A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, September 17, 2016
George E. Lewis (b. July 14, 1952): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, ensemble leader, producer, music theorist, social historian, cultural critic, computer programmer, scholar, and teacher
SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER TWO
ERIC DOLPHY
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
BOBBY HUTCHERSON September 10-16
GEORGE E. LEWIS September 17-23
JAMES BLOOD ULMER September 24-30
RACHELLE FERRELL October 1-7 ANDREW HILL October 8-14
George E. Lewis
is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia
University. A 2015 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis has received a
MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United
States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts
(1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In
2015, Lewis received the degree of Doctor of Music (DMus, honoris causa) from the University of Edinburgh.
A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
(AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work in electronic and computer music,
computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvisative
forms is documented on more than 140 recordings. His work has been
presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia
Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Boston Modern Orchestra
Project, Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink,
Ensemble Erik Satie, Eco Ensemble, and others, with commissions from
American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble,
Harvestworks, Ensemble Either/Or, Orkestra Futura, Turning Point
Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, 2010 Vancouver
Cultural Olympiad, IRCAM, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and others.
Lewis has served as Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music, University
of California, Berkeley; Paul Fromm Composer in Residence, American
Academy in Rome; Resident Scholar, Center for Disciplinary Innovation,
University of Chicago; and CAC Fitt Artist In Residence, Brown
University.
Lewis received the 2012 SEAMUS Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
(University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award
and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture
Award. Lewis is co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016), and his opera Afterword,
commissioned by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University
of Chicago, premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in
October 2015 and has been performed in the United States, United
Kingdom, and the Czech Republic.
Professor Lewis came to Columbia in 2004, having previously taught at
the University of California, San Diego, Mills College, the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago, the Koninklijke Conservatorium Den Haag,
and Simon Fraser University's Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. Lewis
studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of
Music, and trombone with Dean Hey.Video of George Lewis: Ikons (2011)
Lewis, George E., ed. Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation
Studies, Vols. 1&2. Under contract for two volumes, Oxford
University Press. Volume one due in 2015
Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008
SELECTED COMPOSITIONS AND INSTALLATIONS
In The Breach (2015), for two percussionists, two
pianists, and violin. Premiered December 4, 2015, National Sawdust,
Brooklyn, New York, by Yarn/Wire (percussion-piano quartet) and Miranda
Cuckson (violin).
Calder (2015), for trombones, piano, and percussion.
Premiered October 23, 2015, AACM Concert Series, Community Church of New
York. Performers: Thurman Barker, Eli Fountain, percussion; Tyshawn
Sorey, trombone, piano, percussion; George Lewis, trombone. 20 to 40
minutes in one or more movements.
Creative Construction SetTM (2015),
open-form/instrumentation work. Commissioned and premiered by Berlin
Splitter (large electroacoustic improvisation ensemble), Berlin Jazz
Festival, November 5 2015. 20 to 50 minutes in one movement.
Not Alone (2014-15), for cello and computer sound
processing, 18 minutes in one movement. Written for Seth Parker Woods.
Premiered November 10, 2015, New York University.
Afterword, an opera (2015), with libretto by George Lewis.
Premiered October 16-17, 2015, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, by
the International Contemporary Ensemble, David Fulmer, conductor; Sean
Griffin, director, in collaboration with Catherine Sullivan.
Approximately two hours in duration.
Whispering Bayou (2015), multi-channel videosonic
installation, in collaboration with Carroll Parrott Blue and
Jean-Baptiste Barriere. Shown August 1-November 1, 2015, Contemporary
Arts Museum Houston.
The Ancient World (2015), for sixteen solo voices
(SSSSAAAATTTTBBBB), with text by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, 13 minutes in
one movement. Written for the Helsinki Chamber Choir, conducted by Nils
Schweckendiek. Premiered July 3, 2015, Time of Music Festival,
Viitasaari, Finland (Viitasaaren Musiikin aika).
Memorial (2015), for voice and fixed electronic sound
media, with text by Keorapetse Kgositsile, 12 minutes in one movement.
Written for Elaine Mitchener. Premiered June 1, 2015, OVADA (Oxford
Contemporary Music), The Warehouse, Oxford, United Kingdom.
A Recital For Terry Adkins (2014), for quintet, video, and
computer sound processing. Written for Ensemble Pamplemousse with the
support of the Homer in Harlem Project, Columbia University. Premiered
December 2, 2014, St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University, New York
City. Approximately one hour in duration.
The Mangle of Practice (2014), for violin and piano.
Written for violinist MingXuan Xu and pianist Winston Choi of Ensemble
Dal Niente, 14 minutes in one movement. Commissioned by the McKim Fund
in the Library of Congress. Premiered October 30, 2014, Elizabeth
Sprague Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Emergent (2014), for flute and computer sound processing.
Written for Claire Chase and commissioned by the Pnea Foundation, 15
minutes in one movement. Premiered October 2 and 3, 2014, The Kitchen
Center, New York City.
Flux (2014), for sixteen players (fl, cl, ob, bsn, hn, tpt,
tbn, 2 pc, hp, pf, 2 vln, vla, vc, cb). Written for the Oberlin
Contemporary Music Ensemble, 12 minutes in one movement. Premiered May
7, 2014, Warner Concert Hall, Oberlin, Ohio.
Memex (2014), for symphonic orchestra. Written for the BBC
Scottish Symphony Orchestra, 17 minutes in one movement. Premiered
February 22, 2014, City Halls, Glasgow, Scotland.
Assemblage (2013), for nine musicians (fl, cl/bcl, ss/ts,
pc, hp, pf, vl, vla, vc). Written for Ensemble Dal Niente, 16 minutes in
one movement. Premiered October 18, 2013, Bowling Green New Music
Festival, Bowling Green State University, Ohio.
Born Obbligato (2013), for septet (cl, bsn, hn, vl, vla,
vc, with optional percussion and electronics movement). Written for the
International Contemporary Ensemble, 25 minutes in six movements,
premiered August 22, 2013, Mostly Mozart Festival, Lincoln Center, New
York City.
Last Words (2013), for chorus (SATB), text by Charles
Bernstein. Sections premiered at the Walden School, Dublin, New
Hampshire, August 2, 2013. Full work is 5 minutes in one movement.
Hexis (2013), for sextet. Written for the San Francisco
Contemporary Chamber Players (fl/bfl/picc, cl/bcl, perc, pf, vl, vc). 12
minutes in one movement, to be premiered February 24, 2013.
Impromptu (2012), for ensemble with improvisation. Written
for Ensemble Pamplemousse (fl/picc, perc, pf, soprano, vl, vc,.
Variable duration, around 10 minutes in one movement, premiered December
9, 2012, Brecht Forum, New York City.
Tractatus (2012), for ensemble with improvisation. Written
for Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (variable instrumentation: nominally
picc, 2 fl, ob, a.sax, t.sax, b.sax, horn, tp, 2 tbn, drumset, elec gtr,
acoustic gtr, hp, pf, d, perc, , 2 soprano, vc, 3 cb, electronics).
Variable duration, around 25 minutes in one movement, premiered December
1, 2012, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.
Mnemosis (2012), for septet. Written for the Talea
Ensemble (fl/bfl/picc, cl/bcl, perc, pf, vl, vla, vc). 14 minutes in one
movement, premiered December 14, 2012, Mannes College of Music.
Pots (2012), for ensemble with improvisation. Written for
Orkestra Futura (t.sax, tp, tb, elec gtr, a.sax, b.sax, drumset, pf, vl,
cb, electronics). Variable duration around 16 minutes in one movement,
to be premiered November 23, 2012.
Merce and Baby (2012), for quartet. Written for the John
Cage 2012 Centennial Festival, Washington DC (fl, vl, vc, perc/drumset),
9 min in one movement. Premiered September 9, 2012, National Gallery of
Art, Washington DC.
Thistledown (2012), piano trio with percussion. Written
for Ensemble Either/Or (vl, vc, perc, pf), 11 min in one movement.
Premiered April 27, 2012, The Kitchen, New York City
The Will To Adorn (2011), composition for large chamber
ensemble. Written for the International Contemporary Ensemble;
premiered November 12, 2011, Miller Theatre, New York City.
Anthem (2011), composition for chamber ensemble with electronics. Written for the Wet Ink Band.
Les Exercices Spirituels for eight instruments and computer
sound processing. Forum de Blanc-Mesnil, Paris region. Commissioned by
Banlieues Bleues Festival, Arnaud Petit (conductor).
Ikons, sculptural-sonic installation by Eric Metcalfe and
George Lewis, with associated composition for eight instruments by
George Lewis. Premiere: January 27, 2010, Vancouver, BC Canada.
Commissioned by the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad.
Sour Mash, composition for vinyl turntablists by George
Lewis and Marina Rosenfeld. Premiered at New York Electronic Art
Festival, Frederick Loewe Theatre, New York University, October 26,
2009.
Something Like Fred, composition for creative orchestra.
Commissioned and presented by Millennium Park, City of Chicago.
Premiered August 2, 2009, AACM Great Black Music Ensemble.
The Painted Bed, composition for tenor voice and viola,
with text by Donald Hall. Commissioned and presented by Works and
Process, Guggenheim Museum, New York City, May 10-11, 2009.
Travelogue, sound installation. Shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem, November 2008-March 2009.
Interactive Duo (version one, 2007), composition for interactive computer-driven piano and human instrumentalist.
Interactive Duo (version two, 2007), composition for two interactive computer-driven pianos.
Interactive Trio (2007), composition for interactive computer-driven piano, human pianist, and additional instrumentalist.
Artificial Life 2007, composition for improvisors with open
instrumentation. Commission, Scottish Arts Council, for the Glasgow
Improvisors' Orchestra. Premiered December 2007, Institute of
Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Scotland.
Exhibition, Rio Negro II, robotic-acoustic sound installation, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, May 2007
Commission, Harvestworks, new work for robotic sound sculptures.
Premiere, 3-Legged Dog Art and Technology Center, New York City, May
2007
Hello Mary Lou (2007) for chamber ensemble and live electronics. World premiere, Vancouver, BC, January 2007.
Virtual Concerto (2004), for improvising computer piano
soloist and orchestra. World premiere, Carnegie Hall, April 2004,
American Composers Orchestra.
Crazy Quilt (2002), composition for infrared-controlled "virtual percussion" and four European-classically-trained percussionists.
Information Station No. 1 (2000), multi-screen videosonic
interactive installation for the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant,
San Diego, Calif. Commissioned by the San Diego Commission for Arts and
Culture, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ring Shout Ramble (1998), for saxophone quartet,
commissioned by the Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Commissioning program,
and premiered in October 1998 by the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Spruce
Street Forum, San Diego, CA. Performances scheduled across the USA and
Europe.
Signifying Riffs (1998), for string quartet and
percussion. New York premiere, November 2000, Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians Concert Series.
North Star Boogaloo (1996), for percussionist and computer.
Premiered February 1996, Mandeville Auditorium, UCSD. Steven Schick,
percussion. Numerous performances internationally.
Collage (1995), for poet and chamber orchestra. Premiered
November 1995, Society for Ethical Culture, New York City. Quincy
Troupe, poet.
Endless Shout (1994), composition for piano, Premiered March 1994, De Ijsbreker, Amsterdam, Frederic Rzewski, pianist.
Virtual Discourse (1993), composition for
infrared-controlled "virtual percussion" and four
European-classically-trained percussionists. Premiered October 1993,
Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux, France.
Lewis, George E. “enter open or closed space” (diagrammatic version
of text score by Benjamin Patterson). In Patterson, Benjamin. Sneak Review: a free enactment. Edited by Petra Stegmann. Potsdam: Down With Art!, 2014.
Lewis, George. Review of “The Shadows Took Shape,” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Artforum (Summer 2014): 359-60.
Adkins, Terry, and George Lewis. “Event Scores: Terry Adkins and George Lewis in Conversation.” Artforum (March 2014): 244-53.
Lewis, George E. “Collaborative Improvisation as Critical Pedagogy.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 34 (Spring 2014): 40-47.
Lewis, George E., and John Corbett. "George E. Lewis in Conversation with John Corbett." Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 34 (Spring 2014): 52-54.
Lewis, George E. "Benjamin Patterson's Spiritual Exercises." In Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, edited by Benjamin Piekut, 86-108. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Lewis, George E. “Improvisation.” In Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (2014), 311-318.
Lewis, George E. “Christian Wolff: An Aesthetic of Suggestion.” Liner notes to Christian Wolff: 8 Duos, New World 80734 (2 compact discs), 2012.
Lewis, George E. "The Timeless Blues." In Blues for Smoke, edited by Bennett Simpson. New York and London: Prestel/Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2012), 74-91.
Lewis, George E. "In Search of Benjamin Patterson: An Improvised Journey." In Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us, edited by Valerie Cassel Oliver. Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2012), 126-137. Reprinted in Callaloo, Vol. 35, No. 4, 979-991.
Lewis, George E. Review of Robert R. Faulkner and Howard Becker,
’Do You Know...?’: The Jazz Repertoire in Action. Cultural Sociology,
Vol. 5, No. 4 (December 2011), 559-61.
Lewis, George E. “Americanist Musicology and Nomadic Noise.”
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall
2011), pp. 691-695.
Lewis, George E. When Improvisers Speak, Where Do Their Words Go?In Da Rin, Renate, ed. Silent Solos: Improvisers Speak. Cologne: Buddy’s Knife, 2010, 11-13.
Lewis, George E. Review of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa,
by Ingrid Monson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Journal of
the Society for American Music, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2009), pp. 365–369.
Lewis, George E. Interactivity and Improvisation. In Dean, Roger T., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009), 457-466.
Lewis, George E. “Benjamin Patterson: Paper Piece.” Chamber Music, September-October 2009, 107.
Lewis, George E. "The Virtual Discourses of Pamela Z." In Hassan,
Salah M., and Cheryl Finley, eds. Diaspora, Memory, Place: David
Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z. Munich: Prestel
(2008), 266-281.
Lewis, George E., "Foreword: After Afrofuturism.” Journal of the
Society for American Music, Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 139–153 (2008).
Lewis, George E., "Improvisation and Pedagogy: Background and Focus
of Inquiry.” Critical Studies in Improvisation, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2008),
1-5
Lewis, George E., "Stan Douglas's Suspiria: Genealogies of
Recombinant Narrativity." In Stan Douglas--Past Imperfect: Works
1986-2007. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 42-53 (2008).
Lewis, George E., "Mobilitas Animi: Improvising Technologies, Intending Chance." Parallax, Vol. 13, No. 4, (2007), 108–122.
Lewis, George E., "Living with Creative Machines: An Improvisor
Reflects." In Anna Everett and Amber J. Wallace, eds. AfroGEEKS: Beyond
the Digital Divide. Santa Barbara: Center for Black Studies Research,
2007, 83-99.
Lewis, George E. "Leroy Jenkins." Chamber Music America, Vol. 24, No. 3, June 2007, 32-34.
Lewis, George E. The Virtual Discourses of Pamela Z. Journal of the Society for American Music, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2007), 57-77.
Lewis, George E. Improvisation and the Orchestra: A Composer
Reflects. Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 25, Nos. 5/6,
October/December 2006, pp. 429-434.
Lewis, George E. Interview with Amina Claudine Myers. BOMB, No. 97, Fall 2006, 54-59.
Lewis, George E.. The Secret Love between Interactivity and
Improvisation, or Missing in Interaction: A Prehistory of Computer
Interactivity. In Fähndrich, Walter, ed. Improvisation V: 14 Beiträge.
Winterthur: Amadeus (2005).
Lewis, George E. Book review, Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe’s
Reinvention of Jazz (Mike Heffley, Yale University Press 2005).
Current Musicology, No. 78 (Fall 2004), 7-21.
Lewis, George E. 2004. The AACM In Paris. Black Renaissance Noire, Vol. 5, No. 3, Spring/Summer 2004, 105-121.
Lewis, George E. 2004. Gittin' to Know Y'all: Improvised Music,
Interculturalism and the Racial Imagination. Critical Studies in
Improvisation (peer-reviewed online journal), Vol. 1, No. 1, ISSN
1712-0624, www.criticalimprov.com.
Lewis, George E. 2004. Leben mit kreativen Maschinen: Reflexionen
eines improvisierenden Musikers. In Knauer, Wolfram, ed. Improvisieren:
Darmstädter Beiträge zur Jazzforschung, Band 8. Hofheim: Wolke
Verlag, 123-144.
Lewis, George E. ([1996] 2004). Improvised Music After 1950:
Afrological and Eurological Perspectives. In Fischlin, Daniel, and
Ajay Heble, eds. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and
Communities in Dialogue. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,
131-162.
Lewis, George. 2004. Afterword to "Improvised Music After 1950":
The Changing Same. In Fischlin, Daniel, and Ajay Heble, eds. The Other
Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 163-172.
Lewis, George, “Gittin’ to know y’all: Von improvisierter Musik,
vom Treffen der Kulturen und von der ‘racial imagination.’” In Knauer.
Wolfram, ed. Jazz und Gesellschaft: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte des
Jazz. Hofheim: Wolke-Verlag (2002), 213-247.
Lewis, George, "Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in
New York, 1970-1985.” Current Musicology, Nos. 71-73, Spring
2001-Spring 2002, 100-157. Reprinted in O'Meally, Robert G., Brent
Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds. 2004. Uptown
Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. New York: Columbia University
Press, 50-101.
Lewis, George, “Discours virtuel” (in French). Champs Culturel 11, June 2000.
Lewis, George E., “Too Many Notes: Computers, complexity and culture
in Voyager.” Leonardo Music Journal 10, 2000, 33-39. Reprinted in
Everett, Anna, and John T. Caldwell, eds. 2003. New Media: Theories
and Practices of Intertextuality. New York and London: Routledge,
93-106
Lewis, George, “Stan Douglas: Hors-champs, toujours et pour
toujours.” In Jenny Lion, ed. 2000. Magnetic North: Canadian
Experimental Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lewis, George, "Purposive Patterning: Jeff Donaldson, Muhal Richard
Abrams and the Multidominance of Consciousness." Lenox Avenue, vol. 5,
1999, 63-69.
Lewis, George, “Interacting with latter-day musical automata.” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 18, Part 3, 1999, pp.99-112.
Lewis, George, ”Teaching Improvised Music: An Ethnographic
Memoir.” In Zorn, John, ed. Arcana: Musicians on music. New York:
Granary Books (2000), 78-109.
Lewis, George, ”The old people speak of sound: Personality,
empathy, community.” In INSITE 97: Private time in public spaces.
Sally Yard, ed. 1998. San Diego: Installation Gallery.
Lewis, George, "Singing Omar’s Song: A (re)construction of Great Black Music." Lenox Avenue, vol. 4, 1998, 69-92
Lewis, George, "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and
Eurological Perspectives." Black Music Research Journal, vol. 16, No.1,
Spring 1996, 91-122. Reprinted in Vol. 22, Supplement (2002) for the
journal's 20th Anniversary, as one of the twenty-one most cited articles
published in the journal. Excerpted in Cox, Christoph, and Daniel
Warner. 2004. Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music. New York:
Contiuum, 272-286.
Lewis, George, "Singing the alternative interactivity blues." Front,
Vol. 7, No. 2, November/December 1995, pp. 18-22. Reprinted in
Grantmakers in the Arts, Vol. 8, No, 1, Spring 1997.
RECORDINGS
Wadada Leo Smith-George Lewis-John Zorn: Sonic Rivers (Tzadik 4001, 2014).
George Lewis and the Monash Art Ensemble: Hexis (Jazzhead HEAD199, 2014).
Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and George Lewis, Artificial Life 2007. FMR Records, 2013.
Lewis, George. Les Exercices Spirituels, Tzadik, 2011.
Lewis, George, and Marina Rosenfeld, Sour Mash, Innova Recordings, 2009.
Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and George Lewis: Metamorphic Rock (Iorram, 2009)
Lewis, George, and Joelle Leandre, Transatlantic Visions, Rogue Art, 2009.
Lewis, George, Roscoe Mitchell, and Muhal Richard Abrams. Streaming. PI Recordings, 2006.
Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky, Soft Cinema: Navigating the
Database. DVD-video with 40 page color booklet, with “invited
contributions from leaders in other cultural fields: DJ Spooky, Scanner,
George Lewis and Jóhann Jóhannsson (music), servo and Andreas
Angelidakis (architecture), Schoenerwissen/Office for Computational
Design (data visualization), and Ross Cooper Studios (media design).”
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005
Various Artists: From the Kitchen Archives: New Music New York 1979. Orange Mountain Music OMM 0015, 2004
Lewis, George, et al. Audiology: Live In Berlin, Total Music Meeting 2001, ALL 002, 2002
Lewis, George. The Shadowgraph Series: Compositions for Creative Orchestra (with the NOW Orchestra). Spool, 2001
Lewis, George. Endless Shout. Tzadik, 2000.
Lewis, George and Bertram Turetzky. Conversations. Incus, 1999.
Lewis, George, and Miya Masaoka. The Usual Turmoil. Music and Arts, 1998.
Lewis, George, Vinny Golia, and Bertram Turetzky, Triangulations, Nine Winds, 1997.
Iyer, Vijay: Memorophilia. Asian Improv Records, 1995.
Slideride (Ray Anderson, Craig Harris, G. Lewis, Gary Valente) Hat Hut, 1995
Braxton, Anthony: Concert In Dortmund. hat Art, 1994
Lewis, George, and Anthony Braxton. Donaueschingen (Duo) Hat Hut, 1994.
Lewis, George. Voyager, Disk Union, Tokyo, 1993
Lewis, George. Changing With The Times, New World, New York, 1992
Teitelbaum, Richard: Cyberband. Moers Music 03000 CD, 1993
Trombonist and composer George Lewis studied his crafts with Dean Hey and Muhal Richard Abrams. Lewis'
compositions and improvisations are found on over 80 recordings, and he
has performed with such musicians, composers, and improvisers as Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Count Basie, Derek Bailey, and John Zorn. A Yale University philosophy graduate, Lewis
has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians (AACM) since the '70s. His residencies include IRCAM (Paris),
STEIM (Amsterdam), and Alberta's Banff Centre for the Arts. Lewis
has been an NEA Fellow, was hosted as Visiting Artist by the Art
Institute of Chicago, and curated the music program of New York's The
Kitchen Center. Lewis
also programmed interactive music systems for computers, has lectured
at computed art workshops, and has worked as a computer installation
artist, with interactive installations shows at Paris' Musee de la
Villette, in Boston, and Chicago
At a certain stage of a European tour by the Count Basie
Orchestra in the spring of 1976, the band’s newest member, trombonist
George Lewis, hired on a recommendation from his parents’ South Side
Chicago neighbor, trumpeter Sonny Cohn, decided to inject some Dadaistic
levity into his nightly feature, a three-chorus solo on a fast blues
called “Hittin’ Twelve.”
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George Lewis
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George Lewis, Chicago Jazz Festival, 2015
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“My solo was silent, like John Cage, just gestures,” Lewis, 63,
recalled in his office at Columbia University, where he was hired in
2004 as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music. “Now, you have to
be somehow in your own reality to think that would go through and that
you wouldn’t be fired the next day—which I was not. Soon after, while we
were waiting for a train, the Chief walked up to me. I noticed that
people were gathering around because they wanted to hear what he’d say.
“The band had given me a nickname, ‘New Boy.’ He said, ‘Well, New
Boy, I like all that experimenting you’re doing. I think more people
around here should be doing that kind of experimenting.’ Then he left.
Upon reflection, it became obvious that these people were coming out of a
tradition of experimental music. So I can do what I want and call it
whatever I want. I was told right upfront, from the horse’s mouth, that
this is our legacy as African-American musicians. That was a very
empowering moment.”
After 40 years as a “composer, electronic performer, installation
artist and trombone player,” Lewis continues to push boundaries at the
intersection of creative expression and technological innovation. He is
equally adamant about fulfilling his more prosaic academic and scholarly
obligations.
He touched on the matter in remarks about A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,
his exhaustive history of the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians, which he joined in 1971, on hiatus from Yale, where
he earned a BA in philosophy in 1974. “I sent a book proposal to the
anonymous scholars who evaluate academic books,” Lewis recalled. “One
report said it was great, that it didn’t matter what’s being said—it’s
the fact that George Lewis is saying it. But somebody’s artistic
authority can’t be the basis for judgment; if the book doesn’t pass
scholarly muster, it won’t work. You’ve got to follow the terms as
they’re laid out. I am making historical musicology, and I’ve been doing
that for a while. A lot of people who study with me don’t know or care
that I have this artistic life. You have to be able to advise a
dissertation, which is odd for me, because I didn’t have a doctorate.”
Not until last year, that is, when the University of Edinburgh granted Lewis an honoris causa Doctor of Music. The recent publication of Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies,
a two-volume tome that Lewis coedited with his former doctoral student
Benjamin Piekut, further burnishes his résumé. Lewis has mirrored these
academic accomplishments with further artistic development, as evidenced
by the October 2015 Chicago premiere of his opera, Afterword.
It’s an atonal, serial work constructed around a spare libretto,
distilled from the 90-plus interviews and painstakingly researched
source material that bedrocked A Power Stronger Than Itself,
searingly conveyed by three protagonists named “Soprano,” “Contralto”
and “Tenor,” who function as avatars for various AACM personae, as do
three signifying dancers. The timeline traces the AACM’s evolution in
Chicago from its inception until 1976-78, when many members, Lewis among
them, moved to New York City.
Between 1976 and 1980, Lewis earned wide respect among New York’s
multiple (and sometimes overlapping) creative music communities. He
presented extraordinary trombone chops and vivid imagination, not only
with Sam Rivers, his Yale classmate Anthony Davis and Anthony
Braxton—the association that would establish him internationally—but
also with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra and Gil Evans. In Evans’ Live at the Public Theater (New York 1980),
he uncorks notey, timbrally extravagant solos on “Gone, Gone, Gone” and
“Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk” that remain
signposts of trombone expression, blending the technical accuracy and
range of Curtis Fuller and Frank Rosolino with a sonic flexibility
evocative of, say, Tricky Sam Nanton and Dicky Wells. “The music of
florid saxophone players like Johnny Griffin and John Coltrane is what I
studied and tried to emulate as a means of developing,” Lewis said.
“Trombone players on records were always playing half-time at the
fastest tempos. I didn’t want to be that person. But that
improvisational style only works in certain musical situations. If you
want to work more with sounds, or delicacy, or certain extremes of
range, or to really improvise as distinct from developing a personal
style, then you have to question everything, confront new ways of making
music that are the complete opposite of how you thought about playing.”
In September of 1980, Lewis was hired as music director of the
Kitchen, then in its ninth year as a Downtown hub for cross-disciplinary
experimental cultural production. Drawing on that two-year experience,
he culled from the Kitchen’s archives six improvisationally oriented
performances for a 2015 CD titled The Kitchen Improvises: 1976-1983
(Orange Mountain). To celebrate that release, he curated a celebratory
concert in February featuring nine improvisers, including Oliver Lake
(alto saxophone), Earl Howard (alto saxophone, electronics), Michael
Lytle (clarinets), Thomas Buckner (voice) and himself—all represented on
the disc. The music that night leaned toward the kind of spontaneous,
non-linear sound investigation that Derek Bailey and Evan Parker
codified on their Company recordings of the 1970s. He configured the
musicians first into four separate scratch-improvised duos and trios,
and then three larger groupings. Lewis played laptop and trombone in an
electro-acoustic conversation with Ikue Mori on laptop. In a quartet
with Howard, Lake and accordionist Lucie Vítková, he played only
trombone, projecting an urbane, elliptical voice.
Lewis met Parker at the 1979 Moers Festival, where he performed his
electro-acoustic composition “Homage to Charles Parker” with AACM
partners Douglas Ewart and LaRoy Wallace McMillan on winds, pianist
Davis and synthesist Richard Teitelbaum. A year later, in London, Lewis
recorded a duo concert with Parker (From Saxophone & Trombone) and a quartet concert with Parker, Bailey and Braxton bandmate Dave Holland (Fables).
“I went to Derek’s house in Hackney, thinking we’d rehearse,” Lewis
said. “Instead we sat around talking. Derek took me to a chip shop, then
an Indian meal. He’d say, ‘We’ll rehearse soon’—then we got to the
concert and that was it. We’d been rehearsing already, foreshortening
the distance between music and everyday life. My experiences of the past
week folded naturally into the concert experience. That’s where one
started to see that all you really had to do was pay attention.”
After the Kitchen, Lewis moved to Paris for two years of research on
artificial intelligence at IRCAM, the historic institution for music
science. By 1984 he had refined his conception of “creating situations
where software-driven musical systems are in improvised interaction with
human improvisers,” and he performed three concerts in which three
microcomputers controlled three Yamaha synthesizers through a real-time
conversation with Bailey, Ewart on bass clarinet, Joëlle Léandre on bass
and Steve Lacy on soprano saxophone. A subsequent two-year residence in
Amsterdam at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) generated
architecture capable of controlling eight separate voices, as
demonstrated at a 1987 concert where 10 networked computers generated an
80-voice virtual orchestra. By the mid-’90s Lewis had evolved his
Voyager software, simulating a 64-voice orchestra that embodied his
aesthetics in solo performance and in dialogue with collaborators like
Bailey, Roscoe Mitchell and Miya Masaoka. He considers the guidelines of computer networking an apt metaphor
for his European experience—and, by extension, his ongoing musical
journey. “Once you listen and agree not to insist you know it all, you
can learn a lot,” Lewis said. “Anything is possible. Older artists like
Derek, Evan and Alexander von Schlippenbach nurtured me in ways similar
to people in the AACM. I didn’t feel those networks were so separate.”
Recommended Listening:
The George Lewis Solo Trombone Record (Sackville, 1977) Gil Evans Live at the Public Theater (New York 1980) (Trio, 1981) Anthony Braxton Dortmund (Quartet) 1976 (hatART, 1991) Wadada Leo Smith/George Lewis/John Zorn Sonic Rivers (Tzadik, 2014) The Kitchen Improvises: 1976-1983 (Orange Mountain, 2015)
As an improviser, educator and an explorer of musical expression, George Lewis
has become one of the significant contributors towards the respect and
recognition Jazz is finally receiving as one of America's most notable
and distinguished cultural achievements. He recently published what I
consider to be one of the most critical books on Jazz and African
American culture. I also consider the AACM to be the most culturally
important group of artists that ever came together in the history of the
United States. The following interview took place prior to the
publication of his book, A Power Stronger than Itself - The AACM and American Experimental Music. Lloyd Peterson: Was the AACM established out of a common interest amongst peers or out of a feeling of necessity?
Composer
and historian George Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American
Music at Columbia University and has been a member of the Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians for forty-three years. In
celebration of the AACM’s fiftieth anniversary, he has transposed his 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) into
an opera that showcases the rich internal discussions of the
experimental group. The complete opera premieres at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago this fall, and the New York City concert
version Afterword, The AACM (as) Opera will be premiered by the
International Contemporary Ensemble at Roulette in
Brooklyn on May 22 and 23, 2015, at 8:00 PM. We sat down with George to
learn more about his experience composing an opera for the first time.
What was your inspiration for this dramatic telling of the AACM’s internal dialogue?
My
book on the AACM from 2008 is the basis for the libretto; I interviewed
one hundred people for the book and I thought, wow, I’m just talking
with you in this room and I’m hearing all this poetry. It was beautiful,
beautiful prose. And it wasn’t really the poetics of everyday speech;
it’s the poetics of something else. People were trying to recount how
they came to be themselves on the south side of Chicago in the 1960s, as
young African American artists trying to figure out how to reposition
themselves beyond category and genre, and the societal and discursive
strictures they have to fight in order to confront those limits. So if
you take that poetry and enhance it with the orchestration and the
setting, you don’t really have to create dramatic conflict. It’s more
creating a space where ideas can merge and circulate. The arias come
verbatim from the interviews – if some of the people who are still alive
come to the opera … “George, this is something I said on tape! And now
you’ve set it to music.”
This is your first foray into opera after a long career as a composer. Was there a particular challenge in writing the piece?
I
discovered that you can’t recreate anything. Even if you have a
blueprint, you can’t recreate anything that comes out of a socially
interactive matrix. The opera is not trying to reproduce Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians models of production; it becomes a
part of the general atmosphere of diversity and creativity. The AACM
has been around for 50 years and has a very diverse constituency of
people; certain people obviously became more prominent than others in
the press, but I tried not to play favorites. I had to ignore that and
say “inside here, we’re all pretty much the same, we have ideas and
we’re trying to figure out how to survive, how to create new music, how
to realize our aspirations.” I couldn’t see myself writing in a
character with a real name; instead, I felt the need for avatars and
representations.
Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and George Lewis– Photo by R.I. Sutherland-Cohen
The AACM is often described as a group of people who wanted to revitalize jazz. Does the opera address this misconception?
I
think the opera really addresses that question up front. Look, they’re
not stupid. If they wanted to call it the Association for the
Advancement of Jazz Musicians, they could have done that. So why didn’t
they? I went through the archives – a lot of them were audio – and I
heard people talking about ways of getting around societal issues and
compositions that will create a certain atmosphere and be conducive to
the propagation of creativity. They were trying to change the model of
representation, and grappling with the nature of a much more complex
world than they had been told was available. Limiting people based on
gender or race or whatever to a specific area of the world or view or
set of practices, that’s a discursive move. In trying to break out of
that, a whole new world of creativity opens up, just by the power of
your mind.
What is a way forward for young experimental collectives today?
A
lot of the organizations that came up in the wake of the AACM saw their
primary focus as promoting their own music, but the people in 1965 when
the AACM was created saw themselves as serving communities. They were
putting themselves and the music at the service of others. They wanted
to have a school – they still have a school – and to be serving other
people besides just themselves and their artistic career. So that might
be a model that people could consider; maybe there’s more to an artistic
collective than just serving musicians.
How do you hope your audience engages with the opera and its history?
It’s
a historical subject, but I’m not treating it as a history that you can
compare exactly with my book. It’s not a historical opera; you don’t have to think about it temporally. Within
the opera there are debates about the best way to go, what people feel
comfortable with, and how we can create ourselves. I would like people
to empathize with what the avatars debate, which is something that
probably relates to who they are and their own aspirations.It’s an opera about aspirations.
The International
Contemporary Ensemble performing the music of Beethoven and the composer
and scholar George Lewis at the 2013 Mostly Mozart Festival.Credit
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
“We’ve been invisible,” the composer T. J. Anderson
declared, almost immediately after answering the phone for an
interview. “Like Ralph Ellison said, you know: We’re invisible, and any
chance we get for exposure is very important.” Ellison, who in his youth
aspired to be a composer before turning to literature, might have
sympathized with Dr. Anderson’s plight.
At
85, Dr. Anderson is an elder statesman among black composers, and his
forceful emphasis on visibility emanates from a career-long experience
of exclusion. “It’s inevitable, once you are identified — and you always
are identified because of race — there’s a certain different
expectation,” he said. “You know that you’re not going to be
commissioned by the major artistic institutions like the New York
Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.”
Why
do black composers remain on the outskirts of classical music? Along
with broader societal prejudices, there are also factors exclusive to
the classical world. Past musicians like James P. Johnson and Duke
Ellington, who wrote symphonic works alongside playing stride piano and
leading a big band, are typically confined to the jazz canon. Black
composers have been criticized in both African-American and white
intellectual circles for refusing to embrace mainstream commercial
trends. The influence of African-Americans on the orchestral tradition
is represented more often by Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” than William
Grant Still’s “Afro-American” Symphony.
And African-American music is often relegated to special events outside
the main classical season, like Black History Month concerts or Martin
Luther King Jr. Day celebrations.
Mr. Lewis.Credit
Allison Gannon/Oberlin Conservatory
Dr. Anderson once noted that all black composers were avant-garde because of their ostracism from the establishment. In his music — which can be heard on releases by New World Records and Albany Records
— jazz and spirituals undergird a steely modernist language.
“Fragments,” a 2006 concerto dedicated to Bach and Thelonious Monk,
features an improvised piano solo. In the wind trio “Whatever Happened
to the Big Bands?” each instrument plays independent music — the
musicians sit as far apart as possible — that orbits around the riffs of
the swing era.
During
the interview, Dr. Anderson invoked the harsh legacy of segregation as
continuing to divide the concert hall. But younger composers like Jonathan Bailey Holland
don’t necessarily share his vigilance. A professor at the Berklee
College of Music, Dr. Holland, 40, writes bright music in a
post-Copland, Americana tradition. Race is not central to his musical
identity. “As an African-American, I have certain experiences that
shaped who I am, and that I draw on as a composer,” he said in a recent
phone conversation, but added, “I also have experiences growing up in
Michigan that shaped who I am as a composer.”
Expectations
about how an African-American composer should sound felt confining at
the beginning of Dr. Holland’s career. “I really didn’t want to be
thought of as a black composer, because I felt like people were going to
pigeonhole me or have certain expectations when it came to the music,”
he said. “I would make conscious efforts to not include anything in the
music that might have any connection to black music, or might somehow
suggest something about who I was, which in and of itself is completely
not the point of being an artist.
The composer and professor Jonathan Bailey Holland.Credit
Sancho Maulion
In March, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performed Dr. Holland’s “Shards of Serenity”
as part of the New Music Readings for African-American Composers, an
initiative organized by the American Composers Orchestra program EarShot.
A languid, shimmering tone poem, “Shards of Serenity” is Dr. Holland’s
tribute to a Mies van der Rohe building. “I’ve always responded to
visual ideas,” he said. His similarly radiant “Halcyon Sun” is available
on a 2011 “American Portraits” album by the Cincinnati Symphony.
Since the Detroit Symphony began its Classical Roots
series in 1978, it has advocated for African-American composers, a
stance maintained under its music director, Leonard Slatkin. In a phone
interview, Mr. Slatkin said that Dr. Holland showed “great talent.” He
stressed that though the readings were helpful, no single program was
more important for fostering diversity than a broader emphasis on arts
education. Mr. Slatkin also hesitated to oversell the wider effect of
promoting black composers. He asked: “Is going to hear music written by
an African-American meaningful — not just to the regular attendees, but
is it meaningful within the African-American community? Does it inspire
others to want to follow that? I wish I could answer that question. I
don’t know.”
That
skepticism about long-term ramifications is exemplified in Dr.
Holland’s own history with the orchestra. Nearly 20 years ago, he took
part in a similar Detroit program for African-American composers. “It
left me wondering: ‘Is this really the right answer? Are we still
waiting for something to happen that’s not going to happen?’ ” he said.
“It felt a little like being stuck in time.” Though he expressed
ambivalence about writing music for select events for black composers,
he also acknowledged the rarity of any orchestral opportunity today.
Leonard Slatkin with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Detroit Children’s Choir.Credit
Ron Warren
Major
orchestras, of course, are just one avenue for African-American
composition. Black classical music finds its strongest support in
nonprofits like the Sphinx Organization and Videmus.
These institutions hark back to ensembles like James Reese Europe’s
all-black Clef Club Orchestra, which performed at Carnegie Hall in 1912,
or the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,
an experimental collective founded in 1965. Though the association is
more often linked with free jazz, the co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams
noted the importance of composition, itself a radical idea for
African-American improvisers at the time.
The composer and scholar George Lewis told the story of the association in his monumental 2008 study “A Power Stronger Than Itself.”
A longtime member of the collective — known as a trombonist and for his
groundbreaking work in electronics — Mr. Lewis also documented the
history of how black composers have been excluded from experimental
music.
He
cited a panel in London in which he palpably felt that racial rift.
“They had these ready-made lineages all made up,” he said with a laugh.
“They had a black one for me, and they had a white one for the white guy
on the panel. So it was like, ‘Well, wait a minute.’ They were very
offended when I didn’t put on the suit that didn’t really fit.” A white
composer had spoken about the influence of R&B on his own music, Mr.
Lewis said, and “it occurred to me that he knew a lot more about Bo
Diddley than I did. Why couldn’t that be a part of his lineage, and why
couldn’t Andriessen be a part of mine?”
The pioneering composer Florence Price.Credit
University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections
Mr.
Lewis’s career has gotten a second wind recently, with commissions by
youthful groups like the International Contemporary Ensemble. His latest
work is “Memex” for orchestra,
based on a proto-Internet information system theorized in 1945. “The
thing about the memex is that associational memory is nonlinear,” Mr.
Lewis said. “You don’t make these changes from A to B to C. It’s more
like you can go from anywhere to anywhere.”
“Memex” is a dense masterwork, alternately skittish and pummeling. Mr. Lewis’s latest music is available on Soundcloud.
“If
there is a definition of an African-American composer, there isn’t a
single profile, there isn’t a single mold,” Mr. Lewis said. “If you look
at Tyshawn Sorey, or Daniel Roumain, or if you look at Jessie Montgomery — younger people — these are three very different models of what it means to be a composer.”
T. J. Anderson, an elder statesman among black composers.Credit
Clyde May
“There’s just no way to make a generalization based on African-American-ness,” he added. “It’s not a category that works.”
There
was a time in classical music when black composers seemed on the cusp
of the mainstream. In the 1930s, pioneers like Still and William Dawson
wrote symphonies inflected by folk tunes and the blues that were given
their premieres by prominent American orchestras. Alain Locke, the
spiritual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote in 1936 that “the
Negro has been the main source of America’s popular music, and promises,
as we shall see, to become one of the main sources of America’s serious
or classical music, at least that part which strives to be natively
American and not derivative of European types of music.”
No
composer of this era was more impressive than Florence Price, the first
black woman to have a work played by a major American orchestra. Price
grew up in the Jim Crow South, divorced an abusive husband and had her
first symphony performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her Symphony in E minor — available on an Albany recording — is a silvery, post-Romantic work that should be a cornerstone of the American repertory.
At
the height of her career, Price tried to convince Serge Koussevitzky —
conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra — to program her music. “To
begin with,” she wrote in a 1943 letter, “I have two handicaps — those
of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. I
should like to be judged on merit alone.”
The Boston Symphony has yet to play a note of her music.
A version of this article appears in print on August 10, 2014, on page AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Great Divide at the Concert Hall. Order Reprints|Today's Paper
Painting by Jean-Michel Basquait--"Most Kings (get their heads cut off)". Dedicated to Charlie Parker. (c)1982 George LewisHomage to Charles Parker
Black Saint : 1979
GL, trombone, electronics; Douglas Ewart, bass clarinet,
alto saxophone, cymbals; Anthony Davis, piano; Richard Teitelbaum,
polymoog, multimoog & micromoog synthesizers.
We’re dedicating the next two weeks to providing an inside
view of the music of the remarkable composer, trombonist, electronic
musician, and professor George Lewis.
As a young man, Lewis grabbed the attention of the
jazz world in the mid 1970s with his virtuosic and inventive trombone
playing for Anthony Braxton. He went on to record a number of albums
that combined his interests in jazz, classical composition, and
electronics. He’s the recipient of the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant and
author of the essential book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.
We’re focusing this post on his classic album Homage to Charles Parker,
which employs jazz, electronics, and improvisation in startling ways to
create a stirring tribute to one of music’s most iconic figures. The Penguin Guide to Jazz
awarded this album five stars and one of its coveted crowns, designated
it one of the “Essential Jazz Records.” Released on the small Italian
label Black Saint and unavailable for years, the album hasn’t attracted
the wide audience it deserves.
George Lewis recently revisited and performed
“Homage to Charles Parker” at the Kitchen. He generously took the time
to answer our questions and reflect back on this important recording.
What inspired the composition of the title piece and “Blues”?
“Blues” used a notation similar to “Monads” from the Shadowgraphrecording; if you look at a 1950s Morton Feldman graph piece,
you basically know what the score looked like—squares representing
high, middle, and low register, and the odd specification of a dominant
seventh chord at about the place one would expect in a blues
progression. It was the simplest possible blues; given the minimalist
aims of the piece, using snazzy chord substitutions would have sounded
ridiculous. It was interesting, though, that this kind of notation could
be used to represent a 12-bar blues of sorts, but that piece was harder
to play than “Homage”—I got lucky with the people on the
recording—Anthony Davis, Richard Teitelbaum, Douglas Ewart—or maybe not,
since if you want to get lucky in music, these are the people you want
around.
“Blues” is directly depictive; “Homage” isn’t. As I recall, the ethos
of “Homage” was influenced by an LP liner note I read in which Miles
Davis answered criticism about not playing Duke Ellington’s music on an
Ellington tribute concert by saying that performing at the highest level
was the best homage one could give.
“Homage” was premiered in 1978 at the AACM Summerfest at the
University of Chicago. The performers were Douglas Ewart, alto saxophone
and percussion; Rrata Christine Jones (now Christina Jones), dance; and
George Lewis, electronics, electric organ, and trombone. The piece
doesn’t really have a score as such, although there is a set of defined
events, a timeline, and a sonic and even a visual iconography, centered
on two major events—Charlie Parker’s life, and his afterlife.
If anything, the “afterlife,” “floating” section of “Homage” is less
influenced by Charlie Parker than by something like John Coltrane’s
“Peace on Earth,” but without the ecstatic thing; many had tried and
failed to get that going. The “life” section reminded me of
Stockhausen’s “Mikrophonie” pieces.
Can you recount some of the circumstances around the recording of the Homage to Charles Parker album? How did you select the performers?
During my short-lived career as a jazz bandleader, I was
touring with something called, for lack of imagination, the “George
Lewis Quartet”: Richard, Douglas, me, and Anthony Davis, people who
were part of our experimental music scene. In 1979, we had concerts in
Europe, and a truly magical performance of “Homage” took place with this
quartet and flutist Wallace McMillan at the Moers Festival in Germany in 1979. The rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the sun came out when the “afterlife” section was played.
We performed later that year in Italy as part of the “Festival Musica Oggi,”
sponsored by some very cool students at the University of Padua—Massimo
de Carlo, who is now the owner of an innovative art gallery, and
Luciano Linzi, who later was running the Casa del Jazz in Rome until
recently—this was a huge park built by a Mafia person that got
confiscated when he was jailed, and the park was rededicated to jazz.
Only in Rome, I think.
Giacomo Pelliciotti, the founder of Black Saint Records,
had recorded two of my previous albums, and decided to record the
quartet. I was a minor commodity then, but trombonists don’t really get
to be jazz stars. I don’t think Giacomo knew that, or maybe he didn’t
care. Anyway, he kept asking about when I would record a regular jazz
record under my own name. I guess it never happened, and he didn’t press
the point. I was always on the margins of all that anyway.
Why did you decide to perform Homage to Charles Parker recently?
Nick Hallett at the Kitchen was nice enough to include me in the remembrance of the 1980 “Aluminum Nights”
festival they were planning. I helped to curate that festival, which
was kind of an early foray into the multi-genre or post-genre thing that
people seem to take for granted now. I didn’t meet Mick Jagger,
though—“everyone” seems to remember that.
I could have tried to recreate the piece that I performed on that festival, “Atlantic”
for four trombones with electronic processing, but (a) the score is
buried in my basement in San Diego (b) finding four trombonists who
could do the circular breathing and all that might be difficult (c) I’m
not playing the trombone much now anyway. “Homage” was actually
performed at the Kitchen in 1979, so that seemed to fit the notion of
revisiting the era.
Did you approach this latest performance of Homage to Charles Parker in any different way? Did you reconceptualize any parts of the music?
First of all, I found myself having to recreate the
timeline from the recording, which was interesting; I hadn’t realized
how slow the chord changes between A major and G major were coming—about
thirty seconds between chords. In fact there are only two chords in the
entire piece, which is partly an influence of minimalism and partially a
nod to my poor abilities at the piano, since on the original Chicago
performance I played electric organ. There was also a deliberate decision made to work with different
people this time around—Richard and me, but also Matana Roberts, Reggie
Nicholson, and Amina Claudine Myers—not only for logistical reasons, but
also to encourage interpretation rather than simple re-creation. On the
other hand, I did send everyone an MP3 of the recording for orientation
purposes.
The performance had to be a bit longer than the recording. Vinyl
albums were 17-18 minutes per side, and we needed about 30-35 minutes.
So I added extra improvisations for Amina, Reggie, and Matana at the
beginning of the piece, although the goal of the retooled first section
was still to represent the turbulence of Bird’s life and his sudden
death.
On the recording and in the old performances, Douglas Ewart played
percussion at the beginning. I was using piezos attached to a pair of
cymbals, and that signal was passed through various Electro-Harmonix
flangers, phasers, and noisy analog delays, with a mixer of sorts. Live
electronics after the fashion of Gordon Mumma or David Tudor; maybe my
mixer was homemade. This part represented Charlie Parker’s life.
For the new version I air-miked various percussion instruments
brought by Reggie Nicholson—tam-tams, gongs, cymbals, a tom-tom. At
first I thought about using Ableton Live for the sonic transformations,
but I decided to use a multi-channel spatialization/sound transformation
system that Damon Holzborn made for another piece of mine from 2010, Les Exercices Spirituels,
a totally notated piece that has just come out on Tzadik. At the
Kitchen, I could send the transformed percussion and saxophone sounds
around the audience, which I think people found pretty cool. Couldn’t do
it quite that way in the 70s.
For the afterlife section, I had contemplating doing the synthesizer
parts myself using Ableton Live, but having Richard there was a much
better idea, since he knew just how to create the ambient wispy
electronic stuff that I was never able to do even in the old analog era.
I figured that the string sounds were generic enough so that we could
use his Kurzweil, but in fact the old Polymoog sound
hadn’t made the transition to the digital era, so we decided to sample
the original recording with Richard’s playing to get the right sound,
and Richard played that in the performance. I had to clean it up to use
it, since this was the old days—the string sound was at a low recorded
level and there was a lot of noise. On the recording, Douglas Ewart basically created Bird’s
afterlife—you know, “Bird is free.” Matana played splendidly in that
spirit. Basically no one has to do very much in the piece, and like
Reggie, she managed to say a lot with pure sound. By the way, at the
premiere, Christina Jones danced the afterlife of Parker. I decided not
to try to redo that part—maybe an opportunity was missed there.
The recording featured a piano solo and then a trombone solo. Amina
did a fantastic solo in the spirit of the piece, but I didn’t feel that I
could go back to the old ways any more, so I played another kind of
trombone solo instead, electronically modified and spatially
transformed. It was OK.
Was the recording process itself memorable in any way?
Hard to remember all that now; that was 30 years ago. Maybe we did two takes, but that’s all I remember.
I have to say that I never liked the cover painting, not least
because it was taken from a weird wall mural in midtown New York. A
painting by someone like Jeff Donaldson
would have been amazing. However, I did like the back cover with the
photo of Charlie Parker as a boy. Some people didn’t read the caption
and thought it was a photo of me. We don’t all look alike, do we?
There is a recent vogue in rock circles for performing classic albums in their entirety. Were you at all aware of this trend?
No, I wasn’t aware of that. Is Homage to Charles Parker a classic album?
I remember my students at UCSD calling Duck and Cover a
classic album, live in East Berlin, with me, Heiner Goebbels, Chris
Cutler, Fred Frith, Dagmar Krause, and Alfred 23 Harth. One of them sent
me a copy. Classic or not, I thought it sounded great. For that one
Heiner did make a text score, which I think is on the cardboard album
sleeve. That wouldn’t be enough to re-perform it, though; time, place,
and situation are everything.
Other people thought News for Lulu with Zorn and Frisell was a classic album. I also really liked Yankees,with Zorn and Derek Bailey; the cover uses a visual strategy analogous to Homage’s sonic strategy.
* * * NEXT WEEK: We’ll talk to George about his excellent new album SoundDance with Muhal Richard Abrams, improvisation, the AACM, and his future projects.
Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell
“Improvisation is a human right”
Chicago Slow Dance: The AACM in Conversation
The Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is a non-profit
creative organization that supports and welcomes creative jazz
performers, composers, and educators. The AACM was founded in Chicago,
Illinois, by pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie
Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and composer/trumpeter Phil Cohran
(also known for his work with the Sun Ra Arkestra). Some of the most
illustrious free jazz players have been part of AACM’s nexus, including
Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and the Art
Ensemble of Chicago: Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Don
Moye, and Malachi Favors. As the AACM’s charter mandates, the AACM is
dedicated “to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original
music.” Particularly through the 1960s and 70s, AACM members were among
the most innovative in jazz/music, and recorded widely, often boldly
mixing jazz, the avant-garde, improvisation, classical, and world music.
Their contributions to the free jazz world are colossal.
George E. Lewis, featured in the interview, who joined the collective
as a teenager in 1971, and who is an ICASP co-investigator, wrote the
most extensively documented work on the AACM: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.
In his seminal work Lewis applies a cross-generation chorus of voices
to explore the important communal history of the AACM. In the prologue
Lewis describes how the “AACM is part of a long tradition of
organizational efforts in which African American musicians took
leadership roles” (x), going on to detail the more than forty years of
work and composite output of the AACM in a range of methodologies,
processes, and media. Lewis writes: “AACM musicians developed new and
influential ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique
and instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship
of improvisation to composition, form, scores, computer music
technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic
sculptures” (ix). These new forms and medias of playing were
opportunities, afforded by the AACM, as Muhal Richard Abrams and John
Shenoy Jackson assert, “to show how the disadvantaged and the
disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for
political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own
destinies” (qtd. in Lewis ix). As Muhal Richard Abrams succinctly put it
at the “Improvising Bodies” Colloquium in Guelph in 2010:
“Improvisation is a human right.”
This month’s Oral History is taken from the 2010 Guelph Jazz
Festival/ ICASP colloquium, which presented this engaging panel
conversation between AACM members, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe
Mitchell, and George Lewis. Judiciously moderated by Lincoln Beauchamp
Jr., the AACM members discuss how the AACM came to be, as well as their
respective involvement in the group. The panel converses about the
impact of the AACM both musically and non-musically, as well as taking
questions from the audience. The dynamic conversation affirms how
important the AACM remains in providing new perspectives, new
methodologies, and new artistic and cultural practices to the world of
creative improvised practices.
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A full transcript of the interview is available here
George E. Lewis
is a composer, electronic performer, installation artist, trombone
player, and scholar in the fields of improvisation and experimental
music. Interviewed at “Sonorities Festival”, Belfast 23.04.2007. Katarzyna Głowicka: Who is a composer? What is her/his role in society? George Lewis: Composer’s role in society? Well, which society? K: What do you mean by which society? L: Well, we’re here right now in Belfast. I imagine that’s a very different possibility of roles than the US, where I live. K: So, talk about US. L:
I couldn’t possibly talk about what the role of a person here is. I’d
be kind of wrong, but . . . ok, here’s the downbeat view. First of
all, it seems that when we say composers, I’m assuming we’re meaning
composers of high culture art music of some kind. Does that sound
right? K: Yes L: Otherwise, we
could include Prince or whatever, which is a very different role in
society. But, composers doing that kind of work, it seems to me that
the role has been traditionally fairly marginal in the US. I think
that’s partly because composers of that era tended to recluse themselves
from involvement with society. They thought that the Cold War
consensus would support them forever. They kind of felt that they were
on the gravy train of the post war consensus. That is to say that
contemporary music, it’s experimental leanings, it’s claim to primacy,
it’s claim to being the next big thing that would influence all areas of
music. In other words, the modernist project and the sense which
composers align themselves with that, people felt that this was going to
continue forever. And when the modernist project failed and began to
fail in the 70s under pressure from, let’s say, post colonialism, post
modernism of various kinds, multi-culturalisms, the idea of art music as
this sort of unitary, stable construct also began to fall apart. This
is perhaps more a long winded than you wanted, but it wouldn’t have fit
in this space anyway. So, what ends up happening in that environment is
that many composers decided that they wanted to take a less marginal
role and they wanted to move more toward the centre of the concerns of
the society, which of course means you have to find, rather than
assuming yourself be a leader in an elite sense, you had to go out and
find out what your followers wanted you to do. So, you would then see
composers align themselves more with popular music movements. There was
a sense in which composition was – the notion of high culture and low
culture – those were being blurred. Composers began working with,
certainly, electronics being one area of translation across class
stratifications, another being improvisation. So, I’m talking about the
way that composers are viewed with the sense of which music in the US is
largely deemed as something that should be non-political, should be
largely for entertainment and in that sense, I would say that the
performance of string quartet and the performance of country music are
basically considered the same. Which is to say, that there’s no sense
that one is more edifying than another. I’d say they’re both considered
part of a wide ranging entertainment complex and contemporary composers
are told for the most part to stay away social concerns, to stay away
from politics, to stay away from anything that might mark them as being
somehow used by some other aspect of society. Well, composers accepted
that and so they sort of revel in their marginality at the moment, as
far as I can see. That’s my answer to it. K: I was also looking for an answer of what is this to you? L: I said that’s what it is to me. K: This is your role? L: Me, personally? K: You see your role this way? L:
Oh yes, I do. Because, basically I’m a composer and this is the way my
work is seen in the society. It’s a very marginal one. You can’t say
that contemporary composition, especially outside of NYC, is in the
center of the concerns of society. There’s no consensus, you know, it’s
not like here. No one cares what they write in The Guardian. If
there’s a Guardian type newspaper in say, Chicago or Los Angeles or you
know. No one cares what they write about culture. That doesn’t matter
at all. There’s no BBC orchestra that has a guaranteed spot on
television in the US. So, there’s no sense in which contemporary
composers in the US have any real claim on society’s resources. K: But what is your role, yourself? How do you consider your role in society? L:
Oh, me personally. Being an African American, that puts me in a very
different space. I’m not considered part of the high culture consensus
to begin with. The black composer is quite invisible as far as I can
tell. I mean, most people don’t even know there are black composers.
You’re asking me these questions and I’m telling you the answers. K: And women as well? L: Well no, actually, in the United States, woman composers aren’t invisible. K: Really? L:
No, as far as I can see, the millennium hasn’t come, but I don’t see
the same sense of marginality at all. There isn’t a comparison there.
So I think that I don’t see . . . Women composers have won the Pulitzer
Prize in the United States . Women composers have performed with major
orchestras. Not routinely, but quite often. It’s not to say that women
composers have been thoroughly embraced, but you know, it can’t be
compared. Race and gender aren’t the same and they can’t be compared.
So, that’s important. My personal . . . I feel that I’m actually quite
lucky. I’ve won probably the most major awards that the United States
can offer in terms of my composite work as an artist. My . . so called
Genius Award, but that . . . you know, you get on television for a
little while, but then after that it all goes away and you go back to
being George Lewis, and that’s it. I feel pretty happy with my personal
role, if you’re talking about personal. But when you say “the role in
society”, that’s not personal anymore. K: That’s not personal? L: So, you can’t ask a question like “What is the composer’s role in society?”. K: But you can define it yourself. L:
Well, no you can’t; that’s what I’m telling you. You can’t do that
because you have to be responsible to a society. Otherwise, you’re just
asking yourself “How many gigs do you have?” And “What is your view of
the political consensus of the day?” These are trivial questions, as far
as I can tell. They’re too personal to make any real difference to
anyone. So I’m telling you what the situation is facing a young
composer wanting to have a role in the culture. That’s different from
me. I’m 54 years old. At this point, I have a minor role. I’m in a
few books. I have a few books of my own coming out; I publish
regularly. And I have a small role, but it’s certainly not a household
word or anything. But there’s no composer in the US that’s a household
word. There’s no Harrison Birthwistle that trips off the lips of
people. That doesn’t exist in the US. There’s no one like that. That
enough for this? K: Let’s go on. What makes a great composer? L: A great composer? K: Skills? L: Oh, skills? Well, that’s a different question. K:
Sorry, that’s a different question; you’re right. I was trying to
combine two. What makes a great composer? Let’s just concentrate on
this. Hopefully, it will be a shorter answer. L:
Probably not. You asked me to talk. And since I haven’t really thought
about what makes a great composer, this is all new thinking for me. Who
are the people I consider great in music? I guess it’s the people with
whom I’ve had the strongest emotional connection. So, let’s see what’s
the music with whom I’ve had the strongest emotional connection? John
Coltrane. That’s my model of a great composer. (laughs) Number one,
there’s a commitment, an absolute commitment, to being himself at every
moment. There’s no one else that exists. When listening to great
music, the waters part and there’s just you and the music. That’s it,
for a brief moment. You lock out all the rest of the world, all the
stuff about society and the place of composers gets erased. And
suddenly there you are, face-to-face with this very powerful presence.
The other one, of course, with whom I’ve had a similar commitment is
Wagner. Very much the same, I’d say. If you listen to ‘Parsifal” the
opera that a lot of people don’t like, which is one of my favorites.
It’s exactly the same as listening to Coltrane if you think about it.
Let’s see, a third one would be Stravinsky, although, he is not quite
the same. K: So, what you’re saying that what makes a
good composer is the ability to project this presence? Is that the
most important thing? L: Well if you say in other
words what I’m trying to say what my words are. I guess what my words
are that the musical work itself suspends everyday reality. And this is
very romantic. The possibility exists that you are just there alone
with these sounds and what they mean. And they mean different things
every time you hear them. So if you hear things, especially now, you can
hear things thousands of times. I mean, I can’t count the number of
times I’ve heard the overture of to ‘Parsifal’, probably thousands
times. But the thing is that each time you hear it there’s something
else in there that you have to grab on to. It’s like the experience
renews itself. There’s something there from the previous 20 thousand
times. But the 20 thousand and first time, there’s something there that
you think, “Maybe I didn’t really hear that. Or did I hear that? I
have no idea”. So the connection for me is largely emotional, it’s
largely spiritual and it has nothing to do with methodology, nothing.
And nothing to do with so called skills or any of that. That’s not what
you need because the skills of all of the composers that you meet or
hear about, there’s no benchmark of skills. Schoenberg, self-taught,
Berio, self-taught. You know, there’s no benchmark. So, finally, the
fact that I find, let’s say, Webern more interesting than Bartok, is
sort of personal sense of when I’m listening to Webern, I don’t feel
like I can plumb the depths. And when I’m listening to Bartok, I feel I
listen to someone who . . . it’s all quite apparent to me somehow
what’s going on. I applaud the brilliance, I applaud the economy of
means and sometimes also the extravagance of what he’s doing. I’m very
interested in the cultural ‘situativeness’. And then I go away and
that’s it. It’s lovely and it’s extremely skillful. It’s done with a
maximum of beauty. And so many people find that to be enough for them.
And of course there are many people that feel the same way about Bartok
as I feel about Wagner. So there you are. K: Great.
Next question is very similar. What in your opinion are the most
important skills, (although you said there are no skills needed) to
achieve success as a composer? L: Oh no, no, no. I
said . . . You talked about greatness. Now are we still talking about
greatness or are we talking about success? K: Success. L: Oh, success. My goodness. For success, the main thing you need is, don’t be an asshole. (Laughter) L: But
then, even that’s not a mark of success. I mean, Wagner was a huge
asshole. But somehow, he overcame that and inspired people. So
composers, to succeed you have to inspire people with your vision. K: Is that a skill? L: Yes, it is. You can learn how to do that. K: You mean personally, with personal contact or by your music? L:
Both, but personal contact probably first. Because music is a social
world. You have to interest people in it. People don’t just sit there
and say, “That was great music, sir. Let me bestow this cash upon you.”
No, no, no, that’s not how it works. You have to meet people; it’s a
social world. You meet conductors, other composers, presenters,
patrons, institutions of various kinds. And so, one of the major
aspects of that, is to have a vision that you can articulate to other
people about what you’re trying to do. The second thing is you have to
know who you’re talking to. You have to know what your market is. For
example, there are people who will never support my work, no matter how
they think it sounds because I’m the wrong color or because I’m the
wrong gender, or because the kind of music I’m doing, the materials I’m
doing don’t fit into their world. Or they don’t feel they can market it
to someone else. All those things. So in the end the composers who
want to succeed have to find out where they can succeed. What’s the
field? The field is huge. Maybe there’s the sense in people’s minds
that there’s this one field that’s sort of monolithic and that
everyone goes through the same thing. That you go and study composition
or you go to the conservatory and then you visit one of the major
places for contemporary music. Maybe you go to Royal Hall or maybe you
go to, I don’t know where else, Darmstadt, or that sort of thing and you
develop those skills. But even there, if you are doing these things,
you’re developing collegial relationships. So skill developing
collegial relationships, makes the composer sound like a salesman. But,
in fact, he is. And that’s something that has to be thought about.
It’s not very romantic. It’s not cynical either. And then you see
successful composers, the skill level is all over the map. You have
successful composers who don’t even read music. So, what do you say
about that? Well, they should have gone to conservatory? I’m not
talking about rock and roll people. I’m taking about people who get
their stuff done by symphonies and really have other people to dictate
the work and have other people do it. In film composition, for example,
one of the most famous ones. When he started, he couldn’t read a note.
That was Elfman. But outside of that, let’s look at an outsider
model, Glenn Branca. I don’t know if you know who that is. But, he had
symphonies performed. He started out as a rock and roll musician,
playing microtonal guitars of his own construction. Very interesting.
Or people who avoid, drop out of college, like John Zorn, or people who
never went to one. This is success in terms of getting your music
played, in terms of getting commissions. This is a kind of success I’m
talking about. There is no set of skills that can guarantee that. I
think the major thing is commitment and believing in yourself. And even
this can not guarantee the success but you are more likely to. Personal
awareness of oneself and of environment. What I would ask composers to
do is, as a teacher of composition I find myself asking people basically
to be trying to be aware of what they do. And my job is commune with
them regarding their intensions and whether their intensions that are
being realized, and whether there are other intensions out there that
they might want to realize, and then they can’t figure out how to, and
then we can work on it together. I might not know how to do it either,
but I might have seen a little more then them. My way of teaching is to
work with the person together to help them to realize their vision or
help them revise or refine their vision. K: I will
give you just two more questions. They will be similar. Maybe you don’t
want to answer them. What personal obstacles did you find on your way to
success. L: The main personal obstacle was my own
lack of believe in myself. Yes, that’s it. And there are reasons for
that. My personal situation once again. Things like race and gender do
matter at that point. You were talking about women composers. Certainly
truth that women composers are treated the same way, so that for example
if as a women you come into the room, suddenly lot’s of things change
in terms of what that person feels about you. You face a hostile
environment. Now, if you face that kind of environment, which I think I
did, in some areas, you have to prove yourself, that takes a lot of
extra work. It also feels like you never quite proved yourself. So you
are always a little insecure and those insecurities build up to the
point in which you become very unsure of yourself and you don’t really
know. So I’d say, really the main thing was to find people who liked my
work no matter what. You have to find people who really like you, and
have no real criticism about you. No matter what you decide to do, they
are going to say, we are backing this. That is when you might end up
getting married. (laughs) You want someone like that. K: Hard to find! L:
Yes, it is but you have to do it. And it can be done. People do it. And
if you don’t find that person, I’d say don’t marry them. Don’t take
less than that. It’s not worth it. In music, you might find someone who
will support 80% of what you’re doing, or 50%, or 20%. Well, take the
20% and don’t give them the other part. (laughs) Take the 20% and you’ll
be fine. The main thing is belief in self and self awareness. You have
to develop that. The main obstacles are personally generated. And then
beyond that there are the usual obstacles, but these are not as
important as the personal. Because that’s something you can do about.
The rest of it you just have to find your ways around. You know, if
there is a big barrier there, someone is a racist, and idiot or a fool,
you can’t do anything about that. They are just going to be who they
are. So if you find ways of overcoming your own self-doubt then you are
at the much better position to overcome external obstacles. K: This is connected to my last questions. What were the obstacles from the outside word that you faced? L:
Well, I can’t really say that you overcome obstacles. What you do is
you live with them. They don’t go away. You find ways of dealing with
them. I would say for me race issues haven’t been an obstacle so much,
as much as they’ve been a continuing feature of the landscape that can
sometimes bobble up to the surface in unusual ways. And beyond that to
be frank, I don’t think about obstacles. K: well, probably that is your way of, not overcoming , but as you said, living with them. L:
Yes, that’s it. Because otherwise it sound like a kind of bellyaching.
You know, it’s boring.” I was poor”. Yes I was. Or , I didn’t have this
advantage, this teacher didn’t give me the right grade. Who cares?
Basically you don’t learn much from that, cause it’s far too
individualized to matter, or it’s so general, that is probably a myth.
Instead of that something like personal issues that you can work on
yourself, those are real to me. External obstacles there are like berms. K: I don’t know what that is? Do you mean bumps on the road? L:
Yes. You know, you drive over that, you just remember not to drive too
fast, because it will wreck your car and you have to see them coming.
You have to look ahead. Developing that ability to look ahead is one of
your skills. Seeing where the obstacles might be. And the other thing
is. Maybe not everybody, but many people, certainly I am of the ones who
wishes they were smarter, good looking or somehow nicer to people, or
had better musical skills in what I do. But maybe those wouldn’t matter
at the end. We all know the best musicians aren’t necessary the best
composers. K: Thank you very much. It was really great to talking to you!
The trombone, which was an important solo and ensemble instrument in jazz from the music's beginnings, has played a curiously low‐keyed role sice the early 1960's. Roswell Rudd, Grachan Moncur 3d and a few other players made important contributions, but the most spectacular new trombone technicians — Albert Mangelsdorf, Paul Rutherford — were European jazzmen who seemed to stand somewhere outside the main stream of jazz tradition.
George Lewis, who presented the first New York concert of his own music at Environ on Friday, is the most original and important young American jazz trombonist to have emerged in the last 20 years. His background includes a stint with Count Basie, but his principal forum has been the quartet let by Anthony Braxton.
Mr. Lewis brings to the Braxton group a truly exemplary technique—he can execute rapid‐fire phrases as fast, and play almost as high, as most trumpeters—and a contemporary slant on the sort of slurs, smears, growls and other sounds that are part of the jazz trombone tradition. Using a table full of mutes and a number of unusual mouth and lip techniques, Mr. Lewis seems to explore the entire sonic range of which the trombone is capable.
The original music Mr. Lewis presented at Environ was in a vein similar to the work of Mr. Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, with whom Mr. Lewis has also performed. Douglas Euart, on a variety of reed instruments, was not as strong a player as Mr. Braxton or Mr. Mitchell would have been, but Muhal Richard Abrams turned in intelligent, sensitive work on piano.
The Secret Love between Interactivity and Improvisation
Date
10/15/01 Affiliation
Musician, University of California, San Diego
Abstract
Computer programs, like any texts, are not
"objective" or "universal"; interactions with
these systems inevitably reveal characteristics of the culture
that produced them. Prevailing discourses in the field tend to
erase this cultural embeddedness. In particular, narratives
surrounding computer-based cultural production, such as
interactivity, virtual reality and new media, consistently
describe processes and practices that strongly resemble
improvisation, yet the word "improvisation" itself
rarely appears.
Asking why this obvious connection is so consistently
overlooked, this talk will analyze a particular set of metaphors
that mediate contemporary discourses and historical accounts
surrounding interactivity, improvisation, art, music and
computers, along lines suggested by contemporary critical race
theory. Also proposed are avenues for future theorizing in the
production of new forms of computer-based art and music.
Bio
George Lewis is Professor of Music in the Critical
Studies/Experimental Practices area at the University of
California, San Diego. An improvisor-trombonist, composer and
computer/installation artist, Lewis has explored computer music,
multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated forms.
His work as composer, improvisor, performer and interpreter is
documented on more than one hundred recordings, and his articles
on music and cultural studies have appeared in Leonardo Music
Journal, Contemporary Music Review, Black Music Research Journal
and Lenox Avenue. A member of the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)since 1971, Lewis has
served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, as Darius
Milhaud Professor in Composition at Mills College, as lecturer in
computer music at Simon Fraser University's Contemporary Arts
Summer Institute, and as Visiting Artist/Lecturer at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received Fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the 1999
recipient of the CalArts/Alpert Award.
"A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music" by George E. Lewis
The University of Chicago Press
April 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47695-7 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-47695-2 (cloth)
Price: $35.00
Review by Patricia Spears Jones
It is not often that a 600 pages plus music history book can bring a reader to tears, but George E. Lewis’ A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music did that for me. Lewis
brings an emotionally connected sensibility to this multi-disciplinary
study that deeply and aptly meshes his creative powers as a musician and
composer to his scholarship in music theory, cultural studies, and a
sustained engagement with musical experimentalism in the U.S. and Europe
as he chronicles and critiques the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians. Why the tears? His
description of Malachi Favors’ funeral in February 2004 brings together
personal observation; a brief discourse on the Church of God in Christ
(the church I was raised in as a child in Arkansas); the Pastor’s
eulogy; and the church’s refusal to allow drumming during the service. Favors’
body is brought back to the church, but his creativity and gifts to the
wider world are celebrated during the recessional where the drums
mysteriously sounded; and at the internment where Favors’ AACM
colleagues played tiny instruments and clapped and sang as his body was
lowered into the grave. As this scene unfolds over two
pages near the end of the book, it reminds me that Afro-America is
always more complicated and sophisticated than many of us can ever
fathom.
Lewis, who is the Edwin H. Case Professor of
American Music at Columbia University has produced an important,
engaging and occasionally enraging book that offers as comprehensive a
look at the why and how of the AACM’s development and staying power. Equally
important is it serves as a subtle critique of the canonization process
in American musics, both in the “new music” and “jazz” categories even
as he tries to remove the theoretical and political definitions that
separate them. He shows how the ongoing use of “jazz” to
reinforce racist and simplistic attitudes towards African American music
making as well as to deemphasize the power of music composed by African
Americans, whether from the “jazz or classical, i.e. European
tradition” continues as undermine a full acceptance of this documented
and important work. That such critiques continued until the end of the 20th century is, as far as this reader is concerned, a scandal. One being remedied somewhat by the polyphony of post-modernity—what’s in your IPOD? Okay back to the book:
The twelve chapters of A Power Stronger Than Itself,
plus an Introduction and After Word follow several tracks--the main
ones being: artistic, economic and political with Chicago as the locus. Blacks
who had moved there as a result of the Great Migration from the South
helped shape the psychic, artistic and musicological interests of their
children, a handful of clearly talented, ambitious and committed
artists.
He shows how these children of laborers, maids, bus
drivers, teachers, gamblers, ministers and musicians found themselves
huddled together on the South Side of Chicago due to Chicago’s
relentless racial and economic segregation. The schools
they attended; the band directors and teachers they encountered and
learned from; the bad stuff they mostly avoided (drugs, gangs, prison);
the churches they attended where “greats” such as Dinah Washington and
Sister Rosetta Tharpe once sang and/or played shows a large,
economically if not racially diverse community with resources enough to
encourage creative endeavor. Moreover, as in other
Midwestern cities, musicians unions were segregated so that Black
musicians had some sense of how to organize and negotiate, but in
Chicago they were mostly kept out of lucrative gigs; were not reviewed
by the local press or national journals—and Downbeat was in Chicago! --
even as the places where they could find steady work were closing.
As Lewis chronicles, the ideas that would become the AACM was literally conceived as Steve McCall’s mom noted in her home: “The
AACM was born at my kitchen table.” You had the four of them, at the
beginning, Richard Abrams, Phil Cohran, Steve and Jodie Christian.” Their conversations focused on culture, oh how to keep what they had and create more. From
those intense conversations, a postcard was sent to “the cream of
African American musicians announcing a meeting to be held on May 8,
1965. From that and subsequent meetings, the AACM took root.
For me Chapter Five showcases the bet of Lewis’ skills as music historian, cultural chronicler and son of the AACM The
chapter lists the group’s famous nine purposes; discusses Muhal Richard
Abrams’ leadership style which offered a firm, yet open hand to all
those who participated. It also showed the major differences that members brought to the group’s development—what was “original” music? Were they throwing out tradition by not playing standards? Who was and was not a composer? From the speakers quoted throughout this chapter, one can see how different, how volatile this enterprise was. Abrams’ lucidity appears to have calmed most of the heavy waters. Moreover,
the group attracted extraordinary musicians such as Leroy Jenkins,
Joseph Jarman, Favors, Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine
Myers and Anthony Braxton as well as painters like Jeff Donaldson and
dancer/chorographers such as Rrata Christine Jones.
Lewis explores how this organization was created
during a time of political upheaval as the promises of the
integrationist Civil Rights Movement gave way to the anti-integrationist
tendencies of Black Nationalist, particularly cultural commentators
such as Baraka who often found the kinds of music promulgated by Abrams,
et al as lacking “blackness” or deep connection to the “masses.” But the AACM”s events took place in Black run community centers in the heart of one of the country’s largest “ghettoes.” This
policing of Black creativity and subjectivity is handled with great
delicacy by Lewis as he explores how composers and musicians resisted
the critical conservatism of “jazz” and “experimental” music critics in
the U.S. and Europe whose vocabulary did not include such bold African
American agency.
With the economic fortunes of Black Chicago near
the bottom and the Civil Rights and then Black Power Movements bringing
Black disenfranchisement and rage to the foreground, the development of
an artist run organization focused on experimentation, education and
Black culture was fraught with misinterpretation and disbelief. Lewis
focuses on the philosophical and musicological underpinnings of the
group, while at the same time, placing the artists in the contexts of
commercial jazz production and a range of cultural commentary from
French and German academics to Amiri Baraka.
Lewis has created a fairly powerful narrative-epic
like really- of individuals including Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Steve
McCall, Anthony Braxton, Amina Claudine Meyers,Ajaramu, Oliver Lake,
Julius Hemphill, Douglas Ewart and Maia who over the course of 40 years
sustained or critiqued or collaborated with the AACM. Along
the way, everything from how AACM musicians were recorded to the
sustained use of collective endeavor is examined and criticized. Moreover,
the book contains a number of photographs of meetings, performances and
events that show how AACM documented itself over time.
The AACM’s artistic and cultural position serves as
a lightning rod for Lewis witty and often withering critique of white
American music criticism and racist practices from philanthropy to
presentation. Tokenism abounds. John Cage gets more than a once over. Black nationalists take a few as well, particularly Baraka. Lewis
seeks to show that the separations of ideas, practices were often based
more on racist notions and that the AACM practices upset the applecart
because well did they play jazz? Yes and no. How
was “free jazz” different from composed musics utilizing the
multi-instrumentalist that was a sort of hallmark of AACM style? How was racial identity explored or not in the theatrics of the Art Ensemble and other groups? Was this a new form of minstrelsy? And where was Africa? These negative critical stances were often to musicians whose compositional skills; daring and invention continue to astound. So what if 25 or 2500 people heard them or 25,000 bought their records? To have heard the Art Ensemble in its prime was to have had a taste of musical paradise, that’s my stance.
While the discussion of the music scenes in
Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit are artfully done providing rich insight
into the hearts and minds of these practioners and their supporters and
foes; the New York City commentary is sort of thin. This
may be because Lewis at this point was also a major player; AACM member
who focuses on those spaces where members performed or as in his case,
as a programmer for The Kitchen, managed. Also, throughout
the book he tries to keep out his own personality which is admirable
and appropriate, but it can mean some details are left out or remain
under examined.
For instance, there is little about the Tin Palace,
where a great many players worked and/or hung out especially Phillip
Wilson (I was there, so that I know) or the LaMama ETC Rehearsal Space
on E. Third Street (now home to the Nuyorican Poets Café) then run by
Charles Bobo Shaw—the Music for Cartography series was the first to
bring AIR and other Chicago groups to the East Village. While
the multi-disciplinary nature of events and/or organizations in
Chicago, St. Louis, etc. is thoroughly examined, there is little
discussion of the connections between poets, dancers and visual artists
when discussing the AACM in New York. The California
contingent so omnipresent in the 1970s—David Murray, Butch Morris,
Stanley Crouch are barely mentioned although there is a great photograph
from Crouch’s loft where many concerts took place and yes, I am in it! Ornette
Coleman and Sun Ra loom large in many ways throughout this and other
chapters, but while it good to see Studio Rivbea mentioned as part of
the discussion of the not lamented “loft jazz” term, it would have been
good to know a little more about Sam and Bea Rivers. There
is in Chapter Nine a fairly lengthy look at jazz and new music
criticism in local newspapers-Gary Giddens, Tom Johnson and others are
also taken to task; but there were alternative journals that don’t show
up including Ron Welburn’s The Grackle. While
Lewis often talks about the multi-cultural aspects of New York’s
downtown art/music scene, even he can’t quite mask the de facto
segregation that many musicians often found when performing or trying to
perform in the city.
I won’t go into Lewis’s intense and scholarly take
on the literature around jazz, music history, post modernism, and well
all that. It’s woven into the narrative often in trenchant
and useful ways. He cites both well-known and obscure scholars and
critics—his reading is quite wide ranging. However, these
commentaries can be a distraction from what is a most powerful story—the
creation and sustainability of African American artists run
organization the heart of America. In the After Word, when
a range of voices critique this endeavor—they all in one way or another
echo words from Ann Ward, who spoke of the answer to the question posed
by AJ at a meeting: “Why would anybody want to be a part o the AACM?” At the end of his discourse, “he said it was greater than any of us because it is a collective, it was all of us.”
Strength in organization has rarely been sustained
in this society so focused on individual achievement and profit, but the
AACM through hard work, discipline, self-criticism and a willingness to
rethink its ideas and principles, has done that. Lewis
has not only given the organization a fascinating and powerful version
of its story, he has given us tools for reflection and use. How and why should such organizations be created? Do you have to have a powerful teacher such as Abrams? What does service to the community mean? How do academic and established institutions help or hinder? These are the kinds of questions that are asked and answered in so many ways in A Power Stronger Than Itself. Moreover, he has posed a number of questions that others may attempt to answer: how does misogyny hold back an organization? What does self-determination mean in a capitalist society? Do multiple perspectives render better kinds of work or not? Of course the hardest question, why a racialized organization in a society that now as Obama running for President? Well, racism has not left the building.
That Lewis could weave such a philosophical,
emotional, political work also demonstrates his genius as a musician and
composer is matched by scholarship and his capacity to collate, deflate
and instigate a range of ideas, tropes and occasional raspberries. If you hate words like hagiography and polyphony, etc. well, this may not be the book for you. But
if you want to read about how poor Black musicians in the early 1960s
took their ideas up from a kitchen table, came together and then took
those ideas around the world, well, you can’t beat it. George E. Lewis has done his people, even if he would not be so essentialist as that, proud.
GEORGE E. LEWIS—THE STORY’S BEING TOLD by Trevor Hunter
June 1, 2010
In conversation with Trevor Hunter in Lewis’s office at Columbia University New York, New York May 11, 2010—1:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu Recorded and edited by Trevor Hunter Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
In the arts, you’ll come across a lot of multi-talented people, but
not many who can boast the depth of accomplishment in as many areas as George E. Lewis.
Since the beginning of his involvement with the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) at the young age of 19, Lewis
has engaged in a dizzying number of projects with an impressive array of
collaborators. As an improvising trombonist, he has worked with not
only AACM luminaries Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Roscoe
Mitchell, to name just a few, but also with the likes of John Zorn,
Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and Miya Masaoka (who is also Lewis’s wife).
And that’s only a very small sampling.
Starting in the late ’70s and continuing through the time he
spent at IRCAM in Paris during the early ’80s, his interest in
improvisation drew him (perhaps counterintuitively) to work with
computers. Between 1985 and 1987, he worked on his software for Voyager,
improvising software that reacts in real time to the input of another
(human) player, and which has been featured on two of Lewis’s album
releases. In the last few years, his palette has widened to use
computers as something other than an independent factor in his composed
works, which are increasingly fully notated for non-improvising
performers.
But even with such an array of accomplishment as a musician,
his work as a musicologist and scholar might even be more impressive.
Lewis has published dozens of articles, notable not only for their depth
of insight but also for his skill as a writer. His 1996 article for Black Music Research Journal,
“Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological
Perspectives,” is pretty much a must-read for anyone interested in the
subject. In 2008, the University of Chicago Press released Lewis’s
magnum opus to-date, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,
a formidable 700-page tome that’s nonetheless highly readable, the
culmination of more than a decade’s work and thousands of hours of
interviews. He is currently editing the first two volumes of Handbook of Improvisation Studies, due next year.
So the man received his 2002 MacArthur fellowship with good
reason. It’s clear enough that no interview is going to be able to come
close to addressing everything that engages Lewis’s prodigious
intellect; but equally true is that any interview will be expansive and
intensely interesting. The two hours NewMusicBox spent with him is no
exception.
—Trevor Hunter
READ an excerpt from A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis (Courtesy of the author and University of Chicago Press).
Trevor Hunter: One of the interesting things about your
past is that while you have achieved so much in the academic realms of
music and musicology, your own degree is a bachelor’s in philosophy from
Yale. Why philosophy?
George E. Lewis: When I went to Yale, at first I was
pretty naïve about what you could do and what you should be doing. So
the idea was to do some professional thing, because that’s what you were
supposed to do if you were a regular reader of Ebony
magazine—you wanted to be in that part of the paper where they show what
the cool blacks are doing. And they were always doing something like
being a lawyer or a doctor or a businessperson, or whatever. They were
never a composer or anything like that. So I thought that was what I
wanted to do, and then I left school for a year, and then came back. And
in the interim, of course, I met all those AACM people. And a lot of
those people were really doing interesting things. I think it was
probably Muhal who had a copy of the Walter Kaufman translation of On the Genealogy of Morals
at his house, and he let me borrow it—that along with an Elliott Carter
score of the First String Quartet. I thought both of those were pretty
great.
It looked like something you could really study academically,
both of them. The music major thing kind of collapsed, but the
philosophy major thing continued. Because what was nice about that is
you could still think about music, and you could write about it. There
were all these phenomenologists there at the time, people who actually
ended up doing very interesting things—Edward Casey and David Carr. And
there was a team-taught class with the late Thomas Clifton who wrote
this well-known book called Music as Heard, which dealt with the
phenomenology of music. Very inspiring class. So in the end, it made
sense to follow up with that and try to get a degree in it. It’s been
very helpful since then, because I’ve continued to maintain my link with
that world academically.
TH: After graduating in 1974, you released four albums
of your own music in the late ’70s with you as the primary performer,
starting with The Solo Trombone Record. It seems like at that
point you could have sculpted a career for yourself as a sort of go-to
trombone player, but you also started to work with electronics at that
time. How did you get involved with making your own systems?
GL: There was a community that developed in the mid- to
late-’70s surrounding computer music, an itinerant kind of community. I
went to Mills and saw what they were doing there—David Behrman, Jim
Horton was still alive, Rich Gold, and John Bischoff. They had a quartet
of these little microcomputers, and they were hooked up to each other
and doing these cool things. I thought, “This sounds like people
improvising. I think I should try to do this.” It was great. I went home
and got one of these things, and tried to learn. And there was a
community available, so you could ask people for advice and assistance.
The goal was always to make some sort of improvising program; I
wasn’t particularly invested in any other way of doing things at the
time. Maybe I’ve sort of expanded my horizons since then, but it was
good to do this because it called upon a lot of intellectual faculties
as well, thinking about what it meant to be a person improvising, what
real-time activity meant. The more you learn about what people believe
they’re interested in, what they think they’re hearing, or what they
think they’re communicating while in the process of making something
improvised—at some point, it became pretty clear that was pretty much
what people were doing in their every day life, whether they were
walking across the street, or deciding what to eat in the morning, or
whatever. There wasn’t a lot of difference between that and what they
were doing on the stage; they were drawing upon the same faculties,
having the same problems, and the same opportunities for learning. Any
life experience was somehow grist for the improvisation mill.
So there was this sort of radical art-life blending that went
on being technologically mediated. Maybe you could also think about ways
of approaching this without the computer, but somehow the computer made
it that much more evident—you were able to create an avatar that
represented something different from yourself, that you somehow had to
communicate and negotiate with. There were two different modes of
experience, the programming experience and the performing experience.
And, of course, you didn’t have to be the only one performing; other
people were performing, too. And you were creating a group of people who
were thinking hard about what it meant to do what they were doing. And
that’s what I always wanted: music as a space for reflection on the
human condition.
TH: During the process of developing all your work with
electronics and eventually your program Voyager, did your relationship
with the trombone change?
GL: Yes, it did. It sort of made the trombone
superfluous, and in the end I decided to stop doing it as much. The
trombone opened up a space of being able to do certain things, and also
being able to collaborate with really wonderful people. Having the
trombone as a medium for doing that was a very important thing, and in a
sense without the trombone, there was really no way of investigating
what would happen at the computer, because I was the number one guinea
pig as a performer.
I was communicating and trying to reflect at the same time how
else to communicate. I began to develop what I thought was a facility
for having multiple mindsets while improvising. I’ve read that people
say things like, “I blank my mind out when I play.” That’s not my
experience: usually I’m thinking about a lot of different things at the
same time. I think that helped me perform in a different way, because it
provided a space where I could at once hear the sound and to have a
sense of the intent of the other person. It’s not mysterious; people
experience it every day. Parts of sound and intentionality create a
link.
TH: After your activity in Chicago in the late ’70s,
you moved out to New York at around the same time as several other
members of AACM, and you got the curating gig at The Kitchen. How did
that come about?
GL: My girlfriend at the time worked there, but I had
been going there all the time anyway. I saw some great concerts there.
Alvin Lucier with his dancers, or composers with electronics. It was
incredible seeing David Tudor and those guys putting those speakers on
resonating boards and sounding boards and pianos. It was fascinating
stuff.
Rhys Chatham had a sort of drone band, and he and me and Peter
Zummo played trombone; basically playing one note very loud. Being in
that milieu, at a certain point Rhys said, “I’m going to step down as
The Kitchen’s music director. Would you like to do this? What would you
do?” So I came up with a list of things I’d like to do.
The loft jazz thing was happening at the same time, but that
was more about performance, acoustic stuff. Some people were doing
electronics, but people looked at that in a funny way. You know, there’s
a lot of leftover received wisdom from jazz that people were trying to
break out of to some extent. But there was this ambivalence that often
happens to artists of color where you can’t go too far afield, because
you’re already being accused of certain inauthenticity. You’re basically
being policed by yourself in a way; it’s kind of a self-censorship. And
then there’s a community that’s there to make sure that you don’t go
beyond a certain point. So, basically, I wanted to make sure that I was
with the weirdest people around, and The Kitchen was a good place for
that.
So I was music director of the Kitchen before I went to IRCAM.
Two years of that, from 1980 to 1982. That was cool. I gave a lot of
people their first big concerts; I think Zorn was one of those, and
Diamanda Galás. Some pretty good people got concerts while I was there.
We had Bill Laswell’s Material group—or we thought it was going to be
Material, then Bill calls the week before and says, “I want to change
the band.” I said, “I don’t care; you can bring whoever you want.” He
said, “I want to bring Derek Bailey and Charlie Noyes.” Who would
complain about that? So instead of doing Material-type rock stuff, they
did this two-hour improvisation that nonplussed a lot of the fans, but
that was sort of the idea. There was a period of trying to stretch
people’s ears and their consciousness. Anthony Braxton would go to
Donaueschingen and play Charlie Parker for them, and then he would go to
the Newport Jazz Festival and play this 50-page notated piece. That’s
how it would work. You want people to not be settled in their beliefs;
you want to challenge their beliefs through music, in some way.
TH: Do you think that era has ended?
GL: Well I hope it hasn’t. I mean, it hasn’t for me,
but maybe I’m feeling a bit isolated. Maybe it’s not as necessary. Maybe
all that work that was done before had some effect. But then, maybe
not. I mean nowadays, everyone seems to want to be confirmed in what
they currently believe. Technologically mediated narrow casting seems to
make that possible. You don’t have to go to a concert of anything you
don’t like; you don’t have to encounter a sound that you’re not
interested in. What we find, though, is that there are people still out
there who seek out new experience in sound; and that’s our audience. Or
my kind of audience, anyway.
TH: You’ve been involved in several rich and diverse
communities, including the AACM and the downtown New York crowd during
the early ’80s. From my own perspective, looking at various communities
of young performers and artists now, there’s a lot of anxiety about
community. From your perspective, what makes a successful artistic
community?
GL: Communities provide access. They provide access to
history, they provide access to key individuals and traditions. So if
you’re going to make a community, you have to be aware of how to provide
access to community. How to provide access to tradition and history is
extremely important. So, with the AACM, they may have come from the same
background in some superficial sense as African Americans. But while
they were all seen to be striving to do interesting things on their own,
they had very diverse ideas about sound, and about compositional,
improvisational direction. What brought them together?
What brought them together was a shared sense that they should
be responsible for each other, because they were trying to do what you
were trying to do, which is trying to advance as a person and as an
artist. That seems to be the basis on which a kind of mutual aid society
gets developed, and that mutual aid society doesn’t have to be limited
to just that group. If there’s like 10 or 20 or 30 people in that
immediate community, they should really have the sense that they should
be reaching out to other people who might be thinking along those lines
who they don’t know. They should be open to new people and new ideas,
and treat those people as part of the extended community of people who
are trying to do what they do. There are no limits to the size of the
community, otherwise it becomes like a clique. But to avoid becoming a
clique it means you have to be open to new ideas. You just take upon
yourself the notion that you’re going to support people in whatever they
would like to do; that becomes a part of personal transformation, a
community of people who all are engaged in personal transformation. It
becomes a practice of the self that looks outward toward the community
and without limits.
TH: In terms of your relationship to New York, you
started out in the downtown scene in terms of your interactivity with
people like Rhys and eventually Zorn. But now you’re at Columbia, which
has this stereotypically uptown history. GL: Well, it certainly had that reputation when I was
here in the ’70s. But this is my third tour of duty living in New York.
After I lived in Europe, I came back to New York for a couple of years;
those were not very good years. Then I went to Chicago and taught at the
Art Institute for a couple of years. And then I went to UC San Diego
with the help of Stuart Dempster, who didn’t teach there, and Bert
Turetzky, who did, and Roger Reynolds, and then we brought in people
like Anthony Davis. Isn’t that a strange community of people already?
Some people might think so. But that was an amazing, extraordinary
department. And that was when I began to write. So that’s a little bit
of a 13-year blip on screen before the most recent New York experience,
which certainly made Columbia possible.
There were a lot of wonderful things that happened when I was
in California—I got the MacArthur grant and all these things happened.
My big fear of coming to New York again was that I would be doing the
same things I was doing here when I was 23 years old. I was coming back
at 50, and didn’t want to do the same things; I wanted to try something
different, something new. And then the other fear was based on not
knowing anything about Columbia other than my memories of the ’70s,
which were generally uptown/downtown. I remember when I came here at
first, that dynamic was a family squabble as far as I was concerned. I
was as happy listening to Charles Wuorinen as I was listening to Sam
Rivers. I didn’t care; I liked them both, and I got to know them both
while I was in New York the first time. So, for me, all those things
didn’t really matter very much, although they probably matter much less
to most people than they did to me at that time.
The main fear for me was that I wouldn’t be able to maintain a
certain diversity. But that turned out to be completely chimerical.
First of all, I’m on two faculties, composition and musicology, and the
composition side includes computer music so it’s a very wide field of
operation for me personally. I don’t know about the uptown/downtown
thing—maybe it’s still important. There’s a great deal of diversity here
with the composition students, of a kind that maybe there might not
have been when the previous generation of great people was here.
TH: What goals did you have coming here as a faculty member?
GL: Columbia’s a research university, so if you’re a
composer or a musicologist your research is basically musical research.
And so the goal was really to extend the scope and breadth of my musical
research. And what has happened has even exceeded that goal. At UCSD, I
wasn’t really a part of the composition faculty. In fact, we made our
own sort of faculty; our area was called Critical Studies and
Experimental Practices. But here a lot of the effort has gone into
trying to extend compositional practice. It’s been great being a part of
the composition seminar on a weekly basis, being exposed to a lot of
new developments in composition from around the world, and being
associated with an open-minded group of people who are nonetheless
firmly invested in what they believe in. You don’t want to lose who you
are, but still, I’ve really been able to learn a great deal from that,
and that’s reflected in my current set of compositions.
I’ve been getting more involved with the thorny and cranky
medium of composing for non-improvisers in more extended ways. There are
improvisers here at Columbia; there are people doing what might even be
called “sound art” or “interactive media and music”; but you know,
there’s a majoritarianism about writing scores on paper here—virtual
paper nowadays. So you sort of get swept up in that, but I was swept up
in a different way than I was at IRCAM in the ’80s. There’s more of a
maturity about it. That’s on the composition side.
On the musicology side, I’m sort of the 20th-century person
here, or at least I was until Ellie Hisama came. Which is great, because
now there are sort of two of us in musicology. We’ve been able to do
several interesting things. We’ve been able to diversify the student
body, in particular in the area of having more African Americans.
African Americans in composition programs, especially the so-called
elite ones, are very difficult to find. And the hardest thing to find in
any avant-garde scene in music is an African American woman. So we
managed to break that particular barrier at Columbia in terms of the
graduate student make up, as well as other seeming barriers. Another goal is to do what happens in the AACM, which is to
provide the atmosphere for exploration. You try to instill a sense of
that openness about gathering community that I was talking about
earlier. Communities—even a diverse community like Columbia—does have
its preferred set of value systems: some of them are built into the
curricular requirements; some of them are built into the folkways of the
institution; and some are built into the faculty and the people who
come here with their own views of the world. The people who don’t share
those views just don’t come, or are selected out of the process. And
that ends up being a problem because you don’t want to be
self-fulfilling or self-perpetuating where the same people come every
year with the same sense of ideas. So there is a bit of a struggle, but I
don’t think I’m the only person struggling. I think we’re all trying to
struggle in our own ways with those issues.
So I’ve found it to be a pretty salutary experience being
here. And there’s community beyond the music department: there’s a
comparative literature department; there’s a history department; there’s
an anthropology department; there’s an African American studies
department; there’s women and gender; there’s art history. It’s a huge
place, and there are amazing people in all these fields. What I find
interesting about being in an academic institution is that you are able
to interact with ideas from other areas of the intellectual community,
and actually bring your own sense of discovery and research into the
public sphere. I think the challenge for me in musicology and
composition is that we are not really sufficiently invested in the
public sphere. When I say the public sphere, I’m talking about The Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books,
or various blogs that are out now. The public sphere’s kind of fickle.
If we’re not a part of it, then those ideas aren’t influencing the
conversations. So certain kinds of humanisms that come out of
contemporary music don’t turn up in that sphere, and it impoverishes
both our community and the communities that could benefit from that.
Nobody came here with the intention of being an underground
hero. We want our work to be seen and heard and understood, or
misunderstood. We believe there’s something in it beyond just the
careers. Not just the composers, but the performers, and the
performer-composers. In the last 20 years, the most amazing development
for me has been the number of ensembles, much more than there was when I
was in New York the last time. Wet Ink, Argento, Talea, ICE, Sospesso,
and Pamplemousse, just to name a few, they’re all doing these amazing
things. And it’s not just in New York, either. Tristan Murail was
telling me about going to Alabama and meeting contemporary music groups
there. It’s happening in a lot of places around the country.
I think these developments are the result of people redefining
what they mean by “communities.” A community of that kind has to
necessarily be international; it’s supported in part by the internet to
make things possible that weren’t possible before, but overall, it’s
still this internationally, technologically mediated community that is
gathering people in and looking for some new experiences. I think we see
it now, and I think we’re going to be seeing more. I don’t know how
people are surviving, but they’re doing incredible work. When you go to
see one of these ensembles perform, it’s just unbelievable. How do they
do it? I remember trying to get together a freelance band with these
wonderful freelance musicians who are among the best in the world at
what they do. People like Jean Kopperud, an incredible clarinet player.
But now, there’s 20 of those people who are capable of doing incredible
work, and come from these top flight places and who are, as they say,
serious as a heart attack about doing what they’re doing. And a lot of
them are composer-performers, which is in another kind of tradition; but
composer-performers maybe in a slightly different way than previously.
Although composers always did perform their own work, and the work of
others to a very high degree, somehow I think that there’s something a
little bit different in this group. I’m not quite sure what it is.
Anyway, I’m pretty happy about it. I think it’s something that surprised
me and it has been very, very gratifying for me to see how these people
operate.
TH: Contemporary music and musicology entering the
public sphere is sort of The Big Question in those fields, it seems to
me. For the people involved with that, what can be done to take an
active role in entering the public sphere?
GL: This is one of the hardest things to do, and people
are going to have to be pretty ruthless and cynical about it. I was at
UCSD in the ’90s. There are people there who are pretty influential in
the world of scholarship—not just music, but many things. And they had
no idea about what the musicians in this great music department were
doing. So your job as a person is to go out and make those links. But
that requires you do some research about what has been going on in those
areas, and it might require you to develop some moles in the system, so
to speak. There’s always somebody in there who is interested, and you
don’t know who they are, but it’s kind of your job to find them. There’s
no possibility of mass marketing. You’re not going to get attention
without some mole in the system.
I think what’s going to have to happen is that people have to
do things on a more personal basis. They have to extend their community
to people who are more involved in the public sphere than they are, and
be prepared to articulate the reasons why they think it’s important. A
lot of people just aren’t; the old reasons don’t work anymore: it’s good
for you; it’s going to be great in 100 years; it’s high culture work
that exemplifies the highest ideals of human kind. People don’t believe
that stuff anymore. Plus, it was never really true.
As others have remarked, people are ready for very interesting
sounds in the movies. So there’s already an installed base of people
who understand odd music because they listen to it all the time. They’ve
been listening to it since they were kids. But they don’t connect that
with larger structures that are active in their own experiences. That
means that some people have to be developed who can make the
translation. And I think that musicologists are in a place to do that.
The ones who are working on new music are going to have to investigate
the place of new music.
If they want to see how it was done successfully, look at new
media. New media is definitely in the public sphere. Everything from
intellectual property to the interfaces for DJs and electronica to ideas
about identity and computing, they’re filtered into the mainstream
discourse. It’s all there. The people who did computer music in the ’70s
could have done that, but they were pretty much navel gazing about
trying to get into the pantheon of Beethoven. If we hadn’t been thinking
about that, we would have spent our time trying to acquaint people with
these fascinating ideas that were coming out of music. We acquainted
ourselves with it, but we didn’t go any further with it. I think new
media was very successful in forging an institutional matrix that
included technology corporations, government institutions, and academic
institutions. There’s a lot of intellectual power there.
TH: I’m actually quite curious about the appeal of the
pantheon, or what drew you in. Why is there a greater emphasis placed on
the historical significance versus the significance of now?
GL: It’s not that you don’t want to be a part of
history or be disconnected from a tradition. I think a lot of people in
my generation wanted to be connected with more than one tradition or
history. You know, they were Americans. There’s an experimental music
tradition here, and they saw it as being a multi-cultural, multiple
media experience. They wanted to be a part of that, and somehow make
their mark on it. That was their notion about what the so-called
pantheon was.
At the same time, you want to be aware that the pantheon is
being made now. People are dealing with the issues of their time and not
some other time, and that has to be the primary focus of that artist’s
work, as he or she sees it. But there’s kind of a career move where if
you can become associated with a particular genre, maybe rewards come
for successful incorporation into that genre—you get more money from
ASCAP or BMI, or you maybe get a certain commission, or maybe publishers
come in your direction.
Those personal rewards are still mediated by race and class
and, to a lesser extent I think than before, gender, although I still
think gender is very important. So you may find a sort of disappointment
if you’re not one of the favored members of those groups. It’s been
denied that Saul Bellow asked about the Proust of the Papuans and
Tolstoy of the Zulus, but that was the attitude. And so if you were
considered to be one of the descendants of the Zulus or the Papuans, you
would have a harder row to hoe in certain communities. Maybe you go
outside and look for them and develop your own pantheon, or maybe you
just don’t think about it. You spend your time concerned with grappling
with those issues and looking for other people, regardless of field, who
are grappling with the same ones. TH: I want to step back to where we were before I got
off on that tangent about the public sphere. You said that you were
writing notated music for non-improvisers, but there’s sort of a politic
to notated music; in my experience people who do more improvised music
need to grapple with the different relationship that exists with
performers who are playing your music off the strictly notated page. Is
that something you’re considering in your work?
GL: In the old days, when I was writing, I tended to
let my ideas about improvisation and egalitarianism enter into the
composition. I always felt like I didn’t want to have some people just
sitting there doing very little and other people are doing a lot. I
wanted to try to make sure everyone got a chance to exercise something
important. That tended to make the piece a little overly busy in some
ways, which was mirroring what was happening in certain strands of
improvising where things would get pretty busy, partly because the
notion of egalitarianism meant that people were loath to think of
themselves as background or foreground. But you need to think about
background and foreground in any kind of music, including improvising.
The other thing is that improvised music is not free of power
relationship problems. There are power struggles and struggles for
attention going on right there inside the piece, right there while it’s
being performed, and you can hear that. Certainly as a performer you can
be attuned to it, but not all performers are. Not even all improvisers
are. But after awhile you do learn to hear these things, and to use them
as part of the work. You could simulate that in a composition, in a
notated work, but there’s no reason to.
Just go for the sound. That’s how I look at it. Go for the
form. Go for the ideas. Try to figure out where the piece is headed. All
the talk of linear form and stuff, it’s so retrograde. I mean people in
other areas of art practice aren’t talking in those ways. So you need
to get outside the loop of just the people thinking about composition.
Now what you said was something a little different. What you asked about
was whether I’m thinking about performer-composer power relations?
TH: Right.
GL: The funny thing is I’m not quite experienced in
that in the same way, because people decide to play this music because
they’re interested in it. So the most powerful thing you can do is to
write something that the musicians really want to play, something they
maybe haven’t seen before. I don’t think of it so much as power. I look
at it as opportunity. I don’t have power struggles like that. I’m not
trying to impose my will on anybody.
TH: Well, especially with chamber ensembles, it’s much
easier to maintain an individual level of engagement. But within certain
grander institutions of music like, say, the New York Philharmonic,
there’s a disconnect between performer and composer. They’re doing it
because it’s a job, and if you’re doing it because it’s a job, then
power relationships become more pertinent than they would in a more open
environment.
GL: One of my very best students, Ben Piekut, wrote a chapter in his dissertation on the John Cage performance of Atlas Eclipticalis
with the New York Phil. Talk about power struggles. It’s a very
legendary performance because everyone basically accepted Cage’s view,
which was that the performers were childish and stinky and they busted
up the instruments and they played the music wrong and they deliberately
sabotaged the performance. That narrative from 1964 goes on 40 years.
Then Ben says, “That’s very interesting. Let’s ask the performers what
they were doing.” So he interviews these people, and the things they say
are variations on, “Well, I wasn’t acting that way, but maybe some of
the other guys were.”
Yes, they were doing it because it was a job. One person said
as an excuse, “Well, we didn’t have any private stock options.”
Sometimes people form their own judgments about the composers,
especially these young composers. Maybe some of the players didn’t get
into music to play certain kinds of pieces, and so they play them under
duress. But even so, one hopes that a kind of professionalism will
prevail on both sides of the aisle. And one of the things that I think
Ben’s research turned up was that John and those guys were still
learning how to do orchestral music. They didn’t have the same
experiences as Stockhausen because they didn’t have access to the same
resources; that wasn’t happening in the American context.
It may be that as a composer you will encounter situations
that are not ideal in terms of how your music is regarded by the people
who are charged with performing it. That’s your problem. It’s always the
fear, sometimes justified but often overblown, that the orchestra has
this reputation regarding contemporary music for being sometimes
recalcitrant. I’ve only had one orchestral piece performed. It was the
American Composers Orchestra and they were pretty tractable. I mean they
were tractable to the extent of performing on stage live with a
computer-pianist who played the music, and they had very complimentary
things to say about my computer-pianist, which pleased me and relieved
me to no end. There were a lot of codes being broken, and the orchestra
exists with a series of codes. Sometimes younger composers don’t know
what the codes are, and don’t know how to finesse the codes.
You know, being an optimist as I am, I feel that composers do
have an ability to inspire people that think they’re doing it for a job.
Sometimes by what they write, sometimes by their fervent belief in what
they are doing, and sometimes by just laying back and letting it
happen. Where the problem comes is when people respond right away to any
sense of antagonism. Just don’t let the neurons fire. Just suppress
them. If you feel a little draft, you say, “Okay, I felt a draft. Now
let’s go to measure 47.”
Even if they’re doing it for a job, they want to feel they’re
doing a good job. Basically, it’s on the composer to deliver a score
that lets people do a good job. One that’s well written, that’s well
orchestrated, that lets people sound good. Thelonious Monk supposedly
said to Steve Lacy, “You’re supposed to make the musicians sound good.”
Well, that’s what you want to do as a composer. You want to let everyone
sound as good as they can sound even though they may be doing something
they’re not that familiar with. TH: One last question: to use the colloquial metaphor,
you wear a lot of hats—composer, improviser, performer, scholar,
teacher. I would think that breadth of activity requires such a
commitment of time and energy that it’s hard to keep all the balls in
the air. Why do you engage with so many different areas of activity? Do
you feel like being spread out as a scholar, as a performer, as a
composer, et cetera, does it have a negative impact on any one aspect of
what you do? And actually, I’d be curious to know how separate you
consider all these aspects anyway. GL: I used to think they weren’t that separate, if one
gets the same sort of emotional impact from all of them. For me, when a
composition is working—I’m looking at a piece and thinking, “Yes. This
is it. It’s working.” The same thing when you’ve got the scholarly
article working, “This is working. The story’s being told. It’s all
coming together. Fantastic.” Or if there’s a certain part of the
improvisation where you think it’s working—although I find that a little
more illusory. I’m always skeptical, even at the time: “Is this really
working?”
But yes, there could be an issue of spreading oneself a little
bit thin. I spend a lot of time investing in diversity, and now I’m
starting to reap some of the benefits by having a wider palette of
references for me to draw from, and that’s going to enable me to look at
the particular areas that I want to concentrate on and do my best work
in for the next few years. The thing I’m working on the most right now
is composing and then probably just as much on writing—scholarship of
certain kinds, a new improvisation book. The thing I’m not working as
much on is performing because when you’re not working on it, you’re not
really advancing in it. It’s the old model of practicing everyday—I’m
just not doing that. I want to be able to do newer things. I mean, I’ve
played the trombone in improvised contexts since 1971. That’s quite a
long time. I think that if I stopped tomorrow, it would be okay.
What would I do if I couldn’t play anymore? Is that going to
be the only leg you stand on? Are you going to bet your whole creative
life on this one thing? From the age of 20, I didn’t feel I could do
that, and in the end, I feel that was a good question to ask early on. A
lot of my resistance has been to resist people who have tried to
channel my playing to be the only thing. That’s a point of active
resistance, because of the peculiar nature of the policing of the
African American artists in particular. And I think a lot of artists,
regardless of color or gender or whatever, do face this.
So yes, certain things over the next five to ten years may be
done less—but then I’ll be enjoying them more. I’m feeling pretty free,
especially after the McArthur thing happened. I mean, it was really not
the money. It was mainly the sense that you had been doing something all
this time that you got recognition for on some level, and I was unclear
as to what it was. People say, “Why did you get this thing?” I have no
idea. First of all, they don’t call you up and say you got this for
doing this. You just got it for being who you were. So if I just keep
being who I am, then probably other cool things will happen. And if not,
what the heck. You did it. It was encouraging in a major way, and I
stopped worrying about identity at that point. Suddenly there was no
need. Do what you’re doing and keep exploring and see what happens, and
it was felt there was some kind of support. There was a community out
there to support that. But there always has been because of the AACM.
And you talked about a goal here, earlier about the academic
environment, I’ve often wondered why the academic environment couldn’t
be more like the AACM. That is, having a sense of people who are
committed to supporting you no matter what. So that’s what I think I try
to do with the students here. You know, no matter what happens, no
matter where they go, we’re going to try to help them do it.
Simon Rentner: I’m here with George E. Lewis, the author of the book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. First of all, why did you name your book A Power Stronger Than Itself?
George Lewis: The AACM was formed in 1965 in Chicago
by a group of working-class musicians who were interested in promoting
themselves in new ways. “Power Stronger Than Itself” was an early AACM
promotional slogan. I don’t know if it was Lester Bowie or Leo Smith who
created it, but suddenly these bumper stickers began to appear around
the South Side of Chicago that said “AACM: A Power Stronger Than Itself”
in big black letters backed by Day-Glo orange.
S.R:
Now you’re using the word “power” in this era. Probably somebody will
immediately think about Black Power. Was that in the minds of the people
when they chose that slogan?
G.L: No one who was really conscious in the African
American community at the time could fail to be aware of Black Power.
But of course that could take many forms. I guess they could have called
it AACM – Black Musical Power.
In fact, the second slogan that arose, which not everyone by the way
was necessarily as equally invested in, was ‘AACM: Great Black Music,”
which in retrospect seemed to have even stronger legs and somehow
appears more emblematic of a certain view of the collective.
In fact, Black Power had certainly been on the agenda, notions of
self-determination. But it seemed to me that the slogan itself seemed to
refer to a kind of recursion, that is to say a power stronger than
itself. It feeds back on itself. That’s a potentially limitless power.
That seems to be, in a way, a more important notion of power and a
more hopeful notion of power than any you might have. Although,
certainly the connection with the conventional mode of thinking about
Black Power was certainly there.
S.R: A sum greater than its parts basically?
G.L: Well, maybe even a stronger significance if you
think about a kind of infinite feedback. The thing about infinite
feedback is it’s difficult to control. So you’re actually telling people
in a very subtle way that you’re not going to be controlled and that
you will be heard.
S.R: Let’s also look at the AACM. You can’t help but think of the
NAACP too, at least in the way that abbreviation is structured. Was that
thought through, like the choosing of the word advancement? Instead of
Colored, it’s Creative. Was that the mindset too?
G.L: Well, if you think about it, ‘Association for
the Advancement of’ is certainly a gloss on the NAACP. I don’t have any
evidence that people were really thinking about that, but it’s a
reasonable assumption.
In one debate I did have access to, through listening to the tapes of
the early meetings, one of the discussions was whether the name would
be “Association For the Advancement of Creative… “ Then someone said,
“Musicians or Music?” There seemed to be arguments on both sides. So one
person – I think it was Phil Cohran, who was one of the founders, a
trumpeter in Chicago, said that basically we were here to advance the
creative musicians because the music had been advanced for a long time
but nobody was advancing us.
That seemed to make a lot of sense because it was basically referring
to that history of exploitation of black music, which advanced the
music to be sure, but the musicians were kind of left behind.
S.R: Muhal Richard Abrams – do you think the AACM would exist if Muhal Richard Abrams didn’t exist?
G.L: Well, you know, the easy answer is, “Of course
not.” The one that Muhal might subscribe to himself is that he was one
of four cofounders. The others were Steve McCall, the drummer, Phil
Cohran, the trumpeter and Jodie Christian, the pianist. Three of them
are still alive today. Steve McCall passed away in 1989.
So in fact, it seems to me that what needed to exist for the AACM to
exist was a notion of collectivity and collaboration rather than a
concentration on a heroic individual. Muhal has always resisted this
notion of himself as a father figure and he has resisted that kind of
heroism right along.
So when you see the nature of the collective as a whole, which was
one of many collectives that were formed at that time – you think about
the Black Panther Party as being a collective–there were so many moments
at which people felt that individual strategies for success weren’t
working and people had to come together in groups.
So the AACM was emblematic of that period, an artifact of that
period. So you see that notion of collectivity starting right at the
beginning.
S.R: Muhal probably did take on more of a leadership role,
having all of the sessions with musicians, late at night, working out
compositional strategies, original approaches, being the first
president, etc.
G.L: There is no question that Muhal is a very
dynamic individual, but he was there with a lot of other dynamic
individuals who were also holding late-night sessions and workshops and
inspiring people to study and grow and do these things.
A lot of people gravitated to Muhal because he was an open-minded
person. He avoided critique in favor of collaboration. He refused the
role of a conventional teacher. In fact, the AACM School of Music was
his idea, the school that still exists today, providing free instruction
in music to people of all ages – young people, but also people of my
age and much older than me went to the school.
His initial idea was that in order to teach, they had to first learn
to teach. So they got together a group of people to teach each other how
to teach. There were these very practical strategies, these homegrown
strategies for learning.
You see, a lot of the older strategies had broken down. If you can
imagine the learning of advanced music, how many African-Americans had
music composition degrees? How many were sitting on the graduate
composition faculties of major or even minor universities? Well, the
number at that time was very close to zero.
So if you’re going to get that kind of information, you’re going to
have to do it in an autodidact way. You’re going to have to take it upon
yourself. Communities are going to have to take it upon themselves to
build the structures that they’re going to build.
Again, this is very resonant with what was going on in the period –
this kind of intensive focus on communitarianism, the intense focus on
the thing you would see in those Elijah Muhammad papers in Chicago – “DO
FOR SELF” – in giant letters. People would just quote that to each
other – “Well, you know brother, you’ve got to do for self.”
S.R: The frequency with which you use that word “autodidact”
in your book — you could almost put that word in the title. What is the
evolution of that approach in the African-American community?
G.L: Well, if you want to take it as far back as it
really needs to go, you could imagine slave communities needing to adopt
autodidact strategies to advance, for protection, at a period when
knowledge was denied, suppressed, refused. People who wanted to gain
knowledge were routinely suppressed, often violently. So people had to
teach each other as a matter of survival.
Now, you start to find those strategies in people like J.A. Rogers,
or what Jacob Carruthers, I think, called that first generation of the
“old scrapper” African-American historians. These were often self-taught
in the methods of history. So they went into libraries for themselves.
They did their own research.
So by the time people like Muhal came along, or even before that –
you look at Sun Ra and these people, there are all those books that are
coming out now detailing all of his personal research – there are all
kinds of people doing this. It’s the dominant mode, not least because of
the refusal of many traditional institutions to educate – or if they
did educate, they educated in ways that really denied African-American
or African histories.
At that time the idea was that there was no African history so you
didn’t need to study it. So there were communities of resistance to
that. Look at Carter G. Woodson, John G. Jackson, Willis Huggins, people
of this sort – the people who started things like Negro History Week,
later Black History Month.
At that point you weren’t really expecting to be taught from the
outside. You were expecting to have to get a lot of it yourself. Indeed,
Muhal is kind of an example. He basically leaves the academic
institution to embark upon a lifetime of self-study.
S.R: Definitely there is a cultural divide. The way I grew
up, I would think it would be remarkable that somebody would teach
themselves how to play the piano. Whereas Muhal Richard Abrams thinks
about it that there is nothing remarkable about that whatsoever. That’s
just survival.
G.L: Well, it’s not like people didn’t have models
in the black community for teaching themselves. If you think about jazz
and blues, these are autodidact musics. People didn’t go to blues
school, or if they went to blues or jazz school it was in a club or it
was on the street or it was in somebody’s house. That was the blues
school. So it was only later that these things started, like jazz school
with degrees and all that.
It’s a crucial mode of self-determination, in response to social
change. Eddie Harris, the saxophonist, talked about it in terms of how
the institutions that musicians were involved with, that helped them to
learn how to do traditional musical skills, were dying out. Things like
big bands – there weren’t any big bands anymore to play in.
Also, a lot of the music people were playing in big bands wasn’t the
sort of thing these younger people were interested in. They seemed to be
more interested in more experimental things and there wasn’t any way to
do that unless you organized in groups to do it yourself.
Look, communities do this all the time. Take Schoenberg’s Society for
Private Music Performance as an example. People got together because
they wanted to get their own music played and to establish ways to think
about it and talk about it. It’s as natural as breathing and I think
that’s why Muhal looks at it that way. It certainly seems to be
congruent with experience.
S.R: So when they were first talking about forming the AACM
in the meetings, Muhal Richard Abrams was really interested in the
mission, the objective. For Muhal, performing original music was of
foremost importance, perhaps more so than other people in the
collective. Why?
G.L: Well, original music is a sign of
self-determination. So you’re going to be betting on yourself. You’re
going to be promoting your own ideas. You’re going to really depend upon
your own ideas instead of playing the music of others, and certainly
the kind of music that people were being forced to perform in various
ways for so-called survival. At one point the joke or at least the pun
was, “Well, what about the old standards?” Then someone would say,
“Well, whose standards are we talking about?”
They were talking about setting new standards and potentially taking
all the risks that this entails. It’s an assumption of responsibility.
In a way it’s like growing up. These were young people who wanted to
grow up, I think. You have to remember, these people were all in their
20s and 30s at the time. At the time of the AACM, Muhal is one of the
oldest people. But a lot of those people, Jarman and the others, were in
their 20s.
S.R: So they weren’t even going to touch, say, “I Got Rhythm” or any variation of “rhythm changes.”
G.L: Well, some people did that in their
professional lives as artists for hire. But the AACM was a composer’s
organization. People were there to compose their own music and they
could do whatever else they wanted in other places.
I think eventually the people who weren’t that interested in
composition, who weren’t that interested in personal modes of
expression, found less and less reason to be there. The others who were
found more and more reason to be there.
S.R: Do you also think this creating original music also goes hand in
hand with African-Americans trying to get their equal rights, to be
completely free in America?
G.L: If you don’t feel free to express yourself,
then you are definitely not free. In this sense, personal expression is
kind of a human right. No one could say that Charlie Parker wasn’t
expressing himself by playing “Out of Nowhere” or whatever. But you have
to remember that even there, they would take these old tunes and put
new melodies on them. They would change the music around, create new
harmonies or extend the harmonies that were already there. They were
already putting their stamp on the music. So they weren’t just accepting
it as received wisdom, as young people are told they must do today.
So this is a time when musical self-determination and political
self-determination were being conflated, and productively so, I think.
S.R: So would you consider the AACM to be a political organization in some way, especially in its inception?
G.L: Certainly a form of cultural politics, which
has a huge impact on the way we conceive ourselves and how we live our
lives. To place new cultural views before the public can be a political
act.
S.R: As a political organization, you would probably
obviously say it was pretty progressive in nature? It has even been
called radical at times. Would you call the AACM radical?
G.L: Well, it could be radical, but “radical” isn’t
always the next step beyond “progressive.” In the book I recount some
instances in which there are some significant dislocations in terms of
gender with specific AACM people, whose views in that area seemed
radically different, but really not very progressive, at least as the
women who experienced the issues saw things. Then as now, the connection
between gender and race was very fraught. There were groups of people,
devotees of a certain strain of black cultural nationalism, who felt
that women’s natural place was somehow behind their man. In a way it was
very much a reproduction of certain kinds of patriarchy in the white
community – that patriarchy that we now see in, I don’t know, the Tea
Party or something.
So in that sense you can’t say that there was this monolithic leftism
in the AACM. You’d have to say that the viewpoints were very diverse.
It’s hard to say there is a simplistic left position in which we can
place the organization.
S.R: Do you think that the gender issue had more to do with
other systems, say in Africa or in Islam, and those kinds of things
reinforced those gender issues?
G.L: I would say that there was a lot of personal
research into cultural systems in Africa. For example, a lot of those
early books were passed around as a kind of samizdat. You had books like Cheikh Anta Diop’s African Civilization – Myth or Reality? You had Chancellor Williams’ The Destruction of Black Civilization. You had the stuff that Neely Fuller was putting out. You had the Frances Cress Welsing color theories.
There was so much going on, so much stuff that you could read. People
were researching ancient Egypt. They were researching Islam, several
different strains of Islam. As people know, there was the Ahmadiyya
movement in the ’50s. But I think that a lot of the variations were kind
of home-grown in the community.
That’s very American, you know, to reassemble tradition to meet the
needs of any given community. Maybe it’s not exclusively American. There
are various syncretisms in the Caribbean or elsewhere. But it seems to
me the American variant of that has much more to do with an image of
what Africa might have been like or an image of what people wanted
Africa to be like.
This is how cultural change occurs. People re-read or misread the
so-called originals to create something new. I think this even goes on
in the Islamic countries, where we start to hear that a lot of the
so-called gender dynamics don’t seem to be supported by what we read in
the Koran, but would seem to be somehow connected with local conditions
or local interpretations of the Koran.
Not having that background, I couldn’t really comment further. But
one could certainly notice that people often interpreted histories to
meet their own personal, political, economic, and cultural needs[GL1] .
S.R: Did you ever think about changing your name to reflect your African ancestry?
G.L: No, I didn’t want to get involved in all that,
it never appealed to me. That was interesting because some people did
and some people didn’t. If you think about that whole name-changing
thing, lots of people would put an African or Arabic name in front of
their family name, because people wanted to have both. Maybe they didn’t
want to disrespect their families by changing their name, their family
name. You became a Muhal Richard Abrams or an Amina Claudine Myers, a
Hamid Drake or a Kelan Phil Cohran. So you had both things there.
S.R: The same thing was happening earlier too with Art Blakey.
G.L: What happened is that a lot of these names
became Africanized through their association with African-Americans. For
example, everyone named Washington is presumed to be African-American
in this country, except for G.L Washington. He’s the only one. The
others, you know, that’s an Africanized European name. So it seems to me
that a lot of that process was already going on. There were people who
felt they needed to go further.
But there is a whole section in the book that discusses the people
who used naming to effect a greater identification with Africa. One of
the interesting people in this regard was Ajaramu, the drummer, an early
AACM member, who actually changed his name several times. We found out
in fact that after he died the name he died under was not the name he
had lived under.
So at a certain point Ajaramu starts to think, “Well, people are
saying if you don’t change your name then people will think you are
European.” Then he goes on to conclude, “Well, you know, that may not be
so important in the long run, really. Maybe they’ll know you by what
you did rather than what your name was.”
S.R: Could you go over quickly the variety of reasons a musician might be inclined to change their name?
G.L: One reason might be to somehow connect with
Africa. Now the funny thing about it was that a lot of the people who
connected with Africa in this way never actually visited Africa. For
example, I don’t think Muhal has ever been to Africa, and it’s not even
clear that “Muhal” is either an African or an Arabic name. So in a way
the invention or construction of Africa becomes as important as what the
“Real Africa” is.
So naming might be a way of having one’s own Africa, to establish
some connection with Africa. But that didn’t mean that if you didn’t
change your name you didn’t want to be connected with Africa. After all,
even various African people seem to have their colonial names – Nelson
Mandela – things of that sort. So it’s all very complicated, I imagine,
on both sides of the Atlantic. People have multiple overlapping
identities.
S.R: Very interesting indeed. Now, another thing that is very
particular to Muhal Richard Abrams, and maybe particular to the AACM,
probably one of the biggest misconceptions of the AACM would probably be
that it is a jazz club. Like a Jazz Association. It’s devoted to jazz
and they are a band that plays jazz.
G.L: I don’t think there are any people involved in
the beginnings of the AACM whose primary formation was in anything other
than jazz, so that jazz is certainly the starting point. But jazz is a
contested image at this time, and what sometimes happens in the world of
jazz is that there is an emphasis on genre immobility, sort of like I
think what Michel de Certeau called peasant immobility, the idea that
nothing ever changes in these kinds of communities. People don’t leave
certain things. If they are born that way, it’s the way they stay all
their lives.
So it seemed to me that, had they wished to be named jazz, they could
have just called it the “Association for the Advancement of Jazz
Musicians.” So why didn’t they do that? Why did they make up this thing
called “Creative Musicians”?
Well, it was clearly to win some space for a new conception of
themselves. It wasn’t as simple as a denial of jazz, because people felt
that jazz was creative music, and after all it was our music. Our
people created it, so it’s ours and it’s creative–our creative music.
So you think, well, what does it mean to be a creative musician? It
doesn’t say you have to be allied with this or that genre. It mainly
means you have to be creative. So the open field, the possibility for
mobility seemed to animate the choice. So I wouldn’t say that the idea
of the AACM as a “jazz club” is a misconception. I would say it’s more
of a diminution. It’s an immobilizing trope for people who sought
freedom.
S.R: Muhal Richard Abrams hates to talk about the music, jazz music in categorical terms.
G.L: He doesn’t want to talk about any music in
categorical terms (laugh) He’s not the categorical type of individual.
People found that very liberating about him. But nobody likes
categories. There’s that wonderful quote that the historian Eric Porter
identified, where Duke Ellington goes to Dizzy Gillespie and says, or
Dizzy Gillespie remembers that Duke Ellington told him: “Dizzy, you
should’ve never let them call your music be-bop, because when they name
something, it becomes dated.”
Because the minute they did that, they – meaning whoever was in the
power position – they were taking power by means of discourse. It’s just
straight up Michel Foucault. So you can place a name on someone or
place someone in a genre or a space, and from that moment they are
stuck.
So you have to be a trickster to evade all that, again as a matter of survival.
S.R: But a lot of people don’t know that Muhal Richard Abrams
has also devoted a lot of time and attention to classical structures.
More people probably know him through his improvisation and more, shall I
say, “jazz” sounding compositions.
G.L: I don’t know. I think that depends on who
you’re talking to. I haven’t done any surveys, so I have no idea how
Muhal’s work is considered. I just look at how he looks at himself. He
seems to be looking at himself as a creative, multi-voiced artist. Once
you accept that, then you can go anywhere Muhal wants you to go and you
can go anywhere you want to go too.
I guess the other option is you can imagine a segment of the public
that believes anything and then you can go in that direction. But it
might be better, in encountering anyone’s music, just to use your own
ears. Asking people to use their own ears is once again a sign of asking
people to take up the symbol of self-determination that the music
itself presents. In other words, the music was born in an atmosphere of
self-determination. So it invites you to self-determine as well, and to
self-realize.
S.R: If I wanted to join the AACM, could I?
G.L: Probably not (laugh). That’s another part that
was very interesting in the book, as it happened. In the last part of
the book, where people are discussing the past, present and future of
the AACM in this virtual colloquy, I’m taking bits from the interviews
and staging them and saying, well here’s everyone who talked about this
topic.
They talked about race and they talked about the very difficult
incident in which the sole ‘white’ member of the AACM, who didn’t think
of himself as white at all, was ousted in the paroxysm of 1960s interest
in what it meant to be culturally black.
At the time the idea of having an all-black organization was very
difficult to digest. But in the wake of these kinds of organizations,
now we find that there are single so-called race or ethnicity
organizations of all kinds. So that seems to have receded as a concern.
It seems to be accepted now that sometimes it’s best to address issues
of race by somehow adopting strategies that foreground or privilege
notions of race. I think that was clear because of the perceived failure
of multicultural coalitions to achieve success.
The idea comes in the wake of Black Power also, as you can imagine.
If you read the text of Carmichael and Hamilton you start to see that
Carmichael is challenging white people, “Instead of wanting to be
members of ‘our organizations,’ go into your communities and agitate for
a while. Why don’t you do that?” Many people did.
That seemed to be something that seemed to militate against the kind
of naïve form of proto-multiculturalism that had been on offer, avant la lettre–there
was no such word as multiculturalism at the time. But multiracial
coalitions seemed to many not to be doing the job, while being easily
destabilized through appeals to white privilege. So you see that in the
writings of the leftist groups of the period, the SDS for example, who
adopt these points of view.
S.R: Does the AACM employ the One-Drop Rule when it comes to race?
G.L: I think that jazz itself employs a One-Drop
Rule–the idea that if one drop of what you do is jazz, then everything
you do is jazz. That only seems to apply to African-Americans. Everyone
else can be mobile, and jazz can be a part of the network. You can be a
jazz musician today. You can be a classical musician tomorrow. You can
be some other variant the next day.
I point out the difference between, let’s say, how an Anthony Braxton
is considered and how someone else is considered, the idea that you
could suddenly become that sort of protean individual. So I think that
what’s going to happen with the AACM is that some variant of it is going
to decide that the old rules don’t apply anymore. I have no idea when
that’s going to happen–probably around the time that other variants of
the One-Drop Rule also disappear. A lot of the power structures are
based on that, and around the time those disappear, people will feel
more comfortable about taking a less vigilant stance on these matters.
Right now, though, race has not gone away or disappeared as a factor.
It’s unfortunate, but that’s how it is.
S.R: People in the media are obviously willing to point out the One-Drop Rule in very subtle and disturbing ways.
G.L: Oh, I don’t know. I think the One-Drop Rule is
not as important as the No-Drop Rule as far as I see. That’s been the
dominant rule as long as I can remember. Let’s not have any
African-Americans. One drop? That’s already too much. It’s not that it’s
too little.
S.R: A big point of creating the AACM is to workshop, and
embedded in that language, means improvement, or an approach to
improving your work. Muhal Richard Abrams talks about personal growth
and people growing in the workshop environment.
But, he is extremely careful with putting any kind of value judgment
on the work itself. He is very sensitive to saying a piece of art is a
success or a failure. Can you break that down for me?
G.L: I’m not sure. It kind of reminds me of my dad
(laugh). That’s what he did. You learned not to say things were good or
bad around him. That was the moment for a philosophical discussion and
if you didn’t want to have a philosophical discussion, you just avoided
those terms.
S.R: Well, I’ve listened to a lot of Muhal’s records and
sometimes I don’t get it at all. I can’t relate to it. Were you ever in a
position where you are creating experimental music and you are like,
“No, I don’t really care for this very much. It was interesting that we
tried it. It was a nice experiment.” But experiments are not always a
success, right? At the end of the day you are searching for growth and
you are searching for improvement.
When I asked Muhal about it, he said didn’t look at it that way. He
said, “It’s like cooking an egg. You can cook an egg in a microwave. You
can cook an egg on a stove or you can cook an egg on the sidewalk under
the sun. They are all valid.” But if I had a follow-up, I would be
like, “But you really wouldn’t want to eat that egg if it was cooked on
the sidewalk, would you?”
G.L: I guess I take a little different viewpoint,
not speaking about eggs–but you see it all the time. My son has a book
called “Good Luck, Bad Luck.” OK, bad luck, he missed the plane. Good
luck, the plane crashed and he wasn’t killed with it, and so on.
So the lesson, even for kids, is that time and life are sort of
indeterminate, and rather than passing a momentary judgment, we could
live in a state of continuous awareness. If we can do that, then we can
see how much better it could be to learn from the total range of
experience. Once we dismiss some aspect of the experience, once we
commit the final judgment, then that aspect of experience is
inaccessible to us. That’s how I interpret his ideas. So if you don’t
understand or appreciate some piece of music, you just try again, and in
doing that you learn, about yourself at least.
You were never told in the AACM that your concept was not good. You
were always told that it was good. As an academic, I can tell you that
this seems totally alien to the notion of academic critique, where
someone would come to you and say, “Well, you have to be told the
‘truth’ about your work.”
I think Muhal felt deep down that most people already knew the truth
about their work and there was no need for him to say anything to them,
and that if he did, it might interfere with the learning process, which
they had to go through on their own, to come to their own terms about
what they were doing and then to learn what they could from their own
work.
The learning process seemed more important than a judgment that led
to the reification of a perspective. Instead, we say, “That was a nice
experiment. Great. It was wonderful.”
See, the thing is that he’s not just saying, or I’m not just saying,
that you want to avoid saying mean things about other people’s work. You
also want to avoid a categorical judgment. Once you decide that it’s
great then you have no further claim on it. You can’t learn anything
else from it. So your continuous awareness has been broken at that
point. It’s a mistake. You have to keep things fluid and mobile.
S.R: Can you talk about the pieces of music that immediately
come to mind for you that directly reflect historical incidents that
were happening during the time, perhaps like when John Coltrane died or
the Chicago Riots of 1968 or anything historically going on?
G.L: Boy, it’s funny because I’m not trained in that
way. I come from the post-Cage period. Anything goes with anything. To
find some musical essentialism, I just can’t do it, which is why I would
be a terrible film composer. I collaborated with Lev Manovich on “Soft
Cinema.” There were 400 video clips that were deployed randomly and the
music was deployed randomly. It looked fine to me.
S.R: But you do say that clearly the music that is being
played is not created in this vacuum. The black avant-garde musicians
are much more connected to what’s going on around them and that’s
reflected in their music.
G.L: No, I’m not saying that in the book. What I
guess I’m saying is that there were areas of experience with which the
white experimental avant-garde seemed unwilling to connect. But their
work certainly seemed reflective of their own experiences. That is
certainly what connected them.
Now, when it starts to become complicated is when you have a
multicultural experimental avant-garde, where everyone has to connect
with all kinds of experiences. That is closer to what we have today.
We’re not quite there, but it’s coming closer, at least in the U.S.,
which seems to be the place where these kinds of weird hybrids get
started.
But see, it’s sort of a funny thing. You have Charles Ives, a lot of
the American tradition is based on depicting things. Copland – even
though the piece wasn’t originally called “Appalachian Spring,” somehow
naming it that seemed to work. Somehow it seemed to be something that
made sense to them. But I haven’t been a big depicter of things. So I
guess I’m not sure I actually believe or even said that somehow one
could draw a direct analogy between the music and the situation of the
time.
Let me give you a simple example of how that fails. When John
Coltrane was being asked by critics if he was angry, there are two
answers you could give to that. One is, “Yes, the music expresses anger
because I’m really angry.”
That would have been a very bad answer because the first thing that
people want to know in that situation is “Well, why are you so angry?”
The tenor of the times would be, “You have no right to be angry–hasn’t
America been good to you?”
Of course, the answer is, “Well, not really. You just bombed a church
with four children in it. What are you talking about? That’s why I
wrote this piece called Alabama.”
So at a certain point Coltrane says, “Well no, I just want to
acquaint people with the many wonderful things there are to experience
in the universe,” which I think is true. But it is also a diversion
because people like him had every right to be angry.
Now the thing is that when some people decided that this was the
voice of anger and anguish and all of that, it didn’t seem to match up
with the experiences of the musicians, who weren’t particularly angry
when they were doing the music.
Those kinds of really simplistic tropes that match up the music with a
certain emotion or something have always been really difficult for me
to understand. Because what you really want is for music to be not
reflective or depictive but evocative. In other words, if it is stuck in
a certain period, then it stays in that period. But if it speaks to a
contemporary experience, then it seems to be something that doesn’t get
stuck.
But we do have to look at the historical conditions. We have to look
at the social conditions, the class conditions, the gender conditions,
the racial mixtures and everything. Even then it becomes very unclear. I
haven’t been able to draw that one-to-one correspondence.
So yeah, it’s very difficult for me. I don’t think I can do it.
S.R: What about more explicit ways that some artists in the
AACM used, like visual iconography, like dressing up in African wardrobe
like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and using face paint and things like
that?
G.L: Jarman talked about that in their book, their
big Art Ensemble book. He talked about the iconography and what it
represented. Lester Bowie was supposed to represent the experimentalist
impulse. Roscoe Mitchell was supposed to represent the street hipster;
generally you didn’t see him with face paint. Jarman was the pan-Asian
person. Malachi (Favors) was supposed to represent the Egyptian
mysteries and (Famoudou Don) Moye was supposed to represent a
pan-African sensibility.
So what does all that add up to? Well, five different evocations of
what it meant to be an African-American, and the clear implication was
that there were more besides those. What they are depicting is a kind of
fluidity and mobility of identity. They are not depicting “here’s what
it means to be African,” unless they are saying that being African is as
mobile as anything else. Because if it isn’t, then change can’t happen.
S.R: We haven’t talked about it and we should just because it’s important: Great Black Music.
G.L: Great Black Music was a very contested slogan.
When it came out certain people didn’t like it. Muhal didn’t like it,
for example. Other people thought it was very appropriate. The
definition and the commentary that I found in interviews by people like
Bowie and others indicated that it was by no means limited to people who
were black.
In other words, Stan Kenton could be making Great Black Music or La
Monte Young could be making Great Black Music. It all depended upon what
you were doing musically. It didn’t depend on what your ethnicity was
or what your race was or anything like that.
At the time there was a notion that the idea of Great Black Music had
to be racist because you were admitting only a certain ethnicity or a
certain race. The analogy was, well, what about “great other kind of
music,” like some other ethnicity or some other race? What about “great
that kind of music”?
Their answer would be “Go right ahead and do it.” I think Roscoe
Mitchell said it best. They asked him why he made up the term Great
Black Music. He said, “Well, because nobody was calling the music
great,” which was a great answer. Back then, if you were going to go to
“great performances” that meant going to Symphony Hall or somewhere.
That didn’t mean going to hear some African Americans, doing creative
music or any other kind of music.
So for them to reframe themselves as great – they were already black,
so renaming themselves as “Great Black” meant that they could suddenly
tap into another set of associations. They were great because they came
from this legendary tradition of great musicians.
You see, in a way it was just as conservative a notion of
promulgating a canon of greatness as what we found later in the ’80s. In
fact, there are sociologists like Herman Gray, who make exactly that
point, that what happened in the ’80s with the Jazz at Lincoln Center
people and this unitary canon of greatness had already been anticipated
by what these other people were doing.
In fact, they actually had the canon in common, except for the part
about stretching back to Africa. I don’t think the ’80s jazz people were
into that as much. But no one, as far as I know, regardless of whether
they liked the term Great Black Music or not, seriously questioned the
idea that this music had roots in Africa. It seemed really obvious
because the people had roots in Africa. So the music that came out of it
was presumed to have those roots.
Let me go a little bit further with this. This is in the center of what we might want to think about.
Everyone had their own way of thinking about that. Some people did it
through depiction in the manner of the Art Ensemble. They would have
drums going and they would adopt certain rhythms or certain ways of
doing things that would be evocative of Africa or pay homage to Africa
or draw sustenance from African sonic tropes. That was one way to do it.
Another way to do it would be more like what I do in computer music,
which is having things be very multiple. You embody rather than depict. I
think that at the time of people like Jeff Donaldson and the AfriCOBRA
art movement, you had lots of colors in avant-garde African American
art. They were responding to these countries in Africa where everybody
would have these very vibrant colors. There was none of this washed out
color field stuff. Everybody was bright and vibrant.
We are getting closer to the sense of what happens here – and this is
not limited to the AACM, but it’s right across the board – well not
starting with Louis Armstrong, but having that as being an important
touchstone–a very vibrant, non-classical, open, sharp, bright trumpet
sound.
So with the saxophonists Fred Anderson or Roscoe Mitchell, the sound
was on the verge of breaking up. It’s got all these overtones. It’s very
bright. It’s very intense. So that bright, intense multiple sound ideal
was something that is characteristic of the period. People linked that,
at the time, synaesthetically, with the colors that they expected to
find in Africa, and Africa being this huge construction.
I think that when people look for connections with Africa, they are
expressing continuity. But then they reserve the right to have rupture,
which is also very important. That’s how you get revolutions and things
like that.
S.R: Talk to me about this idea of silence and silences, creating silences. What do you mean by that?
G.L: It seemed to me the major thing that was
important about jazz was that it was an outgrowth of a condition of
silence. That is to say the thing that I found remarkable about slavery
was the degree to which people were enforcing silence. People were
afraid of slave music. They didn’t know what it represented. They wanted
those slaves to be quiet.
You had the laws against making drums or drumming or whatever – you
didn’t want that. Then of course, the silence of terror, where you
didn’t know what was going to happen to you or your family, where really
speaking out could be a death sentence. Even acting out, expression
itself, could be easily misinterpreted.
So the best thing to do was to be as quiet as possible or to go
along. Now, when all that starts to end, at least for a brief period, or
even while it was going on, ring shouts become a form of slavery
participation performance, or post slavery participation performance, in
which everyone gets their opportunity to speak.
Everyone is moving back and forth in a circle, and someone does some
incredible thing, some star turn, and then they go back to the circle.
The next person goes out and does something else. Whether they are
trying to top each other, whether it’s competition or cooperation or
whatever, the point is people are getting a chance to speak.
So the idea that people should speak and that they have something
personal to say, unique to say, gets retained in African American music.
I think that accounts for its power really, the fact that it survived
things like the McCarthy Period. Periodically, silence becomes the order
of the day. The culture survived many years of terror in the southern
United States and also in the north with all the race riots. It survived
all those things basically through a reasserting and insisting on
speaking.
While it seems important in another branch of the avant-garde to have
conceptual silences, that is three- or four-minute voluntary silences,
it’s not something that a post-slavery person would choose, to feel that
a voluntary silence would be evocative of their situation, because they
had already had the involuntary silence. They might be much more likely
to want to speak out.
S.R: Is there a piece of music where the use of silence is
deafening? The silence is used in such a way that makes a poignant
statement, by an AACM composer?
G.L: Leo Smith and Roscoe Mitchell became associated
with very quiet spaces, things that presaged the arrival of the
so-called reductionist improvisers. They would have long stretches where
no one would apparently be doing anything. There would be these long
silences with groups like the Leo Smith-Anthony Braxton-Leroy Jenkins
Trio.
I remember Leo telling me that at the beginning they did these pieces
in all kinds of space, including traditional jazz clubs. They would do
these silent pieces, and at some point somebody just said, “Play
something or get off the stage!”
Now that’s a voluntary silence that’s deafening, if you want to look
at it that way. The person just couldn’t take it. What did it mean to
engage in that kind of supposed self-abnegation? Or is it that we are
asking people to listen to their own inner voices and juxtapose that,
blend that with the noises they hear all around?
Of course there is a blending with the so-called ultimate silence piece, which is 4’33,” which shows you once again that –
S.R: The John Cage piece?
G.L: Yeah. 4’33” gets syncretized with the
African-American experience. You’ve got these very interesting hybrids
that you wouldn’t get from either one alone.
S.R: Talk to me about Chicago. Tell me about the segregation
of the North and South side and just the feeling. Can you paint a
picture?
G.L: Of course I can’t paint the same picture that the people who lived through the worst parts of it could do.
The AACM is a product of the Great Migration, really one of the
largest, if not the largest internal migrations in the history of the
US, if not the world. The Great Migration lasted from about 1915 to,
let’s say, the late 1960s. African-Americans left the rural South in
large numbers to migrate to Northern, urban spaces – Harlem, Chicago,
Cleveland, Detroit, not so much to the West, but mainly to the Midwest
and East. Chicago got the nod because of the railroads and, and then you
have the New Orleans-to-Chicago route that jazz supposedly followed,
and so on. But when people got to Chicago, they found that it wasn’t
like the Chicago Defender said, you know, this land of milk and honey.
Sure you found a job maybe, but you lived in often very squalid
conditions. There were lots of fires. There was endemic segregation. It
was an incredibly, incredibly crowded tiny space in which the
African-Americans were basically being herded like cattle. People were
living in one-bedroom apartments with five or six people in them. There
was a lack of amenities, running water, heat, all these kinds of things –
coal-fired stoves in the middle of the room. It was ridiculous.
So this is the environment of many of the AACM people, the earliest
generation. This is what they grew up in. It’s not how I grew up. But it
was close to how I grew up. I was just a few years removed from that
because I do remember the coal stove.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, the South Side of Chicago
was one of those places where, except for Hyde Park, you really didn’t
see very many white people, or anybody else except for blacks
everywhere. In spite of that it was a very mobile space. When you have
that many people crammed together in one space and they all know each
other very well, you get a community that’s in some ways very insular,
in some ways very open and outward looking. A crucible.
The 60s were a period in which the intensification of a kind of
endemic depression of the area increased markedly. The classic novel on
that is The Spook Who Sat By the Door, which is an amazing book by Sam Greenlee.
S.R: Do you think the AACM – Great Black Music – was
nationalistic? Do you think because Chicago was so fiercely segregated
and probably rougher than other urban areas around the United States —
did that somehow condition the AACM in a particular way?
G.L: I don’t see the AACM as terribly nationalistic,
Great Black Music notwithstanding, because as I said, a lot of people
didn’t accept that. People were free to call their music whatever they
liked. Just as long as you don’t call my music Great Black Music, you
can call your music whatever you like.
So no, I don’t see the AACM as an artifact of that sort of very
narrow brand of black cultural nationalism, even though cultural
nationalism in the more open sense was a strong influence. But I could
certainly see that the AACM is an obvious product of the South Side of
Chicago because it responded to the conditions of extreme segregation,
or what the urban studies people called hyper-segregation.
It was a community of African-Americans who were thrown upon their
own resources to create, living in a very circumscribed environment and
looking for ways out of that circumscribed environment. Of course what
happens is, by the time 1969 rolls around, a lot of them – well, not a
lot of them, just a few – leave.
But they don’t go to New York. This isn’t the standard sort of
Chicago-to-New York jazz narrative. Instead, they do something kind of
unprecedented for the black urban class. They go to Paris.
Now the black middle class had been going there and becoming
expatriates for quite a while, but now you had the working class people –
Frank Wright, people like this. That was a totally different
environment–the boys who had grown up in the cut-and-shoot stuff. They
went to Paris and transformed their lives there.
But we were talking really, I guess about Chicago.
There were very nationalist organizations in Chicago. After Phil Cohran left the AACM, he started the Affro-Arts Theater and[GL2]
he started his own workshops. They brought in wonderful people. They
brought in Amiri Baraka, who was already lionized in almost all segments
of the black community. They brought in the then-named Stokely
Carmichael. They connected things up with – Phil was always very
interested in the “classical” aspects of African American tradition,
particularly gospel music. So he had people doing that.
It was a staging ground for The Pharaohs and for the people who would
later form the band Earth Wind & Fire. It all came out of that era
in Chicago, and crossed over with the AACM people in a lot of different
respects.
Obviously the Nation of Islam, also Chicago-based, was involved in
that. You had so many organizations – OBAC – the Organization of Black
American Culture, the artists who created the Wall of Respect street
mural. Later you had the Kuumba Dance Workshop–all these cultural groups
dedicated to various kinds of black cultural nationalism or pan-African
cultural nationalism.
I’d say the AACM was one of those. But I would also say that there
was always a part of it that resisted anyone who came with a dogma.
People didn’t buy it. There was always somebody there to ask a question
or to say, “Well, I don’t know if I believe that,” or to avoid it or
something like that. People weren’t true believers, except in the power
of their own music, and that was sometimes very difficult.
We’ve mainly been talking about the first generation of the AACM, but
the AACM lasted. It’s been going on for 46 years. There are whole
generations of AACM people who came later who have a rather different
set of viewpoints.. The AACM musicians of the 80s and 90s in Chicago
totally embraced the concept of Great Black Music.
They took that slogan as a legacy for themselves and some were
surprised to find, I think, when they read the book, that it wasn’t
considered universal, wasn’t universally admired.
But that was the purpose of the book, to speak across the generations.
Virtually every consideration of George Lewis,
an imposing performer and scholar now serving as a professor and the
vice chairman of the music department at Columbia University, will
invoke the term trombonist-composer. If you’ve encountered Mr. Lewis’s
playing, stressing instrumental prowess seems natural; if you haven’t,
dip into an album like Anthony Braxton’s “Quartet (Dortmund) 1976,” and you will hear instantly why Mr. Lewis is revered among avant-garde jazz aficionados.
But
Mr. Lewis has long been a fascinating compositional strategist as well.
In the early 1970s he used graphic scores to shape the efforts of
improvisers; since the ’80s he has pursued a quest to teach computers
how to improvise in a way that seems genuinely intuitive. In recent
decades Mr. Lewis’s artistry as a composer has come to the fore
decisively, a development reflected in a Composer Portraits concert
presented by the Miller Theater at Columbia on Saturday evening.
Performers putting into
practice “Artificial Life 2007,” George Lewis's set of guidelines for
communal improvisation, at the Composer Portraits concert on Saturday
night at the Miller Theater.Credit
Erin Baiano for The New York Times
The interpreters were ideally fit for the task. Steven Schick, a virtuosic percussionist and an increasingly prominent conductor,
worked extensively with Mr. Lewis when they were faculty colleagues at
the University of California, San Diego. Working with Mr. Schick here
was the International Contemporary Ensemble, a versatile, insatiably curious crew for whom improvisation is a dietary staple.
Anyone
who came in search of jazzy classics might have been disappointed. But
what was on offer was considerably more rare, rich and provocative:
contemporary-classical concert music that reflected, organically and
without compromise, black American musical, literary and cultural
perspectives.
You
heard it instantly in “North Star Boogaloo,” a sly, lively conflation
of slave-era lore and basketball heroism that Mr. Lewis wrote for Mr.
Schick in 1996. The piece calls for a percussionist to rumble, jitter
and snap in loose-limbed coordination with a recorded track that mixes
fractured hip-hop beats, a recitation by the poet Quincy Troupe and
sound bites of hoop stars like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley.
Steven Schick in George Lewis's “North Star Boogaloo.”Credit
Erin Baiano for The New York Times
Mr. Schick has written frankly
about how a white musician might interact with those elements
persuasively. Here, elastic phrasing and stick play mindful of jazz
greats like Max Roach and Roy Haynes did the convincing.
Mr.
Troupe performed in person in “Collage” (1995), bobbing and weaving
through verses in which he evoked Mr. Jordan’s flights alongside those
of Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis. Behind Mr. Troupe (and at times briefly
obscuring him), the music flowed in a riot of moods and styles,
including a jazzy slow-drag initiated with bassoon. Mr. Lewis’s keen ear
for fascinating timbres was also evident in “Ikons,” a 2010 octet in
which huffy quarter-tone fanfares framed a Dalíesque dreamscape of
queasy growls and airy flutters.
Following
a lively onstage interview the program’s second half showed the
extremes of Mr. Lewis’s style. “Artificial Life 2007,” a two-page guide
meant to facilitate communal activity among improvisers, elicited
fitful, fascinating volleys of activity and color and proved that open
ears, sharp reflexes and courage are among the ensemble’s chief assets.
Equally vibrant but more rigorously scripted, the newly composed “Will to Adorn” evoked Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
with a lavish charm bracelet of exuberant shades and explosive
gestures. Absorbing in scope and expressive in detail, the piece offered
compelling evidence of Mr. Lewis’s prodigious imagination and
persuasive skill.
A version of this review appears in print on November 14, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Sharing Hoop Dreams of a Compositional Strategist. Order Reprints|Today's Paper
THE MUSIC OF GEORGE LEWIS: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. LEWIS:
George E. Lewis is
the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University.
The recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, a 1999 Alpert Award in the
Arts, a 2011 United States Artists Walker Fellowship, and fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with
Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with
Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians (AACM) since 1971,
Lewis's work in electronic and computer music, computer-based
multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and
improvisative forms is documented on more than 140 recordings. His work
has been presented by the American Composers Orchestra, International
Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, BBC Scottish Symphony
Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Ensemble Either/Or, London
Philharmonia Orchestra, Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble
Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, Turning Point Ensemble, Ensemble Erik Satie,
Orkestra Futura, Eco Ensemble, Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, and
others, with commissions from the San Francisco Contemporary Music
Players, 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, OPUS (Paris), IRCAM,
Harvestworks, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Glasgow Improvisers
Orchestra, and others.
Most recently, Lewis has served as Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of
Music, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Fromm Composer in
Residence, American Academy in Rome; Resident Scholar, Center for
Disciplinary Innovation, Franke Institute for the Humanities, University
of Chicago; and CAC Fitt Artist In Residence, Brown University. Lewis
has been honored with the 2012 SEAMUS Award from the Society for
Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and his widely acclaimed
book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
(University of Chicago Press, 2008) is a recipient of the American Book
Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American
Culture Award. Lewis is the co-editor of the forthcoming two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. Forthcoming projects include Afterword,
an opera commissioned by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the
University of Chicago, to be premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago in Fall 2015.
Memex (2014), for symphonic orchestra
Fully notated work for orchestra, premiered by the BBC Scottish
Symphony Orchestra, City Halls, Glasgow, February 22, 2014.
The MEMEX device, the thought experiment by Vannevar Bush, was the
inspiration for this piece. A “memex” was to be a mechanized device able
to become "an intimate supplement to associative memory." My
composition deploys associative discourse via “behavior sets,” complexes
of elements that act in particular ways, exchange structures and
recombine with other sets, and recur in new forms and guises.
Premiered by Ensemble Dal Niente, October 18, 2013, Bowling Green
New Music Festival, Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Both the
title and the content of Assemblage refer to a type of visual artmaking
that recombines and recontextualizes collections of natural and
human-made objects. Artists such as Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, John
Outterbridge, and David Hammons, adopted and extended the assemblage
process, recycling and reframing both the quotidian urban detritus of
modern civilization.
Bill Smith : imagine the sound Jazz blogs by Bill Smith
Bill Smith was born in Bristol, England on May 12th, 1938 and emigrated to Canada in 1963. As a young man he played drums and trumpet casually in England. He now plays E-flat & C soprano saxophones and drums and is a photographer, writer and film producer. From 1963 until 2001 he was the art director/editor of Coda Magazine. He has performed and recorded with numerous players among them David Prentice, David Lee, Michael Snow, Leo Smith, Joe McPhee, Evan Parker, Wolfgang Fuchs, Phil Minton, Roger Turner, John Tchicai, Vinny Golia. His many recordings are all in the analog world, two of which (with Joe McPhee - Visitation & with Leo Smith - Rastafari) are soon to be reissued on CD by Boxholder. A CD of duets with guitarist Tony Wilson (Learning New Tricks) has been released. Since 1989 he has lived on Hornby Island.
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GEORGE LEWIS Cecil Taylor Anthony Braxton Interview 1973 PAUL BLEY KENNY WHEELER - Windmill Tilter On the Road Again DEREK BAILEY (1930 - 2005) Anthony Braxton & Leo Records DAVE HOLLAND - Interviews - 1973 & 1989 20th Vancouver International Jazz Festival Archives
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This interview was done during my November 1975 visit to Toronto to perform a solo trombone concert, a medium that, as it happens, I later renounced forever. On previous visits to the city I got to know such innovative Canadian artists as Victor Coleman, and people who later became close associates in Vancouver, such as Eric “Doctor Brute” Metcalfe who was involved with the campaign to elect “Mr. Peanut” (alias Vincent Trasov) mayor of Vancouver. My hometown of Chicago was still being ruled by Richard I, so the possibility of a little cross-cultural transference of consciousness seemed deliciously inviting, even if, as the “colourful” Chicago pol Mathias “Paddy” Bauler had already famously declared, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”
Bill’s mid-1970s Coda interviews allowed free rein to musicians to say whatever they liked, for as long as they wanted. This interview ran to over 14,000 words, about the length of the best-known extended format of the period, the Playboy interview. Part of the reason why the Coda interviews ran so long, I suspect, is that for the most part and for whatever reason, most musicians operating in jazz-identified networks (and I include improvised music practitioners in this, all demurrals and exceptions admitted) were not publishing their own written work – not even their scores. Thus, the Blindfold Test, the interview, and the record and CD liner note became prime opportunities for the dissemination of musicians’ textual expressions.
I imagine that for many readers, part of the interest in the interview format lay in the encounter with an ostensibly spontaneous expression by the subject (always central to the image of jazz), now transposed to the written page, where readers are implicitly invited to compare the two registers of spontaneity. As with music, however, apparently spontaneous improvised dialogues actually undergo multiple mediations – of desire and intention, personal and social history, time, space, memory, diverse methodologies, and power relations. Certainly Joseph Jarman, who counselled me early on about developing “interview technique,” understood this well.
Perhaps this was why Adorno dismissed the products of jazz as “not really improvised,” and I have lately found it rather odd that critics of his decidedly dour view of that music (myself included) have concentrated on (or explained away) the philosopher’s lack of affinity and understanding for jazz, while failing to interrogate the larger issue of Adorno’s notion of improvisation, with the inchoate notion of pure spontaneity that lay at its root. But I’m sure that such a keen analyst of the culture industry could not have seen jazz as the only purveyor of ersatz spontaneity. The practice of electronic punditry had come into its own in his final years, and by the time this Coda interview was published, live television entertainment was fading as a medium, made redundant by the greater control over message offered by recording and editing. Imagine a modern late-night talk show taking the time to explain and perform meditative brainwave music, as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and David Rosenboom did on a 1972 Mike Douglas show that you can search out on YouTube if you like. For today’s media monopolies, there is no reason at all to allow potentially inconvenient and uncontrolled expression to threaten their fraught stewardship of the public airwaves.
Twenty years after this interview, I published “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” in Black Music Research Journal – perhaps the first scholarly article to critique John Cage’s published views on improvisation, sociality and African American musical culture, and later reprinted in Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble’s The Other Side of Nowhere. The afterword I wrote for that book took up the editors’ implicit suggestion that a diachronic understanding of both Cage’s work and my critique would allow for change, development, and even progress, a notion still active at the personal level, if not on grander historical stages. Thus, a historian picking through the artifacts of Cage’s life would find contradictory viewpoints emerging from – well, not the same source, since not even Cage could step into the same river twice.
Much later in my career, I discovered that I had been labouring under a certain naïveté with regard to interviews. In fact, interviews in other areas of the art and academic worlds were routinely edited with the consent of the interviewers. In the jazz sector of my career network, I had never heard of such a thing, and I began to realize that other sectors of the cultural and historical landscape took a very different view of the function of the interview as historical document; precision of expression was believed to trump the pleasures of spontaneity and display.
Although Bill kindly invited me to retroactively edit this version of the interview, I suggested instead that I write this foreword, borrowing Daniel and Ajay’s riff. After all, the original interview is still around in libraries and archives, and discrepancies between the two versions of the historical record rightly invite suspicion. Thus, as with small, specific moments in the musical products of my life, I find myself cringing at some of the more callow statements in this somewhat rambling dialogue. Perhaps Bill’s cover photo for “The George Lewis Solo Trombone Record,” taken around the time of the interview in the home he shared with Chloe, his wife of those years, and their two young daughters, now with children of their own, could serve as a visual companion for this public coming-of-age narrative, guided by a sympathetic, cosmopolitan writer and photographer of a slightly older generation, who as it happens, was just coming into his own as a creative musician as well. In this context, the photo seems to tell us that “the child is father to the man,” that sort of thing.
What we encounter in this interview is someone who was learning the pleasures of the grain of the voice, a phenomenon that intrigued both Roland Barthes and, considerably earlier, Dale Carnegie, who brought the phenomenology of the sounding voice to the business world with his famous book, How To Win Friends and Influence People, which my father obliged me to read while I was still in lower school. At the same time, I hear the voice of someone who was trying to understand the epistemological dynamics of socioprofessional networks and the nature of improvisation as a form of composition, and looking to throw off readymades: “If you find out that in terms of the music that you want to play, Harry Partch suits your thing more than any trombone player you’ve heard, go with that.”
In the end, I was pleased to rediscover at least one other area of remarkable consistency between then and now—the ardent assertion of mobility of method and cultural reference, an artifact of first-generation AACM thinking emerging in a second generation. Or, to put it more succinctly, paraphrasing The Prisoner: “I am not a genre; I am a person.”
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The first part of this “slightly cleaned-up” interview was done on the evening of November 21, 1976, after the taping of George Lewis’ first solo album.
Bill Smith: I don’t think I ever heard a “jazz” trombone player write a piece of music like “Piece For Three Trombones”. How does that kind of concept arrive in somebody who’s basically involved in the jazz tradition; who is supposed to be an improviser; who writes a music that is very formal?
George Lewis: I don’t think there’s any such thing as a “jazz” trombone player. Now let me qualify that! What I mean to say is that I’m not considering myself to be a trombone player, or a jazz trombone player, any of those things. I’m involved in music right now, so being involved in music right now, immediate music, for me that means using the trombone as something that’s getting my thoughts out – an instrument or vehicle for the realization of what I’m thinking. And when I’m thinking I’m thinking – in this case – trombonically if you will; now there’s a nice word. So that means that whatever I’m doing is coming out in terms of the trombone. In terms of what I’m playing, in terms of writing a piece for three trombones or whatever, it’s like a trombonic thought, but at the same time it’s not like I want to say, “Well this is another one in the tradition of trombones”, or “This is one in a long line of pieces that are geared to that”. It is that, but it’s something else, too. Do you see what I mean?
Bill: You deal with your instrument in an historical perspective? You didn’t suddenly hear a trombone player who made you freak out?
George: No, no I never did. The thing is, I didn’t suddenly start playing trombone in response to an idea, like hearing a bunch of guys on the radio playing trombone and saying “oh wow, I want to play like this guy”. I started playing for completely different reasons. It was to help my social adjustment. That’s what my parents figured. That a nine year old kid, changing from the school I was going to, which I guess would be classified as a ghetto type of school, in Chicago, and moving to the University of Chicago laboratory school, which is another trip; it was a mostly white school, differences in the socioeconomic background of the people who were going. Like, changing from a situation where most of the kids don’t have any dough to a situation where most of the kids do.
Bill: The trombone was like a therapy?
George: I think that’s what they thought at the time, that if I got involved in a band that would be a bona fide school activity that I could get into that might hasten my interest in assimilation into the community at large, which was the dominant theme then. To assimilate you as much as possible into the scene, even though you’re black. So one of the ways to do that was to have everybody in the band, or in some sort of activity, so my parents told me I ought to play an instrument. I said well, I thought that was a pretty decent idea, but I didn’t have any idea what instrument I wanted to play. I was nine years old – I liked music, but had never considered playing it.
This is at the “why I play the trombone “ stage… it was just a little social adjustment, and seeing the trombone there out of all the instruments that I went to see. I bought the trombone the same way I buy everything else – impulse, and it was the biggest one, and I guess I figured that if you were playing the biggest one you became the most well-adjusted, which is actually the reverse of the truth. The flute players and guitar players got considerably more press time than trombone players. Trombone players were like the lowest of the low. Trombone players and German students, and I was both. There were three trombone players in the entire school, one of whom dropped out in the third week. There were twelve German students. Out of all the students in the school, twelve of them took German, it was like a little elite club…
Bill: It’s a perfect German instrument, like “Oom-pah! Oom-pah!”
George: Right. You say, “Ynnaaarp, ynnaaarp” and then you try to do it, the guy gave me one and said, “Okay now, what are you going to do when you play this?” So I blew and blew and blew and nothing happened. “What’s this? Is it broken? “ He said, “No, you have to buzz”. So he showed me all this buzzing. And I became a master buzzer, but I never practised for years and years and years, until I started thinking I wanted to play jazz. At that point I said, “Wow, I’m going to be a jazz musician.” I was about eleven or twelve. I wasn’t going to be a jazz musician, I was just going to start playing and see what happened. I wanted to improvise because you get to stand out in front and do your own thing, you didn’t have to read a chart and sit in the back.
Bill: Did your band play show tunes?
George: No, mostly we played a lot of march crap. That was the band, that was the concert band. Now the orchestra, naturally, played Prokofief, and Beethoven, whoever else was on the scene at the time. I was in that too, because with only three trombone players, they had to stretch them through the whole music program. Of these three players the top cat was Ray Anderson, who plays in New York. This cat can really play, he’s pretty bad. He has always smoked me. From the very first, this cat took hold, took charge, learned how to read music very well, really got together, and by the time we were in high school, this cat was so far ahead of me I was thinking of quitting. He was just amazing. I’d sit up there and listen to him pop these high “C”s and “D”s, you know, for a kid…
He’s got a very original style on the trombone. And a lot of my stuff comes from things that he’s shown me to check out, in terms of just thinking about well, what are you going to do on the trombone? And knowing that some of the things were possible that I was thinking about, or hearing some guy and saying, if this is possible how come I can’t do it, or how come I’m not doing it?
Bill: Did you discover at some point that you were a trombone player?
George: Yes, at the twelve-year old stage. I had a horrible embouchure, my embouchure was absurd, it wasn’t allowing me to get out of the middle register. I was always playing second trombone. By then, they had added a jazz band, and a junior jazz band. There was a lot of jazz in this school, the University of Chicago school. They had Frank Tiro there. Frank is now doing analyses of Bird. He played alto. I never made the connection until years later. I knew he played alto, but I never knew he was into Bird as much as he was. So now I’m reading in music journals about this guy, he’s analysing Bird and so on. And he was the guy who gave me my first lessons on the trombone. I didn’t know he was into jazz, he never said anything about it. I guess he sort of kept it out of the way, but when it came time to form a jazz band, he was right there and he dealt it and got the band together, the band won prizes at these suburban jazz contests and all this sort of thing. It was a very white scene at the lab school, but it was the only school that I could see that had a jazz contest at the time.
This was way past the days of Captain Dyett, the guy who’s responsible for all those players like Johnny Griffin, John Gilmore. Roscoe was talking about this cat, but I don’t really know about it, so I can’t really talk about it except to say that he was a teacher in the Chicago public school system who taught a lot of guys who are now very well-known Chicago cats. I get the feeling he was a very strict disciplinarian about playing. He’d give you the right horn, Von Freeman talks about this cat a lot. He would force you to get into your stuff. I’ve heard stories where he’s chased the saxophones, chased the whole trumpet section out of the room for playing a part wrong, threatened them with all kinds of stuff and got cats together on their horn. Henry Threadgill studied with him, a lot of the Chicago cats. He taught at DuSable High School.
DuSable. Named after the black man who founded Chicago but never gets any credit. He was a trading-type cat, he’d be black by our contemporary definition of it. Or some sort of mixed cat, but anyway he was the first guy to establish some kind of trading thing in Chicago, long before any of these cats like John Kinsey. I’m not a history buff, but he was the first cat. And they’ve never really acknowledged that. They have a “DuSable Day” every year, and a school named after him, and a little plaza that they just did three years ago, dedicated to him, but it’s a very tardy recognition of this guy’s role in forming Chicago.
You’ve got plenty of guys coming out of that school, starting in the fifties. People even got to the point where it’s like “The DuSable Gang” or something. But we weren’t involved in any of that at the lab school, it was a different set of circumstances, and they were involved in this suburban white scene. It was like a city school, with private school leagues, a very closed sort of scene. A prep school, most of the kids who went there were children of University of Chicago professors.
Bill: Is there some point around here where you start realizing that you have some inclination towards your instrument and the music that you’re playing? A special kind of interest in the instrument?
George: I’ve always had a special interest in trombone playing. Really. The thing is, there’s a difference between that and knowing “I want to play music” and not “I want to be a nuclear physicist” or whatever.
Bill: I doubt that when you’re ten years old that you have the capacity to realize that that’s going to be some kind of lifelong occupation. But at some point you must realize that. Do you remember some kind of realization of that? When it started becoming more important than other things?
George: I don’t think that really happened until college, which is way up the road, before that it was a totally different scene.
Bill: Did you go to college as a music student?
George: No, as a philosophy student. The first thing I did was decide to be a political scientist. I had a big plan to study political science, then I’d go on to law school, and then make some money, or something like that. My first year in school they had a big student strike, with thousands of people running through the streets demonstrating for various things like “Free Bobby Seal”. So I gave up trying to be a lawyer, that got to be a drag.
At that point, my trombone broke. I had the same horn for ten years. These things have great significance, they seem rather sentimental, but it’s weird. This thing broke, the slide fell off. After ten years the slide had finally fallen off, I said “I don’t have to play trombone any more, I’m not going to, I’m going to bag this shit, I’m going to stop being a musician, this is absurd, I’m practising in my room everyday for nothing, there’s nothing coming out of this, everyone hates jazz here…” – which they did, everyone hated it. This was at Yale. People would completely downgrade what I was doing. The music school in general has never been a big fan of improvised music.
Bill: Why is everybody afraid of improvised music?
George: I just figured that these guys, first of all they’re not able to improvise, secondly I don’t think they’re afraid but they just have a big interest in keeping it out because they’re not doing it. If they were doing it on a wider scale they would start introducing it.
Bill: If they were doing it, it would be cool; right?
George: No if they were doing it they’d be cool! We’d still be out of it. The thing is that they’re not doing it on any scale, so if they say, “okay your stuff is horrible and our stuff is what’s happening right now”, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter so much as improvised music, it’s just the form of music that they have going is composed music primarily and the form of music that we have going is improvised music.
During our last years at school it became in to attend our concerts. People who were in the know, they didn’t attend rock concerts, they listened to our stuff. Guys would come up and say, “Well, I’ve really been listening to your music lately and I think it’s far better than this rock stuff”. And we’d appreciate that, because it was nice to be finally recognized, but at the same time we’d get a lot of people who were being very in, then it got to be a drag too, because it wasn’t like you were playing for an audience, it was like you were playing for contemporaries, and people you had in classes and stuff, so it got to be on a very personal level and it got to be sort of out there. See, there’s a certain impersonality about audiences and musicians, which serves as a dramatic focus for the performance or the concert. A lot of the time, you don’t know the person that’s up there performing. Like personally know them. I don’t think most people do, so they can’t approach the music in the same way. And it’s better that you can’t, because it’s not part of that zone to do that.
Bill: You don’t feel the audience’s role is subsidiary, the audience is part of the performance, isn’t it?
George: Absolutely. But the role is dynamic, it’s not a static thing. You can make an analytical proposition and say, “Okay, the audience is part of the performance”, fine. But that’s not talking about the dynamics of the relationship between the audience and the performer, which is what I’m trying to get to. If you don’t know the performer and the performer doesn’t know you, you ‘re not going to make the same sort of assumptions about your responses to the music and how they fit into the total picture as you would if you knew the person. People respond to the music in so many different ways – they start making all sorts of inferences about the musicians that are playing, about their psyches, their backgrounds, their preferences of whatever kinds. All these inferences start happening along with the music a lot of times. Sometimes people will come up and tell you what they got out of it and that will be the form that they’ll use to tell you, an analysis of you.
Bill: But sometimes it’s not what you are at all. Their reaction to you is not necessarily what you are.
George: Well, it almost never is. But it almost always contains some aspect of what it is. But it’s them, because most of the time you can’t interpret the musician in that way if you don’t really know them in some personal sense. But even if you’ve had the vaguest kind of interaction with a musician, on the level of like, we’d be giving these concerts in school, and people would see us in classes, they’d see us on the street or something like that. That’s enough context to start a whole different chain of associations from when for example, Miles came to the school. And so you’ve got so many different complexes there.
Bill: You were playing with other players at Yale. Was that Anthony Davis…
George: …and Wes Brown, Gerry Hemingway, Hal Lewis. Jerry Hemingway plays drums, Hal Lewis is a saxophone player.
It started out with them. I wasn’t with them from the beginning, I guess it was basically Anthony Davis and Hal Lewis and a drummer named Steve Knapp who I guess is now getting his Ph.D. in English or something and is no longer involved in the music, but he’s a good drummer, and then very floating bass players, playing Anthony’s compositions which at the time were very free, a lot of them very modal. He had a suite for Coltrane, a lot of different pieces he was composing even then, very super music. There were only six or seven people in the whole school who were interested in this kind of music, out of the whole population and they were constantly being shit upon by everybody. Seven cats versus five or six thousand, plus the whole New Haven community. Well, not the whole New Haven community because there were guys like Eddie Buster, you know?
We played a lot of different places. We finally started getting gigs everywhere. At first it was just campus gigs, for the door or something like that, and everybody would just get together and try to play free. So these guys heard me playing in my room and told me to try and join up. They had some other guy, some other trombone player and something happened with him so they got me into the band. But then I flunked out, so we had to start all over again after I came back.
I flunked out, I failed in my mission to become a political scientist. I became so bored, I became so terribly bored that I had three papers to complete, did not complete a single one.
The way that I look at it is that the political scientists failed to interest me in their theories. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do those papers, the papers were easy. In this case it was a combination of things. I guess I don’t regard it as a failure, because it cut across several things. What happened was, I could have had a chance to do the papers over the summer. I said no. I won’t do them and the guy said, well you’re going to have to take off for a year and you can re-apply in ‘72. So I said okay fine but I’m not doing this shit. One of them was a music thing, a history of romantic music which I had to do a paper for. I didn’t feel like doing a paper on that, either. We learned about Berlioz, Meyerbeer, these types of fellows. They wanted everybody to do a paper on some aspect of this, but I just couldn’t see it. The guy who was lecturing us would never even look at the class while he was talking. He would always hold his hand in front of his face and look up at the ceiling while talking in this rambling monotone. It would be for an hour and a half, twice a week! Are you kidding?
So I stayed out for a year, and on my nineteenth birthday I walked into this basement and found all these fellows from the AACM playing. In Chicago, about six blocks from my house.
I had a summer job painting chairs, painting chairs by the side of this pool in the North Shore Cabana Club. You know what’s happening on the North Shore of Chicago. A big high rise scene. No blacks. Thousands of wrinkled people, in t-shirts with alligators on them. All these old people sitting around there, and if they didn’t have money a lot of them would be on welfare. A lot of them were sick, had no way to fend for themselves, not anything. They were sick, that’s a drag, to be sick, but on the other side of the big fence there were people who were sick who were out of it. Because once you got past this high rise, you were in the uptown area with all the white Appalachian immigrants, people who had come to Chicago from the Ozarks. These people had absolutely no money, and they’re sitting up there staring at this high rise, with all these people cavorting around in Cabana Clubs. And I was painting chairs in my street clothes.
Bill: What players were playing in that basement six blocks from your house?
George: Muhal, Kalaparusha, let’s see – oh, a whole bunch of guys. Steve Galloway, John Jackson. I don’t remember very much about it because I didn’t know any of the people at the time. I wasn’t around musicians. I had no connection whatsoever with the musicians, the community of Chicago.
Bill: Did they invite you to play?
George: No, in fact they tried to keep me from playing. You know how it is, they have to see if you’re serious first. Because I was talking about playing with them. That’s another matter. I mean they can encourage you sure. A guy will say, “Oh yes, practise practise practise!”. But it’s a different thing from saying “practise, practise” and saying, “Yes, come and play in this band.” First they have to see if you can play. And that requires a little persistence on your part. So that’s what they do, they test you. This happens all the time, I didn’t regard it as any big deal. I knew it was going to happen, so I was already prepared for it. Because it happens in everything, people are constantly testing you to see if you’re really committed to checking them out, and then they’ll check you out more seriously. It’s just social interaction, and nothing to be afraid of.
I didn’t know anybody. I knew about the Art Ensemble from listening to records, and I knew about Roscoe Mitchell from listening to records, and that was about it. And I’d gone to some live AACM concerts. Fred Anderson, I’d gone to the Art Ensemble – before Don Moye was in it, and I’d gone to a solo Joseph Jarman concert. This was while I was still in high school that I went to these concerts. But it never occurred to me that there was an organization called the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians that I could possibly get involved with, or where I could go and play. I wasn’t at that stage yet, where I wanted to go out and see how great I was. I still figured I wasn’t really any good at playing. I’d better shape up, or pretty soon I’d ship out, and my teacher was saying, “Well, you’ll probably stick with this until you graduate from college, then you’ll probably bag it”.
Bill: So when you came back from Yale to Chicago, they were a more powerful influence then? There were more things happening with the AACM?
George: No, I don’t think so. I think the AACM was in a very transitional period. The older cats were getting older and there weren’t any younger cats coming up. When I joined the AACM there was a big generation gap, which exists now, but the majority of the AACM is now players under 28, 25, something like that, which wasn’t the case when I joined. Now the majority of the players are around 25, 26, that age, whereas when I joined the AACM in ‘71 I was the youngest player, I was 19, then the next cat was like 25, 26, and then it went up to the forties. Plus the guys that I never even saw, like Anthony Braxton, John Stubblefield, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, all these cats had disappeared.
The thing is, being in the AACM encouraged me to check out the AACM. It wasn’t a process of “I’m in the AACM because I dig the AACM and I want to be apart of it”, I was in the AACM because it was my vehicle into playing the music. That was my first contact with musicians, ever, the musicians who were involved in the AACM’s music. It’s not a situation where I came to the AACM from something else, the AACM was it. And it still is it, in most respects that I can think of.
Bill: Do you think of Chicago as some kind of spiritual/central force for a music for the last twenty years? Like Sun Ra, Muhal Richard Abrams, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, George Lewis… ? Does it have some kind of association to Art Hodes and Muggsy Spanier and Louis Armstrong? Does it have some kind of association that far back? Is there some kind of historical continuance? Is that that true?
George: No, “true” is not the word I’d use to describe that. That’s just a potential path of validity that you could follow. But “true”, I don’t know about “truth”, I don’t know about that. I mean I know I’m hedging a little bit, but the basic point that I’m making is that when you’re talking about historical movements and historical figures, you don’t talk about “truth” and “falsity”, at least I don’t. You talk about movements that you can detect. If you see a direct line of inference between Louis Armstrong and what’s happening now, and what happened later on in Chicago There are other schools in Chicago too, like this Beiderbecke thing was happening.
It’s hard to describe because I’m not of that generation of cats that’s giving this a great deal of thought. I see the connection, but I don’t think I understand it yet. Because I’m not at the stage. It takes time to be out here playing this music. Guys like Muhal can really show you about the historical thing that’s coming out in Chicago’s music. I’m learning about the history of Chicago music not from records or from reading a bunch of books. Not that I don’t want to look at them, but that’s not my primary mode for learning about the different connections in Chicago music. And seeing how different people who everyone has never heard of have contributed greatly to the music, and seeing little fillips about them in strange places. I’m finding it’s a more personal education that I’m getting, from the inside out rather than from the outside in.
I’m not ascribing any kind of cause and effect relationships at all to what exists. It’s never been about a cause-and-effect relationship with me. It’s more dynamic than a cause and-effect relationship, I don’t want to limit it to just that aspect. When you hear anybody who’s playing in any style of music, when I hear anyone who plays any instrument, there’s always something that comes out of it and I see the connections with the line of people who have been playing the trombone, from the earliest cats, from the Honoré Dutrey type of thing, and from the cats who preceded them, and the role of the whole thing. Fine, but I’m also seeing the cross-influences which became clear when Bird arrived and wiped out the scene but which have always been going on. With different guys citing like, Frankie Trumbauer as their main influence, and he wasn’t even playing their particular style of music, you know you couldn’t see the connection at first. But then you see it later, and these cross-influences are what I’m getting at, and this is the thing which is happening today – people are taking a view of the music which transcends their instrumental concept. I don’t think it’s any more about “Well, you play the trombone, so this is your thing right now, this is your line of development, you play the sax, this is your line of development… “Everybody’s drawing from everywhere at this point. So if you find out that in terms of the music that you want to play, Harry Partch suits your thing more than any trombone player you’ve heard, go with that. That would be my opinion. Listen to everybody. But go with what you hear. And then you find that you’ll become a part of the historical thing, you are a part of it. It’s not something that you learn how to be by reading about somebody or by listening to his records. You are that, just by playing.
I grew up in a family where everybody listened to music of some kind. My father didn’t sit down at the time and show me, “well this is what’s happening”, but he had his ideas about what the different styles in the music were, and he ran them down. He’d say, “Okay, this is a Count Basie style arrangement”, or “This tenor player plays like Illinois Jacquet”. And this was at a stage when I had no interest in who these guys played like or who they were or anything. I didn’t give a damn. I was four years old! It gets through, but it gets through in a subconscious way. People in my family claim that my father brainwashed me, but it took hold late. It didn’t take hold for years, because I resisted it with all my might. And then all of a sudden…
Bill: Does your father think that the kind of music you recorded today is legitimate music? Does he like it as much as when you played with Count Basie?
George: I think he finds it relatively boring, terribly academic and so on, but he doesn’t think it’s bullshit. He knows it’s real music.
Bill: Does your father play an instrument?
George: No he doesn’t. I would suspect that he always wanted to play because of his lifelong interest in music, but he’s never actually played an instrument. I’m about the only musician in my family.
Bill: Is he proud that his son plays trombone?
George: Well, he started it. He was responsible for that whole sequence of events in terms of my playing the trombone. He was always the guy who’d say, “Look, you’re not going to stop practising after I’ve paid all this money, and you’re claiming you still want to play! You have to practise for this amount of time every day”, and “I can tell when you’re not practising because your lips get big. When you practise properly your lips will remain the same size because your muscles are in shape”, he’d say all this.
I guess my parents enjoy the idea of what I’m doing. I guess they enjoy the fact that I’m not a drain on their resources. That I’m trying to make ago of it, and no matter how meagerly my scene is happening, I’m trying to do it on my own. So they’re into that, as much as they’re into the idea of the music, because they’ve always taught me this big self-reliance thing. Which is why they’d never bug me about practising or anything if I didn’t want to, they’d just say, “Well, he’s doing something else.” I had a lot of freedom to do basically what I wanted to do in most respects. So that was the upbringing type thing, which has an influence. But my mother likes the gospel type of music. She goes to church regularly, she goes to different choir things that they have. And my sister is heavily off into the current popular music of the day. But she has to have it – with us it’s always like a fanatic thing going on. Like if we want to listen to music we want to listen to it, all the time. All day, every day my record player plays. When I’m there there’s always something on. I’m not interested in what’s going on on television, and I don’t like movies. But I do like to listen to people play music.
Bill: Is there some point in this career where you begin to think that you have some kind of talent that’s worth pursuing?
George: When I came in, everybody in the AACM seemed to like what I was doing on the trombone.
Bill: Was Lester Lashley another trombone player in that period?
George: Yes, but I didn’t actually get a chance to play with him until much later. You know Lester often quits playing for a long time. He does art, he’s involved in cinematography, in visual art, in theatre, in a lot of things. He has a vast art output, he also does leather work, so any of those interests can get him away from music. And especially as it was happening in the Chicago period, nobody could make a living playing the music. There was never a big gig scene where you could work or anything like that. I had a job throughout the entire time that I was off from school playing with the AACM. I played in the Monday night big band in the Pumpkin Room until four o’clock in the morning and then I’d go to work at seven in a slag plant. Slag is a by-product of the steel-making process. The iron melts off and there’s the slag. Slag is made into all kinds of useful substances. So I was a labourer. I’d be a creative performer until four and then at seven I’d labour. Then at three-thirty I’d go back to being a creative performer.
Bill: But when you finally come to Toronto George, you’re a star. You’ve been here three times now: once with Roscoe Mitchell, once with Count Basie, and once as George Lewis. Here, you see, you’re treated with some kind of respect.
George: Yup! But everybody laughed at me back then because of my slag affiliations.
Bill: How did you get out of the slag industry?
George: Well, I decided to go back to school. I stayed out for a year, re-applied and got back in, went in and finished up. I went back as a philosophy major. I’d read Kierkegaard over the time I was a slag person. I thought Kierkegaard was out. I’d read this thing and I didn’t understand a word, so I decided that anything written in the English language that I couldn’t understand was certainly worth investigating. I’d been reading since I was three and a half years old and I’d never read anything I didn’t understand until I read Kierkegaard. I said, “What in the hell is this? “… a nineteenth century Danish philosopher! He comes after Hegel, as a critic of Hegel. And he’s involved in theology and so on. He’s written some interesting stuff. Either/or. A lot of religious works. Fear And Trembling. The Sickness Unto Death. He’s a precursor of guys like Paul Tillich. Anyway, he was kind of intriguing, and I read some Nietzsche and all that so I decided I wanted to be a philosopher.
Bill: I kind of think of the trombone as a philosophical kind of instrument. Philosophy has always seemed to me to be very inaccurate, sliding about all over the place, there aren’t any fixed positions…
George: A slush-pump science.
Bill: The trombone has always been associated, to me, with street music, folky kinds of things. In England we used to call it “push me off the pavement”. It seems that it’s very hard to bring some kind of sophistication to the trombone. It’s always been a “brrrawpbawp bup bup brrawrpbop” kind of music.
George: Instruments go through phases. Read what Mendelssohn has to say about the trombone. It was the expression of a commonly accepted idea, that trombones were not to be used except in sacred music contexts. They would bring the trombone out for the voice of God.
The earliest classical Western literature doesn’t refer to the trombone. Then the later literature uses it up to a point. In the Romantic period they start using it all the time. After Beethoven it becomes a very important instrument, and they have a whole trombone section and so on. This is what I gather from my meagre studies of it. The trombone also has an important aspect in marching bands, these street music bands. Because you can go “dyiaahhdup dit dit dit dyiaaadat”, that’s a beautiful effect, that’s very important. So everyone wanted to do that, you had to have that in your band. Saxophones couldn’t do that, that’s why they didn’t allow saxophones in the orchestra! No, that’s not true
Bill: I’m not going to respond at all to that kind of comment.
George: I’m just bugging you about the sax.
Bill: We understand the superiority of the saxophone against the trombone, we’ve already decided that that’s a fact of nature. A slush-pump, versus an articulated instrument which has pads and mechanisms, balance and curvatures…
George: …a precursor of the analog computer!
Bill: We’re getting back to this same question again. Is there some point where you discover you have some special kind of talent?
George: I never discovered it, I just had people saying, “oh, this cat plays all right. “Go to the Pumpkin Room, sit up scared and everything, take a solo, everyone says, “Oh wow!” I said, “What’s this???” I was playing in the key of D-flat. Ornette talks about how this D-flat blues really gets to you. When I learn how to play the D-flat blues better I’ll be in charge.
This time, this was “Blues Forever”, one of Muhal’s compositions, that the band has played at least fifty million times, and that several generations of cats have played. Everyone remembers playing this, Braxton remembers playing “Blues Forever”. So it’s “D-flat blues, slow”, and I’m going oh shit, and then he points at me to take this solo. I thought, “well, maybe I should have practised my D-flat scales more, uh, carefully”. So I just went free. Well, I was out, I couldn’t believe it. And then everyone stood up and applauded. So then they asked me to stay in the band, make rehearsals. That’s how I got to know a lot of these cats personally, although I’d been checking them out, and I’d heard about different cats like Lester Bowie, I’d heard about Roscoe, heard about Muhal, heard about Jarman. I hadn’t heard about Anthony [Braxton], that was out of my zone at that time. And these cats came back about the time that I joined up in the AACM. They came back from Paris, there’s this big ballyhoo. “Jarman is coming back.” It’s like a tradition in the AACM, a whole historical thing, ten years of being together, and before that, in the fifties…
Bill: Is Sun Ra not linked into that somehow?
George: I guess what I’m describing is how I learned about the AACM’s history. He’s not linked into that. People didn’t go around talking about Sun Ra all the time, although he was involved in the stuff. People would go to hear him. There were a lot of cats who were off into a lot of the spiritual aspects of what Sun Ra was talking about in Chicago, a lot of them weren’t musicians either. There’s always been a strong Hebrew contingent in Chicago as well. There’s a whole cultural thing that you come to know because of your involvement with the music, but not all of the people involved with it are musicians, and not all the musicians are Hebrews, or people who follow any particular mode.
Anyway, in terms of knowing guys like Jarman, if you don’t know them at first, you have to come to know them. Once you are involved in a musical circle you know them on a different level, it’s like you know them, it’s not like they’re involved in a historical process. You meet them, and you become aware of their involvement in the historical process as you become aware of their involvement with you. Like when I met Sun Ra this summer, that sort of thing. I know about his influence on the AACM, but there’s nothing like meeting this cat, and seeing how everyone acted towards him and their relationship with him and seeing how that came out, that was more valuable than just “knowing” it in the abstract. When I say “abstract”, I mean by just listening to records and figuring it out. By “concrete” I mean actual experience in the historical process, which is social interaction. How Muhal acted towards Sun Ra when I saw him. What happened when Braxton showed up in Chicago for one day. Everyone’s saying, “Braxton is back, Braxton is back”, and I ‘m sitting around saying, “who is this ‘Braxton’? Who is this?” Or when Joseph and Roscoe came back and immediately took over the big band, and started bringing their compositions in and getting them played. Anyway, this is the point I want to make clear. It’s a different scene to be involved with musicians not knowing them as the musicians of the day or the people who are shaping the music. I didn’t know who was shaping the music. I just knew who I liked. And a lot of them I didn’t even know.
Bill: People don’t come consciously to originality, do they?
George: I don’t think they go to originality consciously, because that’s not a goal, it doesn’t mean anything. “Okay, I’m going to be original now”. At some point you may come across the realization that you might have something, your own little corner of the world, your own little ironic situation where you know you have something that no one else is doing quite like you. But that’s not really enough. That’s fine, but that’s just the first step. You have your own thing that you think you’re going to work out of. Fine. But you could have your own thing, and still not know anything about the dynamics of actually playing your instrument. You hear guys all the time that have their own original concept. You say, “Wow! This guy has his own original concept. It’s fantastic, but his tone is horrible” or “he can’t play this” or “he doesn’t read” or something. Just any number of things. I don’t think these things come about in a logical order. It all happens at different times. I think also that everybody I’ve heard from Chicago has their own original style of playing. Whether certain large groups of people have taken up their cause or not, that’s something else again. But I hear lots of cats in Chicago right now who amaze me. And I think I put them on the same level as the cats who are currently being written about and are getting a lot of press time. That’s true of every musician. I think that people tend to put people who have become more famous up and they become images, you know? And I’ve always tried to get past the image aspect of everyone who’s involved in it.
Bill: How did you stop being a local musician? How did you get to play outside of Chicago?
George: People kept asking me to play with them. All different kinds of people. I’d play with everybody. Anybody who asked me, I figured that if I had the time and I always had the time, I haven’t been working a great deal. So if a Latin band asked me to play a gig with them, I’d play a gig with them. The AACM had some gigs in Mississippi, I played with them. And whatever type of requirement that they had for their music, I was usually capable of running it down. If they had heavy chart reading, I was into that. If they had freedom or whatever, I was into that. If they had a particular kind of rhythmic style I was either into it or I could learn it within a few minutes, or do a creditable enough imitation of it to make the gig. If it was a music with which I had absolutely no familiarity… nobody ever asked me to play a Greek wedding or something.
Bill: There’s been a big rush for you out of Chicago in the last year and a half. It’s been Michigan, Toronto, New York, Europe, America…
George: But with all different people. That’s the thing, the diversity of contexts that people have seen my stuff in. Although I seem to have become known right now for playing this “new music” that everyone is talking about, or that’s currently being rapped about in some papers. When I first came here I came with Roscoe, I’ve been here with Basie’s band and I’ve been here with my own thing as we were talking about. A lot of different situations playing different types of music in different contexts. It’s not so much people knowing about you as musicians. The musicians invite you to participate because they know you can do what they’re doing. Braxton I’m sure wouldn’t have asked me to play on his thing (“Creative Orchestra Music 1976” on Arista) if they hadn’t told him what was happening. Because there’s big chart reading and some solos. So they say, “yeah, you should get this cat because he can also read charts” in addition to play a little bit. So whatever the requirement is, if you can deal it you have a better chance for getting a lot of gigs. So that means your musicianship has to be at least up enough so that you can play in a context which you’re not practising every day and with which you’re not entirely familiar. And go in there and become familiar with it right off and deal it. Which is what these studio cats amaze me at, their ability to do that. I’d really like to find out more about the requirements of doing that, whether I could meet those requirements. In terms of serious strict attention to what’s happening with a page of music. I mean I’m good, but it’s not... I mean I’ve seen guys just go on stage: “okay let’s go on this” (snap!) nothing. Just incredible. Then I hear, “Oh, they’re not the top players! These cats are the really bad cats!
Bill: Do you feel privileged in being able to play exactly what you have inside of you out to a very open public?
George: I can’t believe it. Especially when I hear about… I came in on the tail end of what these cats have been experiencing for like fifteen or twenty years. When I came in, nobody was listening to the music at all, it was completely out, the AACM was doing concerts and very few people would come and so on. That’s still true in Chicago but the New York phenomenon of the AACM didn’t exist; and I’ve seen the music rise to a position where there are more records coming out now than ever.
I’m not saying there’s some big amount of dough in this or that people are getting what they really deserve for their artistic output. I don’t even want to give the impression that that’s what’s happening. I think it was Threadgill who pointed out to me that something like ninety per cent of all the national endowment money in the States goes to classical music, which only about three per cent of the people listen to. Which is also not the American music. You can get five or ten times the amount of money in the States for a classical group than for a jazz group.
Now the music scene is on a different level, so it’s talking about a redistribution of the wealth. There’s always been a situation where certain musics have been downgraded and other musics have been upgraded. This is great, this sucks. This is real, this is fake. Like jazz is – “you know how to improvise, that’s faking”. That means, playing the real notes versus the fake notes you’re just making up out of your head. Aside from the fact that that’s a terrible thing to call your own music, a bunch of fakery. The psychological consequences of that must be tremendous.
Bill: Recently you’ve been coming to some attention with Anthony Braxton. Do you think that’s part of your overall concept, that you’re still playing with a Chicago musician? Is it happening by accident, or did you arrive at this situation logically?
George: I think it’s a natural consequence of what happens when you’re around people who are involved in a particular sphere of the music. If you affirm that line of development, then your development follows those lines. And what happens to you comes out of your involvement in the area. I don’t think you come out of the blue and start playing with anybody in the Chicago school, that’s not to say you’re not involved in something else. I had Braxton describe to me his experience playing with Ken Chaney’s band in Chicago, and then I described to him my experience playing with Ken Chaney’s band five or six years later. And the music had changed and different cats were playing and so on. Or playing in Morris Ellis’ band. And that sort of thing enables you to jump in on that set without coming out of nowhere, because you can’t come out of nowhere into a situation. It arises as a product of what you’ve been doing before. So I see whatever I’ve been doing with any Chicago music as a natural outgrowth of what I’ve been doing all along.
Bill: Do you feel that way about what you’ve been doing here in Toronto this weekend, a solo concert?
George: Absolutely.
Bill: This is your first solo concert. Was it an alarming experience for you?
George: It’s not my preferred medium. For one thing, it takes a lot of chops.
Bill: Have you ever made audiences laugh like that before? Made them that happy?
George: Oh, audiences always laugh when I play. People are always cracking up. Well, I like to make a joke every now and then. There’s no reason why it can’t be funny. I mean, you listen to Lester Bowie, now there’s a joking cat. He doesn’t say a word, and he’s funny. But there’s humour in all the AACM stuff. I’ve never seen any big deal in doing something funny. When I play a concert with Douglas Ewart in Chicago, we get involved in theatrical stuff. He’d be playing little instruments, which I’ve never been able to get into. For some reason I’ve never felt comfortable with them. But I had a set of things that I would play, and Douglas had this whole setup of little instruments, and we’d do a whole play or something. Acting is not my thing, I don’t think so, but we’d do a play with music. And that’s the way it would go down. Douglas would say, okay, would I give a concert with him today? Very seldom was it an austere kind of thing where people say, “oh my”, very closely examining and “don’t laugh, shut up”…
Bill: I don’t agree that acting’s not your thing. I still think that every trombone player of merit since J.J. Johnson that I’ve seen was an actor. The first one after J.J. that made any kind of impression was Roswell Rudd and he had a bent instrument just to prove that he was an actor. It’s a very dramatic instrument, trombone.
George: J.J. Johnson. Let me say something about him because I think he’s a far-out cat. For me he’s the cat who shows the direction that the instrument can really take if you really think. Because he thought. And that’s the thing that really wipes me out about him, that he’s a thinking guy – he had to think about how to play that fast. I’m seeing now the approach he had to take to think about the possibilities of playing quickly on the trombone, getting over the horn in a big hurry, because I had to go through the same process and lots of musicians have described to me the processes they used by which they jump over a certain hurdle to get to the next one. Through a very logical process of deduction. It’s very cold and analytical.
All music makes me feel the same way. I have to confess that. I’m sorry to say this, you may think this is wrong, everyone I tell this to says “you’re crazy!” But all music, if it makes me feel something, if I like it, it makes me feel the same way. And I get the same feeling from all music. I don’t mean to say that I get the same content, or emotional content, from all music. I’m saying that the basic feeling I get when I enjoy a piece of music never changes and I know the feeling and I’ve come to really love it. It’s not the same thing as saying that all music is the same, because it’s not. I’m talking about a specific feeling that comes over me when I’m listening to a piece of music that I’m really enjoying, that I really dig. It has nothing to do with anything else beyond that
It takes a long time to make these kinds of things clear, but it’s better to make them clear than to gloss over them, as I see in a lot of situations.
Now J.J. Johnson has been a major stylistic influence on everybody that plays the trombone. He wasn’t everybody’s favourite player, that’s a different thing. But everybody who has played it has had to deal with structural aspects of what this cat is playing. Today as well as in the past. Because of what he showed is possible on the instrument. That’s all you need to show, possibilities.
But when I think about the sort of thing I’m looking for in my playing, I think about Johnny Griffin’s playing, or Coltrane’s playing, in terms of that driving sort of rhythm that I want to achieve. The sort of thing which pushes and has a certain intensity, then it backs off for a while, then it increases with renewed force, that sort of thing, which jumps, seemingly without regard for lines and bars and chords and produces layers of rhythm besides the basic one, layers that don’t even get into these transcriptions of solos that appear in magazines. Because they don’t understand that aspect of the music which is basically the drum aspect. Where a rhythm is played on two drums, one is high and one is low, it’s ba-boo-bup, is different from boopbup-boop, even though they’re notated the same. That’s the thing that these formularizers of jazz music tended to wipe out. People who tended to put jazz into a particular kind of, “well, this is the line of development” or, “this is what you must do and if you don’t conform to this line of development… “. It’s not like an interrogation – you listen to what somebody’s line of development is, then fit it into the total picture. Because history is not determined by the past. The past is a component of what’s happening now, but it’s not unalterable. You’re here now, you can alter what you want to do. I can stop playing this bullshit. I feel I have the freedom intellectually if not emotionally. I can say okay, no more of this new music scene, I’m going to go off and join the Chicago symphony. People do that and they don’t have any qualms about it. That’s not to say that the symphony is great and that playing this music is absurd, that’s to say that you have that power of altering your destiny. It’s not like you’re determined by your background, and you’re going to play this instrument at this time, you’re going to listen to these cats. Sure, you’ll do all that. But the number of ways you can do; fascinating.
When I hear about most guys’ development I’m always amazed because they came from a point at which they aren’t even listening to the music. Like I listened to Braxton talk about how he was already listening to Ornette in grade school, and that’s fine, because he was from an earlier period of time and it didn’t take long, it only took five years. But people in my generation weren’t listening to Ornette. At least the people that I knew weren’t listening to Ornette. I knew blacks as well as whites. When I came back from the white thing, out of school, I was back on the block with the cats – they weren’t listening to Ornette either. They were off into the popular AM theme of the day… (end of first tape)
Afternoon of November 22, 1976:
George: We were talking about whether people were listening to this new music, or whatever it is. I’ve never been in a community where that was happening to any great extent, until I got involved with the AACM people. We were talking about Braxton telling about when he was a kid in grade school they were trading ideas about Ornette, saying “Ornette’s great” “Ornette sucks”, and so on.
I’d been listening to Braxton’s music for a long time, since college. That record he did, “Three Compositions of New Jazz”, that got me off of Coltrane. Before that, I had every Coltrane record, I was saying, well, this is where it’s at right now, this is where it’s going to be, Coltrane’s the greatest ever and so on and so forth. So I was doing that, and someone gave me this record. So I listened to it – “hmm, it’s all right” – I got hooked on this record. I couldn’t stop listening to this record, I listened to it every day for like a year. It was just very good. I had always known that this type of music existed, but I was never interested in it until I got to that point. It was a natural outgrowth of the AACM music that was happening all along. It’s just that that got to me more than most of the AACM music. It got to me on an immediate emotional level that most of the records didn’t. Even though I like the records, I think they’re great, that one in particular really hit me on an emotional level.
Bill: Is Braxton your first experience of travelling outside of Chicago with other players and going to different parts of the plane
George: The first time I went to Europe was with Braxton, but the first time I went overseas was with Basie, going to Japan. But all that’s happened in the past year, since I left my insurance job.
Bill: Was that a peculiar experience, touring with Basie? I can’t really associate you with that kind of terminology, in the trombone section of the Basie band.
George: Actually, it wasn’t very peculiar. Because I certainly had training for it, and I’d played a lot of the arrangements in other bands. Or at least something akin to the arrangements, because you know how people get arrangements for bands, they take them off records. In fact we played with a band in Japan that had done exactly that. I sat in with this band, and I was playing my own part. I’m sitting up there reading this part: it’s mine. This cat copied it off a record. So that type of music is not unfamiliar to me at all. It wouldn’t be for any AACM members who’d been listening. That’s the thing about the AACM, it’s not as if you were ordered, but it was considered to be very silly if you didn’t check out all the different types of music that you possibly could. That’s why I said earlier that all music that I like affects me in a very similar way.
Bill: Are you aware of Basie’s historical order, like Lester Young, Wardell Gray, Buck Clayton, all of those famous players that came out of the Basie band in the thirties and forties?
George: That was how I started listening to Jazz music, listening to Lester Young. Before that I wasn’t interested in that at all. By accident I got this record by Lester Young, “The President plays with Oscar Peterson”. I played it a lot, tried to play some of the solos, that was when I decided I should really start I trying to practise more. I was about twelve. He’d go “dadadadaduhduh-daduhdaduhduh, duhduhduh-dadaditdada “. I said okay, that doesn’t sound too hard – “splrrp “. Of course it was ridiculous.
It was a two-month hitch with Basie. I did the big replacement for Curtis Fuller. The band had a very good trombone section. It was a big learning thing for me, these cats are so tight. You play the same music every day, so you know what the whole program is from start to finish, for the most part. He always throws in a couple of ringers, but usually it’s the same thing every day. The major thing I liked about being in that band was the opportunity to jump on music in a formal chart-reading sense where you’re concerned with dynamics and attacks and shadings and blend and balance and all these sorts of things. They’d do that to the max, like when they’d do a release, or they have a certain way of phrasing a line, they hit with that, and that’s all there is to it. Their interpretations of charts. I had some battles with cats over interpretations of a chart, but it’s silly for you to battle with those cats because they’ve been playing those charts, so I had to get with their interpretation: even though it was my solo. You have to get with what they say about it. That’s fine. I got to play solos. There were two solo chairs, the third chair that I was playing, and AI Grey. Mel Wanzo was playing lead, and Bill Hughes was playing bass. All three of those cats showed me different parts of what’s happening with being a trombone player in a band of that kind. A lot of cats were very helpful in terms of showing me different things, not so much just about music as about, just existence. The existence of a person on the road. I learned a little bit about what sorts of things are important to those people, the concerns of the Basie band, memories. John Duke the bass player, he’s always a very friendly, open guy. He was one of the oldest cats in the band and I was the youngest, as usual. And there were well-known cats, Danny Turner plays in that band, he’s a very good player; Jimmy Forrest played in the band – Freddy Green. These cats sort of thought I was strange, but I wasn’t obnoxious or anything, so I think they enjoyed having me for the time I was there. It was important, it really was.
Plus the thing of meeting and being able to talk with Basie. He’s freaky, I began to see why he’s such a great leader, how this cat can assemble a band, year after year and do different things. Now I don’t know anything about any sort of stories that anyone has heard about what this cat has been doing, none of that means anything to me. I was never involved in it, that’s the baby of these cats who have been on the scene for years and know all the stories. What I saw in Basie was a real willingness to listen to what people were doing. Like he would hear me playing the piano, he’d say, “Well, I know you don’t really know how to play the piano, but you sound good. I don’t know what it is you‘re playing but… you mean you get enjoyment from playing that style of… ?” I said yeah, it makes me feel relaxed. He said, “Well… yeah, I can understand that.” And he sat down and listened. I started to get up, I thought he wanted to do some practising. “Oh, no no, sit down “. I played about a minute, then I got up, you know I couldn’t sit there and play in front of this cat, I don’t even know how to play the piano. But listening to him, night after night, listening to the various terms he would use, how he would introduce a simple blues thing with an incredibly complicated progression, how he would move the band with a note or two. And how when he got on the stage everybody shaped up. There was grumbling and all that, but when he got on stage, music time, no more arguing. Music time.
Bill: You don’t feel inclined to periodize music anyway, do you? A lot of people who listen to the music, and a lot of people who play it tend to set everything out in patterns like this is Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong, Bechet, this is EIlington, Lunceford, Calloway, this is Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Coltrane, like a historical process. Music is an open thing for you.
George: I’m interested in seeing influence and confluence but I’m not interested in periodization if that means that if something comes in that doesn’t fit with your idea of a period then you just ignore it. I’ve seen too many instances where you try to fit people into boxes and they just don’t fit. Not into neat little categories. So I try to avoid categories as much as possible. Some generalizations are really unavoidable though when you’re considering a music that has evolved over just about a hundred years when you consider the precursors of ragtime music and all this sort of thing. The slave thing, what was happening with the music that these cats had going. All that is a development that leads up to this. It’s not like, “Here jazz starts, today”.
Bill: Is travelling with Braxton similar to travelling with Basie?
George: No, the big band scene means travelling by bus. You’re riding on a bus with a whole group of cats. That’s where I learned about the inter-personal dynamics of bus travel. In other words, everyone had their own seat on the bus. It’s a sacred entity, don’t sit in someone else’s seat. I had seat number 27, that’s right in the back, behind me off to my right sat Danny Turner, behind me sat Bill Caffie the singer, behind him sat John Duke, next to him sat Freddie Green, Basie sat up at the front, but he didn’t sit in the front seat, he sat in the third seat or something like that. You had the same seat on the bus every time, plus you had the space directly above your seat for your luggage, your garment bag and your suits and all this kind of stuff. Because there’s so little privacy on the road, people value just that little bit that they do have.
Whereas with a small group it’s a different kind of thing. The Braxton band is more closely knit, naturally, and not only because it’s a smaller organization but because Braxton, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul have been playing together for a long time. And the number of things they know about each other from having played together that long, and having been personal friends – they know each other’s wives – is absolutely staggering. Sometimes I still have this feeling: “Well, maybe I should leave the stage”, because at times if my stuff falls down they just take it, they say, “Well, he’ll come back”, because they’ve been playing and they know. They know something about each other’s capabilities, and they know how best to utilize them. And they’re all super players, I really enjoy it. I’m not saying it’s better or worse, but I haven’t found its equivalent in anything I’ve been doing before. Playing with this band allows me to get a full measure of learning about collective improvisation, solos, construction of solos, compositions. It’s not like… the Basie band has a book with a thousand tunes, they call number 427, you take it out, play it and put it back. But Braxton does it with some tunes, and most of them are kind of challenging. I had to practise the tunes for a long time, or at least for an extended period so I could get them down, it takes time. But even then that’s only the surface part of it, and after about a month of the surface I discovered what was really happening, how far I really had to go to learn the open improvisations that they’re doing, how to function in the context of Braxton’s written music. And it’s given me a chance to try my own written music out, that’s one of the things I like most about it, it gives me a chance to do my written music with people who are really up on it, who can play it technically, and who have the emotional commitment to it as well, which is something I didn’t find as much in Chicago although I did find players able to do it.
Bill: I remember that when we first met a year or so ago you weren’t actually aware of lots of other trombone players except for people like Joseph Bowie. Were you surprised to discover Albert Mangelsdorff, Gunter Christmann, Radu Malfatti, all these trombone players from different places who are at a very high stage of development?
George: I’ve never been a person to go out and buy all the records of people I don’t know anything about. And these people are never talked about in any circles I’m ever in. Braxton was really the person that got me listening to these guys because he had been going out, and knew all these cats, had heard them and so on. I don’t know if he thinks they’re the greatest or whatever, but he used to say well, you should at least listen to them, because they’re out there playing. So I decided to go out and listen to them and, well… it’s nice.
I find that what these guys seem to be investigating the most is getting new timbral things out of the trombone. That’s what I’m learning the most from these cats. Mangelsdorff has developed what he’s doing, with his chord-progression thing up to a very high level. He played opposite us once in Europe. When I heard this guy play, it was amazing. It was even more amazing to hear him practise this for a minute. Then in Berlin I heard Christmann play. It’s not that you haven’t heard it before, it’s that you hear it and you say, “hmm, what’s that?” and then you listen and you say, “oh I see, that’s what it is”. It’s just that nowhere have you thought how to do that, you listen to the cats and say, “hmm, I never thought of that”. Then you go and see what it is this guy is doing. It doesn’t take long, because there’s only a finite number of variables. So you just investigate all the different variables and come up with what the cat is doing, or something like what the cat is doing. And Paul Rutherford, he’s the guy that really interests me. Aside from being a very nice cat, as all these cats are, he’s not using a developmental thing in his playing, the thing of a melodic or harmonic or timbral development, I don’t see that. But he’s investigating the use of all different kinds of mutes, he’s using a lot of them. I don’t think he’s using as many as I am, but he’s using them. He’s using them in non-traditional ways, he’s using the things you can do when you hit the trombone, strike the bell. A lot of these things evolved from these classical cats like Vinko Globokar, with using reeds and so forth.
It just looks like there are a lot of trombone players right now because there were so few before, but there are still only a very small group of cats that are dealing this. We’re talking about maybe six or seven, maybe ten cats at the most that I know about that are actually dealing it, but there are hundreds of saxophone players, so it’s not like there’s a big trombone explosion and everybody’s going out and buying one, it’s not on that level yet. But I think that the reason that more people are investigating it and it’s getting more of a play, is that so many saxophone players sound alike right now. Coltrane is such a major influence on so many cats and, well, people are getting tired of hearing cats sound like Coltrane. I know, because I wanted to sound like Coltrane – kind of a tough deal when you’re playing trombone. So I was going to switch to the saxophone.
My feeling is that the reason people want to sound like anybody is that they feel good listening to this cat, and then when they start playing this cat’s thing it’s like they’re this cat for a minute, they’re Coltrane for a second. And they borrow some of his magic, it’s like the African thing where you put on the lion’s skin and you become the lion, the attributes of the lion come to you.
That’s one of the reasons why people are investigating the trombone. It has to go back to when these cats were young, though. Like Mangelsdorff hasn’t just started.
Bill: He was a bebop player for a long time. He even played dixieland music.
George: And he told me what he was doing before that. He used to play guitar, also. I said, “What?” And Christmann, he’s not a young cat, Rutherford isn’t either, at least they’re not my age. They’ve been coming along and coming along and coming along and right in this period where with the saxophone you either sound like Coltrane or you can’t get a gig. The trombone cats have never been encumbered by having to sound like Coltrane or Charlie Parker, so a whole new avenue opened. And they can go and take from the old cats, and make up stuff of their own if they think it’s happening, too. Without the need for people to compare them with some guy. Even a guy like Roswell Rudd, he’s an important cat in the music, that’s not to say I thought he was the greatest.
Bill: He was very traditional, wasn’t he? Even though he was playing in another situation he was actually almost like a New Orleans-style tailgate trombone player. Even though he was involved with Albert Ayler, Marion Brown…
George: Yes, but it’s hard to put him into that. The best thing I ever heard him play was a solo he did with Archie Shepp live in San Francisco, where he does this long solo, it’s very well-constructed, not just a technical thing, it’s like he’s playing music, that’s what wiped me out about that, but not enough to try to sound like him, I’m just not interested in that. But in terms of what he’s doing, I dig it, and that’s as far as it went with him. But even he didn’t wipe out the scene like Coltrane wiped out the sax scene in general, and I don’t think anybody’s going to wipe out the scene like that again.
Bill: You think the days of the startling genius on the pedestal are over?
George: Oh no, no. But the nature of the startling genius is going to change. It’s not going to be like oh, here’s this guy playing alto… who did Braxton listen to on the contrabass clarinet? This is why it’s getting to the conceptual artist stage. The thing I’m seeing about all the different cats that are playing today is that in order to play their music you have to patch into their conception. What they want out of their music, like reading Leo’s [Smith] rhythm book. It’s very exact what he is doing but you must patch into his conception in order to play it. The same with any of these cats’ music. The music is not standardized the way conventional Western notation is now. The newer forms, the extensions of it, are becoming conceptual again. In other words, it’s the conception of the moment: “okay, this is a graphic page, play it like this” – all right. But that’s not standardized, the player’s input is too great for it ever to become a standardized thing. Like when Braxton showed me these pages that he had going, he’d say, “okay, this is the way this music is played.” Boom!, you play it like that. So I’d listen to him, I’d have it. It wasn’t something that you could read like one two three four . Braxton would say, “this is it”, and you played it like that. Then when he showed you another composition in the same vein, that was his system, so you’d think back to his system, you’d play it like that and you’d be right again. Not because it was standardized but because it was standardized for him in a conceptual way. Maybe I’m not explaining that too well…
Bill: Do you feel that you have some special way of dealing with that yourself? You just did this thing with three trombones… a concept where you think your music is going to become that recognizable too?
George: Well, if it keeps getting out I think so, if I can avoid getting wiped out by trying to copy someone. I think my stuff has a little originality. A lot of it needs work. The piece is not perfect but the thing I’m trying to get to is to get more of my written music performed so that I can hear it so I can continue to advance in writing it, and listen to more notated music to find out what sort of interfaces between composed and improvised music are possible. How far you can go in welding the two together, which is the plan in the three trombone piece. Improvised music, composed music, coming together. (end of first side of the second tape)
Bill: My final question is: How important do you feel Muhal Richard Abrams has been to you and to the AACM in general?
George: I know that every interview with every cat I’ve read about who has been involved in this has rapped about Muhal, and how great he is and so on. I agree. But in terms of me personally, I’d say, crucial, not just important or interesting or any of those things. He was the first guy that I met in the AACM. Learning about attitudes to deal with myself, learning about philosophy, he was the person who convinced me to go back to school and study philosophy because of his interest in philosophies of all different kinds. He was the person who encouraged me to go out and study other forms of music of whatever kind, and he had some of it that he could let me listen to. I consider he and his family to be my friends, as well as he being my musical mentor in many ways. And my parents credit him with saving my life! They thought that I was really out of it, but that being around this cat’s influence really got me straightened out. From being a very uncentered, undirected sort of kid, to trying to grow up a little bit. So that’s like a father-figure in a sense, I saw him as being that then, it’s not that way now. It’s like I can go and play on a set with Muhal. He’s always treated me as if I was his musical equal, which is absurd. He’s always treated me as if we were collaborating on music - “oh, we’re just collaborating! – actually, I’m just listening, he’s doing all the talking. You can collaborate in silence, I guess that’s possible too. And I’ve seen how he’s affected a whole generation of newer AACM members my age and younger, and how he’s still trying to do a lot of things he was doing back then in the earlier days of the AACM, in terms of bringing younger players to the fore. He’d never put out a set of dogmas that you had to follow. Or if he did, I never listened to them anyway, I don’t think he did, the point is that he would show you, “I’m doing this now… “ He was the first person who gave me any lessons in theory that I could understand and relate to. In music theory, in composition. I credit him with anything I know about composition, as based upon things that he showed me. Anything. In the class, giving a lecture on composition, he’d say, “well, I’m doing this right now”, this is the approach that I’m using or these are the approaches that I’m using, “but I haven’t investigated this approach, I think it might be nice, what do you think about this?… okay, bring back an exercise based on this concept”. And you’d come back with it, he’d look at it, sometimes we’d play it, go over it on the board. He’s the person that got me into transcribing solos seriously. He’d transcribe solos like piano things and Bird things by writing, but usually he’d just transcribe them by ear to the piano. I think that’s a very good method for learning, and he’s very quick at it, that’s one of the major ways by which he has learned about music and that’s why he values it so highly.
He was the only teacher I could ever really relate to in terms of him actually teaching me something which I thought was useful in a field that I was passionately interested in. I was passively interested in philosophy, but none of the teachers I had in philosophy could really stack up with Muhal. If I had had Muhal in philosophy I might have been a philosopher. Well, he’s just a hell of a guy, that’s my opinion. Maybe that boils down to the same thing everyone else has said about this cat. Muhal, to me, is someone that I came to knowing nothing about, knowing practically nothing about the AACM, knowing nothing about the entire Chicago music scene except having been to three AACM concerts. I hadn’t even been to a nightclub before I played with these cats at the Pumpkin Room for the first time. I’d never been inside a nightclub, I didn’t know what it was like. My parents had to go to make sure I was all right – “he’s going to a nightclub!” You know, you’re not allowed in nightclubs until you’re 21.
Braxton said he tried to sneak in to see Coltrane one night. They wouldn’t let him in, he cried, so Coltrane and the cats got him in. Once I went to see Miles on a Sunday. You never play Sunday matinees, I didn’t know that though. So I went to see him at the Plugged Nickel. Of course he didn’t play, I was heartbroken, I really wanted to see this cat, it was my first experience. But you couldn’t get into a nightclub. And there’s no way I was going to sneak in!
George Lewis on Sackville: with the Roscoe Mitchell Quartet (Sackville SKCD2-2009 also featuring Muhal Richard Abrams & Spencer Barefield.
The Solo Trombone Record (Sackville SKCD2-3012)
Available from Sackville Recordings, Box 1002, Station O, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4A 2N4 (Fax 416-465-9093)
George E. Lewis A Power Stronger Than ItselfThe AACM and American Experimental Music
From the cover of Endless Shout, 2000, Tzadik. Photo by Glen Wilson.
I first met George Lewis in 1999. It was at the Velvet Lounge in
Chicago, where I was performing as a member of the Fred Anderson Quartet
for a live recording, and Lewis was composing the liner notes. He
introduced himself and said that he would like to interview me for the
book he’s writing, a history of the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM), the legendary, innovative, and influential
Chicago-based musician’s collective, of which we are both members (an
extensive project—he’s done 90 interviews since 1998, and the book will
be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006). I was quite
familiar with him and much of his work, not to mention awestruck and
flattered that he even knew who I was. A few days later he showed up at
my old apartment in Bucktown and asked me questions about music and
myself that shone a fresh light on the path I was heading down (I’m
still traveling that path). This was the beginning of a friendship that
has inspired me in ways that I could’ve never imagined.
Lewis wears many hats: he’s a trombonist, an improviser, a composer, a
pioneer in music technology and computer music, a scholar, an historian,
a multimedia artist, and an educator. He has always been light years
ahead of the pack, asking questions that need to be asked, addressing
and eloquently articulating issues about the various relationships
between art and society, and realizing his humanistic vision through his
brilliant works. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Lewis on two
occasions. The first was as part of a performance and discussion (along
with Kelan Phil Cohran) that George curated, called “Frankiphones and
Silver Cycles: African-Americans in Electronic Music” (2002), where I
also got to see an incredible performance with Lewis, the great Roscoe
Mitchell and Lewis’s computer-interactive composition/improviser
Voyager. The second was the “Baden-Baden Free Jazz Meeting,” which
George describes as
an event that, since the late 1960s, has had a long and important
history in European improvised music. For this edition of the meeting, I
wanted to explore ways in which technology dovetailed with
improvisation in creating a site of hybridity between electronic and
acoustic sound worlds. Each of the musicians I chose for the project
seemed to me to be addressing that nexus in some way—Jeff Parker
(electric guitar), Guillermo E. Brown (drums/electronics), Kaffe
Matthews (electronics, Great Britain), DJ Mutamassik (turntables), Miya
Masaoka (koto, electronics); 48nord (Sigi Rössert, bass and electronics,
and Ulrich Müller, guitar and electronics); and me.
Three days of performances followed, and the experience reminded me of a
ring shout—everyone had their say, but the collective was just as
important, creating an improvisatory environment in which I felt truly
open.
Jeff Parker: Hey. I have a bunch of topics I want to try to cover.
George Lewis: Really? (laughter)
JP I’m hoping that they will kind of lead into one another. But maybe not. (laughter)
Okay. Well, one thing I’ve noticed is that you create a historical as
well as a socio-political setting for seemingly all the work that you
present. Is this something that you feel is necessary only as it applies
to you and your work, or do you feel that all art is political in
nature?
GL I’ve always wanted some
kind of subtext in my compositions, and I think where it starts to get
intense for me is with the piece called Homage to Charles Parker,
which was done at the AACM Festival in 1978. It was in two parts. For
the first part we put contact mics on cymbals and Douglas Ewart used
mallets and brushes, and I had, like, stomp boxes from the ’70s (laughter), Electro-Harmonix stuff, phasers and flangers. You could get sounds a lot like [Stockhausen’s] Mikrophonie I and II
and things like that. So the idea for me was that this kind of
represented Charlie Parker’s life, which seemed to me to be very
turbulent. My interpretation of Parker was that he really was trying to
realize more than society was going to allow him to achieve, and so he
found other, more destructive ways to exercise the rest of his
prodigious energy. You know, all the things he was reputed to be, this
extremely smart guy who could talk about anything. Fred Anderson has
this wonderful interview with him on tape where he’s talking about
Bartók. He’s very voluble, very well read and so on. And then the second
part of Homage was these two ethereal seventh chords:
Charlie Parker’s afterlife. I wanted to go back to the “Bird is free”
idea—“Bird Lives,” that phrase coined by Ted Joans in the ’50s.
JP Sure.
GL Douglas was playing alto
saxophone; I played an electric keyboard. The idea was to approach these
historical and socio-political energies in a subliminal way, sort of
like what Anthony Davis was doing on a grand scale with [his opera] X, or with Amistad, which is an even more amazing opera than X, I think.
The other important point for me was my recording Changing With the Times,
which was done in ’92, where all the pieces deal with history, memory,
and with how black males are viewed in society, through looking at an
older black male—in this case, my father—and using an original text by
him, more or less a found text. He went to this adult education class
and they said, You guys read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and
then write your own autobiography. In other words, it’s a slave
narrative.
You know, the idea that art has to have a political basis
seems a little too much like preaching to other people about what they
should be doing. On the other hand, seeing artists as political seems
almost intrinsic because of what you have to go through to get art
before the public, or to make a space in which it can be interpreted or
understood, thought about, or debated.
JP Right.
GL All of that is a political
process shot through with the usual dimensions of class and race and
gender and sexuality and all the rest of it. There’s that whole thing,
in classical music mainly, the idea that political music is just not
quite as good as music that is apolitical. But why should music be
necessarily secular, with no spiritual component, necessarily apolitical
with no claims on society? That’s kind of out of touch with the
realities that we face.
George Lewis, 1999. Photo by Ian Cummings.
JP You have a strong compositional background. I use the term compositional
in the organizational sense. In your approach to music, there’s often
no written notation. It’s highly conceptualized, but not composed. I
notice that you focus on improvisation a lot, also in your writing. Do
you see improvisation as a way of presenting a social ideal? When we
worked together at Baden-Baden it was like that; you were trying to get
us to realize a way of relating to each other socially through the
music.
GL In improvisations, I believe that people should know what to do, but I’ve realized that often they really don’t
know what to do, or rather, they know what to do as it relates to
themselves. That is, they have a certain style that they impose on every
situation; otherwise they’re not “keeping it real,” not being true to
themselves. I’d like to be more protean about the whole thing, analyzing
situations and then taking action based on that analysis. You listen,
you try to intuit, use every technique or possibility for awareness, and
after a while you can tell more or less what’s inside the musicians’
heads, what they want, what their goals are, what they’re trying to do.
But this is just a subset of what people are doing in
their normal everyday-life improvisations, if you will. Creativity is
not a special gift, but a kind of birthright. You get rid of the idea
that the musician is being some special priest, and move into a very
prosaic space where all we’re doing is trying to get along in the world
as creatively as we can, given what we find in the environment and our
own possibilities for creating change.
JP Sure, yeah.
GL Creating a computer
improviser draws on these ideas about awareness. You couldn’t really get
it to work unless you did those things. At least it’s been my approach
to getting it to work.
JP Are you referring to Voyager? You started working on this in the late ’70s, right?
GL The first interactive
computer music piece I made was in ’80 or ’81. Then in ’82 I went to
IRCAM [Institute for Music/Acoustic Research and Coordination] in Paris,
worked on a piece there for a couple years, then premiered it there in
’84. It was a network of three computers that were making music, and
they were listening to four musicians: Douglas Ewart, Derek Bailey,
Joelle Leandre and Steve Lacy.
JP And this is before Voyager.
GL Yeah, maybe three years
before. It was my idea of a virtual orchestra. I didn’t call it that in
those days, but it had something you couldn’t have in “real life,” at
least not in the classical domain: an orchestra that improvised. There
was a lot of disapprobation, so in that environment you could get
individual brilliant improvisers, like Frederic Rzewski, for example,
but you weren’t going to get a whole culture. So you created it in
software, (laughter) and then you could invite people like Frederic.
Voyager was more an architectural than a conceptual change
from the IRCAM piece. It was a massively parallel type deal, where you
had a large number of software “players” that could play any instrument
at any time. This comes directly out of AACM multi-instrumentalism. When
I saw the Art Ensemble in 1972, they’d have like a thousand instruments
on the stage. See, I don’t know of any culture where you can get a
hundred people together, each one of whom can play a hundred
instruments, and they get together and they improvise. It doesn’t
happen. Software is the only place where you can realize conceptions
like that now. My feeling was that there is a political subtext to the
idea of signifying on, that sort of détournement of the classical orchestra.
JP So this concept of having a
multi-instrumentalist orchestra, is that what Voyager is now? The one
time that I saw yourself and Roscoe Mitchell—
GL The piano thing in Chicago.
JP Yeah.
GL I had taken the Voyager
software and made a little piano version of it. It didn’t play the piano
very well, it didn’t have a great touch or anything, so I revived it
with the help of Damon Holzborn, who’s now a Columbia composition
graduate student. We were using the Disklavier, the Yamaha grand piano
that’s MIDI controllable. The thing is, usually people just run a
sequence on the piano, and it sounds very wooden, or alternatively,
somebody plays the sound in and takes the whole thing into some editing
software, and then the touch is as good as the person who originally
played it. But in my case, I felt that I should be able to get the
computer to sound good more or less on its own, so that someone
listening to it says, “Who is that playing?”
JP Right.
GLBut if you get “What’s
that?” instead, you have to go back to the drawing board. And that may
seem scandalous to a lot of people, but at this point I feel like
Voyager’s gotten pretty good, actually dialoguing with people—or maybe
just playing a solo, because the other thing about Voyager is that it
doesn’t need you. It’s perfectly capable of playing whole concerts by
itself. If you choose to go in and play, it’s happy to listen to you and
dialogue with you, or sometimes ignore you, but the conceptual aspect
of it is that it’s pretty autonomous. You can’t tell it what to do. Just
like with people, I expect it to listen to the situation and figure out
what’s appropriate, and although I may not agree with what the computer
finds appropriate, that’s too bad, because there’s no reason why I
should have a veto on what anyone does. So improvisation becomes a
negotiation where you have to work with people rather than just be in
control.
JP You referred to it as—
GL —anti-authoritarian. (laughter)
That was in this great film by Jeremy Marre, with Derek Bailey going
all around the world talking to improvisers. They interviewed Jerry
Garcia, and I borrowed the anti-authoritarian thing from what he said in
the film.
JP That’s a great phrase.
GL It’s a great film. It’s
one of those things that they made for PBS, but you know PBS these
days—my God, they can find time for Tucker Carlson but they have no time
at all for Derek Bailey. (laughter)
George Lewis, published in New Music America Program Book, 1979.
JP We’ve had conversations in
the past where we touched on the subject of genre and how it implies
certain restrictions. I guess it’s kind of a credo of the AACM, breaking
down these genres that seem to restrict artists’ freedom. And it seems,
at least to me, that you try to challenge people’s perceptions or
expectations, definitely of African American artists, in order to
redefine or modernize what’s considered Afrocentric.
GL Maybe so. I came up at the
tail end of the sort of heavy cultural nationalism period, where it
seemed to be pretty rigid as to what was considered truly black music.
By the way, this is something that has always excited me about your
work—how you just ride over all of that, especially when it comes to the
interface with rock, you know, the Tortoise thing, the Isotope thing. I
don’t want to feel that people are looking over my shoulder all the
time. If they are, I don’t want to have to even notice it. (laughter)
JP I feel the same way.
GL This is what I
want to do, figure out ways to feel that free, while recognizing at the
same time that there are actions by society that make it difficult to
exercise these kinds of freedoms. And of course you can’t boil it down
to personality X and personality Y. That’s just recapitulating Horatio
Alger.
JP Sure.
GL That’s what I think has
been great about operating in spheres that are very different. You start
to see the hidden assumptions, the comfortable agreements about who is
authorized to make certain sounds, and there’s a sudden Aufklärung—an
enlightenment. I like bringing those kinds of situations out through
the music, so that people start to realize that maybe everything is much
more in flux than they thought.
Jeff, let me ask you something, is that okay?
JP Yeah, of course!
GL I was going to ask you
about this little business of so-called free improvisation. I mean,
maybe just broadly stated, how do you feel about it? Is it something you
do a lot?
JP Yeah, I guess it’s . . . I
do, I do it a lot, especially with musicians around Chicago. Are you
talking about it in terms of what’s implied by the term free improvisation, or just getting together and improvising with other musicians?
GL I guess particularly in
the European sense, it became this kind of practice, and then it became
quite politicized in some ways. I was reading the new biography of
Derek, where it takes on this messianic dimension that I’m pretty
uncomfortable with.
JP You mean the people who kind of define the idiom, like Derek Bailey?
GL Yeah, or were said to have
defined the medium. The author put Derek in the role of the messiah,
but maybe none of us can take on that role.
JP Right right right. It seems like a parody now; I mean, it contradicts what it was supposed to be about in the first place.
GL I would say the people who really were doing great work back then are still doing it. You just said idiom,
which is interesting, because I think a lot of writing about
improvisation goes like: Well, our thing is not idiomatic, whereas other
kinds of music are very idiomatic—that is, immobile, unchanging,
non-dynamic, like a fixed star—and the fixed star is usually jazz,
because that’s where most of them came from anyway, so it’s kind of
Oedipal. Also it’s frankly the most successful Western form of
improvisation. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s sitting there like a
big elephant in the room. For me the subtext of the
idiomatic/non-idiomatic thing is largely about race, and there is a
poverty of theorizing on that subject that has yet to be really
addressed.
JP You’ve definitely been focusing on that for the past, I don’t know, ten years or so? At least in your writing.
GL This goes back again to my record Changing With the Times.
The liner notes by Paul Carter Harrison talked about the trickster
imagery in the piece, and I realized, I don’t know anything about any of
this, and this is my music. It made me understand that you didn’t have
to rely on the composer as the ultimate arbiter of what the work was
about. Other people could develop ideas and if you encourage that
process, you could develop a larger network of discourse surrounding
what you’re doing.
A couple of years after that, I started publishing
so-called historical and critical texts. Musicians have always been a
little disaffected with what’s been said about their work, and then
suddenly, I’m saying things that they had always thought about but
couldn’t quite put together, or maybe were afraid to say. This other
mode of thinking feeds back into the musical thinking. I get the same
feeling from writing a scholarly article as I do from composing or
playing music. I don’t want to get too romantic about this, but there is
a kind of ecstasy connected with it all.
Stills from video of Leon Theremin and George Lewis, January 1991, Moscow. Collection of George Lewis.
JP It’s important to have the history documented from an alternative viewpoint, actually from an insider point of view.
GL Well, so many of us have
been written out of these histories of contemporary music. But we can
write ourselves back in. It comes out of the whole jazz idea that your
job as a musician is to bring your individual voice out.
JP Right. That’s the reason I
personally started doing a lot of the stuff that I got into, because I
felt like my individual voice was something that I needed to find.
Coming from my experiences in music school, they tried to repress it,
like they didn’t want me to find my own thing, my niche.
GL When you say they, who is that?
JP Just some of the jazz pedagogy police. (laughter)
GL Well, you really went all the way through that.
JP At the time that’s what I
was into. I was always infatuated by jazz and jazz history when I was a
child, and I really wanted to know what it was about. The deeper I got
into it, the less it seemed like I had to do it the way that they were
teaching me in the schools.
GL What would you say your relationship is to jazz today?
JP I don’t know if it’s
necessarily something I can define for you. It’s not especially a part
of what I do. Just the fact that it has an improvisational nature is
what attracted me to it, because that’s what I was always doing on the
guitar anyway, from the minute that I picked it up. That’s the extent of
my relationship with it really, just as an improvising musician.
GL In Tortoise, does everyone have a jazz background?
JP No, nobody does.
GL How does that work in terms of the conception of improvisation?
JP It doesn’t really. It’s
improvisational more in the way that a composer improvises. It’s
basically a band that just gets together and we write together. We
document it like that. There’s no improvisation in it at all.
GL So the improvisation is not in the performing but in the conceptualizing of it?
JP Right, exactly.
GL So what other kinds of projects are you involved in right now?
JP I just got into Reason.
It’s electronic music studio software. When we were in Baden-Baden,
Guillermo [Brown] was trying to get me into it because I was explaining
some things that I wanted to do. I was dealing with sample-based music,
trying to incorporate it into whatever it is I’m trying to do in a
really natural way.
GL When you say natural, do you mean playing it on an instrument, or having a real-time composing environment around you?
JP More a way to compose,
using sample-based technology as a compositional element, but in a way
that doesn’t sound like you’re just making a hip-hop or electronic music
track. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for years, but I was
intimidated by the process and kept putting it off. Now it’s something
I’m getting into, even though I know it might take me years to really
figure this out. (laughter)
GL You know, the Baden-Baden
experience was the outgrowth of work I’d been doing with this electronic
music duo 48nord from Munich: Sigi Rössert and Ulrich Müller. I had a
residency there, and they were showing me stuff I’d never seen—the
laptop improvisers and their world.
To people who know me, this won’t sound terrible at all,
but I have always had a real ambivalence about the trombone. It got
acute after I had some real success as a trombone player, and then it
was like, Well, if you don’t play the trombone you’re worthless, you
know? As a creative artist I thought, I didn’t sign up for this, to have
a brass albatross around my neck. (laughter) Electronics were
the road out of that, and there I am with Sigi and Ulrich, and I’m
thinking, Well, I could be doing more of this. This is what I’m
interested in, creating sound in real time and improvising with them,
and they’re all using this Ableton Live software. They showed me how it
worked and I started using it for a piece that’s part of Lev Manovich’s
DVD Soft Cinema, which was a personal travelogue presented
as a database of video clips of video screens, hotel rooms and so on.
Years before, when camcorders were new, I had made videos everywhere. I
made about 300 or 400 sound clips from those videos for Lev’s
travelogue. They come from all over the world, everywhere I went,
playing with these 80-year-old guys, Austrian amateur musicians playing
the Ländler.
You can authorize yourself to drop all the stuff about
what people expect. In order to do that, though, you also have to
authorize yourself against your friends and colleagues who also believe
it.
JP Right, right.
GL Some of those expectations
are pretty intense, whether you become world-famous or locally
significant to a certain small group of people who get very invested in
your previous practice, so that when you decide to step out of that
practice, people say, What are you doing?
The Baden-Baden thing was designed to be gender and
racially diverse. I’d been playing in all these European scenes where I
was always the only African American and there were never any women,
especially not women of color. I decided I didn’t want to play in any
more concerts like that. It wasn’t an environment that I was that
interested in, and it played totally against all these other ideas of
community.
JP Sure.
GLI think that having three
women in there, Miya Masaoka, Kaffe Matthews and DJ Mutamassik, instead
of the usual token one person, made a lot of things better for
everybody. This was also related to ideas written by Susan McClary and
others about how women are kept away from technology in music and so on.
So you’re playing against that as well.
Then there were the three of us African Americans:
Guillermo, you and me. It provided a very different idea of what
improvised music could be like than what you normally see.
JP When you put electronic elements on the trombone, did that lead you into computer music or into electronics?
GL Early on, Douglas Ewart
and I would talk about how we wanted to get a computer, but we didn’t
really know what computers could do. We’re talking about ’72, ’73, and
computer music was mostly a mainframe thing. You also had people like
Joel Chadabe and Sal Martirano who were doing the interactive live
electronic music, but we weren’t in touch with that world. We were just
thinking about it from our perspective.
I first encountered computers at Mills College, around ’77
or ’78. Hearing David Behrman and his associates doing this kind of
work, it sounded just like the improvised music that we had been doing. I
thought, Wow, if you can do this with computers, then I want to get
one. (laughter) It started with one of those small single
boards that you had to program yourself. And that was where people like
David were just great. He would sometimes stay up all night, worrying
with me about whether some interface was going to work. I mean, it was
him and Richard Teitelbaum, who really did stay up all night. (laughter)
He didn’t get started until ten or 11:00, and then we’d play till like
four or five in the morning. These two people were my electronic music
mentors. But then you also have to look at Muhal [Richard Abrams],
because he did electronics on all his records; he wasn’t averse to it
the way a lot of people were.
I wasn’t that interested in playing the trombone through
the electronics. I thought I could—and I still believe this—really get a
much wider palette of sound playing acoustically. I spent a lot of time
working on just “how weird can it get,” you know?
JP Honestly, that’s how I
feel about my guitar playing as well. I can get more interesting sounds
out of just playing the guitar with my hands than with a bunch of
devices hooked up to it. So at the time when you did the Solo Trombone record, you were already into computer music?
GL Yes, but the main point
for me was always using computers to create these alternate beings, a
kind of animistic conception. Of course, what I’ve done is on the fringe
somewhere, but I’ve been a part of so many fringes, including
contemporary music. It’s not really sampling, it’s not really
transformation of timbre or playing your instrument through the
electronic box. It’s just its own little thing. You saw me in
Baden-Baden with the electronics and the trombone, but I still approach
it very gingerly, because you can get into some pretty hoary clichés
really quick.
JP You mean as far as in the laptop—
GL Well, there, but I’m more
insulated from that because having done electronic music for so long,
you hear a lot of the stuff that people have already picked over. You
don’t have to go into those ancient middens to find stuff.
George Lewis conducting, 2003.
JP I want to ask one last
question. Did you learn from the AACM the direction that you eventually
ended up taking, or was it a direction you were already going in before,
that was cultivated by the AACM?
GL I was 19 years old when I
met the people in the AACM. It was just dumb luck that I almost
literally stumbled upon Muhal, Pete Cosey, people like that. I was
walking on 87th and Bennett and I saw a band rehearsing in this
children’s center. I poked my head in, and that was how I met them. They
had their Monday night band, and then after the initial period of “Who
is this guy?” they let me play.
It seemed that the AACM was a place where if you didn’t
have a clue, you were encouraged to develop one. If you had an idea, no
matter how half-baked it was, they would try to realize it, and they
would demand that you create your own concepts, your own compositions.
They had their Saturday classes, and people were being encouraged to
compose. They never discussed improvisation; the only classes were in
composition. So to bring this whole thing full circle, this whole
business of my approaching things compositionally came from the AACM,
because it was assumed that you were there because you wanted to be a
composer, and by being a composer you were manifesting a kind of
alternative model of what African American creativity would be about.
People like Fred Anderson, Lester Lashley, and Roscoe were
constantly questioning you about what you were trying to do. I remember
riding in a van with Anthony Braxton, and he turns to me and says,
George, what is your music like? So I gave him what I thought was a
pretty cool answer, and he said, You know, George, that kind of sounds
like bullshit to me. (laughter) I mean, he was right, you know?
People took it personally as to whether you advanced as a
musician. I had a whole community of benevolent aunts and uncles who
were trying to help me do stuff. That seems almost utopian, but I have
to say that’s my recollection of it. They wanted to institutionalize
that attitude toward nurturing artists. Rather than keeping it on the
individual basis of mentorship, you have a whole group of people who
feel that it’s necessary to take each other on. It’s a model I haven’t really found in any other world of music I’ve been involved in.
In writing this book on the AACM I’m trying to sort out
why the AACM succeeded where so many musicians’ collectives failed. The
focus was on helping someone else rather than helping your own career.
The economic strategy of the AACM is the thing that most people focus
on, but very few people have a strategy for encouraging individuals to
realize themselves. They always talked about self-realization, and being
a college boy from Yale, I thought it was about Abraham Maslow (laughter) but it was really Paramahansa Yogananda that some of them were influenced by.
I’m not saying that other people didn’t have a hand in
what I have become, because I’ve learned from everyone that I performed
with and did stuff with. But the AACM gave me the tools that enabled me
to really open up, to have a questioning and a critical attitude.
Was it the same way for you? I think it changed quite a bit by the time you were there.
JP No, in honesty, man, I
wasn’t really as immersed in this as in that time. I was mentored by
Ernest Dawkins and Ameen Muhammad in a lot of ways, but I felt like I
developed more of a community with my peers around the stuff I was doing
in Wicker Park in Chicago.
GL In my case, there was a
sense of urgency about it. One doesn’t want to get into the nostalgia of
it, but if you were on the stage with Henry Threadgill, Muhal, Roscoe
Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Amina, and Braxton would visit, or Leroy
Jenkins and Leo Smith—and who’s playing drums—Hamid Drake? I mean, it
was my luck to come up right at that moment, and I think that the AACM
is about to have another one of those lucky moments with lots of new
people, like Nicole Mitchell, who’s brilliant, Corey Wilkes, people like
this.
That’s not to say the community doesn’t have dislocations,
but in the end, part of what I found interesting about the AACM was—for
one thing, I got to meet you through it. You know, it works in
mysterious ways.
President Lee C. Bollinger and Provost Claude M. Steele host the University Lecture given by George E. Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music.
"Improvisation as a Way of Life: Reflections on Human Interaction"
Date: March 7, 2011 from 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm EST Location: Rotunda, Low Memorial Library Columbia University
New York
Many musical improvisers have understood their sounds and practices as addressing larger questions of identity and social organization, as well as creating politically inflected, critically imbued aesthetic spaces. Following a 1964 suggestion by Alfred Schutz that a study of the social relationships connected with the musical process may lead to some insights valid for many other forms of social intercourse, the realization that improvisation is not limited to the artistic domain, but is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life, can lead humanists and scientists toward new models of intelligibility, agency, ethics, technology, and social transformation.
The lecture was followed by a question and answer session with the audience.
George E. Lewis -- Voyager Duo 4: George E. Lewis - trombone Roscoe Mitchell - alto and soprano saxophone
Avant, Japan (AVAN 014) 1993
George Lewis "Interactive Trio" for Trombone, Two Pianos, and Interactive Music System, 2011:
George Lewis and Vijay Iyer in Concert:
WELLESLEY COLLEGE PRESENTS:
"George Lewis and Vijay Iyer in Concert"
George Lewis collaborates in concert with Vijay Iyer, one of the most exciting jazz pianists in the contemporary scene. Lewis and Iyer perform with Lewis's "Voyager" system, a digital improvising device capable of listening and responding to human improvisatory performers.
Grammy-nominated composer-pianist VIJAY IYER was described by Pitchfork as "one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today," by The New Yorker as one of "today's most important pianists... extravagantly gifted... brilliantly eclectic," and by the Los Angeles Weekly as "a boundless and deeply important young star." He was voted the 2010 Musician of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association and named one of the "50 Most Influential Global Indians" by GQ India. Iyer has released fifteen albums as a leader, most recently Tirtha (2011), Solo (2010), and the multiple-award-winning Historicity (2009), which features the Vijay Iyer Trio (Iyer, piano; Marcus Gilmore, drums; Stephan Crump, bass). Historicity was a 2010 Grammy Nominee for Best Instrumental Jazz Album, and was named #1 Jazz Album of the Year in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Metro Times, National Public Radio, PopMatters.com, the Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll, and the Downbeat International Critics Poll. The trio won the 2010 Echo Award (the "German Grammy") for best international ensemble and the Downbeat Critics Poll for rising star small ensemble of the year. Iyer's many awards also include the Alpert Award in the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and numerous composer commissions.
A polymath whose career has spanned the sciences, the humanities and the arts, Iyer holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Yale University, plus a Masters in Physics and a Ph.D. in Technology and the Arts from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published articles in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Wire, Music Perception, JazzTimes, and The Best Writing on Mathematics: 2010.
Join us for an evening with acclaimed composer, improvisor, and Columbia University scholar George Lewis, featuring the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, premier European free jazz pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, and Arnold I. Davidson, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Currently in residence at the University's Center for Disciplinary Innovation, Lewis and his collaborators will explore the relationship between humans and machines, musicians and their instruments, improvisation, social responsibility, and agency through both live performance and discussion. The evening will feature the very first creative collaboration between the Great Black Music Ensemble and Alexander von Schlippenbach, bringing together two renowned traditions of creative improvised music — European and American — that have excited generations of composers, improvisors, and audiences around the world.
George Lewis Quintet, Moers 1979 - 'Hommage To Charlie Parker' (part 1):
George Lewis, trombone Douglas Ewart, alto saxophone, bamboo-flute, bass clarinet Wallace McMillan, flute, alto saxophone Anthony Davis, piano Richard Teitelbaum, synthesizer
Recorded in Moers, Germany 02.06.1979
George Lewis and Marina Rosenfeld-- "Sour Mash"
George Lewis and Marina Rosenfeld perform Sour Mash, their collaborative vinyl composition released in 2009 on innova. For this performance,
Lewis will play computer and Rosenfeld turntables, using their
composition as an electro-acoustic palette for live recombination. http://www.marinarosenfeld.com/
At the AAR, Arnold Davidson and George Lewis on "improvisation as a way of life":
Excerpt from 3 June 2010 dialogue at American Academy in Rome between
Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago/Pisa) and George E. Lewis (Columbia)
RAAR'10, "Improvisation as a way of life: time, technology, ethics
Either/Or: George E. Lewis - "Thistledown" (world premiere)
(Composition by George E. Lewis):
Either/Or is: Richard Carrick, piano, Esther Noh, violin, David Shively, percussion, Alex Waterman, cello. www.eitherormusic.org
Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Dave Holland, Barry Altschul from THE BERLIN/MONTREUX CONCERTS (1977):
Recorded in Berlin, 4.11.76. The titles are alphanumeric diagrams: for
"Cut One," the elements are "72 degree-Kelvin-L"; for "Cut Two," "BFG-12
337-4 46842." Anthony Braxton, various reeds and flute; George Lewis,
trombone; Dave Holland, bass; Barry Altschul, drums. AL 5002 (LP).
"Toneburst" (Piece For 3 Trombones Simultaneously)
(Composition and arrangement by George Lewis):
From: The Solo Trombone Record by George Lewis--Sackville Records, 1976:
George E. Lewis (born July 14, 1952) is an American composer, electronic performer, installation artist, trombone player, and scholar in the fields of improvisation and experimental music.[1] He has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, and is a pioneer of computer music.
Lewis has long been active in creating and performing with
interactive computer systems, most notably his software called Voyager,
which "listens to" and reacts to live performers. Between 1988 and 1990,
Lewis collaborated with video artist Don Ritter to create performances of interactive music and interactive video controlled by Lewis’s improvised trombone.[5] Lewis and Ritter performed at venues in North America and Europe, including Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Verona Jazz Festival, Art Institute of Chicago, The Kitchen (NYC), New Music America 1989 (NYC), The Alternative Museum (NYC), A Space (Toronto), and the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge).
In 2008, Lewis published a book-length history of the AACM titled A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press). The book received the 2009 American Book Award.
Appearances
In 1992, Lewis collaborated with Canadian artist Stan Douglas on the video installation Hors-champs which was featured at documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany. The installation features Lewis in an improvisation of Albert Ayler's "Spirits Rejoice" with musicians Douglas Ewart, Kent Carter and Oliver Johnson.[6] Lewis is featured extensively in Unyazi of the Bushveld (2005), a documentary about the first symposium of electronic music held in Africa, directed by Aryan Kaganof. Lewis gave an invited keynote lecture and performance at NIME-06, the sixth international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, which was held at IRCAM, Paris, in June 2006. In 2008 his work "Morning Blues for Yvan" was featured on the compilation album Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records) produced by Mendi + Keith Obadike.
Steve Lacy Seven, Clichés (hat Hut, 1997; recorded 1992)
Steve Coleman, Genesis & The Opening of the Way (BMG/RCA Victor, 1997)
Evod Magek, Through Love to Freedom (Black Pot, 1998)
Miya Masaoka Orchestra, What Is the Difference Between Stripping and Playing the Violin? (Victo, 1998)
Anthony Braxton, News from the '70s (New Tone, 1999; recorded 1971-1976)
NOW Orchestra, WOWOW (Spool, 1999)
Globe Unity Orchestra, Globe Unity — 40 Years (Intakt, 2007)
Musica Elettronica Viva, MEV 40 (New World, 2008)
Compositions
Solo and chamber music
"Thistledown" (2012), for quartet
"The Will To Adorn" (2011), for large chamber ensemble
"Ikons" (2010), for octet
"Dancing in the Palace" (2009), for tenor voice and viola, with text by Donald Hall
"Signifying Riffs" (1998), for string quartet and percussion
"Ring Shout Ramble" (1998), for saxophone quartet
"Collage" (1995), for poet and chamber orchestra, with text by Quincy Troupe
"Endless Shout" (1994), for piano
"Toneburst" (1976) for three trombones
Electronics
"Anthem" (2011), for chamber ensemble with electronics
"Les Exercices Spirituels" (2010) for eight instruments and computer sound spatialization
"Sour Mash" (2009), composition for vinyl turntablists, with Marina Rosenfeld
"Hello Mary Lou" (2007) for chamber ensemble and live electronics
"Crazy Quilt" (2002), for infrared-controlled "virtual percussion" and four percussionists
"North Star Boogaloo" (1996), for percussionist and computer, with text by Quincy Troupe
"Virtual Discourse" (1993), composition for infrared-controlled "virtual percussion" and four percussionists
"Nightmare At The Best Western" (1992), for baritone voice and six instruments
"Atlantic" (1978), for amplified trombones with resonant filters
Installations
"Ikons" (2010), interactive sound sculpture, with Eric Metcalfe
"Travelogue" (2009), sound installation
"Rio Negro II" (2007), robotic-acoustic sound installation, with Douglas Ewart and Douglas Irving Repetto.
"Information Station No. 1" (2000), multi-screen videosonic
interactive installation for the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant,
San Diego, Calif.
"Rio Negro" (1992), robotic-acoustic sound-sculpture installation, with Douglas Ewart
"A Map of the Known World" (1987), interactive mbira-driven audiovisual installation, with David Behrman
"Mbirascope/Algorithme et kalimba" (1985), interactive mbira-driven audiovisual installation, with David Behrman
Interactive computer music
"Interactive Duo" (2007), for interactive computer-driven piano and human instrumentalist
"Interactive Trio" (2007), for interactive computer-driven piano, human pianist, and additional instrumentalist
"Virtual Concerto" (2004), for improvising computer piano soloist and orchestra
"Voyager" (1987), for improvising soloist and interactive “virtual orchestra"
"Rainbow Family" (1984), for soloists with multiple interactive computer systems
"Chamber Music for Humans and Non-Humans" (1980), for micro-computer and improvising musician
"The KIM and I" (1979), for micro-computer and improvising musician
Music Theatre
"The Empty Chair" (1986), computer-driven videosonic music theatre work
"Changing With The Times" (1991), radiophonic/music theatre work
Creative orchestra
"Triangle" (2009)
"Something Like Fred" (2009)
"Fractals" (2007)
"Angry Bird" (2007)
"Shuffle" (2007)
"The Chicken Skin II" (2007)
"Hello and Goodbye" (1976/2000)
"The Shadowgraph Series, 1-5" (1975–77)
Graphic and instructional scores
"Artificial Life 2007" (2007), composition for improvisors with open instrumentation
"Sequel" (2004), for eight electro-acoustic performers
"Blues" (1979), graphic score for four instruments
"Homage to Charles Parker" (1979), for improvisors and electronics
"Chicago Slow Dance" (1977), for electro-acoustic ensemble
"The Imaginary Suite" (1977), two movements for tape, live electronics, and instruments
"Monads" (1977), graphic score for any instrumentation
Books and essays
Lewis, George E. “Americanist Musicology and Nomadic Noise.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 691–95.
Lewis, George E. "Interactivity and Improvisation". In Dean, Roger T., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009), 457-66.
Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Lewis, George E. "The Virtual Discourses of Pamela Z". In Hassan, Salah M., and Cheryl Finley, eds. Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z. Munich: Prestel (2008), 266-81.
Lewis, George E., "Foreword: After Afrofuturism.” Journal of the Society for American Music, Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 139–53 (2008).
Lewis, George E., "Stan Douglas's Suspiria: Genealogies of Recombinant Narrativity." In Stan Douglas, Past Imperfect: Works 1986-2007. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 42-53 (2008).
Lewis, George E., "Mobilitas Animi: Improvising Technologies, Intending Chance." Parallax, Vol. 13, No. 4, (2007), 108–122.
Lewis, George E., "Living with Creative Machines: An Improvisor Reflects." In Anna Everett and Amber J. Wallace, eds. AfroGEEKS: Beyond the Digital Divide. Santa Barbara: Center for Black Studies Research, 2007, 83-99.
Lewis, George E. Improvisation and the Orchestra: A Composer
Reflects. Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 25, Nos. 5/6, October/December
2006, pp. 429–34.
Lewis, George E. "The Secret Love between Interactivity and
Improvisation, or Missing in Interaction: A Prehistory of Computer
Interactivity". In Fähndrich, Walter, ed. Improvisation V: 14 Beiträge. Winterthur: Amadeus (2003), 193-203.
Lewis, George E. 2004. "Gittin' to Know Y'all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism and the Racial Imagination". Critical Studies in Improvisation (peer-reviewed online journal), Vol. 1, No. 1, ISSN 1712-0624, www.criticalimprov.com.
Lewis, George E. 2004. "Leben mit kreativen Maschinen: Reflexionen eines improvisierenden Musikers". In Knauer, Wolfram, ed. Improvisieren: Darmstädter Beiträge zur Jazzforschung, Band 8. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 123-144.
Lewis, George. 2004. Afterword to "Improvised Music After 1950": The Changing Same. In Fischlin, Daniel, and Ajay Heble, eds. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 163-72.
Lewis, George E., “Too Many Notes: Computers, complexity and culture in Voyager.” Leonardo Music Journal 10, 2000, 33-39. Reprinted in Everett, Anna, and John T. Caldwell, eds. 2003. New Media: Theories and Practices of Intertextuality. New York and London: Routledge, 93-106.
Lewis, George, ”Teaching Improvised Music: An Ethnographic Memoir.” In Zorn, John, ed. Arcana: Musicians on Music. New York: Granary Books (2000), 78-109.
Lewis, George, "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives." Black Music Research Journal,
vol. 16, No.1, Spring 1996, 91-122. Excerpted in Cox, Christoph, and
Daniel Warner. 2004. Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music. New York:
Continuum, 272-86.
Gale, Peggy (1996). "Stan Douglas: Evening and others." VIDEO Re/VIEW: The (best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artists' Video. Eds. Peggy Gale and Lisa Steele. Toronto: Art Metropole. p. 363. ISBN 0-920956-37-8
A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) "Four Decades of Music That Redefined Free", New York Times May 2, 2008 [1]
Monaghan, Peter. “Thoroughly Modern Music” (review of A Power
Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George
E. Lewis). Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2008, 113–117.
Bruno, Franklin J. Review of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM
and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis. The Nation, February
2, 2009, 34, 36.
Zorn, John, ed. (2000). Arcana: Musicians on Music. New York: Granary Books/Hips Road. ISBN 1-887123-27-X.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
What inspired the composition of the title piece and “Blues”? 
George Lewis, published in New Music America Program Book, 1979.
Stills from video of Leon Theremin and George Lewis, January 1991, Moscow. Collection of George Lewis.
George Lewis, published in New Music America Program Book, 1979.
Stills from video of Leon Theremin and George Lewis, January 1991, Moscow. Collection of George Lewis.
