement holding our attention and guiding our endeavors --- dream-dusk pillars, we gather developing our powers of manifestation, and as a general practice taking in another’s eyes as a planetary visage of longing and yearning and striding strengths of joy usurping the talis-chains from crippled keepers to ascend back neath the mountains, ore-seat of emotion, as the moon phases by here in the far and wide . . .
--- there’s talk of the musician as being less civilized than most people, a little rough around the edges, “out there,” aloof, strange --- the musician-becoming is as outside the framework of civilization as can be and these misinterpretations of appearance, when run through the mills of belief, become projections of the same reactionary representationalism that perpetuates the present cultural stagnation --- there is no arguing that the musician’s plumage is grand, but the knowledge and feeling is inherent, that this singular becoming also has everything to do with having avoided,
82 relinquished and shed the impositions of conformist-culture, in order to maintain a connection to certain forces and intensities resonating within and without the polyphonous-machinics comprising the real, the corporeal and incorporeal existents making up the veil of now --- sensing, aware, and familiar with a conduction of energies through the bodymind, energies commonly maligned as the demonic forces of nature or desire, and allowing and working with and through these forces, the musician produces music-machines as reflecting consonances --- smiling with the fury and innocence of flowers, knowing that most people misperceive her craft because they don’t have the present capacity to sense its inherent worth as any bloom or jewel-form unpredictably realized in the effortless fashion of primordial flux and reflux, and as a result instating arbitrary categories around it so as to be able to belittle it, yet craving its presence, but only its expression in a form they can understand and feel as if they control --- so, the musician tends to frequent occasions where the air is filled with celebration and joy, where the rewards for performing are about many things besides monetary compensation alone --- and when the festivities have subsided and quiet again has its way, his work done, the musician is off again, away, maybe after some company and refreshment, yet, always discerning as to avoid the trappings of the overall tendency here to limit and quell the life producing itself through human-becomings, out to the open spaces so as to align and attune the spirit-sense to the madder rhythms of nature, a reassertion into the dialogue ongoing with the productive forces of the chaosmos, to acknowledge desire as the seat of divinity --- the musician needs to be wary of civilized influences as they can disrupt the instinctual action-base of her creation, brazen behemoth of cradled chaos, innumerable fragments occupying the bodymind as sound, urgent resurgence and congruity of transformations, the scatter and bleed for all the marbles, the acts of leaving-off and taking-up with a spontaneous will-to-action, always in the act of singing and playing and life is the song, the intermingling particulars and obscurities, places and people, everything determined through the emotive-directives guiding bio-social interaction, as this is our playing field of desire determining solitude and community, where desiring-machines are assembled and disassembled, arranged and rearranged, for the operative interplay and intermixings of flows and the breaks in these flows necessary for the taking off in another direction, as the varietal unpredictability of desire behaves . . .
83 --- the musician is a nomad and an orphan who doesn’t answer to a set of laws or system of beliefs, all useless in the immanent fields of creation, where desire abides in all its root fervor, the flowing libidinal fragments of love, living in a continuum of expulsion, self-guided but mostly unconsciously delegated, the wandering train of minstrel rain crossing all cultural, racial, and class delineations with tact and assurance, and, if necessary, shoulder down, fearlessly demolishing any obstacle which won’t be dissuaded to cease its vain attempts to strangle the flows of desire --- that all of humanity’s so-called conscious investments of energetic steams and stamina are but the tip of the iceberg of the raw undifferentiated bastions of desiring-production directly investing the creation and working of the energetic-machines spanning and comprising the realities of our conceptions of life, creation, the natural, as it can’t be separated from this planetary impossibility in all it’s insouciant fury, with its possible-becomings of unconsciousness and all that this entails of relationships of energy and energy-forms, groups grouping, multiplying and pluralizing, big and small, simple and complex, general and particular, all happening at the same time all the time continuously --- to speak of a beginning or end is rhetoric and by and large an eternal distraction from, and repression of, the all-out workings of desire, pouring from the chaosmos through nature and into the world, and then back again into the dim dimmers, washing away and uncovering, completely destroying some things and leaving others unscathed --- chance finds alongside chance melodies, the necessity of chance as to the generation and regeneration of the magic and mystery of the present, the kindling of thoughts felt, words and sounds spoken-sung, which bemuse and lure the rebel-becomings charmed by living, reveling that they’re bewitched --- to be taken under the spell and to spellbind in turn, to open pathways and lines where a breath is had, a stop look and listen time to see that the wisened scopes of our realities are converging . . .
--- the musician is at home in the cradling arc of translucent perfection describing the flow of sunlight across the earth over the day, and in the open-ended maw of night, moving seamlessly in the city, country and town, yet most at home and peace where expansive skies meet wood and meadow and leaf, where the land and the ether kiss and tell why --- ready to lead ready to follow, accompanying where the music comes and goes, meeting and sharing with the initiates of now, wherein the blends of curiousness and shrewd vision around hearths and trees heralding the
84 open-flame of the present, the colossal lunge within the twilight-fleshy newness, the persistence of openness and assuredness granted you beautiful creatures in the dance and toss of creation --- what gradations of awareness make up the forms before us and through us, where to feel is not necessarily to understand, the encouragement of one another as to our pangs of heart and girths of mind --- at the part of the journey where heart and mind no longer need to struggle against each other, one blaming the other and vice versa for its woes and misgivings, the heart allowed its gilding of stone and resistance and the mind its membrane of assurance and ability to fly, and when both recognize the folly of the illusion of their beliefs, the heart is open to discussion because the mind’s feet are on the ground --- the emulations from an active reverence for source are then one in the same with self, that energy tendrilling and scoping and reeling in the possibilities of the celebration always in motion, abundance is now and gratitude resides in the roost --- reckoning the appearances of dualistic development within and without this terra-chaosmic phenomena of alchemical genius, shape-shifters finding the groove of each other, rhythms of commonality growing from the validity of all formations, groupings and patterns, the variable light-derived impermanence merging with its singularity of previousness, moments as machinic-assemblages of stop-and-go progressions of core-peripheral stimulation --- undistorted vibrational flows acting in synergistic cooperation between our detoxified cellular presences, and, through the process of deindividualization, producing the realization of the inherent need in our world-becoming to celebrate and embrace each other’s differences, personal and cultural, and, that this intensity of experience, arising from the celebration and encouragement of difference as the expression of complexity in nature, is what is needed to embrace and fully integrate oneself into the unique and powerful sovereignty of one’s presence and influence in the here-and-now: meaning there are no rules per se, as the sureties of direct-experience will guide us in the realms of liberty and resistance --- ocean-seed gargantuans, we are always holding the staff-of-surety in the power of the fascinated-self, as the momentum is undeniable in its conviction of wisdom and fostering of play, good-feeling all around, the will to face it all head-on whatever transpirations unfold, witches and warlocks, shamans and keepers of fire and seed, sorcerers and magicians, fists in our heads and torches in our hearts . . .
85 --- the musician is an observer and a seer of chaosmic and organic rhythms and incorporates the feelings and intuitions of these natural syntheses and refrains into his music-becoming, the continuous variation of her weft and forge --- the musician shares a special relationship with all of existence, exchanging fragments and pieces of sound and shape with any and all creatures, as well as say the wind through the trees, sharing calls to all nascent river outriders, born blue and translucent, ravaged and hewn, indecipherable and strong, unyielding and tender, wielding a ray of ashen disregard to bequeath the primordial dissonance, more awake than alive, sieve of heart, particulate distribution --- humming motes and flying notes, cauldron style for best results: entrail of grackle, eye of swan, tail of newt and claw of crow, the second coming was rock ‘n’ roll --- a preamble for those just starting out: pitfalls are innumerable and cleverly devised so a certain vigilance is necessary where it concerns the operative dynamics of bioemotions as the fulcrum between our instincts and understandings --- done with the glorification of nihilism, that false pride in self-destruction, the musician knows and sings of the time that is human and of the spaces of physical connection, that anything worthy of being assigned value in any future soon to come upon us, is beginning here, in the crucible of the human-animal, in the unfolding of this creature-blossom in its most desirous light --- so, what of the human element? --- the musician, a throwback unable to get on-board with contemporary cultural tendencies, the hold-out fighting for ways-becoming like sensory awareness and discerning perception, tactility and touch, originality and authenticity, collaboration and anarchy, all considered inapplicable to current trends? . . . NO! this humanity-becoming, this dramatization of the currents of life and death, movements and stillnesses, communalities and solitudes, is simultaneously both the point of arrival and departure for the inherent processes and dynamics of change we call the perpetual motion of the chaosmos, the intermixing of fear and perception, thought with the senses, the endurance and long-withstanding of a simultaneous coming-apart and coming-together, and this model multiplied to infinitude creating the wield and array of chaosmic existence and continuous-creation, coming and going in pulses big and small, what remains what passes away --- disappear into the breeze, escape the prison-camp of sleep, be blasphemous and attire the here-and-now in the bounty of day and night, heretics for our insistence on the real, foreclosing by the hour the sickening clutch of the symbolic, the
86 black holes of myth and fantasy, abstraction and idealism: what gestures fraught with the representations of illusion will we eliminate today? . . .
--- what season does not know the musician’s harmolodies and the tones of his instruments, what era does not know of the truths evoked in her ramblings and quietudes, soul-creatures abounding in the fields and frequencies of music spilling the credence of the smallness of the conscious will to repression, these munificent extollations coming from the woodwork and from cracks in the sidewalk, from classrooms and bedrooms, from alters and dinner tables, televisions and radios, laboratories and factories, places familiar and those unknown --- the musician’s unattachment is part and parcel his devotive life of music, yet, she is happiest in the comings and goings, the quiet time when silence speaks, the time of the dissolution of vibrational intensities, the between-times of music and sound as the celebratory vehicle of creation and commonality in difference --- in all directions the sand is indiscernible from the sky, rolling and ripples with the wind whispering with the sounds of many tongues, the smooth spaces of escape, grounds of creative insistence where desire resides, where the state has no territories, where all your becomings hold sway at once, the field of immanence, the inherent field of creative production --- the musician leads the tendency of cultural-turnover, the passing of the torch, and sings of melody as the singularities of becoming and reveals the ways of harmony as the relationships of force influencing singularities, and it’s the always shifting dynamic of relationships of force within and without singularities of becoming which describes the unending harmolodic pluralizing influence of melody affecting harmony and harmonies in turn affecting melodies, the give and take between singularity as force and force as singularity --- the production of music within a group context shows how singular expression is valuable, providing that those comprising the many are all acting out their respective powers and abilities, a reciprocity of strengths --- that any designations like individual and group are merely working models, tools of conviviality based on a matrix of mutual perceptual-positioning, allowing us to be simultaneously a partial element being tossed about on the waves of desire and a subjective participant with the capacity to understand the illusiveness of significations from a position of non-determination, yet, thriving with the signs and perception-becomings we use to communicate about our world-reality, our world-becoming . . .
87 --- the musician may, or may not, know about harmolodics and its jazz roots and multifarious branchings, but he does know how to shoot from the hip, play now and talk later, improvise with no plan but what feeling and emotion show as the visceral grounds for creating the very space of living --- these sounds emanating from the connections of musical bodyminds with the wood, metal, etc, are backdrop and foreground of the direct and indirect efforts to destroy the present tendency to distort perception and replace it with a fabricated virtualness so small and inhibiting that there is no longer room for things like movement and liberty: you just say you’re free and that’s enough, you just push a button and things come to you . . . NO! --- the ultimate consequences of this phantasm being the disappearance of difference and variation, the life-impulse coerced into smaller and ever more narrow realms of negation, wherein the annihilation of the other is increasingly required to feel one’s autonomy, some sense of purpose and self-realization --- so naturally, this marginalizing urge toward the standardization of all aspects of life and culture also affects the musical realms, determining what will be co-opted and what will be exiled and silenced: wielding the wills of creation, the actions of the musician are partly fragmentizations directed against the fascist tendencies to homogenize and standardize desire, a witting and unwitting conspiring to keep the human-animalistic sense-palette in decent working order --- revealing the rust and calcifications to those experiencing disuse, and showing places of wear and deterioration to those experiencing overuse of all or some parts of their sensing-machines, most of this happening through the dynamic interplay between the musician’s sound-assemblages and the listeners acknowledgement and acceptance --- all this so that people’s perceptions are challenged and alerted by difference, not in the sense of a judgmental comparison of opposites, but simply acknowledging one’s personal sensory-experience, as it reveals wave after wave of varietal-phenomena displaying difference as the dominant tendency in the multiverse: what this means in terms of bio-social relationships of physical connection is celebrating each other’s unique gifts and powers, and resisting the urges and tendencies to make everyone‘s abilities and interests (the production of one’s desires and the desire of one’s producing) conform to the extremely limited choices of mindbody movement as directed by social and psychic repressive agencies --- it comes down to creating the transformation of life and culture by living-out one’s personal sonorous truth in joyous acceptance of this world-becoming . . .
88 --- the musician implores, what does the harmolodic adventure mean to you: do you discern and channel the auspices of desire’s first and foremost function of production, the raw production inherent in the becoming of any creature in and of these terrestrial goings-on? --- or are you on a daily basis yielding to the most narrow and short-sighted representations of desire, all nicely set-up and maintained as the commerce-induced wheel you get on and close your eyes to? --- standing firm on the winged-feet of imperfect desire, the musician creates an air which bathes the environs with light the color of a child’s face, cheeks rosy credence from the blues underneath, forever trying to shake off the breadth of the hand that feeds, what sense have we forgotten, the only proof of love, the troubadours and tramps acting in concert to keep love as varied as desire’s shades of becoming, that conformist-culture’s shortsighted and confining representations of love, sexuality, and desire, as they appear mostly in the atomized and nuclear patriarchal household, will not suffice where the tides of desire are moving more and more rapidly, setting up and retracting associations of psycho-physical (erotic) contact which are rapidly overspilling the bounds inscribed by daddy-mommy-me . . .
--- the life of the harmolodician: the timbre of space and the omnipotence of sound assuming the very nature and vastness of creation --- ahoy! to you brothers and sisters in the dawning of this age of desire, desires awakening to their conscious-machinics --- how fare thee in this weather of liberty? --- what blessed ingress we intensely steward into existence and becoming . . . to be mere witnesses!, to the moment, never! --- we will trail off with this dragon-line and spend our birth wisely, as if action is a dirty word, or work for that matter?! --- orphans, nomads, and atheists: the consequent bridge of affiliation, the schizophrenic emergence, as we allow the other’s magic, maneuvering and navigating through the shadow-worlds and interzones, building the strength of an organismic consensus . . .
89
90
The Song’s Never Played the Same, Rob Aiman
91 “It Might Get Loud”, Selections
That’s the disease you have to fight in any creative field. Ease of use. —Jack White
The technology was taking over so much. So processed, it wasn’t real at all anymore. —Jack White
It’s the music that tells us the direction the song should go. As writers, we start with the feeling and everything follows from that. —The Edge
The thrill was just being able to do it even if you did it badly. —The Edge
We’re always worried about being satisfied. When you become satisfied, it’s sort of like you just die. —Jack White
Meg and I don’t even talk about what the first song’s gonna be. We just go out and play. —Jack White
We were so comfortable playing with each other that we could take it in any direction. The four members of the band had taken on this sort of fifth element. —Jimmy Page
Passion, honesty and competence. Absolute musical heaven. —Jimmy Page
If we believed fully in what we were about, that actually was far more important than how well you could play. —The Edge
92 Our limitations as musicians were ultimately not gonna be a problem. —The Edge
By the time I was about 18, somebody played me Son House. That was it for me. This spoke to me in 1,000 different ways. I didn’t know that you could do that. Just singing and clapping. And it meant everything. It meant everything about rock ‘n’ roll, everything about expression and creativity and art. One man against the world in one song. That’s my favorite song. Still is. It became my favorite song the first time I heard it and it still is…I heard everything disappearing. It didn’t matter that he was clapping off time. It didn’t matter that there was no instruments being played. All that mattered was the attitude of the song. —Jack White (on “Grinnin’ in Your Face” by Son House)
I shed this coat off of me, and then I wanted to try everything that was breaking rules. I wanted to do things that sped up. I wanted to do things that were like playing a bow and hurting people’s ears. —Jimmy Page
I liked this idea of movement. Pulse, push. Rise and fall in its intensity, in its power. Light and shade…That was something that was gonna keep increasing, building, accelerating, from the beginning to the very end, like an orgasm. —Jimmy Page (on “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin)
Every night that we went on stage, it was living. Totally living at every point. The spark had become the flame and the flame was burning really bright. —Jimmy Page
We’re all doing the same thing, attempting to share something with another human being. —Jack White
93 Jim Dickinson, Artists House Music Video, Selections
Somebody says to Charlie, says ‘Man your tom‐tom is rubbing the bass note maybe you better tune it.’ Charlie says, ‘I never tune me drums…Why should I tune something I am going to go up there and beat on.’ He says, ‘I’ll hit it a few times, it’ll change.’ (on Charlie Watts)
I had experienced a little success as a session player, an R & B session player. And what we did was the same thing every day. Insert the artist. Hamburger production. Assembly line. Lines, patterns, forms. Insert the artist. Play it till its right. I’ve been on cut hundred and thirty‐two with Aretha Franklin. I mean you play it till its right. No Pro Tools. That was what I was learning. That was the way I thought you made a record. And here’s the Rolling Stones. And they take literally the first cut that they get through without a major mistake. Nobody says the word ‘Should we do that again?’, ‘Can we do that better?’, ‘Why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that?’…This is certainly not the way we make records. Who did you suppose is right here? I think maybe its them. But I learned spontaneity, the importance of capturing spontaneity.
As I’m struggling with it, Wyman comes back over to me and he says, ‘Where’d you get them chords mate?’ And I said, ‘I got them from Keith.’ And he said ‘Pay no attention to him he has no idea what he is doing…He only knows where he put his fingers yesterday.’ Which is a perfect definition of rock ‘n’ roll guitar playing. (on the Rolling Stones)
You can sit there with Pro Tools and line the damn beats up all you want to. And you can tune the vocal till you’re blue in the face. And you haven’t done anything but make it more correct. You haven’t made it into a record.
Through digital technology, you can hear the mistakes that were clouded by analog. Analog is very forgiving. We’re never going back there. Its not ever gonna be that way again. So you might as well accept the technology and learn to defeat it.
When you look at it on the Pro Tools screen, and this is the weakness of that system, the beat appears to be this tiny little spot, this almost nondimensional spot out in space somewhere. And to me the beat is a much larger area. You talk to a jazz musician about the pocket and the beat, you can be up on the beat, you can back on the beat, you can be dead on the beat, you can be behind the beat, you can be in front of the beat. You’re all still relative to the beat structure.
94 Ah the dog its almost like the telephone. Documentary production is wonderful. I’ve got some dogs barking on a couple of my records. Best things on the record.
Talk to a group, what do you want your record to be?, ‘I want it to be loud.’ Well, I’m sorry pal. Its gonna come up to zero on the VU meter and that’s how loud its gonna be. Whether it’s a cello or it’s a Marshall stack its coming to zero on the meter. And that’s how loud its gonna be. You don’t want to be loud. You want apparent volume. You want to sound loud. In order to sound loud you have to create silence around the note. That silence that space is the hardest thing to get in the studio. And if the musicians don’t learn to breathe together and move together and simplify their parts and give up the fill over the drum turn around. I mean stop. Don’t just play lightly. Stop. Go away. Let the drummer have it. That’s not natural you can’t do that on stage. If you open up a hole, everybody falls in it. If you open up a hole on a record, here comes something through it. It’s a miracle.
95
Yo La Tengo, Electropura, back cover
96 HARMOLODICS: thoughts this way and that
Andrew Poppy
Revised introduction for The School of Harmolodics as part of Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown Festival, South Bank Centre London 14-20 June 2009
It’s a privilege to be invited by Meltdown Festival 2009 to help run The School of Harmolodics week of workshops.
I am some kind of contemporary composer rather than an improviser. And what improvising I do, does not instantly connect to the bop, post bop tradition that is the starting point of Ornette Coleman’s music. But probably that’s why I’ve been invited to be here; to be the wild card in a team of artistic leaders with Chris Batchelor and Julian Siegel who are such wonderful improvisers and whose music has more of a family connection to Ornette’s work. And the team also includes Alice Tatge’s making a dance and movement response to the Harmolodic idea.
What I want to contribute here is a sense of context. To see Harmolodics as connected to ideas in other areas of music and performance, both historically and personally.
Harmolodics: how does it work? Looking at various explanations by Ornette Coleman himself and members of his various bands it would seem to be a spirit or attitude as much as it is a method.
There are some innovative technical inventions for sure, such as the Harmolodic clef. This is an interesting strategy. It’s a way of instantly building chromatically inflected harmonic fields within a predominately melodically articulated style.
Perhaps Harmolodics is an example of an approach to creativity which organises one parameter while trying to be un-mindful of another to which it is intimately connected. The relationship of harmony to melody is particular in Ornette Coleman’s style. The latter is articulated whilst the former is implied. As Wilfred Mellers says in his still resonant book ‘Music in a New Found Land’ (1964):
‘…the first musician who has carried further some of the implication of Parker’s line and rhythm…Ornette Coleman achieved this stylistic development by paring harmonic texture to a minimum: by discarding the piano as a harmony instrument and exploring, more radically than Sonny Rollins, melodic variation on line, not on chord sequence.’
Melody and melodic form are what dominate. And melodies have always been the more rigorous agents of control in any musical context. They survive almost infinite fragmentation and transformation. A harmony or a texture is much more fragile by comparison and more specifically located in a particular moment.
We can all sing The Beatles ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and, if we have the skill, we can riff and play on the intervals and shapes of the tune. But the opening chord on the electric guitar is a unique identity even if we own that particular Rickenbacker guitar and can voice it correctly. It’s a unique identity made up of interval
97 structure, chord voicing, articulation, amplification and recording technology. Transpose it up a few intervals on the sampler and its identity is lost.
We can find that fragility in other places. ‘Durations’ by Morton Feldman where each ‘harmony colour’ is a stated thing in itself. Melodies are, where you find them, implied.
Harmolodics could be seen as a poetic strategy. Because trying to explore technical questions further sometimes dissolves into the mystification and magic of ‘a chord which cannot be inverted’! But perhaps that’s how it should be. Strong ideas are often simple and stand alone. They don’t always need some vast tome to explain them like Wagner’s ‘Gesamtkunstwerk.’ E=MC2 is a good example of a big idea expressed with economy. Harmolodics in some ways is more useful to think of as an attitude. Ornette is ambitious for his idea to be more then just a musical technique. He says:
‘Harmolodics can be used in almost any kind of expression. You can think harmolodically. You can write fiction and poetry in harmolodic. Harmolodic allows a person to use a multiplicity of elements to express more than one direction at a time.’
This is a way in for me as a composer whose own work is formed and influenced by American experimental and minimal contemporary classical music of the 1950-60s.
Who was he thinking of when he said ‘You can write fiction and poetry in harmolodic.’ Certainly listening to ‘Little Symphony’, ‘Peace Warriors’, ‘Enfant’, ‘Feet Music’, all sort of connections present themselves.
The novels of Jack Kerouac, where the words rush like ‘Big Sur’ in endless sentences where the full stop gets pushed further and further into the future. Or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg on ‘Howl’, the shaman, where the mesmeric flow of images tumble over each other suspending the reader’s desire to understand what he’s talking about. An invitation to trance dance in the metaphorical.
And could Harmolodics be in the painting of Jackson Pollack with its beguiling suggestion of freedom within an exquisitely choreographed painting action. He dances while he paints. The painting the memory of that dance.
All these guys put the sense, the image, the experience of spontaneity as the most importance thing to be communicated to the audience.
Perhaps it’s worth noting at this point that, for the listener, high modernism, the most rigorously organised total serial music of Boulez and Stockhausen, also projects an image of spontaneity if not arbitrariness for the listener. I’ll come back to this later.
No doubt Kerouac, Ginsberg and Pollack all listened to Ornette Coleman back then. And given the six degrees of separation rule and the ‘small world‘ cliché of any artistic scene in any city, you can bet he knew a few of those guys.
Even before I heard the story that Ornette and Yoko Ono had been an item, I 98 sensed an aesthetic connection in their approach to performance. Ideas that were new, sometimes confrontational, but definitely floating free in the air of 1960s New York.
Fluxus was a movement that originated at that time. A loose association of artists which embraced many different modes and players from the proto-minimalism of La Monte Young to the confrontational performance strategies of Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono. They developed the instruction score. Often a single paragraph, sometimes only a sentence, the score set the frame of a performance idea.
Danger Music Number Seventeen May 1962 by Dick Higgins
Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream!
That’s it. The score doesn’t say how many performers, how they should be co-ordinated, how it starts, how it stops. What kind of duration there is between each ‘Scream’ event. All these things are decided either by negotiation OR NOT and if not these things are decided by WHAT HAPPENS by the particular quality of the moment and the thought of the people in the room.
Yoko Ono’s Laundry Piece 1963
In entertaining your guests bring out your laundry of the day and explain to them about each item. How and when it became dirty and why, etc.
But getting back to Harmolodics. Harmolodics is a new word, and as a coinage it says almost all we need to know. It brings together the word ‘harmony’ and ‘melody’, the vertical and the horizontal, your space and myspace. The individual and the group are incoded in the idea.
Perhaps it’s what composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham explored as their co-existence of forms. ‘Music’ and ‘dance’ or ‘sound’ and ‘movement’ brought together, outside of any kind of deterministic framework.
So I think all we need to know is the word, to contemplate the word and things will fall into place.
Let’s talk about school. Perhaps an unfortunate word in this context. Perhaps Harmolodics Lab would be more useful! This School of Harmolodics could be a number of things. We may start from Ornette’s tunes but we won’t strive to ape the style in some of a kind of hall of mirrors. We should aim to be true to the spirit and ourselves and make something that will be about this particular moment in 2009. We should continue the spirit and translate the ideas. As the man said ‘it’s not about style it’s an idea.’
There is a song lyric by Nick Cave which is interesting to mention here. It’s called ‘We Call Upon the Author.’
‘What we once thought we had, we didn't, and what we have now, will never be that way again
99 So we call upon the author to explain’
‘Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain’
‘He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon Well, he knew exactly who to blame And we call upon the author to explain’
Nick Cave sends up of the idea of God in a meaningless world. But more than this, what Cave satirizes is the desire for ‘knowledge’, to know; the desire for there to be a complete method and plan. As we know these things are always provisional if they exist at all.
We encounter meaninglessness and mystery everyday and we wonder why we are here and what we are doing and somehow we get on and do stuff. And in moments of insecurity and doubt that continually surface we ‘call upon the author to explain.’
The author has been much theorised since the 1960s. And the author idea is, in part, a naming game. The word is a great promoter of identity. A herald of something. Or a wall for the academy to breach.
George Russell has the Lydian Chromatic Concept. Gunther Schuller has Third Stream. Arnold Schoenberg had the Method of Composing with Twelve Tones. Steve Reich had Music as a Gradual Process. John Cage had Silence. The musical work and title of a book which made him even more in-famous and was anything but silent. Arvo Part has Tintinnabulation. Lars von Trier the Danish filmmaker has Dogme 95 a set of rules for the liberation of filmmaking from postproduction.
Although some authors don’t need any encouragement to explain, it’s useful to remember that Debussy was against the idea of being labeled an ‘impressionist.’ But try going to a concert of his music or reading a book or record sleeve without encountering that word.
One last stab at the theory.
The idea is that Ornette’s ‘harmony is not something predetermined, but emerges from the interaction of the improvised lines in the ensemble.’ And in this situation the intervallic structure of a line, a melody, is the essential element.
100 It’s an idea that echo’s Schoenberg’s serialism. The Twelve Tone Method starts with the organisation of intervals. It has been trailed in the press as the heroic ‘liberation of dissonance.’ This tells us more about the ideology of the style. Because most important to Schoenberg is his ‘prohibition’ of intervals which suggest triads. Intervals which have harmonic gravity. Ornette doesn’t have this agenda but perhaps does feel that melody needs to be less restricted by a fixed and stated harmonic frame.
John Cage - who with Allan Kaprow invented ‘Happenings’ in the early 1950s influencing the Fluxus movement in the 1960s - studied with Schoenberg in his youth. Cage seems to have understood some of the irony implicit in the serial method.
The rigorous and mechanical control of one element, the melodic, tended to have implications for other parameters. The unforeseen or unintended consequences were fascinating, more fascinating than what was worked by the composer. In Schoenberg’s music the rigorous control of intervallic structure and the resulting lack of tonal centre left the rhythmic character in a time warp. An empty shell without any harmonic motivation.
In Ornette’s approach the idea is that harmony is not something pre-determined, but arrived at though the soloist’s exploration of possibilities in the moment. So the specifics of the harmony are self determined by the free playing associations in the band. Harmony emerges from the interaction of the improvised lines in the ensemble, but the specifics of the harmonic results are indeterminate. The melodic is articulated but the harmony is implied and always moving towards ambiguity. This is the idea.
Ornette’s harmolodic clef or the strategy of transposing instruments all reading from the same clef goes quite a long way to making some kind of consistent harmonic world. It can quickly establish a harmonic identity.
Some composers in the middle of the 20th Century were quick to take Schoenberg’s melodic ideas further by applying rigorous control to all parameters. Rhythm, Dynamics and Timbre. However the more the parameters of composition where rigorously ordered, the more the surface of the work projected some kind of free play. This seems particularly true of Stockhausen’s music.
Cage on the other hand wanted to play what was controlled off against what wasn’t. He asked: why not devote composition and performance energy (control) to making an experience in which all the sonic events are unforeseen (uncontrolled) by the composer.
The final stage of this approach, in which both composers and performer seem redundant, Cage asks: why not just listen to the sonic events that naturally occur in the world. To consider for aesthetic experience those things which are not controlled by us and the specifics of which are unforeseen. The continuing irony is that to do this Cage still has to have a score and, in the classic version of 4’33”, a pianist. Even if it’s a one word instruction score: ‘Tacet’, to ‘not play.’
Perhaps this relationship of the controlled element to the uncontrolled elements is
101 the theme of what I’ve been talking about.
At the centre of Ornette Coleman’s practise and thought is the idea that everything is connected to everything else. C major might be connected to Db somehow. And a musical interval may be connected to love or the smell of the earth. Ornette plays with Moroccan musicians at one moment and that European invention the symphony orchestra the next.
Both La Monte Young and Terry Riley played some kind of Minimalism. The heterophonic textures of Riley’s ‘In C’ look both ways towards the textural micropolyphony of György Ligeti’s ‘Chamber Concerto’ and back to Parker. And a more recent work like ‘Hout’ by Louis Andriessen has the memory of those bop lines imprinted in its DNA.
The British version of Fluxus was The Scratch Orchestra led by Cornelius Cardew, whose ‘The Great Learning’ is a series of instruction scores. John White’s ‘Newspaper Read Machine’ is a fascinating example of how instruction scores show the creative process. In America the experimental approach continued in work by Daniel Goode and his one page scores. Sorry this has turned into a stream of possible connections. Hopefully it’s useful in provoking a visit to the record shop or library or a few hours googling.
‘Harmolodic allows a person to use a multiplicity of elements to express more than one direction at a time.’
I hope that the thoughts and connections I’ve put together here could possibly be Harmolodic. When Ornette talks about Harmolodics I think he’s talking about the creative process. It’s the continuity of action and experience that can pull disparate things together, be they musical pitches or different people from different places and traditions; to be together and to make music. This is what for me is at the centre of Ornette Coleman’s life, music and idea.
Sources
Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music by Peter Niklas Wilson (Berkeley Hills Books, 2002).
Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music by Wilfrid Mellers (Barrie and Rockliff, 1964).
The Fluxus Performance Workbook Book by Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn, Eds. (Performance Research e-Publications, 2002).
Thanks to Neil Quintin, Cameron Reynolds (Learning & Participation (Music) at the South Bank Centre) and Dominic Murcott (Head of Composition) at Trinity Laban for making it all possible.
© andrewpoppy June 2009
Reprinted with permission from Andrew Poppy.
102
Believe It or Not! Daniel Fagereng
103 “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage”, Selections
What makes Rush unique is fearlessness. It’s the quality of starting to write a song and not caring about what’s popular, what’s not. There’s only one band that sounds like them. What kind of band is Rush? It’s Rush. —Gene Simmons
Fly by Night was a little different from the first record, so the record company wasn’t sure if we were developing in the “correct way.” They wanted us to be more like Bad Company and not so much like this weird thing that we were becoming. —Geddy Lee
We talked about how we would rather go down fighting than try to make the kind of record they wanted us to make. We made 2112 figuring everyone would hate it, but we were going to go out in a blaze of glory. —Geddy Lee
We all decided that we would rather go back to our jobs working on a farm or working as a plumber’s mate for my dad or whatever than give in and just be something that everybody else wants us to be. —Alex Lifeson
We did summon that strength of character to say, ‘No we won’t do that, we’re doing it our way, and if this is the last hurrah, fine.’ You know, back to the farm equipment dealership for me. It was a big no. No we’re not doing any of that. No you can’t tell us what to do. And no we don’t care. —Neil Peart
We could have gone in and done Moving Pictures all over again. But we’re too curious, we’re too dissatisfied with where we’re at. And just because we got successful doesn’t mean we’re gonna stop. And that’s the motivation. You have to find the better Rush. —Geddy Lee
We didn’t have any protective nature of what Rush was that it could never be allowed to be influenced by New Wave music or could never use an African rhythm. There was no such thing as that doesn’t suit Rush. Those words have never been uttered. —Neil Peart
104 The approach to what you do results in what you get. —Freddie Gruber
Freddie is all about the motion and it was all about the motion of the hands and feet that contributed to a dance. And one of the first things he did was stand up and do a little soft shoe dance for me and saying, ‘When you’re doing that is that dance happening on the floor? No, it’s happening in the air.’ So these were revelations to me to start thinking about not just the hit, but the motions between. —Neil Peart (on Freddie Gruber)
Time is linear. It’s not…like a pogo stick. A lot of pop music is played like that. It’s extremely vertical. It’s like people slapping water when they swim. It doesn’t breathe. Let’s put it this way, you can have a beautiful body and look marvelous. But if you’re not breathing, it’s not alive. You know, so you gotta at least put the breath in there. —Freddie Gruber
We had our own stream, and it wasn’t the main one. But it was not too far away from the main one. —Geddy Lee
There’s a comfort in knowing that those same three guys are out there. And it’s also spectacular to see three guys that can tolerate each other for all these years and still make music, make good music. —Les Claypool
105 Patti Smith Wellsprings
Her sound is as new‐old as her look. You hear the Shangri‐Las and other early Sixties girl groups, as well as Jim Morrison, Lotte Lenya, Anisette of Savage Rose, Velvet Underground, beatniks and Arabs. Meanwhile, the minimalism of the band forces her sound out front along with the poetry, and that sound stands. This is not a "spoken‐word" album, it's a rock 'n' roll album, and even if you couldn't understand a word of English you couldn't miss the emotional force of Patti's music. And you'll love it when she makes mistakes (in this era of slick, pre‐digested "rock" as muzak), when her voice goes ragged (but right), like the perfect act of leaping for something precious. Who needs the other kind of perfection? —Lester Bangs (on Patti Smith) ∞ Lester wrote a really nice article about us a long time ago called “Stagger Lee Was A Woman.” But then he turned against us because he felt we sold out with Radio Ethiopia. Everybody thought we sold out. They thought we had turned heavy metal. They found lyrics like “pissing in a river” offensive, they found experimentation offensive, definitely too sonic. ∞ When we got to the part were we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.” “Say anything,” he said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.” “What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?” “You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.” In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life. ∞ “Whaddya want?” he asked casually, and proceeded to play a medley that went from Mendelssohn to Marvin Gaye to “MacArthur Park.” Richard Sohl was nineteen, classically trained, yet he possessed the simplicity of a truly confident musician who did not need to show off his knowledge. He was as happy playing a repetitive three‐chord sequence as a Beethoven sonata. With Richard we were able to move seamlessly between improvisation and song. He was intuitive and inventive, able to give us a field upon which Lenny and I had the freedom to explore in a language of our own. We dubbed it “three chords merged with the power of the word.” ∞ what i feel when i’m playing guitar is completely cold and crazy. like i don’t owe nobody nothing and it’s a test just to see how far i can relax into the cold wave of a note, when everything hits just right (just and right) the note of nobility can go on forever. i never tire of the solitary E and i trust my guitar and i don’t care about anything. sometimes i feel like i’ve broken through and i’m free and could dig into eternity riding the wave and the realm of the E… ∞ 106 5 HAIKU
Hard spring, porous skin let demons in, her knife cut creativity
Bodiless summer, airless music, all this hot compassion worthless
Blind date: old woman shuffling across cool kitchen thinks night is morning
Figure skaters draw long sixes, pick up the pen one word at a time
Who comes to the door? pond in winter, silent wind breathing under ice
—Mike McDonough
107
The book “Zen Guitar” is cover to cover harmolodic essence. Enter the dojo…
108 “Tom Dowd & the Language of Music”, Selections
We’d just get together and set up all the equipment and jam, and there was a freedom for each one of us to add what we brought to the table with us, there was no preconceived idea of what we were going to play, we’d start with a jam and everybody’d contribute what they brought. —Butch Trucks
You cannot start telling somebody in a studio what to play, as soon as you do that they’re going to tighten up and they’re not going to be playing emotionally, they’re going to be playing scared they’re going to be playing tight. —Dickey Betts
Tom doesn’t go in like many producers say well do it this way or do it that way and put his stamp on the music. Tom goes in and finds out what’s inside of you and pulls it out. —Butch Trucks
You got to always remember the name of the game is what does it sound like. —Ray Charles
Most rock bands are formula bands, the Allman Brothers would play an 8 a 12 a 20 a 30 40 bar formula and then its like jazz complete free‐form and everybody goes from himself, and they have enough empathy and enough musicianship among them that Jaimoe could be playing 5/4 Butch could be playing 6/8 and Dickey could be playing 4/4 and they’d all go in different directions and it would swing, and when they get through this solo and that solo and this section they’d nod and boom they’re back to square one, they’d go all of them back to their parts right away in line again, its magnificent. —Tom Dowd
We have kind of developed a thing of working with Dowd of more or less playing live in the studio, most people start at the very rhythm track and build it up, which you get a lot cleaner recording that way, but you don’t get a real performance. —Dickey Betts
Thats Duane that we hear on the left…now you’re going to hear the duet, Duane and Eric playing the melody on the right…it is just beautiful, those are notes that aren’t on the instrument, those are notes that are off the top of the instrument, that’s what makes those people such magnificent guitar players, its in the tips of their fingers, its not in a knob its not how loud they play, its touch, its touch, and both of them have exquisite technique and touch. —Tom Dowd (on Duane Allman and Eric Clapton)
It is not necessarily the notes you play and it’s not necessarily where you went to school, how much you studied, who your teachers were, it’s what you can take from your heart and convey it to the other person. —Dickey Betts 109 “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan”, Selections
The moment I became acquainted with old songs I realized people were always changing them. Think of it as an age old process. It’s been going on for thousands of years. People take old songs, change them a little, add to them, adopt them for new people. It happens in every other field. Lawyers change old laws to fit new citizens. So I am one in this long chain and so are millions of other musicians. —Pete Seger
I didn’t really know if that song was good or bad. It just felt right. —Bob Dylan (on “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan)
Yeah, I can’t get in tune at all when they’re booing. I can’t hear anything. I don’t even wanna get in tune. —Bob Dylan
An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere. You always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming. As long as you can stay in that realm you will sorta be alright. —Bob Dylan
The Bringing It All Back Home session was really fun because it was this sort of spontaneous telepathic thing, you know. Like he might have, you know, played through a song very briefly and that was all the rehearsal or preparation that anyone had for the songs. Everyone was really good. Everyone was really funky, you know. Everyone had a great time. And, you know, everyone really got behind Bobby’s songs. It was almost like just getting together and jamming without any mandate or any charts or anything. —Bruce Langhorne
110
VISCERAL MUSIC
Let the melody reveal itself. Let the rise rise, let the fall fall, let the curve swerve, curl, angle, let the loud soft pause stop let the rhythm reveal itself let the throb throb, let the build build, let the swell sweep, crescendo, pulse, let the loud soft pause stop
Let the release release itself. Let the flow Flow, the go Go, let the free fly, roll, float, let the loud soft pause stop
LET THE LET!
Excerpt from “JUST INTONATIONS”, Lawson Fusao Inada and Robert Kostka, 1996
111 In the Dirt by Bob Lordan
Dance, paint and sing It's all the same thing
A call to accounting for yourself—in the jelly roll joy of others
Collaboration as in a cheer
You cheer, but you need others to cheer at the same time to Manifest for the viewer or listener the now and then experience—lest you are just one person yelling
So there you find yourself yelling, but knowing the final outcome will be a cheer
Cheer yourself
And Dance
The dance of one The dance in twos The dance of many Wear soft shoes
People moving simultaneously Legs moving into the void only because others have left it open
Knowing and moving at the same time landing in continuity Hands, eyes, sound, kisses, wishes and smiles connect The name of the tune spinning is Trust Engaging creation in all its bountiful possibilities From picking the strings to pushing the paint, from pounding the drums to feeding the canvas 112 Music's sibling painting and painting’s sibling music All a part of the great wheel going round and round
Painting-sound in the visual usually born to form by the isolated brushsmith—creating the end piece leading in uniformity
The artist’s continuous energetic desire adds up to the work living and holding strength in it's oneness
A Rembrandt brush stroke placed in the color field of a Rothko would prove disastrous Yet where might the images have landed if they had worked side by side on the same piece? One thing is certain: a change of their acquired knowledge
Outcome is based more on the synthesis of intentions A collection of musical intentions will conjure up a uniformity of sound that if tended will grow and flower
Questions always arise: What marks or sounds are to be left or covered over? Does the ego prove to lead the future ship in the direction of less? Is there time given for hibernation through germination?
The answer is lying in the dirt Tend well brother/sister farmers
113 “Burning Ambulance”, Selections
Issue 1, Winter 2010
To me, creativity is completely that realm of manifesting energy. —Matthew Shipp
He made me do some stuff that I had never done before! I don’t even remember what I did, but it was completely in response to the way Bill played, almost in desperation to find a sound solution. People like that make you leave the beaten path to look for something new. —Warren Smith (on Bill Dixon)
We ended the evening in a sound environment that was unlike any I have ever heard or participated in before. Again, no instructions were issued, not even a signal to start. Bill began slowly, softly intoning pitches. I added a drone, a single pitch in the pedal register, and stayed in that position without variation. What unfolded was almost dreamlike in quality, and had the feeling of suspension, with motion so slow as to be almost imperceptible, shimmering like light on water. For a long moment after we finished, no one spoke or moved. —Stephen Haynes (on Bill Dixon)
I remember reading Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar while we worked with Bill that summer. I wrote a note in the margins of the book, ‘breaking our attachments to the shticks which are our shadows in the music.’ Look, I have a shtick, you have a shtick, even Bill has a shtick. Everything that he did during the recording was to make it so we could clearly see the music, the group sound, rather than our individual thing. That is so important, and it’s a subtle essence in 20th Century music: we have the improvisation, the individual/learned voice; but then finding the collective voice, that’s the thing! —Ken Filiano (on Bill Dixon)
The whole of our compositions are different ways of our vision about what heavy metal must be, that is, a risked, non‐conformist, epic music. Most people in heavy metal, the new bands I mean, are becoming very predictable. Only a few stay faithful to the first spirit that guided heavy metal when it was a music that blew away the listeners’ heads. —Ricardo Jimenez Gómez
Issue 2, Autumn 2010
It is more important to me to be able to communicate a feeling than to get wrapped up in technical playing. —Gary Mader
114 When I’m playing with another horn player, I’m trying to really connect with him or her so we can have synergy as a front line, playing lines together, making sure my voice and his voice are creating a singular voice that’s the combination of us both. Like in Little Women, a lot of times I’m really surrendering to what Travis is playing, his ideas and stuff like that, and he would say the same thing. It’s a give‐and‐take. Sometimes he wants to do something, and I’ll go there with him. Sometimes I’ll say, I don’t wanna go there, I wanna do this more accompanying thing, or play on top of what he’s playing, making what he does accompaniment. It’s just about connections. —Darius Jones
Early ‘70s. NY Great Meadow Correctional Institution (maximum security). Black Solidarity Day. Bill asked me to play horn for a prisoners’ soul group. I stood to the side, watching Bill talking to someone and smiling. The auditorium doors opened. A sea of 700 prisoners gushed in. Suddenly I felt two hands on my back. Bill pushed me on stage and yelled, “Play!” Tenor in hand, alone, I shut my eyes and played as if my life depended on it. After three minutes, I heard a huge clamor in the hall. Opening one eye, I saw all 700 prisoners on their chairs, wildly cheering me on: “Go! Go! Go!” The guards were terrified. The prisoners were of the verge of rioting. As they yelled more, I played louder! For a few minutes my playing seemed to shatter the walls of the prison, to free those guys…When I finished, they cheered…Bill came up to me, smiled, and said in a quiet voice, “Now that’s the way you should always play!” —Stephen Horenstein (on Bill Dixon)
At one point he said, “You know, they might drop the bomb tomorrow, and this will be the last concert for all of us. Play like it matters!” —Taylor Ho Bynum (on Bill Dixon)
Issue 3, Winter 2010
One of the challenges of this period is to find a way to break through, because there’s a barrier that’s been erected to make it difficult for the men and women to find out what’s truly going on. Tri‐Centric are the people who are poor and in debt but they believe in music and the mystical power of creativity…It’s about the Third Millennium and a change of the guard. —Anthony Braxton
What Braxton had created in his Ghost Trance Music is a system in which, by buying wholly into the rules, the players have complete freedom. Not freedom to create anything, but freedom to create something bigger than themselves. A sum greater than the parts. A power (to cop a tagline from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a seminal Chicago musicians’ collective of which Braxton was a member) stronger than itself. —Kurt Gottschalk 115 The model I’m trying to build is not a hierarchical model that comes down from the top but a multi‐hierarchical model that respects differences…The men and women come together in terms of convergence and differences. It’s not about one way. I really want a music where it’s not about one person being in charge, [but] a field of activities. —Anthony Braxton
It’s really alive…It’s very surprising and usually there are some accidents that are really fun…Something usually goes wrong, which he loves. He’s always talked about not wanting things to be perfect. It’s like life, it’s not predictable. So when accidents happen, it’s a thrill. —James Fei (on Anthony Braxton)
Be honest, do your best but don’t let anyone disrespect your work…Know that you have a right to do your music whatever it is, but then fight for your music. If you want to make money, go into popular music. Don’t let the popular forces bring you down because there is a community of people behind you who will support you. Do your work. —Anthony Braxton
They both taught me that if you’re going to play with that kind of intensity, you’ll miss sometimes. If you go for it—you will have to miss, make mistakes, and fall flat. When you do, that will ensure the intensity of what you’re doing comes through. —David Weiss (on Billy Harper and Charles Tolliver)
I remember one time, playing at Slug’s with Paul Bley. I’m not going to mention names, but one of the more established trumpet players almost got physically violent [when he heard] the music that was being played. He was very upset that we could do that to music. —Barry Altschul
The ideal was to have a scene in which each band created their own genre with their albums…I think that ideal is very much alive still. But at some point the newer bands had this idea that being a proper Norwegian black metal band was about repetition and maintaining status quo—yet the initial idea was the opposite: Tear down your ideals and just totally fuck up every possible rule. —Ivar Bjørnson
Issue 4, Summer 2011
Harriet Tubman is a sophisticated ensemble—by that I mean we improvise in a compositional framework—we are composing spontaneously—and at the very least organizing and structuring vis a vis “arranging” individually and collectively, in a simultaneity, which coalesces into the group’s “sonic signature.” —Brandon Ross 116 The music is us, we are the music. —J.T. Lewis
If you live in New York City it’s impossible to not sound like it. If you just stand and listen to the sounds of the city, you can hear the music of it (or at least I can)…a beautiful cacophony of chaos and order 24/7, whether you notice it or not. —J.T. Lewis
Playing with a large ensemble is all about listening, and more listening. Actually, it’s the same in any ensemble…Which is what all musicians who are great truly are: The best listeners in the room—and it’s not a hierarchy, it’s just a way of going about it. —Brandon Ross
Sometimes in improv, it comes and goes and you don’t even remember what you did, and other times it stays with you like a composition. —Bill Laswell
I play piano; I took a couple of lessons when I was young, but I didn’t like knowing what to do. A lot of the instruments I know how to play, I don’t really know how to play, but I experiment and work really hard at it until it sounds like something that I want to put out. I play a lot of instruments, but not knowing how to play them helps me get out of preconceived notions of how to play the instrument. —Nicolas Jaar
117
light rhizomatics, billy conde goldman
118 piccadilly, 1972: taking a turn off main-street, away from cacophony and real-life relics, & into the outer spaces myriad faces & sweet deafening sounds of rock ‘n’ roll. And inner space…the mind loses its bearings. what’s the date again? (it’s so dark in here) 1962? or twenty years on? is this a recording session or a cocktail party?...on the rocks, please…where’s the icebox?...oh! now! that is…so cool…(there’d been rumours, of course, nothing certain, but the suggestion of truth). musicians lie rigid-&-fluid in a mannerist canvas of hard-edged black-leather glintings, red-satin slashes, smokey surrounding gloom… …listening to the music re-sounding, cutting the air like it was glass, rock‘n‘roll juggernauted into demonic electronic supersonic mo-mo momentum — by a panoplic machine-pile, hifi or scifi who can tell? Wailing old-time sax, velvet/viscous, vibrato/vicious or ensemble jamming (& more)…synthesized to whirls & whorls of hardrock sound… mixed/fixed/sifted/ lifted to driving, high-flying chunks & vortices of pure electronic wow — gyrating, parabolic, tantalising (oh notes could not spell out the score). …fantasizing: phantomising: echoes of magic-golden moments become real presemces…dreamworld & realworld loaded with images (of a style & time & world of — celluloid artefacts? heart-rending hardfacts?). Monaural & aureate fragments sea-changed & refined to pan, span the limits of sensation…leaves of gold, crossing thresholds & hearts. Saturday nite at the Roxy the Mecca the Ritz — your fantasies realized…& are they still? & is this the end, the bitter end? (or the beginning?) &, so help me, so many questions? & are the answers naked to the eye or ear? or are they undercover? ——Simon Puxley, Roxy Music, Roxy Music liner knotes
119
Knotes by Steve Lacy on advice from Thelonious Monk
120 Wynton Marsalis Speaks
Some of the essential traits of jazz have nothing to do with music, and others are musical traits. Of the things that don’t just have to do with music, first comes the concept of playing. You take a theme, an idea, and you play with it. Just like you play with a ball…So you have the spirit of play…Next is the desire to play with other people. That means learning to make room…When I joined Art Blakey he was always telling us, “Man, y’all got to play more like a group. When your solo is over, stop playing!”…Third, playing jazz means learning to respect individuality. You don’t have to agree with me; you have your own way of thinking, and that’s good. You and I, we come together and have a conversation. I consider what you’re saying. And I come away thinking “It could be true” or “It’s definitely not true.” Playing jazz means learning how to reconcile differences, even when they’re opposites…Jazz teaches you how to have a dialogue, with integrity. 3 In jazz somebody’s playing on every beat, generally the bass and drums. There’s not a lot of fat in the rhythm, unlike, say, in funk, where there’s plenty of space between beats. That’s what makes swinging in jazz a challenge. On every beat there’s the possibility of the rhythm falling apart…Swing isn’t rigid. Somebody might take the swing in a new direction, and you have to be ready to go that way. You’re constantly trying to coordinate with something that’s shifting and changing. 3 A syncopated approach to rhythm, which means you’re always prepared to do the unexpected, always ready to find your equilibrium. If you’re thrown off, you get back on. You challenge the rhythm. In jazz you’re improvising within a form. You challenge that form with rhythms, with harmonies. Art Tatum challenged form harmonically, inventing new harmonies and resolving them. You can challenge form melodically, like Lester Young. Ben Webster challenged form with timbres and textures. It’s all connected to the notion of play. You set parameters and then you mess with them. 3 In jazz the point is to achieve your identity on your instrument, no matter what role you play. You could play the most insignificant role in the music, just a simple riff— the challenge is, play that riff like you. 3 Jazz is a music of conversation, and that’s what you need in a democracy. You have to be willing to hear another person’s point of view and respond to it. In jazz you have the opportunity to establish your equality—based on your ability. That’s the chance you have in a democracy. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be even, but you do have an opportunity. And often things won’t go your way; they’ll go the way the majority takes them. So you’ll have to go with them and make the best out of a situation you might not like. The principle of American democracy is that you have freedom. The question is “How will you use it?” which is also the central question in jazz. In democracy, as in jazz, you have freedom with restraint. It’s not absolute freedom, it’s freedom within a structure. 3
121 Call & Response
Jack Healey: What do you practice? How do you say to yourself, Wynton’s got to improve in that area?
Wynton Marsalis: There are different things to improve and there are musical things—hearing, more precisely. Having quicker reflexes so whatever you hear you can just play automatically on your own. Playing with a more beautiful tone, bigger sound, swinging harder, playing with rhythms, with a more groove‐oriented rhythm. Better communication with the other musicians that you play with so that you can really get a group dialogue going. And then there are the things—the human things—that are not music, but come through the music. Like developing greater humility. Developing greater understanding.
Jack Healey: So there’s a whole hell of a lot going on in that, in your jazz path, and it’s swinging and moving. It’s a democracy.
Wynton Marsalis: Because everyone is playing, and you’re trying to make them sound good, and they’re trying to make you sound good, and you’re inventing what you’re playing at the moment that you’re playing it. So there’s a lot going on. It’s an actual representation of what goes on. It’s a musical representation of what goes on in a working democracy. You have to want to play with other people to play jazz music. You can’t just play your part. ‘Cause your part is their part.
122 “Sound Levels: Profiles in American Music 20022009”, Phil Freeman, Selections
The illusion—the con—at the heart of so much of today’s music is the creation of a “performance” that never really existed. Sampling, over‐dubbing, endless retakes and the careful paring away of errors all contribute to the deception. —Phil Freeman
I like my music with germs on it…I’m usually looking for something outside of the frame. At a certain point I realized, why are we trying to close the doors and block out the world? I like the way the world sounds. —Tom Waits
Part of the collective method is that nobody gets their own way. It’s one of the many ways we try to combat artifice in what we do. —David Thomas
No safety net. Naked on stage, where it all could and would and should have gone wrong. What you do is, you listen and interact and hopefully develop a language…And it can happen with a total stranger. It can happen with someone who’s 30 years older than you, or with a small child, but developing that telepathy is special when it does happen. —Mike Patton
I found that every person that played an instrument had a different way of feeling. But when you played collectively, it made the total become one. —Ornette Coleman
If a person could hold one note in an ensemble, as far as I was concerned he was just as important as your best soloist. —Bill Dixon
We don’t really record in a linear fashion, we record pieces. I show them their parts five minutes before they’re about to perform it…They say, ‘Why couldn’t I have had this material a week ago? I could kill it if you’d just give me a week!’ And I say, I don’t want the normal, comfortable musician in you to play this part. I want the part of you that’s unsure, the animal side of you. The essence of what you are and drives you to play the drums or the bass. I want that, stripped of everything else, stripped of experience, of sophistication, of everything we have to avoid in order to not find ourselves going into a corner, basically. —Omar Rodriquez‐Lopez
We’re not trying to be weird, we’re not trying to be complicated, we’re just trying to express ourselves. And we all have a range of emotions. I don’t know anyone who isn’t complicated, who isn’t one day in a great mood, the next day looking at the ground, the next day has lots of jokes. That’s why our music goes like this. —Omar Rodriquez‐Lopez
123
The War Goes On. Daniel Fagereng
124 R o y a l T r u x ******************** ******************** I know this sounds strange, but it's not like I'm enough of a real guitar player to say something like "I made a few mistakes" or "I messed up." I mean, that's me up there, that's the way I play. I once thought about taking lessons, trying to learn how to be a really good guitar player, but what's the point. Even if I learned how to play other people's songs perfectly, it's not like I'd be putting any part of me into them. —Jennifer Herrema
We follow rules to the extreme like a little kid would, to show how stupid the rules are because they cause all these other problems, to show how grotesque we look and how grotesque the whole thing is. Then, we break the rules. We use the limits. We're not just portraying the breaking of the rules. Like being a black rock band or performing The Wall at the Berlin wall, which is typical rock 'n' roll. That's okay, historically, but we're gonna replicate and destroy the mold—follow the rules and make a grotesque satirical display of ourselves. Marquis de Sade. It's also traditional neoclassicism. Stravinsky would say you're freer when you're hindered by conventions and rules. It keeps things flowing. But I want glimpses of freedom. Instead of acquiring things through money and business and power, I'm interested in capturing moments. We're setting an example for the rest of the world, but we're not really good spokesmen for it because we made everything we touch look bad. —Neil Hagerty
After a while everybody's so in tune to what's happening at that time, that you find you have all this room. The thing I'd thought was the key to that song is suddenly gone, but it's still working. It's sort of like learning. Cause shit, it would just suck to do something right and just keep doing it. Wanna try to stretch, I mean, come on. If it doesn't work we drop it, there's always stuff we can fall back on. We're not going to go out there like, "This is an experiment. Do not move. Do not applaud." —Neil Hagerty
125 There are just too many languages of music to get stuck doing one thing. —Neil Hagerty
I guess when people go to a club and pay to see a band, they expect the band to get up and play song after song and they're supposed to be tight, they're supposed to sound as much like their records as possible, and I just think it's really boring. We don't rehearse for shows. We do it the way our last memory of the song is. Sometimes I remember it in my head differently than Neil. Like the groove I've got might be a lot slower, and I won't change for him. I just go my own way, I will actually block Neil out completely and almost feel like I'm doing a solo show until maybe all of a sudden something totally kicks in where we're right on time together, then it brings in, you know, a total flow. —Jennifer Herrema
Well, they [the lyrics] were made up on the spot at some point or other. That's the big thing, part of the whole Royal Trux idea, stay loose, keep moving and grooving. —Neil Hagerty
Everybody in the band has their job to do and you can't mess with the other person. The idea is to have a band where everybody is equal. I think with a lot of bands it's usually just one person. I mean, we write the songs and that's the concept of the band, basically. It's like this is the band in which we write the songs and not the band that dresses up like Martians. And that's it. We had this other guy who was playing percussion, but his was a light contribution and he wasn't carrying his weight as an equal member, so instead of changing around to accommodate him, we jettisoned him. Jennifer and me, we've always been equal—that's why it's always been the two of us. It's been hard to get people into it, because they're always third or fourth members. The function of the band, to me, is a metaphor for different social arrangements. That's when it really works well. In jazz a lot of the time it's really equal, but in rock it's generally hierarchical. We don't want to be like that. —Neil Hagerty
We actually played a couple of shows last year where Golden were like our back‐up band. It was cool, they came in and had learned our songs off the record. It was good because it was kind of wrong...wrong chords and such, but it sounded right. That was fun. —Neil Hagerty
126 Harmolodics is my only social and moral framework. Everything I do is in a relationship with a billion fragmented lines through time. Understanding those relationships and my next line is the exertion that leaves its record in music. Rather than trying to control the things I understand, I would like to leave them free to develop as they will. —Neil Hagerty
Hagerty and Herrema have been releasing RTX records for a decade. They have eight LPs under their studded cowboy belts, plus enough singles to form a double‐CD set…Each record has featured new collaborators, a fresh recording method, different rules for song structure, and new ways of examining their music altogether. If something's wrong they fix it; if something's right they fix it. Seeing Royal Trux play live is an even bigger gamble. At times they are an absolutely unbeatable rock‐and‐roll machine; other times it's like watching your grandfather parallel park. Hagerty has been known to forsake his guitar in favor of a synthesizer, or to sit on a stool and let the audience examine his back for 50 minutes, or play astonishing Hendrix‐blessed guitar lines only to bury them behind a heavy‐handed keyboard player the Trux picked up from a classic‐rock cover band. Herrema can sing as if possessed, swaggering faceless behind her stringy mane and good‐guy cowboy hat; or she can grunt her lyrics in a grotesque monotone, seemingly wrapped up in an entirely different number than the band. Or she can ditch her post mid‐show for a bathroom break. The backup band is likewise kept in a state of perpetual flux. A bassist was recently dismissed after a pair of albums as "too skilled"; the couple replaced him with the aforementioned keyboardist, who left after Accelerator, when Jennifer and Neil remodeled the group as a Jefferson Airplane homage with Herrema taking female lead and Hagerty and a former drummer on male backup. "Rock and roll used to be thought of as a unique combination of individuals coming together to create a sound," Hagerty explains when asked about their rotating lineup. "That idea is total bullshit, just another myth. We fashion ourselves after jazz sessions from the '20s, which were made up of whoever was around, or in the tradition of the Brill Building, Phil Spector, or Stax‐Volt, where there were anonymous session musicians. This way there's a different chemistry for each session." —Jay Ruttenberg
127 royal trux: cats & dogs a harmolodic way of life (knotes for a proposal by the red threads to continuum’s 33 1/3 book series) sound of cats & dogs: impressions of the whole being, biological/cosmic. the cats’ roar(((())))(((explore)))… my faith is in the spectre, my faith is in the ground, my faith is in the sun: on three…a one a two a three…my faith is a reflector of all that is around. activate: harmolodics as energetics = albert ayler’s energy music…cats & dogs at 33 1/3, 45, 78, and (sweet) 16 rpm… in support of collaboration and a dual (tribal) authorship: much of the music presented in the 33 1/3 series is collaborative. we continue the harmolodic tradition of working and creating and playing together—the synergy super-magick-power of union. the hex of the howl coyote trick or treat.
meowing and barking purring and snoring sounds of plenty music is for everyone. no bumper-sticker flag-waving morality but a natural truth. for rock and for all. cats & dogs is open to all who enter…harmolodics for you and me... harmolodics wrapping your arms around your love, swimming the waters. in the flow…in time and together sharing together but not always saying the same thing at the same time. jennifer behind neil behind jennifer—both in front leapfrogging in stride. uncertainty in the knowing we are here through the journey, the song—supportive. trash tumble-weeding off the road and dirt-deviling a cloud of movement. auras glowing on the heads of the living, vital and aware.
128 cats & dogs rocket to the moon of the heart. the yin-yang round and round monkey chased the weasel. chasing the tail of a fly went by. the whirling dervish spin off on your own. whisked from the carousel of levity and gravity and centrifugal force engaging. this is our music. when the breeze takes a key <> in the beginning…on creation’s dust making orbit and making entry. for all the fuss, no futzing around—serious and driven as jammy packing ween’s the pod and captain beefheart’s trout mask replica. just when you get a look at your direction… buried and unearthed: the trux fall to pieces and fall apart as they fall together back ‘n’ forth a tumble…jump into the waters from stagnant to turbulent and ride the coaster of the music….meeting on the other side, hand-in-hand sometimes, crawl out of the water to land on their bellies side-by-side but out of reach sometimes. sparkling! and there it shall remain. exercise: hand drum circle join in and play beating your belly or clapping your hands its own reward. out on a limb. lost in the mantra song. records to live by…receiving the lift/gift/shift of music… ecstaticdanceofarrivalawarenessmountaintopblue hey zeus. in the jesus tradition powerful. get our balance in this new gravity = harmolodics. where compassion and love reign in freedom’s allowance and individual response ability. exploring the uncertain into the now. field trip down with the whales and basking in the sun. the mystery of the womb. animal call to gather.
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Zapped. Rachel Znerold
130 Zappa!is yes
Without deviation (from the norm), ‘progress’ is not possible. —Frank Zappa
The Ultimate Rule ought to be: “If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it’s bitchen; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it’s shitty.” —Frank Zappa
I was ready to dedicate myself completely to Frank’s music. He really knew what buttons to push, emotionally and musically. He was a remarkable referee. He knew how to synthesize people’s personalities and talents. That’s a very rare gift. He wasn’t just a conductor standing up there waving his arms; he was playing people. —Ruth Underwood (on Frank Zappa)
Frank was one of the most awesomely in‐control guitar players that ever walked the earth. He isn’t playing learned licks, but attempting to invent something, playing within the outer realms of his knowledge of the guitar, and doing that in front of thousands of people. The fearlessness is one of the more noble and ballsy things about him as a guitar player. —Mike Keneally (on Frank Zappa)
Any piece of time can be subdivided any old way you like. And that’s what happens when people talk, because people don’t talk in 4/4 or 3/4 or 2/4— they talk all over the place. And if the rhythm of what you play follows along with the natural scan of human speech, it’s going to have a different feel to it. —Frank Zappa
When he was soloing, it was very intuitive and not done to be clever. That’s just the way he felt stuff, the way his heart would beat. It was just the fabric of his musical soul. —Mike Keneally (on Frank Zappa)
I think that all music should be personalized. If you decide that you want to be the bad boy of music and play with a two‐by‐four, then that’s your message. —Frank Zappa
131 If you can get the right tone, you know your solo is going to go great, whatever the notes. It’s something spiritual, to do with the way the fingers respond to what the ear is hearing, a continual refinement and adjustment. —Frank Zappa
I’ll play 13 notes over a half‐note and try to space it evenly so it flows. This is sort of against the grain of rock and roll, which likes to have everything in exactly duple or triple, straight up and down, so you can constantly tap your foot to it…The hardest thing for me to do is play straight up and down. Stuff that everybody else does naturally just seems as impossible as shit to me. I don’t think in little groups of twos and fours—they just don’t come out that way. I can sit around and play fives and sevens all day long with no sweat, but the minute I’ve got to go do‐do‐do‐do, do‐do‐do‐do, it feels weird, like wearing tight shoes. —Frank Zappa
I think I shouldn’t be rated as a guitarist!...Rating guitarists is a stupid hobby. I’m a composer, and my instrument is the guitar. If you like the composition, fine. My technique as a guitar player is fair. There are plenty of people who play faster than I do, never hit a wrong note, and have a lovely sound. If you want to rate guitar players, go for them. But there isn’t anybody else who’ll take the chances that I will take with a composition onstage in front of an audience, and just go out there and have the nerve, the ultimate audacity, to say, ‘Okay, I don’t know what I’m going to play, and that makes us equal. So let’s go—we’ll have an adventure here.’ That’s what I do. There’s no way to rate that. You either like that kind of entertainment or you don’t. I’d rather have the ups and downs than the assuredness that I was going to go out there and amaze everybody with technique. I want to hear some music, and the challenge for me is writing an instant composition while I’m playing. That’s what I do. —Frank Zappa
I have a lot of different musical questions, and I’m looking for a lot of different musical answers, and if the audience is similarly disposed, then they can take the course with me, because, I’m learning stuff as I do these things. —Frank Zappa
There have been great live music events happening onstage that will only happen that one time, in one place, and it happened because guys were playing instruments, and they were really tearing it up that night. —Frank Zappa
132 But all the rules of counterpoint and what constitutes good counterpoint, I just couldn’t force myself to do that, and I could barely make it through the harmony book, because all the formulas that you learn there sounded so banal. Every time one of the exercises was presented, you would hear how the chords were supposed to resolve. All I could hear was the infliction of normality on my imagination. —Frank Zappa
It’s not easy to put together a rock band for any purpose. —Frank Zappa
A few notes are going to get the job done better than a million notes. —Frank Zappa
Hits are not necessarily musical phenomena. —Frank Zappa
“He’d always keep us on our toes. About a month into the tour, you’d think, ‘Okay, I’ve got this down, I can do it in my sleep.’ But just then, ‘Band meeting in Frank’s room!’ Frank would tell us, ‘You guys are getting too comfortable with this. We’re going to change the whole show tonight.’ So we’d do all this stuff that we hadn’t done since rehearsals a month before, and suddenly put together a whole new show.” —Arthur Barrows (on Frank Zappa)
The ear prefers variety. —Frank Zappa
Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love, love is not music. Music is the best…So, if music is the best, what is music? Anything can be music, but it doesn’t become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music. —Frank Zappa
Just about every day during soundcheck his Synclavier was parked right there on the stage. He would frequently come up with something on the spot which would then be used as source material during the show. He would either alert the band to what the music would be, or sometimes stuff would start floating out and you’d just have to react to it. —Mike Keneally (on Frank Zappa)
133 Any stack of notes you can call a chord—or any stack of sounds, whether they’re musical pitches or just textures. —Frank Zappa
I knew the reputation of how difficult Frank’s music was to play and I wasn’t disappointed when I saw the music. It was extremely intricate and detailed. The working process really varied. Often you would learn a rock song by rote, without any paper, which didn’t mean it was a simple thing to learn. Some of his material would be a rock song until you got to an interlude section, when he’d bring in a piece of paper. You had to use your ears a lot, be able to memorize things quickly. When we went on the road, all this music we’d accumulated had to me memorized because it was a rock ‘n’ roll show, basically. You had rock ‘n’ roll lighting, and you couldn’t have your face buried in any music. Also, he tended to change things all the time. A piece we might have learned as a heavy‐metal song, he’d give the cue and it might become a reggae song, just spontaneously. So every show was completely different. —Chad Wackerman (on Frank Zappa)
I want the frighteningly original all the time. —Frank Zappa
134 What is Music?
“We’re coming to the beginning of a new era, wherein the development of the inner self is the most important thing. We have to train ourselves so that we can improvise on anything—a bird, a sock, a fuming beaker! This, too, can be music. Anything can be music.” Biff Debris in Uncle Meat
A person with a feel for rhythm can walk into a factory and hear the machine noise as a composition. If we expand that concept to include light, behavior, weather factors, moon phases, anything (whether it’s a rhythm that can be heard or a rhythm that is perceived, i.e., a color change over time—or a season), it can be consumed as music. If it can be conceived as music, it can be executed as music, and presented to an audience in such a way that they will perceive it as music: “Look at this. Ever seen one of these before? I built this for you. What do you mean, ‘What the fuck is it?’ It’s a goddam ETUDE, asshole.” When someone writes a piece of music, what he or she puts on the paper is roughly the equivalent of a recipe—in the sense that the recipe is not the food, only instructions for the preparation of the food. Unless you are very weird, you don’t eat the recipe. If I write something on a piece of paper, I can’t actually ‘hear’ it. I can conjure up visions of what the symbols on the page mean, and imagine a piece of music as it might sound in performance, but that sensation is nontransferable; it can’t be shared or transmitted. It doesn’t become a ‘musical experience’ in normal terms until ‘the recipe’ has been converted into wiggling air molecules. Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance space is sculpted into something. 135 This ‘moleculesculptureovertime’ is then ‘looked at’ by the ears of the listeners—or a microphone. SOUND is ‘ear‐decoded data.’ Things which MAKE SOUND are things which are capable of creating perturbations. These perturbations modify (or sculpt) the raw material (the ‘static air’ in the room—the way it was ‘at rest’ before the musicians started fucking around with it). If you purposefully generate atmospheric perturbations (‘air shapes’), you are composing.
Excerpt from “The Real Frank Zappa Book”, Frank Zappa and Peter Occhiogrosso, 1990
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Image from the Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com), Copyright © 1998‐2011 Thinkmap, Inc. All rights reserved
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Ornette Coleman. Relief engraving print on paper. Eric Hoffman 138 HARMOLODIC = HIGHEST INSTINCT SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
Ornette Coleman
I use the term imagination like I use Most listeners and players think of the terms religion and gospel. rhythm as the drums and think of Imagination becomes something you non‐rhythm as sound or words. To wish to bring into existence. I don’t me they’re the same. You can be think a healthy imagination can moved rhythmically or dominate people. You have to share non‐rhythmically. imagination so that you’ll appreciate Improvising is a word used to it and those in your environment will express music that is not being appreciate it. Imagination has quite written and calculated at the a bit to do with what we call life style. moment. Once I heard Eubie Blake But the style isn’t as free as the social say that when he was playing in style that we have in life. For black bands for white audiences, example, life style doesn’t tell you during the time when segregation that if you dress in ancestral clothes, was strong, that the musicians had to or if you dress in western clothes, go on stage without any written that people will see you as such. If I music. The musicians would go dress up in African clothes and walk backstage, look at the music, then the streets of the United States no leave the music there and go out and one is going to say there’s an African. play it. He was saying that they had a They will say, “Oh there goes a guy more saleable appeal if they dressed up like an African.” If I put pretended to not know what they on western clothes they’ll say, were doing. The white audience felt “There’s a black guy with a safer. If they had music in front of three‐piece suit on.” Therefore the them, the audience would think that costume that you wear doesn’t tell they were trying to be white. So anybody what you are. So that’s that’s what I think about the word what I mean by the imagination. improvising. It’s outdated. The term When I speak of rhythm I’m doesn’t describe the musician’s speaking about the oxygen for the individual struggle for expression. notes. The beat of the time is the Usually the person improvising has constant format. It’s the mechanical to use some sort of vehicle to let you part of motion. Rhythm is the freest know he’s doing that. It’s a limited part of that motion. The best is the term. Memory has a lot to do with cement for the road. It’s the road improvisation. People enjoy the that you’re traveling on. The road music they’ve heard before, much doesn’t necessarily ever change. more than the music they haven’t Rhythm can be harmonic or melodic. heard. To me that’s like memory. 139 The same sensations that made them we — including jazz, classical and the enjoy what they liked in the past, music I play — all use the same when it was the present, wasn’t ingredients. The same paint and memory. That was an experience. canvas. What I’ve tried to do is find In this society the present is called out why a particular western form of pop music. Lately I’ve been reading music has to always be designed for in the paper that that kind of only a certain age group, or for a stimulation for the senses is at a very certain class of people, in order for it low ebb. The pop scene is intensely to become successful. I’m designing flat. I mean there’s nothing exciting my music for humanity. I realize that going on. Pop music is based upon we (the human society) have been songs with lyrics. Mostly the lyrics through education etc. We have all are in English, but pop music is really made judgments based upon class. I any song that has a lyric regardless of want to get to the essence of what it what language is used whether it’s is, in order to be free of design. In African pop, American pop, etc. other words, I don’t write or design a Without a catchable melody or an particular piece of music for a emotional experience, pop music specific person or a specific audience, doesn’t have the depth of other although what I’m doing is for human music. consumption. I think of my music as
having some sort of healing quality, ======like religion or medicine. There’s a
Music for Humanity lot of emotional love that’s closer to religion in music. Instrumental music, the music usually labeled classical music and ======jazz music, doesn’t depend on past Ancestral Links memory as much as it depends on the present memory. People seem to Sound and music have the use their memory for the past attributes of sound medicine and the instead of allowing themselves to emotional depth of a religious enjoy what their present memory connotation. I have always thought would mean to them in the future. of expressing music with those What I’m saying about memory is qualities even when I was in that the formats, or the ingredients California trying to get out of bebop. that go into making what is called I still have this same feeling. soul music, pop music, country and There is no real North American western and rhythm and blues is the system. White people in North same identical words, the same America are still restricted to their identical notes, the same identical own ancestral culture. North time. It’s like a puzzle. If you want a American culture is an inversion puzzle that looks like a car, you put of European culture. The the pieces together to look like a car, non‐European people in North but it’s still a puzzle. So basically, America are forced to relate to the 140 same European ancestors that white course is a very degrading title for a Americans relate to because that has music that has such a wide range of been the standard here. However, expression. It’s the only there are some young white people instrumental music that has actually today who are trying to create for become a cornerstone for the world. themselves another concept of what The first thing it does is to eliminate they call culture. Most non‐white the class category of sound. You people in the United States feel don’t have to use only categories to they’re doing this naturally because play it. The music called jazz has no they’re Americans. It’s very hard for class category but all other music ethnic groups in a society that has that is instrumental does. The designed the life style to be a certain reason I call my music Harmolodic is way, for a certain race of people, to because twenty years ago I had four see themselves as part of the design pieces, and now twenty years later, I without having the tools to enjoy have seven pieces. So I’ve gained what that design has meant for three pieces. I started my career in a others. In the life style of America standard jazz quartet. I wasn’t the pop song is extremely limited. If concentrating on calling my music we could turn on the radio and hear harmolodic then because it was too any language in a pop sound, then limited for the people to understand pop music might be very exciting. it. In those early days in Los Angeles, But most people who don’t speak I sat in with many different English in the United States are cast musicians. At that time I was playing out of that expression. English is and inventing off of the melody. I spoken to the masses, but it is not the would be playing and everyone only language that is spoken in the would say I was out of key, or that I country. In years to come maybe all was doing something wrong. Yet ethnic groups in the U.S. will be able musically I knew the same things to express their own origins, their they knew. That’s when I really own ancestral links and birthrights. understood that I was doing what I’m
doing now. It’s called harmolodic. ======When I got rejected so much, I
A Cornerstone for the World stopped trying to express that concept and started trying to get Instrumental music is more back into a survival point of view. valuable to a country than the music The bebop point of view. Later I that only sounds like one language. A person can listen to instrumental analyzed it and came to the music, receive it in their minds or conclusion that I was taking what is their ears and language is not a called the changes, the harmonies problem. For some reason and other elements, and using them instrumental music suffers. I think as ideas. Not using them to get ideas. the most advanced music is the During that time some people started music called jazz. The word jazz of calling it “Free Jazz.” I never called it 141 free jazz. Now I’m using the word harmolodic? Yes, that can be harmolodic because I’ve written a instantly done or it can be planned or great deal of music in the last twenty it can be calculated. The results years. Harmolodic is the best title to happen when you actually complete describe my music. the motive that you’re using it for.
It’s the motive that brings about the ======results of harmolodic. In my case I’m
The Highest Instinct always trying to do it instantaneously. It’s a challenge to In classical music there are four do it that way. Although when I sit clefs. The bass clef, treble clef, alto down to write a film score I have to clef, and the tenor clef. I transposed calculate it. I get the results I want. all four clefs into one clef. I write I never thought about playing the music based on that theory. I would music of my time. I’m always say to one of the musicians, “Play this attempting to outdate myself. For a and g with what you are already some reason ideas seem to change doing,” and it wouldn’t sound like a more than concepts and moods. I’m and g. It would come out totally for the idea. The other two are different. It would just sound like his always contained in the idea. I would personal ideas. This made me realize rather work toward the things that I that there were more components would like to see happen. It would than just melodic. It also contained really be beautiful to have music not harmonic components. It had all the come under the heading of class and rules required for western music but style. It would be good to see the the method of these rules was freer. people who are responsible for This information let me know that if I creating it enjoy the rights of that kept on perfecting this theory, it concept. could actually stand for a musical I’m going to be a black person form which I later named regardless of how many events and harmolodic. The more I use it in my projects I participate in. But if I let playing and writing, the more I style, or my dreams, make me believe realize that it can be used in almost I’m someone else, then I’m living any kind of expression. You can against myself. It’s better to think harmolodically. You can write eliminate the styles and the past fiction and poetry in harmolodic. categories and be you. I never Harmolodic allows a person to use a thought of myself as being strange or multiplicity of elements to express odd or weird or far out. I always more than one direction at one time. thought I was being the way that I The greatest freedom in harmolodic found myself to be, being born. is human instinct. Harmolodic is the highest instinct that exists in human “Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent expression. Is there a completion in Imagination” I, 1982 the results of the effects of
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Fibonaci. Scratchboard. Jeremy Langston, jeremylangston.com
143 ❀❀❀The surest ❀❀❀❀❀❀❀way to ❀❀❀frustrate ❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀the ❀❀❀possibility ❀❀of any free ❀❀realization ❀❀❀is, it seems ❀❀❀❀❀to me, to ❀❀❀❀willfully ❀❀❀❀direct it.
—Hart Crane
144 participants/contributors
[ Alexander Bingham \
[ Andrew Poppy \
[ Ben Kelley \
[ Bill Cole \
[ billy conde goldman \
[ Bob Lordan \
[ Daniel Fagereng \
[ David Sirois \
[ Dennis Warren \
[ Eric Hoffman \
[ Geoffrey Oldmixon \
[ Han-Busily Gotham Johnson \
[ h.p. karass \
[ jean-paul larosee \
[ Jeff Schlanger \
[ Jeremy Langston \
[ j.g. \
[ Mike McDonough \
[ Natasha Holmes \
[ Rachel Znerold \
[ Rob Aiman \
[ SRB \
[ Zito \
145 K N O T E S
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