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Director's Statement from Jake Meginsky Director’s Statement from Jake Meginsky The seeds of Milford Graves Full Mantis were planted nearly 15 years ago. In 2004, I ended my relationship, quit my job, and presented myself at Milford Graves’ door. I waited for almost an hour. When he arrived, I asked him if he would take me on as a student. It was an impulsive decision -- I was nervous I would be rejected on the spot, and I didn’t have another plan. He looked me up and down and said, “Come on in, we will see what the story is…”. Without another word, he directed me toward the purple drum kit in his studio. I grabbed a pair of sticks, took a seat and noticed the timbale in place of the snare drum. He sat down on an old, and slightly out of tune, upright piano, and we proceeded to play together, improvising for almost an hour. This marked the beginning of my time with Milford, my great mentor -- known to his students and his fans all around the world as the Professor. The year before, in 2003, I had attended his solo concert at the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts. I was already a huge fan. As a drummer who had interests in electronic music, free-jazz, folkloric music and the avant-garde, Milford Graves loomed large. Each river of the American underground seemed to lead to the ocean that was Graves. Milford was every heavy-weight drummer’s favorite drummer. I hunted down all the records I could find, each one presenting a percussive voice so intensely singular and dynamic, that it forced me to rethink my long standing relationship with the instrument entirely. I practiced drums listening to Nothing: Milford Graves Percussion Ensemble ESP 1965 on my headphones. I imagined myself as the third drummer in the ensemble, at- tempting to create counterpoint to the dense clusters of rhythm coming from Graves and Sunny Morgan. I read every interview and the books that Milford mentioned -- Helmholtz’s “On the Sensations of Tone” and Khan’s “The Mysticism of Sound and Music.” However, there was no amount of reading or listening to records that could have prepared me for the experience of seeing him live that year. The hour-long solo performance proved to be cataclysmic. I had never heard so many tones coming from the drum kit -- a brilliant lattice of melodic patterns, weaving in and out of each other, extending from the high frequency metallic punctuations of the hi-hat, all the way down to the subharmonic rumble of the kick drums. As the concert progressed I could feel my heartbeat changing, responding to the music. I entered the concert one way, and I came out different. It was then that I decided to throw my life in the air and find a way to study with Milford. Private lessons grew into an assistantship at Bennington College where I took a job as a technician, assisted Milford in his laboratory and taught his Intro to Percussion classes to freshman and sophomores. Graves was a generous and tireless teacher. Late into the evening, often past midnight, our private work expanded from the drum- kit into the practice of Yara, a martial art he invented based on a synthesis of Kung Fu, boxing, West African dance, and a direct study of nature (including the praying mantis!). We also worked on bioacoustics, graphical programming, electronic music, gardening, I started to have an acute sense that the film was talking to me, and in turn, I was learning music healing and polyrhythmic musical concepts applied across disciplines. I was now to listen to it and understand how to best help it become what it wanted to become. practicing drums to digital tracks Milford would create for me -- each containing a sine wave sonification of my own heartbeat or nervous system sound recorded in the labora- In 2015 I asked my friend and fellow drummer, Neil Young, to join me in filming Milford’s tory. Within the first year, I asked if I could record class to both preserve and reflect upon solo concert with me at Brandeis University. I was extremely impressed by the footage the work we were doing. I knew I was in the presence of a living master, and I felt it was Neil captured during the nearly three-hour shoot. Over the next two years, Neil jumped important to do my part and make a contribution to the history. I was learning, slowly, the into the project wholeheartedly and became much more than a cameraman. He would central aspects to Milford’s kaleidoscopic philosophy. It is these recordings that form the accompany me to Milford’s house and take part in our lessons. We would spend extended foundational basis for Milford Graves Full Mantis. hours focusing our cameras on the basement laboratory, on the garden, on the drums, and on the house itself. We shot hours of Milford’s performances at various venues on I was soon filming Milford at his house with borrowed equipment. I would invite various the east coast, including the documentation of his first-ever sculpture/sound installation friends to come down and record video, while I asked questions and helped with gar- commission for the Artist Institute Gallery in Manhattan. In 2016 I traveled to Stockholm dening or with other projects around the house. Little by little, over the years, clips and for an electronic music residency. Instead of making music with the incredible collection sequences would emerge out of the footage. I didn’t know what they would become, but I of early modular synthesizers at the Elektronmusikstudion as I had intended, I spent the knew these clips had a special vibration -- one that I would later recognize as the central week editing footage, night and day, on my laptop. I almost never left the studio. The film vibration of the feature film. was starting to talk loudly and forcefully, demanding action. It was there, in Sweden, that I carved out a basic structure for the first third of the film. When I returned to the States, my In 2007 Graves began to share unseen material from his personal archive. One hot sum- collaboration with Neil expanded into the editing room where we would set up our laptops mer afternoon in his basement in Queens, we threaded Super 8 footage taken on a 1981 side by side and cut scenes and clarify others, as if we were in a percussion duet. We Japanese tour with the great butoh dancer Min Tanaka. As we watched the screen flicker, both approached the material in an intuitive, rhythmic way in order to inject the film with a younger Milford appeared in front of a Japanese forest, demonstrated Yara movements the same sense of fluidity and intensity that are the hallmarks of Milford’s sound – each with focus and intensity, and then proceeded to disappear, absorbed by the quivering of us bringing our often distinct but complementary musical and visual sensibilities to the bamboo. In another reel from the same tour, Milford and Min Tanaka perform for a school creative process. for children with autism. The concert begins with the students sitting still. Over the course of 20 minutes, as Graves plays the kit and Tanaka dances, the students begin to get up Late in 2017, after a year of editing, we had a rough cut of the film in hand. and dance, one by one, until the entire school erupts in a display of energy and joy. In the I drove to South Jamaica, Queens, set up a projector and watched the film, sitting be- final frames, a single child remains, dancing beautifully in front of the drums as Milford tween the Professor and his wife Lois. After the film finished, Milford proclaimed, “Man, plays the ride cymbal in 12/8. The child’s eyes are locked in with Milford’s, and I could feel that’s me up there on that screen--that’s what I’m about.” the energy transmission between the two. At that moment, I caught my first real glimpse of the cinema that would become Milford Graves Full Mantis. I was Milford’s student long before this film was completed. I continue to be his student to this day. Over the following decade, Graves continued to share selected personal archival material with me -- photos from the early days of Yara in his backyard dojo, performance photos, In many ways, making Milford Graves Full Mantis was one profound lesson among many family pictures, heart-beat recordings, old flyers and playbills. He told me to find the orig- that I have received over the past 15 years, and I know there are many more teachings I inal footage for a concert from 1973, during an under-documented period when his group have yet to receive. opened for Carmen McRae in Belgium - “That is the real stuff Jake, we were really playing on that one.” Jake Meginsky I filmed Milford in his garden, at Bennington, in concert. During this time, I also performed Director, Milford Graves Full Mantis with him, triggering his electronic heart sonifications and projecting video of the garden. I often slept in the dojo when I would stay with him, becoming more intimate and familiar with his collection of masks, objects, figures, and books from nearly every continent in the world. Over time, I discovered some of the things Milford wanted to share most about his life, and especially about his creative process. I also began to understand what I felt most compelled to share and reflect back to him, regarding my experience as his student.
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