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session 6
A So we're talking about a transition period for me, and the transition would come about through Pierre and Tommy Evans and meeting their father, who was like a jazz guy. Mr. Evans would start giving me records to listen to; it would be through him that I would have my first opportunity to experience Cecil Taylor's music: Cecil Taylor with Earl Griffin on vibes…
M Was this before you got into Charlie Parker and bebop and all that?
A Yes.
M So you got into the "new thing" first.
A Yes. Cecil Taylor's music for me was a revelation. Here was an African American man with a super intellectual music that was also emotional, that actually set me up--and I didn't realize it at the time--to be able to hear Schoenberg. Mr. Evans also gave me The Shape of Jazz To Come, by Ornette Coleman, which I kept taking back and then two, three weeks later going back to get it. This was like a cycle of three, four, five months.
M You didn't like it much at first?
A First time I heard Ornette Coleman, I almost died; I thought this was the worst thing I ever heard in my life; I couldn't even sleep.
M You should have gotten a magazine quote out there, like Phil Woods did about you. "There are a lot of primitives out there with big egos…" [laughter]
A That's what I would have said when I first heard Ornette Coleman. But I couldn't shake it, it was clear there was something happening, and between Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, it was as if they were shaking me upside down. Finally, I graduated from high school, went to Wilson Junior College…and actually, even in high school I was listening to Claude Willie, who now calls himself Claude Lawrence. Played tenor saxophone back then, and I'm telling you, in my junior and senior years in high school, Claude Lawrence was so bad, he was such a great musician; he had his own sound…and of course back in that period bebop was the thing, especially Benny Golson compositions. And Claude Lawrence was dealing with it.
M Did you like Benny Golson? He was pretty interesting.
A In that period, Benny Golson was new to me, so this was the beginning of learning about the African American masters' tradition, the hard bop tradition, which was something that I didn't know that much about.
M Did you kind of go through a young man's psychological revamping in the '60s where you thought, "man, I've just been formed and steeped in all this white stuff, and now I'm going to get to move into this distinctly African American stuff?
A No. I was attracted…when I discovered that this music did exist, and that there was this continuum of African American masters that I did not know, I definitely became curious, but I saw no reason to let go of the guys whose music touched my heart; I have never been interested in disrespecting something that's come to me that's helped me.
M Well, what exactly did it speak to in you?
A It just opened up my world. And so Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, and Claude Lawrence would set me up for after graduating from high school, I'd got to Woodrow Wilson College. Now CVS, Chicago Vocational School, was where I went to high school. It was an integrated school, but it was really mostly Polish American and Russian American, and African Americans made up maybe one eighth of the student body; it was my first opportunity to meet European Americans, and I discovered of course that they were human beings, just like me. I also discovered that there were European Americans who were much more brilliant than I could ever hope for: guys like Richard Begeysky; seems like this guy couldn't do anything wrong. I think he got A's all the way through high school. Not to mention I discovered girls, which became a major diversion.
M Did you get good grades?
A Oh, okay; I'd say I got a B average.
M But I remember reading that you were a philosophy major at Wilson ?
A Yes.
M You weren't into the music department so much there?
A Yes I was. Going to Wilson Junior College would be the first experience for me of going to an all African American educational institution. And it was dynamic and vibrant, and I went to, I think, one session, but before going to that session I was in the band, and there was this guy next to me. He had an interesting sound, but I was a very good reader, and I thought I was really hot stuff. But I noticed that wherever I went in the school, when the name Roscoe Mitchell came up, fear struck into the hearts of men. I just couldn't get it; I said, I'm a very good reader, I had my little Olds Opera alto saxophone; I was the only African American in the United States who would go to a jam session and call "Take Five." And of course, everyone looked at me like I was crazy. But I couldn't figure out why everybody talked about Roscoe.
M What did he play like then?
A Well, we were playing in the marching band and the classical orchestra, and he played pretty nice, but I was stronger as a reader, I thought; I was in fact, I'll be honest, I was stronger. So I went to this session, and I found what all the talk was all about. The experience was another epiphany in my life. Now before hearing Roscoe, I was aware that Henry Threadgill, who studied with Jack Gell, was advancing in a very deep way; Henry was playing like Sonny Rollins by the time he was 13; he was a good musician, and competent in bebop, but the depth that I was only starting to sense, he already had. At Wilson Jr. College, it was Henry who signed me into my classes. English 101, Henry pulled out the slips; "oh, thank you, Henry." He had glasses like this [points to his wire-rimmed specs] in 1963. At that session, I sat in--this was before Roscoe showed up. I think I got lost on "Milestones…" [laughter] I think it was maybe the first time I'd played with a rhythm section. I was so nervous and excited. Anyway, when Roscoe came in, everyone did the equivalent of backing to the walls, sweating with fear. And by the way, Roscoe had a sound that was like forte to the 26th power. He was playing something like seven reeds; the guy was out. He came up to the bandstand, called up his guys, a tenor player, trumpet player, saxophonist, maybe Jack DeJohnette on drums; they started playing "By By Blackbird." Mike Heffley, I can not begin to describe it; all I can say is they played the head; he took the first chorus. I said, well, you know, it's okay. He took the second chorus; hmm, fairly interesting; third chorus: whoa, this is kind of interesting; fourth chorus: goddamn, what the fuck; fifth chorus: GODDAMN; sixth chorus: MAMMA, HELP! seventh chorus: KILL ME, FUCK IT; eighth chorus: I'LL JUMP OUT THE MOTHERFUCKING WINDOW, I'M GIVING UP MUSIC AND LIFE!! I'LL BE A MOTHERFUCKING SHOE SALESMAN!!! When Roscoe Mitchell finished his solo on "By By, Blackbird," my life had changed. I joined the army a week later.
M Was he mainly just playing changes and did it very well, or what?
A He started off playing the changes, and then it started going into sound; and Roscoe, by the way, had his own sound on the alto, even then.
M Because like now he's so minimalist.
A He was completely different back then. He wasn't circle-breathing or honking and beeping back then, it was just a young Roscoe Mitchell language, but it had different components. But even then, it was awesome. I tell you, with the exception of Paul Desmond, who as a young guy I used to go see when they came to Chicago; I'd be sitting there crying while he was playing, I loved it so much. But hearing Roscoe Mitchell was like getting hit with an H-bomb. When he finished his solo on this one song, I never even heard him play another song after that. I'm talking about one solo, it was so awesome that by the time it was over, I had seen God. There was no comparison. Suddenly I understood how I was a little chumpy-wumpy-tumpy motherfucker. [laughter]
M So did the effect it had on you send you into thinking that you wanted to be a better saxophonist?
A After hearing Roscoe, I think the thing that had dawned on me was, what the fuck was happening. There was something happening in music that I knew nothing about, that had the most awesome pull on me. I had already discovered that I couldn't get away from music, because it was all I could think about. After hearing Roscoe, it was a confirmation. It's kind of like you're looking at the moon, and starting to see it; and suddenly you get a better telescope, and then you see the whole sky; for the first time in your life, you notice that it's not just the moon, there's a whole motherfucking sky. And then not only is there a sky, but my whole understanding of reality is that there was an earth and there was a moon, and now suddenly I'm seeing there's a whole sky, a whole galaxy--and when I left Wilson Junior College after Roscoe's solo, it was like, what the fuck; what the motherfucking shit…
M Well, it sounds like a big leap from Paul Desmond to Roscoe Mitchell. You didn't catch any of the in-between points?…
A Well, I had been listening to Ornette Coleman, I was starting to get used to the Ornette Coleman records, I started to buy more of them; I discovered Eric Dolphy…
M Did you process Ornette in the sense of saying, like, okay, I know Desmond and these guys, and I know the paradigm of playing changes and so on, and so now I see that Ornette is doing away with the changes. I mean, were you thinking in terms of breaking it down in terms of the components like that?
A Ornette Coleman's music, for me, was this new universe, and Cecil Taylor, and it was a new compositional universe, it had a different feeling to it, and the kind of ideas he played were so exciting, and there was this intellectual component in his music that affected me, and sent me reeling; it was the beginning of reconsidering everything. Then Eric Dolphy; Outward Bound would be the record that was just coming out. I went out and bought that record; I almost died! I didn't even know it was possible to play the saxophone that fast, with those kind of skips. And so before I heard Roscoe Mitchell, I was starting to make inroads into this strange universe; I couldn't figure out what it was, but I was drawn to it. And then hearing Roscoe was kind of a culmination of the fact that, one, something is happening that I don't know about; I was just starting to appreciate Coltrane. The records I was hearing were just moving into "Giant Steps"…
M So you thought maybe there was more to Coltrane than before?…
A I hadn't gotten that far with thinking, I was only thinking "boy, these are strange chord changes, and he might not play like Desmond, but he's coming…" I mean, you know, I was kind of confused about what was happening; it was like more and more I was starting to…so many things were happening to me between, say, 1960 and 1963; that's what we're really talking about, that time period. So we're talking like something at an increased rate, and it was turning my life upside down. Because basically I was moving toward marrying, and working in the post office, and playing a little music on the side. And then I'm buying these records, starting to move away from the European American saxophonists. Also, I had started really getting into Jackie McLean in the hard bop period. So that period from '59 to '63 was a heavy period for me, because suddenly new information was coming in. I even got a record of Alban Berg's chamber music, and I was attracted to it, but I didn't know why I was attracted to it; I guess it was the composition, because I had a hard time with the notated music space. It didn't interest me that much. But there was something about Berg…so I'm discovering a lot of different things. And then after hearing Roscoe, I tell you, after this H-bomb exploded in front of me, I joined the army, said fuck it, I had to get away from everything I knew about, and try to make some sense out of what was happening, because no longer, by 1963, was music something that I enjoyed or something that was fascinating: it became something that totally dominated my whole psyche, all-encompassing; and it was so powerful that it was basically like someone turning you upside down and shaking you.
So then I'm in the army, and the first matter of business for me was to go back and re-examine the hard bop tradition. I met Sonny Seals, a tenor saxophone player from Detroit. He was a little older than me, a good player, in the blues tradition, also an organist…
M Did you feel like there was something there that was at the foundation of what you were hearing in Roscoe and everybody, or?…
A Yes, but I also felt that my education wasn't complete, and that more and more I had opened up to where I could hear this music. For instance, I was a big fan of the Modern Jazz Quartet in the mid-50's and early '60s. I liked the composed reality of their music, and I think that helped me go to Berg, for instance: John Lewis with his fugue-like Bach stuff…
M So you're saying you really got into European masters through Cecil Taylor, and the MJQ, and maybe through Ornette somehow too?…
A Yes, and Dave Brubeck. Brubeck would talk about Milhaud as his teacher; there was that crazy composition of Milhaud's, Creation of the World or whatever it was called…
M Did you like the time signature stuff?
A Of Brubeck's? Yes, I mean…you don't understand; once I hook onto a guy, I hook onto a guy. I mean I get every record, and I don't think in terms of do I like it or not, I just want to know it; I love it because I love them, and I want to know what they're doing. So my first year and second year in the army I had to go back to John Coltrane. Even by, say, 1959 I was starting to be able to hear Charlie Parker, and that would be the beginning then of re-educating myself, especially with respect to the contributions of the great African American musicians.
M So you kind of came to terms with the rawness that you first heard in Bird? What, did you think, okay, I didn't like it before because I was younger and now I'm more of a man, so I can handle the rawness, maybe?
A I don't think it was on that plane; suddenly it opened up where I could hear it, and feel it. And whereas I found myself as a young guy thinking "this John Coltrane, why does he have to play so many notes?" suddenly I was able to hear it. And then I remember kicking myself: "how could I not hear it?!" [laughs] But I couldn't hear it as a young guy. So it would be in the army that I would frantically go back and try to educate myself about what was happening. And that period, say between 1963 and 1966 was maybe one of the heaviest periods of my life. I mean, one, our country would have maybe two assasinations--three, including Malcolm X--the Civil Rights Movement. I'm in the army but I'm buying records; that's all I did, when I wasn't doing army duty: buying records and listening to music and practicing. I'd go to Korea after being stationed at Highland Park, outside of Chicago for a year and a half; in that period, after meeting Sonny Seals, he would help me to know which records to buy by Coltrane, which by Sonny Rollins; so I was devouring these records, learning the repertoire, going into sessions. And then I went to Seoul, Korea, and my mother mailed me Albert Ayler's "Bells" and Coltrane's "Ascensions," at my request. That music…I cannot begin to tell you; that was IT for me. I was ready for it when it came out.
M What was it you liked about it? Starting from Roscoe on, did it sort of wake up something?…
A I liked the ideas! Suddenly I hear the ideas in the music. I wasn't interested then or now in, oh, I like the rawness of the music…
M What were the ideas, exactly? How would you explain them?
A An increased sonic spectrum; fresh logics, fresh vocabularies.
M All purely musical.
A Purely musical; I didn't know how to…
M You didn't really connect it to the Civil Rights Movement and all that?
A Well, the Civil Rights Movement for me meant a lot of different things. Remember, now, in the '50s, separate but equal…you had to go the the Colored section if you lived in the South. Brown v. the Board of Education. When the Civil Rights Movement burst on the scene, I found myself thinking, as I began to understand what was happening in America, that I could identify in every way with the Movement. Looking back now, how could I not? All they were talking about was equal rights and that every American should have an opportunity to live. As I began to learn of the depth of American social and historical reality, started reading, say, from 1958 to 1963, before going into the army--this would also be the period when I started to venture outside my neighborhood, started hanging out at the University of Chicago, seeing what kind of books people were reading. I met Shoshana Orai, a wonderful Japanese lady who I fell in love with, who looked at me like I was a little kid. She was maybe four years younger than me, and maybe twenty years more advanced than me in terms of literature and things like that. So there I am reading Freud, trying to impress Shoshana, and also trying to increase my information scan, because I didn't realize how little I knew; I was just buying my Brubeck records.
M What's interesting about that is that we've been talking about all these influences as being both problematic and also promising--Europeans, Africans, etc.--and the feminist component of your persona has developed in the academic realm, and in the creative realm markedly and publicly over the years; so we can say, well, the problem about that, too, is that, obviously, femininity is one of the forces in the world that has had to struggle under a cloud of oppression, just like the others we've talked about; but the feminist movement itself has turned into a sort of Southern strategy, kind of idiomatic quadrant of its own…
A I agree completely, I'm no longer interested in the feminist movement at all; I'm only interested in humanity. But as a young man, after what I'll call dog days, I came to understand that what I was really looking for was someone I could be with, and be in love with. Plus, since my very first year in high school, I was with Darlene…(…). So that was the other component.
But the army experience for me, being away from home and going to Korea for a year and a half, was very good for me. It gave me a chance to be separate from my brothers, separate from my family, in this period of such profound social upheaval in our country. Meanwhile, I'm learning about so many different musics. It would be in the army that I discovered Schoenberg, in Korea; and that was just as heavy as when I finally started hearing Coltrane. I went to hear Coltrane several times when I was in America, between, say, 1963 and 1965--somewhere around June, 1965, I went to Korea--but in that year-and-a-half period I saw Coltrane play three times. The first time I walked out.
M You didn't like it?
A I went and heard him at McKee's Lounge on 63rd St. on Cottage Grove; I was just starting to warm up to "Giant Steps," felt like I was ready. So of course he's playing like, you know, Elvin, McCoy, and Jimmy, and it was intense, man. And it was crowded and I was heading toward the door; I decided this man is crazy, I want nothing to do with it. And the composition came to an end, and then this is what took me out: he played the ballad, "It's So Easy to Remember and so Hard to Forget." And he played it straight, and it was beautiful, and it was profound, and it took me out, in the same way that Roscoe's music took me out. I found myself with this paradox: how can this guy play so beautifully when he plays this ballad? then he goes back to this other music and it's all sound again? There must be something happening that I don't know about!
M Like Bob Dylan's Mr. Jones. [laughs]
A Dylan was a hero of mine then too. So I was consumed with trying to find out what it is, because it was something that was much more real than what I was looking at, something much more encompassing, let me put it like that, that I had not been able to penetrate.
M It's obvious that first and foremost you've always been a human being interested in humanity, but you also have had a certain path from a certain place, and I'm wondering what you would say distinguishes your relationship to the African American, or trans-African sector that makes it stand out from your relationship to the other sectors, simply by virtue of the fact that you are an African American.
A I don't think at this point, based on the things we've been talking about, that I was any different than anyone else. I think what distinguished me then, as a young man, is part of what I've been fighting for all my life: the right as a human being to be able to learn from experiences and then have hope for doing the best I can do. I think everybody was of that psychological nature. And I think in the time period of the '60s, with the social upheavals, I started to see the problems in my country--like what were we doing in Viet Nam, bombing these people into submission? Suddenly questions about the ethics of my government would come into play in a way that I had never even thought about. I had never even thought about politics. Suddenly, for instance, after the army I would discover, "I guess I am a sexist kind of guy in some ways." I'd never even realized that women had special problems that they had to deal with at all, I'd never considered that. I had never considered that I was connected to Europe; I just liked what I liked. I had never considered the great body of literature as representing the human experience that actually included me whether I wanted to be a part of it or not. I had never considered that there was an African American intellectual tradition that I was the recipient of, whether I understood it or not. I had never considered that the guys from my community would not be able to go out and have fulfilling lives; but I had started to notice, even in high school, that half of my grammar school friends were either dead or in jail, with maybe, say, 10 per cent being able to go to high school. I didn't understand all of that.
So it was a gradual awakening to American social reality, after finally busting out of my neighborhood, starting to see greater Chicago. As a young man, I used to get on the L, which in Chicago means the subway system and elevated train system, at different points. I used to always ride the train all around the city. As I started going further into the north side, in the white communities, started noticing how different they looked. I didn't understand all that, but I did notice that the world was bigger than my little two blocks in Chicago, where we'd be at the little drug store talking about baseball scores, having a malt, and that was like big time, hanging out with the guys who knew all the baseball statistics, arguing about who was the best pitcher and this kind of stuff.
M Were you not happy with it because it seemed limited to this realm of ethnic identity in any way?
A That was one component, but there was another one. I grew up with my mother and stepfather, but I was always very close to my father, who, at that time, was still alive.
M Let's try to sum up from a distance, then, your mature assimilation of the trans-African thrusts around you.
A From 1961 to 1966, when I got out of the army--that whole period for me was about assimilating and reevaluating the trans-African, especially the bebop musics. It would also be my introduction to the modern musics, starting, say, with Bartòk. After the army, Cage and Stockhausen, and Albert Ayler, and late Coltrane, and the New York School. But after the army is when I went into the AACM, and met a family of musicians who were totally interested in the kinds of things I was interested in, on some level. We all had our various interests as individuals, but it was an organization of kindred spirits; you could be interested in whatever you wanted to be interested in in the AACM. And I was interested in composition, improvisation, and ideas. By then, I would say, the life of my music and the direction of my life had started coming together.
M When you first made your public debut, it definitely seemed in the press, in Down Beat and so on, to be the voice of the new young generation of African American identity sort of breaking out of the mold. When that started happening for you, getting media attention and everything, I remember you being pretty adamant about all your influences and connections, nodding to the Europeans and European Americans among them; but still, it was in this context the new young black guys from Chicago, with something new to say in the black tradition, of, as some of them said, Great Black Music. I'm wondering how in your own mind you had squared away all of your influences in relation to the African American tradition of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, etc.
A I saw myself as interested in composite reality by the time I joined the AACM; and I would also say that I did not see myself as unique in the sense that I was the only person who had solidified a fresh aesthetic position. In fact, part of the significance of the AACM would be that all of the principal guys would solidify an aesthetic position that would reflect something fresh. By the time the guys had started writing about me, it had become clear to me even then that there was a political-racial component that was distorting our work.
For instance, when I got out of the army, the record Sound, by the Roscoe Mitchell sextet, had already been recorded. That record, for me, was one of the greatest records then and now, from the time period of the '60s. I'd like to hope that when the mature histories are written, that that recording will be reevaluated. Not only that--I feel that the universe that Roscoe Mitchell would put together represents then and now one of the great bodies of music from my generation; I feel that the universe of Leo Smith, the universe of Joseph Jarman, the great work of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the great music of Muhal Richard Abrams, has been seriously ignored and undermined. There was a guy named Troy Robinson; he didn't survive it, but he was another African American who had a store front, who trained his own people, à la Sun Ra, and was doing a music of total integrity; everybody was postulating positive goals…
M Let me ask you this: we've been talking about long sweeps of history, and how you have taken in your idea of composite reality going all the way back to the beginnings of the West, Northern European mythology, Jewish influences; we've talked about people from Aristotle on up. So let's talk about the trans-African sector in that picture.
A Thank you.
M And we've also talked about the trans-African sector as being incorrectly framed, and appropriated in a distorted way by the powers that be. So let's leave that aside for a second and say just in the terms of the composite reality that you're engaged with, what role does this long tradition of trans-African musical expression, from Africa into America, what role does it play in your musical universe?
A Thank you for that question. That continuum is the template of my experience; I would come to understand that. It is from that template that my relationship to Europe can be understood. For instance, in the late '50s I started to read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and this continuum of writers. The work of William Grant Still was very important to me by 1964, because I was always looking for African American equivalents of everything that touched me, as I got older, especially, when I came to see that there was a continuum that I didn't know about. I think the time period of the '60s, for me, would be when I would always look to that continuum to better understand who I was. When I discovered Berg, and as I started to develop a taste for notated music, the next question I would ask myself was, were there any African Americans doing this kind of music?
So what I'm going to talk about now, I'm going to talk about…but I can't talk about it in a sequential order starting from say 1954 or 5 in the way I can talk about discovering Ahmad Jamal or Brubeck, because I didn't like notated music as a young man. But in the end, when I talk of the template of my aesthetic qualities, I'm talking of a continuum of African American men and women who have tried to meet the challenge of existence in every space. Many of them I still don't know about--scientists, agriculturalists, spiritualists--I'm still in need of education.
M Among the ones you do know the best, what would you say they bring to the table of world-historical culture and discourse?
A Let's go back to Frank Johnson. He brought composite interdisciplinary conections, setting the propositions up for multimedia. His work in the Philadelphia area, and his trips to Europe, would produce a music that would clarify active rhythmic logics in a way that would become a point of definition for the modern era experiences that would lead away from the vertical musics.
The work of Jelly Roll Morton--who, while he was from New Orleans, and had experiences in the Western part of the United States, especially Texas--Mr. Morton's music never fit in. He was an example of an African American--or non-European, because he had many different qualities--who would tackle the integration of circle and square…maybe no triangle…well, triangle, as integration. The early Hot Five, Hot Pepper ensemble musics, would define the nature of integration that accelerated the collective experiences of the New Orleans music, and go outside the entertainment-aesthetic parameters that would be imposed upon the New Orleans music by the political manipulations that would become part of the Southern strategy.
The great work of William Grant Still, for me, would help me as I sought to understand my relationship to Bartok, who was very important to me in the beginning; Bartok and Alban Berg…
M Why Bartok?
A I just liked his music, I liked the melodies of his music, I liked the string quartets.
M Did you get to a point where…first of all, you say, you didn't like notated music; so you got to a point where something about the device of notation opened a door for you into something that at first you didn't like, but now you did come to like?
A Yes. And I think it was a gradual change going through the work of the Modern Jazz Quartet, the dynamics of Ornette Coleman. Ornette Coleman's compositions--very important to me, especially in the early period. Cecil Taylor's composition in the early period was very different than it is now, and I was attracted to the abstract nature of his writing, and his improvisation. But Alban Berg's music had this melodic quality, and Bartok's music for strings, celeste, and percussion, that was a favorite composition for me. Honegger's music: when I was at Wilson Jr. College, I was at the library every single day playing recordings…and I was very affected by Honegger, of all people. And Hindemith.
M So you just got to a point of moving from disliking to liking notated music. I'm thinking of Jost Gebers, the manager of FMP, hates composition tradition; and the reason he doesn't like it, and the reason he doesn't like your work, is because he sees it as too calculated. But it sounds to me like a guy who starts out not liking notated music, and only liking improvised or spontaneous music, begins to like notated music because it offers a way to calculate something and set something up that is only possible through notation?
A I would arrive at understanding that later. I think before understanding that, I just liked what I heard. It wasn't such a big step from the Dave Brubeck Quartet to the Modern Jazz Quartet, just looking at compositional change, to Third Stream music, with Gunther Schuller, which was interesting; then Bartok and Berg. Now I'm playing in the student orchestra, and later the 5th Army Band, and we're playing Prokofiev, The Sound of Music, Bartok; I remember playing Prokofiev and thinking, hmm, this is strange; it didn't feel tonally correct, it felt weird, but I liked it. The Scherzos, which were off balance. So I started going to the libraries and finding these records. At the time we played Bach, I hated it; I kind of consigned it to this region that was "white people's music…"
M Did you hate it because it was too calculated?…
A No, it was just irrelevant, kind of like the Southern strategy [laughs]. It was like you had to learn this to learn the instrument, so you did it for that reason, but it was irrelevant, it was something white people liked, whoever white people were.
M Like the John Lennon song says, "nothing you can say that can't be said; nothing you can sing that can't be sung…"
A For me, I just couldn't hear it., but I knew, and my teacher made me play in these various ensembles as I sought to learn the instrument, I just kind of consigned it to this region of, well, this is what white people did, and I want to be competitive and play my instrument, but it dind't touch my heart. Only later, when I started listening to Bartok and Berg did the actual music start warming up to me; but even then the ideas of the music were more interesting than the actual music, because the music didn't touch me. It would be after hearing Schönberg's "Three Pieces for the Piano," in the library, with the Kandinsky cover, where I almost died, because it was at that point for the first time in my life that I heard the music.
M And you say Cecil Taylor set you up to be hearing that.
A Yes, the early music.
M Cecil Taylor was influenced by that.
A Of course he was. But at the time--I mean, I didn't put all that together; this was very different "jazz" for me, and it was not tonal in the way I had been thinking of tonality.
M I guess where I'm trying to get to is, like, when we talked about Wagner and the European traditional stuff that influenced you, we're talking about a tradition that hasn't been touched by African America. But when we talk about the trans-African sector in America, we're talking about a whole culture and people who had to find their way in the dominant culture.
A Yes. And we're also talking about different time cycles. When I was growing up, I didn't like Wagner either. When I was growing up, I didn't like Stockhausen; I thought they were all totally irrelevant. And I didn't know about Frank Johnson or William Grant Still, so only later, after Schönberg, when I actually heard the music, in a totally notated space, it was liberating. Suddenly, I was starting to be able to hear Bach, his music. Because before that, it was always, like "what's all the big fuss about?"
M And you heard Ornette and Roscoe and all these people before you heard bebop; so you got to bebop through the really out guys.
A Well, not exactly. I heard Dave Brubeck; that was bebop. Tristano, that was bebop, Gigi Gryce, Jazz Lab Quintet, that was bebop; some Jackie McLean…but I had a narrow experience, and hearing Roscoe and Threadgill would make me go back to broaden my experience.
Let me go back to William Grant Still. In talking about this area of the music, we're not talking about me as a young guy, we're talking about me moving through the late '60s and into the '70s. I'm evolving my own ideas at the same time. It makes a lot of sense, the connection between Bartok and William Grant Still, although I would experience in academia, and I won't name names, a profound disrespect for the African American composers tradition. Again, it was marginalized and basically written off as irrelevant. William Grant Still--do you know his music?
M A little bit.
A I think he was awesome.
M He was kind of influenced by Bartok? He also wrote some twelve-tone stuff, didn't he?
A Some; he studied with Varése and rejected it. Basically, this guy has something like 9 operas.
M What about Ulysses Kay?
A I think he's still alive. T.J. Anderson…this whole tradition; Olly Wilson. This whole tradition, Leo Smith and I, starting in the late '60s, we started to explore this music. We were shocked--I know I was shocked. Leo's always been a much deeper scholar than me, even as a young man, so I was like killing myself trying to keep up with him. He knew more about Ellington, for instance, than me.
M Funny story from Europe. Günter Sommer and Peter Kowald and Leo together in their trio. When Günter first heard Leo, he thought, "I have to be the black guy in this group, because I, Günter Baby Sommer, the East German jazz musician, have to be the black drummer, because this guy is playing like Schönberg or whatever." [laughter] "Was is das, es ist nicht richtig!" [laughter]
A Leo Smith is a great American visionary, and we'll get to him later. William Grant Still, and the continuum of African American composers would not only be the template that I would build upon, but their work would represent a confirmation that there was more to the African American experience than what I had been taught, even in the African American community. Because I didn't hear their music when I was growing up; no one talked about their music, or even knew about it.
M When we do get into your work…
A We'll get into my work in the next five years, the way we're going, but I love this.
M What I'm noticing, though, is that of all these influences that you've mentioned, none have gone into the territory that you've gone into with your work, your actual body of music in terms of integrating improvisation, out kind of sound spaces, notation.
A It just depends on who you're talking about. W. C. Handy started writing music, published the first notated blues; Scott Joplin was not an improviser, but we have to look at these guys with respect to their time period and what was possible. William Grant Still, for instance, was very interested in the composite tradition but was not an instrumentalist or improviser himself, so you're right, there was a limitation there. But at the same time, this guy would compose across the spectrum from solo piano music all the way to an opera cycle that has never been performed. His work is neoclassic in the same sense as Bartok--taking melodies, ethnic melodies, folk musics, and building a symphonic logic out of them. William Grant Still would do the same with blues, put it in a symphonic context. That was revolutionary in his time period. And the actual music is as unique and as separate as Bartok, but we never talk of it like that. This is my point, that that continuum would just be marginalized; it doesn't matter, it wouldn't be integrated into a Charles Ives--we talk about Charles Ives and his move toward dissonance and complexity, but William Grant Still's music was exploring fresh materials, in his use of blues scales, in his decision to bring it into a symphonic context, but it's just not talked of in that way; it's kind of…
M Because of American cultural politics.
A Because of American cultural politics, this is my point. Florence Price's "Symphony in E" is not even played any more, but it was considered a very important composition in the early '30s.
M Ruth Crawford Seeger, maybe we should mention her too; because what we're talking about now is areas that are really of great interest to ethnomusicologists, like Bartok and Ruth Crawford Seeger, but not William Grant Still.
A Yes. And before talking about Ruth Crawford Seeger, I'd have to go back and say the great Charles Seeger's music has also been kicked out, and this was like a point of definition for world music psychologies. Charles Seeger is very important; we don't celebrate this great American master. It's from Charles Seeger, and from Henry Cowell, another great master, whose tonal clusters would define and isolate another component, which would set the stage for Ruth Crawford Seeger, who studied with both of them, who was the recipient of both their works.
M How would you explain the prominence of Charles Ives as the American icon he is now, in terms of what we've been saying about coalition politics and the music industry and all that. Why did he get seized upon as the big spokesman?
A He was a New Englander. What kind of American is he, English, German, or what?
M English, I think.
A And what is Mr. Seeger?
M I don't know.
A Charles Ives was a recipient of the East Coast intellectual quadrant that Spiro Agnew talked about; and even though he experienced rejection and hard times, his work was a component of the East Coast intellectual platform, even in rejection and opposition. He would make his fortune in insurance, went to Harvard…that is why we talk of Charles Ives as opposed to Henry Cowell, whose sexual experiences would require sidelining him. But Charles Seeger is the man, and William Grant Still is an African American whose work was awesome on the scale of Wagner. But before William Grant Still, Scott Joplin.
M But how would you explain him in terms of becoming a great American icon too? Was he appropriated in some way?
A Well, his work would come along at a time when the piano would become a part of the salon culture of America, when the piano roll would be introduced. Ragtime would become very popular; but Ragtime, of course, was a composer's music. Joplin was not a leading exponent of the improviser's Ragtime, but he was able to translate it into the notated space and achieve success, but they would not accept the opera or the grand ideas. This is why the man became a depressive and eventually lost it. He was the beginning of the continuum that I'm a part of. But I consider him a great American master. After him, William Grant Still as a dynamic master, kind of like Wagner but not as encompassing in terms of bringing in a mythology. Although the operas--have you ever heard the operas? I have one on videotape. He's dealing with African Americans, placing them in mythological contexts and dealing with the battle of good and evil, a la Wagner. This isn't to say he's a point of definition for that integration, Wagner's the point of definition. I'm only saying that Joplin was a small-time poor guy like myself who had great dreams, and his work would respond to the improvised restructural strategies of Ragtime as well as the dynamics of Chopin. So you have a Chopin-Ragtime integration that was uniquely American, that he tried to, that he did in fact parlay, transform, expand into the operatic context. He wrote two operas; one was lost.
M Treemonisha and what else?
A I can't remember the name of the other one. But it's lost, it's never been performed. But it would be at that point that we can start talking of the grand African American composer's tradition, Joplin into William Grant Still. The next group would be an academic group that was interesting but also complex, because that group would be a part of the African American middle and upper class that would draw its information mostly from the academy, while at the same time drawing on African American thematic materials. That group was greatly misunderstood, but it was a complex group because in many ways they would accept second-place status. We're going to see them reappear in the next twenty years, now that the Southern strategy is back, guys are graduating from college; they're going to start writing correct African American notated music, papers; some of them will achieve success. But the success is predicated on that second-class status.