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Anyone who's known Anthony Braxton for awhile has heard these words often: "Get ready for the third millennium, people!"
I've known and worked with him closely, off and on, since 1987, first as a musician, then as his graduate teaching assistant at Wesleyan University from 1993-96. I wrote a book about his music, and helped him fund and stage the first full production of the flower of his most recent and mature work as a composer, his opera Trillium R: Shala Fears for the Poor in New York in 1996. Most to the point here, I've had numerous conversations with him about our mutual fascinations with ancient prophetic writings, both biblical and more occult, that have come over time to lend the charge of myth and mystery to mundane markers like millennia. We didn't know exactly what sea change or revelation the new one would bring, but we knew we liked the numerological dimensions of the number "three" and the mythico-theological ones of the unit "thousand." The rest would be details.
Without planning it, we ran into each other last December, just before the real millennial shift--and before the Armaggedon-like attack of September 11--and sparked to the idea of an update interview: a comprehensive retrospective of the past, pulse-taking of the present, pipe-dreaming of the future. What unfolded was a series of five weekly sessions over that holiday season, each one as long as it took to fill two 74-minute minidisks, eat two Red Lobster lunches, and down one carafe of white wine. Great fun! We just kept meeting until we felt we had covered it.
Those who haven't grown up with Braxton's public persona and work, as I have, should know this: he was and remains one of the pioneers and giants of the musical terrain this magazine covers. It would surprise me if the lion's share of the artists, young and old, working in the "improvised & experimental music" enounced in the front-page masthead didn't know and acknowledge Braxton's groundbreaking work from the late 1960s on as crucial to the beginnings and developments of their "medium of expression." Let us recount the ways...
Braxton's 1968 double LP For Alto opened the door onto the single-line instrument as a valid vehicle for solo performances among improvisers; a little later he did the same thing for saxophone quartet, breaking ground for the World Saxophone Quartet and numerous others since. As one of the most popular and successful of the post-'60s (post-Coltrane/Ayler/Coleman/Ra) musicians, Braxton was also the most visible example of multiinstrumentalism as part of the soundscape, expanding the improviser's voice and the music's timbral pallette. Braxton, as those of us who have played with him know viscerally, has fused the realms of the "free" improvisation and the through-composed piece so systematically and consistently, with such increasing sophistication over the years, that the treasures of each--from the heaviest golden crown to the least little bead, previously locked away from each other not only in traditional practice but for want of effective notational devices and aesthetic parameters--gradually merged, modestly at first, then with a great bursting of the walls of the chests containing them, resulting in a double fortune in one gleaming pile, for all the world to sort and run through its fingers with the treasure-hunter's shout of joy. One of the richest of those treasures was musical time. Braxton opened up that field, building on African America's pulse-rooted stretches beyond meter, and on European America's and Europe's experimental and avant-garde concert music, to devise ways more specific to the improviser striking out further from both traditions for newer, more, and more personal gestures.
More than any single musical innovation, however, Braxton's doggedly uphill and ongoing quest to challenge and change the assumptions underlying the musical-cultural terrain of his times, through his prolific recordings and interviews, is what sets him apart most valuably from most others. He came of age in the days (still going strong in powerful new and high-end quarters) when jazz was jazz, rock was rock, art music was art music, and woe to those who messed around with their well-policed borders; when black was black and white was white, and the border patrols policing them were even more vigilant, yea, vicious; when all these little quadrants had their place in a hierarchy that dictated socioeconomic and personal value--and forget about borders between high and low there, think rather in terms of DMZ zones. Braxton has braved and defied all this, often and largely without peer in the role, taking heat and flack few were able or willing to deal with. His payoff for doing so, far more than fame or fortune or honor due, has been to have produced a body of written and recorded music that is to "jazz," "Western art music," and "African-American composer's tradition" what Einstein was to physics, Picasso to Impressionism, Dylan to folk music. We who enjoy a scene with said borders and zones dissolving like a bad dream do owe him the honor of remembrance, respect, attention, understanding and support.
One aspect of the musical system he's been constructing since the 1960s is the terminology he uses to describe and explain it. Thus, to use the examples in the following, "house of the rectangle" refers most generally to the fixed aspects of nature--product rather than process, position rather than trajectory; "house of the circle" is the polar opposite of that, spontaneous improvisation, that which streams; and "house of the triangle" is synthesis, of those first two houses and in general. The "house of one" refers to the first of twelve musical components, or "sonic languages" on his chart, the long tone; it also has an anthropomorphizing personal name, Shala. "Identity" refers to what an improvised musical gesture ends in being as a finished product standing in time's moment, after its flow. "Tri-centric" has to do with Braxton's sense of the universe as rather a "tri-verse," a term of Muhal Richard Abrams', stressing trinity rather than unity. His chart of his system will clarify other terms. Click here to go to his website.
AB It has been an incredible time period for me just because of the depth of the change. The concept of "exile" has been a real experience for me, it hasn't been just a theoretical concept. Since around the performance of Trillium R, my world would turn upside down; and now I'm poised to go into the third millennium in a completely unplanned way. I have no idea of what I'll be looking at in the future, and I'm fortunate--I don't mean to be painting a picture of sadness; I've had a life with many bright moments. To have the kind of complexities I'm having to deal with in this period in some ways makes a lot of sense, or at least in some ways I'm very fortunate. When I think about what's happening in the music world, and looking at my life, I've come to see that it's really correct, for instance, that the jazz people see me as not being a jazz musician, and it's really correct that the classical people see me as not being a classical composer, that my life, in fact, has been in between the African-American and European-American communities, in between the concepts of conservative and liberal. It's going to be interesting to see the alignment of components in the third millennium; from my perspective, I feel like what looks like the minstrel period is coming back. Did you see the NY Times, with the Al Jolson article?
MH Yeah, I did. Did you see Spike Lee's new movie, Bamboozled?
AB I'm going to see this movie; one of my students saw it in New York. I have a feeling this movie is relevant. I'm no fan of Spike Lee's, but the fact that he would have a project dabbling in minstrelsy, on whatever level, is just further proof that the components of the third millennium will be very different from what we came up with in the '60s. For instance, much of the hip-hop music that we're experiencing right now has a minstrel component. More and more, it's the tough guy celebrating vulgarity--which isn't to say this is the only component of hip-hop. I have a feeling hip-hop, like every other form of music, has many different levels, but the one that gets through is the level that the marketplace co-signs. So we're seeing the same thing that has happened to the jazz world. At this point in time for me, it's almost irrelevant what's happening in the jazz world.
MH Because it seems taken over by corporate commercialism and so on?
AB Yes; everything's become generic in a way that the people who are allowed to be successful are those whose experience and perceptual parameters exist within the framework of what the jazz business complex has deemed acceptable.
MH Let me go back to this concept of exile. For those of us who know your work and history and everything, you've always been sort of on the margins in certain ways. You took a lot of flack in the early years for your music, and you've kind of done your own thing all along, regardless of the trends of the times. So have you never felt the exile before in quite this way, or is this a whole new level of exile?
AB By exile in this context, I'm referring to a fresh context of isolation, where say for the past four years I've basically separated myself from everyone. In the end, it was the only thing I could do anyway. Another component of it is my special relationship with the IRS, as I seek to undo the financial complexities of the opera.
MH How would you explain that whole MacArthur Foundation experience in terms of how it turned out to be more of a liability than an asset?
AB I would not characterize the MacArthur Fellowship as a liability in any way; in fact, it was just the opposite. It was a gift from the heavens. Because of it, I was able to realize an opera project, and for a guy like myself, opera projects have not been an option. Because of my good fortune in this area, and their decision to give me the fellowship, I was able to realize a performance, and for that alone, everything that I'm going through, as far as I'm concerned, I'm lucky to be able to go through this period of exile. That's how much a performance of Trillum R meant to me; that was how badly I needed to get that done. So I will eternally be grateful to the MacArthur Foundation for that opportunity.
MH Was that the first actual full opera production for you?
AB I had a performance of Trillium A that the University of California at San Jose produced in 1985. That was the first actual performance, of a one-act, the first opera written in the opera complex cycle. But Trillium R was the first of the extended four-act operas that I would have the chance to actually produce onstage and record, and it meant everything to me to be able to do that, because I was sinking into depression, looking for a way to get a performance. You can write and compose all you want, but unless you can hear some of the music, there's no closure. And when I think, for instance, what has happened to composite aesthetic assumptions concerning African-American vibrational and creative dynamics in this time period, the gift of the MacArthur Fellowship would make a profound difference in my life.
Two weeks ago, I went into New York City. I'm teaching this semester the History of African American Music. I went to nine different record stores, Mike Heffley, looking for CDs of the music of William Grant Still. I was only able to find three CDs of African American notated music. As far as I'm concerned, the political decisions of the last 15 years have involved what I would call quadrant-specific coalition politics. Quadrant-specific in the sense that, looking back on the last 15 years we see a movement that has sought to move toward idiomatic certainty, as opposed to what my interest has always been, which is responding to composite reality. Idiomatic certainty is a way of talking about the kind of reductionism that has come to characterize present-day notions of what we call the jazz musician. Reductionism, in the sense of where in the beginning, we could look at the continuum of the music and the recorded materials available demonstrating the music as the artifacts, the sonic footprints of the path of evolution and experience of the great creative masters who have brought us to this point in time. Reductionism, then, is my way of looking at how that information has been redefined to where the language and conceptual experiences from the great lineage of mastership of those individuals that we call jazz musicians have been frozen, and have become the sonic artifacts that have been used to reduce the composite conceptual and vibrational implications of what that information originally meant. And so when the term jazz musician is put forth in this time period, it's put forth as part of a grand Southern political strategy. Southern political strategy in the sense that since the 1980s, in my opinion, what we have seen is a continuum of political decision that, one, would reposition the New Orleans experience as a point of definition of this erected concept of canon, at the expense of a composite American creative experience that reflects on American experiences in a way that transcends the political and ethnic position parameters that have characterized, even historically, how American progressionalism is viewed.
What am I saying? I'm saying that the emergence of the modern era--say from 1880 to 1920--can be viewed on many different levels. The most important level in this example would be the concept of the IQ as a reflection of Darwin's evolution of the species, on the one component; and on the other side of that composition would be the concept of rhythm and blues as a way to establish a thought unit that on one side says the European and trans-European continuum is responsible for all of the intellectual advances of our species; and on the other side, the concept of rhythm and blues as a way of saying that African Americans have this special feeling, and that the Europeans, with all their intellectual advancement, are somehow retarded in the area of natural human feeling. I see this intellectual gambit as profoundly flawed and false; in fact this is a political gambit that is consistent with the original Southern gambit that would involve the concept of 3/5ths of a person as a way to justify a political decision that would enslave non-European, especially African American people.
MH Let me jump in here for a second just to get my bearings. From what you just said, it seems real clear to me how we might compare not only hip-hop but also the jazz industrial complex to minstrelsy. Also, I'm thinking that as you've matured as an artist, and at this period in your life, the genre of opera has become very important to you. Also from what you just said, and from what I know of your work, I see how you incorporate the so-called jazz tradition into whatever goes into use in your opera. I don't see you as someone who has come up in jazz and then decided to cross over to "classical" music tradition, I see you more as someone who's really engaging both traditions in the way they're actually engaged in American culture, and that your argument is with the continued segregation in the marketplace of the cultural categories signaled by genre, based on race to a large degree. So how would you describe your relationship to this genre of opera at this point in your life both as a personal tool for your own creative growth and creativity? Also maybe in comparison with someone like Anthony Davis who may be having an easier time, if you agree with that, in getting across.
AB Before I can deal with your question, I would have to first back up and establish this perspective: part of my problem, or part of the complexity of my creative struggle, has been that there's no category for an African American person who's interested in composite reality and in responding to it. I think in the very beginning, many of the problems that I would experience would come about because, for many sectors, I was an African American who did not know my place; who embraced the trans-European and trans-Asian musics to the same extent that I embraced the trans-African musics because I did not experience a natural opposition to those continuua. Part of the complexity of the ethnic politics that has been the political gambit leading into the modern era would be that the African-American person has to function within a defined zone, or parameter. I have all this natural feeling, so-called; if I would just behave and use my natural feeling and function as a jazz musician as that concept is being defined by the marketplace, then there could be possibilities. But my problem was--or at least their perception of my problem was--that in looking at a guy like Karlheinz Stockhausen and having an affinity with him, as well as with Cecil Taylor, that in making the decision to even think about an opera, I would suddenly violate the political dimensions of what kind of experiences I would move toward, or what kind of performance dictates would be available for a guy like me. I mean we talk about jazz, and playing at the Village Vanguard as if at a shrine...but the Metropolitan is also a shrine, but they're dealing with another level of financial support to do an opera. It's no mistake that as we move toward 2001, that there's been no performance of a William Grant Still opera. In fact, that domain has been closed off in a way where it's like for a guy like me to even think about opera, it's almost perceived an un-African, or un-African-American, or non-jazz, or--it's something I'm not even supposed to think about.
Let's give a nod of ritual thank you for that small group of people who do exist in America who are trying to promote inclusive and positive participation in various creative spectra. That group has always been there, and that group has been the one that has helped me to stay alive. Were it not for those special individuals, I could not have been fortunate enough to get to 55 years old.
There are many people I could talk about. Colleagues like the great Leo Smith, whose work has never been embraced or commented on in a way that's equal to what he's demonstrated. In fact, part of the beauty of my life was the experience I had with the AACM, and the information that has come out of that experience. The AACM was a restructural and mystical union that was dedicated to advance composite information dynamics. So when I talk of my work in opera, or any interdisciplinary kind of quadrants, I'm really talking of the genesis components which came together in Chicago that affected all of us. My struggle has not been that different from my colleagues; for instance, I would mention the work of the great Leroy Jenkins, whose music has yet to be embraced by the composite media. I would mention the great music of Henry Threadgill, the great music of Joseph Jarman, the great music of Muhal Richard Abrams. These people were and are dedicated Americans, people that we can be proud of. They were seeking to advance a position that would be consistent with what America is all about. Their work has not been interpreted correctly because, again, it goes back, in my opinion, to the axioms that would determine what I call the Southern Strategy 2000. Southern Strategy 2000 is a way to regain an ethnic-centric parameter that would determine what musicians could be successful and from which value systems. Axiom 2 would determine which individuals would be allowed to be successful, and what subject and area focuses those individuals would have to talk about to become successful; and Axiom 3, the nature of what kinds of flexibilities the creative musician would have to entertain: flexibilities involving vulgarity, and input from the A&R people as far as what projects could be documented and what musicians would be used. As far as I'm concerned, the last 15 years was prepared in the 1980s, and we're seeing a fulfillment of this Southern Strategy, which would also be connected to the African American middle class, and finally the African American upper class.
Also, connected to this strategy would be manipulation of image-logic quadrants; I'm thinking of the work of Hollywood in the last 20 and 30 years, and also image logic manipulation on the television set. I turn on the television set, I look at the political pundits discussing the coming elections; only a couple of TV shows, like the Chris Matthews "Hardball" show, will include the input of African American intellectuals; for the most part, we're seeing 20 or 30 European American intellectuals who are defining the American intellectual schema as it relates to American political and social dynamics. We can look at Hollywood and see the African American sidekick, and invariably the African American sidekick has an iconic function, a contemporary Shadrack or Rufus figure, whether we're talking of Shadrack in space, or Shadrack in the gangster movie. We look at the television set and we see an array of comedy shows, and in every instance we see an African American iconic figure that will be there as part of the concentric group set; group set in this context would be, say, six central characters on a TV show, one being African American--although there's a little flexibility, and every now and then you'll see two African Americans--very rarely do we see a group set that has a composite reflector agent that includes the input of Asian Americans, or Hispanic Americans, where we can gain some sense of the greater American vibrational spectrum. All of these matters, in my opinion, are connected to this Southern strategy that would…
MH Let me ask you about this Southern strategy. I understand totally what you're saying, but is this something you've kind of worked out for yourself as a working concept, or do you actually envision some sort of active cabal here? What I'm thinking is how the young neo-con guys are from New Orleans; are you thinking of a contemporary Southern state of mind that's taken over the mainstream arena?
AB Let me put it like this: what we're talking about transcends individuals, but Southern strategy is a good way of talking about this, in that the concept of a Southern strategy, and its success, in my opinion, has been that in many ways the Southern strategy trumps the composite intellectual strategy. By that I mean that the depth of slavery, and the actualness of slavery, was of such a dimension that everyone has to genuflect, especially in the trans-African American intellectual community, to the profound weight of the slavery experience. So the concept of the Southern strategy in this context is a strategy that sets the parameters for the intellectual dimensions of the music, and trumps any thought unit that goes outside what is considered race-generic, if I can say it like that.
MH What I see going on here is that there's obviously this arena that has always been going on in jazz, where jazz moved out of the national into the international, and when it actually did engage with European culture, it found a much different kind of vibe and perception of the music, with white Europeanness than it found in America. There was a whole different set of rules and worldviews and so on that were relatively freer of the racial dynamics in America. It seems to me that your body of work and your sensibility and so on has been a prime example of one of the fullest engagements in that arena, not only because you actually worked there because it was the only place you could find most of your work, and so you got familiar with European culture, but because you engaged the European traditions that were also engaged here in America, but in different ways. When you talk about a Southern strategy, I start thinking, well, Jelly Roll Morton, creole, opera, French opera, that whole thing--
AB --and remember, they kicked him out (laughs)--
MH --yeah, all the racial dynamics of lighter skin and darker skin within African America, as well as between whites and blacks. I think of Louis Armstrong coming from the South…
AB The Southern strategy is also a way to understand the exclusion of the contributions of the trans-European creative musician, or in this context the European American contributions to the creative music tradition. I'm convinced more and more that the whole idea of black music, jazz music doesn't really encompass the correct context to talk about the evolution of American creative music. Jazz works because, one, the European American political structure, from the beginning of the modern era, would place a quadrant circle around the black community, because the black community serves several functions in America. The black community would be of a zone where the trans-Victorian component would not be allowed to be dominant. The black community would be the quadrant that would challenge the trans-Christian and especially the trans-Pythagorean component; the black community would be the quadrant that would allow for extended morality, or existentially posited psychologies. So the black community was isolated because, one, the European American power structure needed to have it isolated because of the psychology of racism, first, and also the psychology of financial and economic dynamics. But the evolution of American creative music, and finally the evolution of world music has always been much greater than any territorial experience. In seeking to understand the discipline of creative musics and the phenomenon of vibrational dynamics, more and more I think in terms of territorial experiences into continental experiences into, finally, global experiences. From that paradigm what we call white and black doesn't work in the same kind of way, because the real history of our species and of creative music evolution has been a history of human beings responding to one another, based on coming into contact with one another, and that was the case in the Byzantine period, in the Ottoman Empire period, in pre-classical Greece time period, the period when the classical Greek information would go into the Islamic world, to later be re-translated into the European universe and locale; it was the case in the forming of the American area space, and it was the case in the time period of colonialism. What we see in this time period, in my opinion, are efforts to undermine continental experiences as a way to continue present-day notions of ethnic politics, of coalition politics, that's what we're really dealing with: ethnic and racial politics, idiomatic politics, and the phrase Southern strategy in this context, in my opinion, involves the latest component of this reconstituted agenda from the 1880s that seeks to put everybody back into their place again. By that I mean put the African Americans back in their place, put the homosexual community back in their place.
We establish a hegemony that involves the parameters of the black experience…well, we're looking at a trans-Christian component, which is interesting, because the time period of the 1960s, and the reemergence of African American nationalism can now be viewed as a continuum that has not been effective. And we see that the young people of the African American community are only able to be successful when aligned with the work of the black church, and Christian component. But of course the Christian component comes with a Catch-22; the whole idea of the image of God being the image of someone other than yourself is inherently not healthy.
MH You're saying there's a revival of the black church in the culture?
AB Oh yes, the black church seems to be…let me put it this way: I think we're seeing a cyclic phenomenon. Part of the progression of emancipation after the Emancipation Proclamation would see the black church as the quadrant that could deliver demonstrated evolution. I see that cycle coming back around, and I see it that way because it has been created politically. The AACM was not able to achieve all it would have hoped for because there were political components that would not allow for certain initiations to go outside the perceived parameters of what African American vibrational creative dynamics should be about.
MH In Chicago. You mean like a local church opposition or something?
AB No, I'm talking about the Democratic Party. This is why I have no use for the Democratic Party or for the liberals, and this is why I've come to see that I can no longer afford to think in terms of having some kind of alignment with the conservatives or the liberals. This is why a guy like Ralph Nader is a person I can support, because of demonstrated commitment, and this is why, in my opinion, both the conservatives and the liberals hate Nader--but actually, I guess the conservatives love Nader, because they know that Nader is taking away from the liberal sector of the Democratic Party.
MH What was it the Democrats did in Chicago that blocked the AACM?
AB The whole jazz platform, everything that's happened since the 1960s in the jazz world, in my opinion, has come about through the liberal sector, and that sector has postulated a concept of "we are with you in communion around trans-African matters," while at the same time, what they're really saying is "we're with you, but you had better follow our concept of what you should be. We're with you as long as we can say that jazz goes to 1965, and everything after that is not black." By chopping off the restructural component of the music, what we've seen in the last 30 years has been that without the head you start taking from the body, drawing from stylistic influences. From that point, the musicians would start to go further and further back in time; now we're back to the minstrel period, back to Stagger Lee. But it's taken for granted in every other community that evolution is a point of fact.
For instance, the trans-European community, if the subject is the Third Millennium, looks ahead into digital evolution, looks ahead into the Hubble telescope…
MH On the other hand, you must admit that the European classical tradition is the supreme example of cultural chauvinist nostalgia for the past, rather than forward looking into the future. This whole idea of canonizing everyone from Bach on up was really an idea of the last two recent centuries, and the classical canon that exists today is definitely a backward look. So it seems to me that this Southern strategy you're talking about, as I understand it, is like a mirror image of power relations--
AB --they're taking the same concept, a transposition--
MH --so they have a certain backward look over the jazz tradition that mirrors that European gesture toward the composition tradition. But what would you say then, given all that, would contra-distinguish your position? You obviously have this real serious, deep awareness of what we're calling the jazz tradition's connection to European musical traditions, as well as African traditions. You've always proven your concern with both of those aspects, and you've always demonstrated them in your work. So now we have this Southern strategy be a raising up of jazz as America's classical music, modeling its power on the model of the European gesture--
AB As long as they accept the parameters of what they call jazz. What they call jazz is a reductive proposition that takes away the restructural spectra of the music. We can talk about jazz from many different standpoints, but one thing is certain: jazz was the only quadrant where an African American creative person would have the right of definition, to seal a definition; but that has now changed. All of the musicians who would define a way for themselves based on their understanding of affinity dynamics have been kicked out. In their place we have a concept of jazz that is generic, that is a reductive attempt to create an artificial quadrant that would have the properties of what they call jazz…but in fact jazz was always much more profound than what these people want to deal with anyway. Their problem with the restructuralist tradition has always been that the Establishment was never prepared to accept that an African American person could have an intellectual thought that would be equal to the Europeans.
MH But consider this. In European tradition and culture, in both Europe and America, if we have this trend of classicizing and canonizing and looking back on the masters of the past, idolizing and putting them on a pedestal, we also have the mavericks that you've liked and identified with so much--Charles Ives and the other American Independent composers, through Cage, and their counterparts in Europe, Stockhausen…
AB And I claim them as part of me.
MH So can't we say that this Southern strategy and this whole jazz industrial complex is kind of the African American community's response to and version of the European power and conservative tradition, but that there is also a European and European American tradition of people like you, who do see the past being fulfilled in their work, but in different ways?
AB I would agree completely. That's the creative music tradition, and--many things. We're talking of the European mystic creative traditions, as well as its technocrat tradition. We're talking of the trans-African mystic creative tradition, and the trans-African technocrat, or…appeaser's tradition. [laughter] And I don't mean that pejoratively, necessarily; I can relate to the desire of every individual to have a good life, to be in the middle class, and aspire to the upper class--but we're really talking about the reality of value systems, the reality of political dynamics and the trade-offs necessary to enter into certain sectors. So I have no problem embracing Derek Bailey, or Evan Parker; when I found those guys…when I went to Europe, I didn't go as the hip African American jazz musician who was going to teach the Europeans how to play the music. I went there curious, and excited about the hope of meeting kindred spirits, who were interested in human creativity and creative evolution. That was my position then and now. The subject of human creativity is not an ethnic-centric, but a composite subject.
MH At this point, what would be interesting to me is, since you've sort of given your views on the unsettling state of the American scene--the African American community, the jazz scene, the Southern strategy, and the commercialism gone global and all that--your views on the European scene of improvisers, and what you think might be the challenge there in terms of what directions that culture and scene have taken since you've been engaged with it and seen it so up close.
AB Wonderful question. After this interview, I will only be able to live in Antarctica. First, I would say that I support creative musicians in every way, regardless of continent. I feel that in the last ten years, we are experiencing so many different levels of coalition politics that it's become very interesting. I'm happy, for instance, that colleagues I've grown up with, like Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, are starting to have opportunities in America, just as, when I was a young guy, the Europeans saved me. Having the opportunity to go to Paris, to travel in continental Europe would make the difference in my whole life. So I'm very grateful and proud, to see that there's reciprocity, and that over the last 10-15 years we're starting to see more possibilities for great European musicians to have opportunities to perform in America.
At the same time, I find it interesting how the total improvised musician's community is being used in a way that posits Evan Parker's music as the state of the state, but somehow doesn't recognize the great work of Roscoe Mitchell as equal to Evan Parker. We're seeing idiomatic wars, or idiomatic supremacy psychologies, when in fact the dynamic implication of the AACM pointed toward a trans-idiomatic music. Suddenly we find ourselves swinging the pendulum from "if it's totally notated, it's correct, it's the best; now, if it's totally improvised, it's the best." It's another form of idiomatic certainty; it's, again, a form of emphasizing the "ism" at the expense of the "is."
MH You mentioned Roscoe Mitchell as an example. Are you thinking of him as someone who has a fruitful combination of notation or orchestration along with improvisation?
AB Roscoe Mitchell has demonstrated total improvisational musics and music strategies; Roscoe Mitchell has demonstrated restructural multi-instrumentalism; Roscoe Mitchell has demonstrated composition for chamber musics, orchestra musics. How do we find ourselves in the situation where a guy who's done so much is somehow looked at as secondary to Evan Parker?
MH Why do you think people look at him as secondary?
AB I feel that part of the coalition politics that we're dealing with would be the Southern strategy, on one end--but one component of the Southern strategy, in my opinion, is the move to reinstill high European vibrational dynamics as part of a mono-hierarchical thought unit that does not allow for equal respect or celebration of similarities and differences. Rather than acknowledging a spectrum of masters…
MH This is interesting to me because of my recent work in Berlin. Let me ask it this way: all these FMP guys, and those in England, clearly came into their styles as a result of the inspiration they got from African American musicians. So once they came into those styles, and solidified them as, like you say, idiomatic territories, are you saying then that you think maybe the deep subconscious of the European culture is seeping up from the bottom and making them sort of claim that territory as being somehow better than that African American ground?
AB I am saying that quality is present; but even more than that quality, many of the political forces that are manipulating events are doing it from that psychology. Just as many of the young African American bebop guys coming out of the universities cannot be faulted for suddenly finding themselves pushed up front in a position in which they find that their music represents the state of the state of the music. In fact, many of these young people are fulfilling several doctrines; among those is the understanding of bringing in a group of people that can be defined, and whose opportunity will operate within the constraints of the power center. I see something like that happening also with the European improvised musics, in terms of the political components which are operating to determine how that music is being viewed, as compared to musicians like myself.
MH Also as compared to the actual European musicians themselves, because you're saying…what are you talking about, the media?
AB The media, the festivals, performance outlets, magazines…and I'm talking about the value systems which have been attached to the music. I'm also talking about how many of my colleagues are allowing these misdefinitions to be advanced without challenging them.
MH Because it's in their interests to do so?
AB When I went to Europe, and when I had that period in time when I was the recipient of a lot of publicity, I made sure that everyone understood that if you're dealing with Braxton, you're dealing with Paul Desmond, Warne Marsh, as well as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Not only that, you're dealing with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Richard Wagner, and Ahmad Jamal and Dinah Washington, and that you cannot accept me without accepting the family that made me possible. I'm not always getting that from my colleagues; I'm getting more of a revenge of the pendulum. But the pendulum will swing left and right always, because every time period has a pendulum swing that covers the spectrum.
MH So can we say that it's entirely possible that a musician who's one of your colleagues, whom you've performed and recorded with, can be totally in your corner as a human being, and say "I love Anthony, I respect him, etc.," but in the course of their life and the choices they make in the way their body of work evolves, just like anybody, they act in their own immediate interests and needs, and what they have to do, and that is what results?
AB I think that is the case--but it gets even deeper. There is the reality, for instance, of the interview, and what we think we're talking about, as opposed to how that information comes out in the press. That's two different things. My experience in the '70s told me that whatever I would say, they would write about it basically the way they wanted to write about it anyway, because I served a need in that period. That's not to say that everything that was written about me was incorrect, but rather that when the radiant spotlight falls on a person's work for a given period of time, a lot of different forces come with that spotlight, and not all of those forces are thinking of advancing a person's work on every partial with respect for how that person would hope for it to be advanced. Then add to that subliminal components, which all of us are dealing with. So the subject of the modern-day creative musics--which, more and more, I even reject that phrase, because there's really only…creative Western music, as opposed to, say, the creative music that's happening in China, or the other non-Western cultures. The psychology of the creative musics and that of the entertainment musics. And the psychology of the entertainment musics has been the aesthetic goal of the Southern strategy; they've moved the creative music that guys like myself were working with, they've changed the aesthetic concept to entertainment being the highest goal again. We're back to the Eisenhower years; I'm waiting for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to come out of his grave and take away Brown vs. the Board of Education.
MH I think I understand what you mean by the Southern strategy, but it's still hard for me to get my head around the idea that it might be occupying the center place in American global capitalism at the moment.
AB You put your finger right on it.
MH You think it is there?
AB I feel that this time period, in many ways is analogous with the dawn of the modern era. That's why I keep going back to the late 1800s to 1920s. The same components are at work; and in this time period, in seeking to understand those components, we can look at the phenomenal success of Wall Street over the last 15 years; the greatest gains in the history of our country. We're seeing mergers on a level that's equal to the early 1900s. We're seeing a new tier of super-rich people, that 1 per cent Al Gore liked to talk about; and on the other side, the gap between rich and poor is widening. The Southern strategy, in my opinion, is part of this greater component that really reflects on multinational reductionism, and multinational reductionism in this context has kicked out 3/4 of the recording companies and merged them into one; controlling the performing outlets, bringing in a group of guys who are working all over the planet because they play ball. This is political, and part of a political strategy: if you play ball, you can be successful, because the ball has never…there's never been greater abundance, because we are again at this cycle of dynamic technology that has resulted in new possibilities for making money. Jazz is a part of that; the jazz business complex is that zone that controls the music; the motion picture industry is the zone that controls image logics in the film; television has its domain; so we're talking of political and aesthetic domain parameters.
MH The thing I'm trying to get my mind around here is that the whole idea of the Southern culture as being a paradigm, or worldview, was kind of knocked out of the picture in the Civil War. So I'm trying to figure out how exactly you mean the term. I know that the history of Southern culture is basically colonial, the plantation, the master-slave domain, etc.; but when we think of modern global capitalism, including the music industry, we think of it coming out of New York, or West Coast entrepreneurialism and so on…
AB It is coming out of New York; they brought the South to New York. By Southern strategy in this context, take the blues, for instance. The blues is being posited as the legitimate projection for African Americans to function inside of. More and more, the blues is being defined as an idiomatic generic state as opposed to an infinite affinity state, which is what it really is. The blues, in my opinion, is being used as a way to marshal and limit, or define the parameters, of African American intellectual and vibrational dynamics. With the blues, they can say "this is black music." If it's not the blues, if you write an opera, they can say, "oh, this is not black music." If it's blues, it can be received and appreciated as consistent with what African Americans are supposed to be involved with.
MH Given that the jazz musician has been redefined in this way to be an idiomatically correct version of blackness, and that they're really succeeding in the record companies because of that, and there are actually people out there making good livings at it, and are in the highest American cultural spaces now too...how would you characterize their relationship to those African American composers of notated music that you mentioned? Are they ashamed of them or something?
AB That's one of the sacrifice zones, because the thrust-continuum of the trans-African composer's tradition is a tradition that challenges the intellectual domain of ideas, and this has been one of the sacrificed components. This is why, I believe, my music has met with such intense reactions, because one component of my tradition, that being the composer's notated tradition, is a tradition that's never been respected, but that disrespect is not separate from the components of the modern era's psychology. That's why in the beginning when we first started to talk about this I mentioned Darwin's Origin of Species as a point of definition for the understanding of a hierarchy of intelligence. Europeans at the top--
MH Social Darwinism.
AB Yes, thank you. And on the other side, rhythm and blues, or this natural feeling, as the domain African Americans can operate in--
MH So that they can then say "we're at the top of emotional/natural intelligence, and you Europeans are at the bottom."
AB Meanwhile, the African American composer's tradition, going back to people like Frank Johnson, was one that had no slot, as a category that could be accommodated and respected. In fact, it was a continuum that shouldn't have existed if African Americans had no intellectual weight, and so it would be a sacrifice continuum, even in that early period from the 1880s to 1920s. The African American notated tradition is connected to the emergence of Broadway, it's connected to the development of modern dance, and to active existential rhythm. Active rhythm is one of the main components that would define the poetic dynamics of the modern era, but we don't talk about active rhythm; it doesn't even exist as a category.
MH What exactly do you mean, active existential rhythm?
AB Generally, the European tradition likes to talk of Stravinsky as a point of--
MH Oh, you mean as opposed to metered rhythm?
AB Yes.
