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session 4
A We're talking about the reaction to Wagner, and we're talking about composite trans-European progressionalism. For me, looking at the northern end of the continent, at Russia, Scriabin is the point of definition for holistic synthesis; and from that point, looking at Prokofiev…I like Prokofiev because he covers the dark end. I like Stravinsky because he has that airy Gemini music, and that airy Gemini complexity; and I like his correspondences, especially in dance. And I like his active rhythmic strategies, whether we're talking of Firebird or the Symphony of Psalms. But it was Schoenberg who had the fresh vibration, and for me--and the reason I consider myself post-Schoenbergian as well as post-Wagner, is that Schoenberg would be a point of definition for existential propositions, not just vertical propositions, which of course are actually existential too, but we tend to think of vertical as fundamental. The concept of existential propositions would lend itself to multi-hierarchical model-building, which is what I'm interested in.
M Vertical being from the bottom up on roots, and linear…
A Existential pitch sets.
M And why do you call pitch sets existential, because they define themselves as a row, just the way diatonic music defines itself?…
A Yes. And that, for me, is a point of definition in model building. So I agree with Schoenberg when he stood up at the Firebird Suite in Berlin, I think it was, and said, "I cast myself against the wind; I am alone, and I am right!" (laughs)
M That was his response to Stravinsky, huh?
A Yes.
M Because Stravinsky was all about the vertical?
A Stravinsky would exploit the vertical to the extremes, but Schoenberg would recast the model, and that's why he's a restructuralist, and Stravinsky is a stylist.
M Let's move back for a second…
A But let me add this; I want to be clear with this, because this is very important, what we're talking about. I support the great trans-Jewish continuum, I want that to be clear. The trans-Jewish continuum, in European continental experiences, would provide the Other for information dynamics in Europe. And would balance the thrust of the great trans-Germanic musics.
M Let's move from there, then, in the way that the Jewish community came about in America, in a couple of ways. First of all, Schoenberg came and worked in Hollywood and the films and all that, and lived there and taught there. Then, in the course of this century, twelve-tone music, serialism, post-serialism, all found its home in academia…
A …to become the "ism" in America…
M …yeah, and it became sort of like a little reified ghetto, in the sense that it dominated academia, and led into the position of being sort of an ivory-tower music that most people couldn't relate to; then we had Milton Babbit come along and say "I don't care what you think," and all this…so obviously, if you take that on, that's part of the problem that's going to be attached to you as baggage, just like when you take on the European-American jazz players, or the European composers, how all of that stuff has been problematic for you.
A Yes, but in fact I have transposed that information, just as I've transposed all the information I've dealt with, into my own terms. With regard to serialism, in the hands of Stockhausen and Boulez, serialism would not be more important than the results. In America, serialism would be more important than the results. There's a big difference, and that difference is the academic psychology.
M But can we agree that earlier in our first session you made a distinction between your problem, in your work, and the world's problem with you; in other words, it's not your problem, it's theirs.
A It's theirs, but also it's the African American community's problem as well, when they look at my music, and can't recognize its legitimacy as a component of my experience as an African American, and as my right as an African American to build a music that respects my vibrational experiences, my conceptual experiences, and my intuitive experiences. The African American political quadrant has been as dogmatic as the trans-European component with regard to my work.
M So just to kind of clarify the contours of the baggage, then…you've made your decision to pursue composite reality; you've found your way through the dark side and the light side, the evil and the good in terms of how you relate to them…but one part of the problem has been your embrace of European American cool jazz musicians, and of the composer tradition in Europe, and your embrace of Schoenberg in the sense that Schoenberg's music became this academic ghetto in America, and only recently has that been changed…
A But my connection to Schoenberg had nothing to do with that. I was never drawn to the academic composers; I was drawn to music, and if something pushed my button, then I sought to investigate that. Invariably, I would discover that in most cases many of the people I was drawn to were state of the state people, who were doing the music with the "ism" in the secondary position.
M Let's say also that the other colleagues you mentioned last time are in this with you. Muhal played the piano with that in the mix, for instance; and the records you've made with Leroy Jenkins and Leo Smith…it's all in the mix.
A For me, what you're saying, which is correct, is that by the term composite information, composite reality, I most certainly have been influenced by the great American blues tradition, by the great American folk tradition, by the great trans-African American musics. My music system was not built in rejecton to anything; it was built as an affirmation of my experiences. And yet I was not interested as a young man, nor am I interested now, in adopting an intellectual cloak that's not mine, nor an idiomatic perspective that's not mine, that's outside of what is real for me.
M Just to also kind of further map the terrain here, can we also say that as we talk about Old World history spanning over thousands of years, and including a whole lot of concourse between African cultures from the time of Egypt on, and European cultures, and Arab cultures…and only recently, in the last couple of centuries, have they reconvened, in America, under this rubric, because of slavery, of white and black, so that all of the white tribes that had been feuding--the "barbarians" of Germany and Ireland and so on, as opposed to the civilized people of England, Italy, and France, and the Jews, all come together in their past feuds as kind of an undercurrent…but basically they have this new umbrella in America called "whiteness" and that's when it gets complex in terms of what we see in Louis Farrakhan, talking about--you mentioned in the last session that even though you wouldn't agree with him in any kind of grossly racist statements, still, you did see the reality of the Jewish presence in the American music scene as being part of the whiteness spectrum.
A But let me reflect on this, because when I think of Jewish-American political dynamics in this time period, I don't separate that from composite European-American information and political dynamics. In seeking to understand that phenomenon, I also include the African American middle and upper class, because I don't have any choice. But there is a distinction, that being that European Americans, Jewish Americans, German Americans, French Americans, are connected with the upper strata of political dynamics and economic dynamics. So if we find ourselves now talking about continental experiences in the United States moving into the modern era, the divisions I would make at that point would be the European American community in opposition to the non-European elements of the culture, especially African Americans. But also, if our conversation is to be comprehensive, the effect of that continuum as it relates to the Native American, Asian American and African American communities, to the homosexual community…all of those communities, on one level or another, can be looked at as "the Other" in relationship to the new hierarchy based on the American experience.
M How do you fit the emergence in the commercial arena of this genre known as "world music," then, how from the mid-80s on the music industry really became globalized, and we started seeing a lot of--well, the emergence of the genre itself as a marketing genre.
A Before responding to that question, there's still another contingent progression of the European experience that we haven't talked about, which is important, because if Schoenberg represented a point of definition for existential model-building, there is still the need to mention the work of John Cage as another restructural component that would re-solidify the great trans-European musics, in the sense of establishing restructural propositions. Cage is at that same point of Schoenberg; Schoenberg comes to America, Cage studies with him in Los Angeles, and the dynamic implications of Cage's music would challenge the propositional disposition of the European American musics in a way that would be very different from Schoenberg. This would be another attempt to erect a composite aesthetic based on existential propositions that would not be linear.
M One thing I've wondered about over the years is the way you've talked about trans-Asian musics. Can we say that John Cage is an entry point for you into trans-Asian influences, because he was obviously influenced by them?
A I would say yes, but the period of the 1960s was such a dynamic period. Suddenly I'm learning about Ravi Shankar, Ali-Akbar Khan, exposing me to the great Asian musics. I had the experience of being in the army in Seoul, Korea, and an opportunity to study Korean music. When I came back to America I had 30 or 40 records of Korean music.
M I've been getting into Jin hi Kim lately, because she's a composer trying to synthesize the West and Korea. This Korean traditional music is…
A It's out!
M …slow, metaphysical.
A And the folk music is totally incredible.
M Here we have a zone that was defined by occupation, war, and the clashing of cultures through that.
A Thank you.
M Just like in Berlin.
A Not to mention, more and more, because I was fortunate enough to come of age in the '60s, there was a whole category of recordings I would be exposed to…for instance, when I got out of the army, I found myself studying gagaku, the Japanese court music. Looking more and more into the trans-Asian musics to try and understand what that was, and of course I'm still a student of them. There's much more for me to learn.
M I remember from your Composition Notes that there were some definite pieces that you wrote in response to that information--but probably not so many, right?
A A small part of my work compared to the experiences I've had with trans-Africa and trans-Europe, and trans-Indian. I'd like to hope that over the next time cycle, if I'm fortunate enough to be able to live another 20-30 years, to better experience and assimilate the trans-Spanish music, the trans-Asian musics, because I'm interested in earth. I came to understand that in the '60s, that earth was quite a place.
M Interesting you mention India. When we talk about this long deep history of migrations and so on. The first place the Aryans got to when they came down from the Caucasus Mountains from the north around 3000 BC or so, was India. So you see a lot of connections between Medieval European modal music systems and Indian raga systems…
A Thank you.
M So in my mind it's a little different than trans-Asian when you think of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, because they basically stayed put there for a long time and built that thing up. How do you account for the fact that you haven't really gotten so much into trans-Latin American music. Just something you haven't gotten to yet?
A Just something that I haven't been able to move deeper into because of the law of circumstances. I was doing what I was doing, trying to do my best, and the way I've chosen to take has presented me with a kind of struggle in which I still find myself trying to penetrate deeper into areas that I haven't been able to learn about. As a professional student of music, I'm trying to grow and learn as much as I can. But the great Hispanic musics are just something I haven't been able to learn about in a way that I need to; it's on the agenda of things I need to learn about.
M And in the context of the way we've been talking too, we might mention the big African Moorish influence in Spain that redefined this European culture by Africanizing it in a certain way; and that comes to America and merges with the native cultures in a way that was much more intimate and integrated together than was what happened in North America.
A Let's go back to the purges. That period of the Inquisition was a component in Portugal and Spain mainly because of the interracial components taking place. In that period, there were many African creative people who had assumed positions of prominence. The Inquisition was an edict attempting to respond to the liberated feminine psychology; women were wiped out all over the continent. A guy would come in from the Church, and women who were "misbehaving," or might have been misbehaving, or might misbehave tomorrow would be wiped out. And that was happening all over Europe as well as Spain, and in America. The Inquisition was a mechanism to remove the opposition, and the opposition would be the free-thinking woman and non-Europeans, especially the Africans, who had a profound effect on the solidification of the modern European classical musics, but that's not talked about.
M Then we had Miles come out with Sketches of Spain in the '50s, which was a nice statement about that direction.
A Right.
M Let's talk about your Ghost Trance music for a second then.
A Before going there, I'd rather talk about the genesis of the system and how that has evolved, because the Ghost Trance music is just a component of that.
M Before we do that, then…off tape you also started talking about your work in terms of the square and the circle and triangle, and the opera and what you've managed to integrate and what you haven't yet…so I want to get to that in a second. But now that we've kind of mapped out this terrain of the Old World politics moving to the New World and reconfiguring there in the way that you had to deal with in the 20th century, let's pick up where we left off before taping on the subject of academia. It was about the mid-80s that we started seeing the shift in the music to a neoconservative, retro reconfiguring of jazz that took place and became so prominent, to the point of the jazz-industrial networks we see today, and the parameters defined by the Lincoln Center and so on. It was in that period when you first started working at Mills College as an academic. You mentioned that as you've started to work in academia, some of your most problematic students were the African American ones because they had this anti-intellectual association of learning and knowledge with European norms that fell outside the prescribed realm of blackness in the culture.
A The prescribed realm of idiomatic qualities, all of which goes back again to the period between 1880 and 1920. We're talking about the slave master looking at the Emancipation Proclamation to set the image logic parameters of African Americans in terms of how they would be perceived. At the same time, with the new technologies developing--i.e., the movie industry--Birth of a Nation would be a vehicle to posit idiomatic qualities as regarding the image characteristics of the African American. The recording industry would create "race records," separating African Americans from composite realities, creating the special circle for the black community. Some would say--I think Max Roach said it beautifully--that the music was able to evolve because nobody would accept African Americans in the composite space, so the black community, turning in to itself, had no choice but to do the business of living and creating within this sanctioned sphere. And yet, on the one hand, the positive implications of that experience would bring forth a whole new category of invention dynamics and exploratory musics; on the other hand, the principle axiom of the modern era would involve an overseer quality by the European American community, which would determine what components of the African American experience could be viewed as valuable, and on what terms that overseer position would also define the vibrational synergies of the black community. And in every case, their definitions would always function with respect to what was in the interests of the European American community.
M And you mentioned John Hammond as an arrogant motherfucker.
A Well, I mean, you know, this was the guy who would later be a part of Columbia Records; he was the guy who provided the final components that helped Columbia to be a great company, and get it off the ground.
M But you made a distinction between Alan Lomax and someone like Hammond…
A Lomax didn't form any companies, or any alliances with companies to profit from and define what is good and what is bad in the music, he was trying to capture and document the music because of his love for American culture, and for the music.
M Getting back to the question about "world music," I noticed when I went to Germany that when I listened to all the FMP [a Berlin record label] recordings, I thought I was going to be studying this bid for European/German assertion of identity against American jazz, because that's kind of how they emerged.
A But you found that they were actually separate from one another.
M Yeah, that too, but I found something else. It's interesting to me that you've been talking about this period of post-Emancipation and going back to it a lot and identifying with it and all, because the music that came over in the '60s to Europe was exactly the music that the Germans used to go off into their own reconnection with original roots, in the free jazz movement there that they call the Emanzipation.
A Is that right?
M Yeah, in German. Because for the first time they were no longer just imitating Americans, but coming up with something of their own. But, paradoxically, they got that through the African American influx, which was itself a gesture of coming into something of your own.
A But this has been, what you're describing, in my opinion, one of the axiomatic tenets of the modern era as far as the imposition of quadrant experiences and ethnic experiences. In that context, African American creativity is used as a stimulant for American culture; for the Europeans, it would also function as a triggering mechanism that would provide vibrational stimulus through the parameter of the Other, to reactivate dynamic European creativity and curiosity. And we're talking about the 1880s when that started.
M What I was going to say is that a lot of these improvisers whom you've played a lot with in Europe are having these collaborations with traditional Mongolian musicians, traditional Japanese musicians--not second-generation ersatz jazz musicians, but traditional taiko drummers and shakuhachi flute players, traditional Tuvan throat singers…
A And it makes sense, because the concept of composite reality in this time period is a concept that has to take into account where we're at technologically. We're at a point where we can turn on the television, we can read about the tragedy of the Russian sub that sank and see it immediately, we can see what is happening in Indonesia, China. Any healthy viewpoint, in my opinion, is one that takes into account the state of the state, in terms of what the possibilities are in a given time quadrant. For the European improvisers to find themselves attracted to global creative music makes sense.
And yet, a guy like me--somehow, I'm hard to figure out, for the jazz people. Because I've been interested in the world, just like Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, but there's no slot in the ethnic quadrant of what is now called black music for an African American person who is interested in composite reality. At the same time, show me a moment in your day--you hear this music [referring to background restaurant radio]--anything could be on that radio. It could be Indian music; we could be driving in a car, a guy pulls up next to us, it could be Turkish music. You turn on the TV, you don't know what's going to come on. Different kinds of information of a global nature is the norm in this period; to not respond to it is interesting or not interesting, but it is certainly a different concept of reality based on what the fundamental concepts used to be. The fundamental concepts are that people are naturally attracted by something that's different. When the Europeans came into Africa, the Africans were interested in the Europeans as much as the Europeans were interested in them. When the Europeans came into China, they were totally curious on both sides of the meeting. That has been an axiomatic quality about our species; people are interested in the experiences happening in their space.
Going back to 1880, at the beginning of the modern era, the information spectrum had already started changing. Remember, not only did the early British voyagers who went into Africa bring back Africans when they came back, they also brought back native Americans from here. In the beginning, the British celebrated them, and everybody started dressing up like Indians, smoking tobacco, getting into corn. Later, as Shakespeare would document, it became necessary to look at them as savages, animals. Why? The political component entered the space, and the Europeans started to value the actual land; and of course the native Americans weren't even into that concept, so they were at a disadvantage. The Africans would not experience the brunt of the new technology, as far as firepower, tank power, but the native American community would. Talk about Holocaust. We don't like to compare what we call the Holocaust to other movements and experiences in history, and there's a reason; if we did, then the Holocaust would have to be placed in the context of human experiences, and in that context what happened to the native American community was outrageous, on a scale we don't even know how to integrate, we don't even have the numbers for.
This is also true for the slave trade; we don't have the actual numbers to compare with what we call the Jewish Holocaust, but the experiences and the documentation suggests that it was so far out--genocide against the native Americans on a level where by 1880, the emergence of the modern era, they had basically lost all of their culture. What they called the Ghost Dance movement was a reconfiguration of all the different groups, each one trying to remember some part of their culture, two generations removed from the genocide. Trying to remember, "oh yeah, we did do this," so they made a composite. Because the genocide was so profound that they lost everything. So, I mean you know--hooray for life.
M Have you ever, in your strategies as a player, been drawn to seek out collaborations with traditional Japanese musicians, traditional Indian, whatever player from a tradition that interested you?
A I have been interested since the mid-60s in trying to explore composite possibilites. When I was in Korea, I played with the Korean folk musicians. When I went to Japan, for the little moment I was there I studied with the Japanese musicians. I think the jazz guys there hated me; they were dedicated to the blues, and Braxton doesn't play the blues correctly. But to respond to your question, I've always, as a component of my aesthetic, looked for kindred spirits, but I have not tried to approach the idea of kindred spirits in a way that did not feel healthy. My hope in the future is to have more experiences with human beings of different experiences, because there's always something fresh to learn from people thinking in a different way. My first opportunity to play with Native Americans, ironically, occurred at Wesleyan, when I used to go there to follow John Cage like a little puppy dog. I played with Richard Teitelbaum here, and did a duo with an Indian chief.
M That brings me to the next question. Since the mid-80s spread of the music industry globally, "world music" as a marketing genre has emerged. There've been many ethnomusicological papers written about how all this influx of new voices onto the world market, from Arab and Indian and African traditional and pop sources, is coming into that scene through the world music genre, but critics have sometimes seen them as sellout gestures to the business, basically fodder for marketplace music--which is the kind of criticism you've often leveled against the jazz-industrial complex: taking a sort of traditional expression and making it conform to the pop scene. Like Paul Simon, for example. He's taken heat for the dynamic of his relationship with South African and Brazilian musicians as being exploitive in some way.
A But in fact he is functioning in a way that's consistent with the modern era. And the modern era says that everything has to be redefined from a Eurocentric perspective, and it's at that point where it gains value. Now let me be clear about this. I have no problems with whatever Paul Simon decides to do; I'm a Paul Simon fan, so Mr. Simon's not what I'm really talking about. What I'm talking about is the position of European Americans in this time period, and their ability to appropriate whatever they want and be able to define it in whatever way they want to define it. At the same time, if I go and try to have an experience and seek to define it, I'm looked at like I'm a fool. Plus, the same opportunities are never available in reverse, like for the African musicians to be able to use Paul Simon, or musicians from that ilk, and have their work respected based on its fulfilling some aspect of their experience. My problem is not with Paul Simon. As far as I'm concerned, he understood in his own way the dynamic implications of globalization, and the fact that the creative person has to, if he wants to keep growing, find fresh parameters. Not only that: just as I hope to have more experiences with the great Latin musics, the great Asian musics, it would make sense for Paul Simon to look towards Africa, and Latin America. I have no problem with that. My problem is that the Metropolitan Opera won't give me a performance, because somehow it's outside the natural order for me to write an opera; but it's not out of the natural order for André Previn to go and do a trio record of My Fair Lady tunes with Leroy Vinnegar and Shelley Manne, and have everybody say, "wow, this is great jazz, it's jazzy jazz;" then he can go and conduct and do his opera.
M Is that what you meant when you said you've been careful not to get into situations where collaborating with a kindred spirit might be unhealthy? you've avoided situations like that?
A Well, it's not for me to have any kind of stipulations about what another person should do with their creativity. In fact, the more I explore myself, the more I find that the axiom tenet that says it's impossible to judge anybody but myself is the only position that makes sense to me. The problem, as far as the spectrum of experiences and humanity…the problem is that the modern era defines African Americans as a people that can only function in an idiomatic quadrant, one that contains an ethnic mechanism that has not been understood. So when I use the phrase "Southern strategy," I'm talking of a political coalition that is functioning under a particular psychology, and that psychology is connected to what the modern era is, and it manipulates quadrants, manipulates who is going to be successful and under what terms--and invariably that quadrant is concerned with the elevation of trans-Eurocentric definitions and value systems and political proclivities.
M So we get a picture of the music industry as being totally willing to welcome the whole world in, only on its capitalist terms.
A And to undermine world culture dictates; to undermine the great Japanese musics, the great Turkish musics, because most European and European American peoples are brought up to view themselves as superior to non-Europeans. It's sometimes very subtle, but the superior psychology is at the heart, in my opinion, of the European gambit toward incorporating information.
M You know, when I've thought about this, I've seen it in terms of the superiority complex of the new over the old, because when you go back as far as the origins of the humans here today, as far as we can tell they started in Africa and moved north from there…
A Yes. Africans are full of ethnic tensions based on one group feeling superior to the other group; that's still not ironed out.
M And one of the reasons for that, if you think about genetics, might have something to do with the fact that they've been kicking around on that continent the longest, and have developed the most diverse gene pool because of that long time. If you compare them with Europeans, the latter have a much narrower range of genetic diversity than do Africans.
A That's interesting, I didn't know that.
M So what I'm thinking is you get this group of Africans who move north. Because of Darwin's selection process, what happens is your skin gets lighter simply because the northern climates dictate that for survival…
A Not to mention the fusion of so-called miscegenation.
M Even before that, if you think of dark-skinned Africans leaving the continent and moving north…the way the climate works is that the people with less melanin in their skin survive better, because they don't need it as a sunblock, and they do need all the sun they can get for Vitamin D. So all the light-skinned tendencies would come to the fore. So as far as anybody can tell scientifically, white people are just mutated Africans.
A I firmly believe in the unity of humanity, and I came to that belief through myself, looking at myself. I came to understand that my attraction to Schoenberg was as natural as my attraction to Frankie Lymon; thus would my struggle in the black community commence, because I was not about to give up Bill Haley and the Comets.
M And when you see something in the black community that responds to this idea of whiteness in an exclusionary sense, in the same sense that they do on the continent with each other because of the genetic differences, the internal feuding and so on… you get a mythology such as Elijah Muhammad's, with the mad scientist Dr. Yakub and his mutant race of whites: you get a demonization of your brother Africans who went up north and got light.
A We're laughing at Farrakhan's mythology, but we're on the threshold of seeing a new breed of people genetically engineered, who will be the fulfillment of our strengths, with the possibility of being stronger through genetic manipulation. These concepts are interesting concepts, I don't dismiss any of them; but whatever, I still see the unity of opposites. Remember, even in Farrakhan's mythology, the affinity destinies of opposites still come together.
M Because he loves to play Mendelssohn on his violin.
A He can't help it. Opposites attract, that's another mystical law.
M So the superiority complex that we've seen in the human race, which we've talked about in terms of Europeans over the rest of the world…
A Exists in every group.
M …but also, on this global scale, it seems like it's a superiority gambit of the new people over the old people, because they went north and were able to survive in these icy conditions, which honed skills that eventually led to the atom bomb. Having to deal with certain challenges by the environment, they developed skills they never would have had to develop in Africa, so then they look back on their original home sort of like we look back on our home towns as the parochial little place we came from before making our big splash in the big world.
A And Christianity is the fulfillment of those propositions--but the Islamic world understood that very quickly and immediately erected their own godhead.
M Then if we take it down a notch to Western European civilization over the last 2000 years…if you look at the whole of Eurasia, there was a continuous migration west. By the time Europe solidified as a culture, it was a polyglot mix of a whole lot of influences in from the East, and also from Africa. So they get that same kind of superiority over the old peoples that Americans have about their various "old worlds" too.
A The classical Greek period was the first of the filters, and the next filter would be the experience of colonial exploration. The colonial experience would start to bring back world culture information to the Europeans, including reconnecting the Europeans with the classical Greek information, as filtered through Islam, and the great Turkish, Ottoman Empire period.
M And then when you get the Age of Exploration, moving into America, again you get this movement west by a lot of different people leaving old worlds behind, you get the superiority Americans feel over those old worlds--over Europe, and over the other places. So thinking about progressionalism, and evolution, as concepts, I tend to think of this superiority complex that emerges in the human race as being as much a variation on the theme of "kill the father" as on "kill the other." But now, what you're talking about in the terms of composite reality, and the unity that's necessary, is that we're all continually being reborn on the planet, and there's no room for that psychology in the ideal state of affairs.
A This planet has been mapped in terms of continental experiences, there's nowhere else to go, except into space. And you can believe that once we discover another species in space, suddenly it will be human beings versus the aliens.
M This little riff of the young versus the old gets me to my next question. I've noticed that since you've been an academic, especially at Wesleyan, you've made a lot of records and done a lot of bands with students. It's interesting to me that it's actually worked well musically; and it is part of a tradition of elders mentoring the young, both in the music and in academia. How has your career, in terms of your body of work, fared with that? Do you see it as sort of the optimum strategy that you could take in the circumstance that you find yourself in?
A Good question, Mike Heffley, good question. At this point in my life, I have arrived at a juncture that's very interesting. That juncture is that, as much as I enjoy exploring traditional repertoire, and as much as I enjoy, on occasion, collaborating with colleagues or a particular person, at this point, what I really need to advance my work is a group of people who know the system of my music, not just someone who can learn a head, and then we improvise. So academia for me has been a way to meet young people who are interested in my work, whom I then teach my system to. That way, I can advance my work in a way that is more complex outside of academia. Also, at 55 years old, with the experiences that I've had, and with the amount of material that I have in my music system, I need people who can start to build on the connecting concepts of the system. So academia has been a way to find kindred spirits, young men and some young women, who are interested in going through some aspect of my work in a way that my colleagues, the guys I've grown up with, couldn't possibly entertain, because they have their own way of working. At this point, my real interests--except, of course, for the solo musics, which I do alone--can only be carried out with ensembles of various sizes that can achieve an experience through the system of my music. That's been the positive part of being an academic.