well-weathered music

Here are some pictures and an audio segment of the Relay event in Williamsburg last week, organized by flautist extraordinaire Jane Rigler, part of the Conflux Festival. The idea is that there are a number of improvising musicians who trade off playing trios in three locations. When a fourth musician shows up, someone must stop so that this new musician can join. The one who has stopped moves on to a new location where the same situation occurs. And on and on for three hours or so.

Here is an audio clip from one location (Lucky Cat):

This clip starts with me, Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon) & Jessica Pavone (viola). Then Chris McIntyre (trombone) shows up and takes Jessica’s place.
More audio and info here.
Here I am playing at the Ione Bar with Julianne Carney, violin, & Kyoko Kitamura, voice.

And the Lucky Cat Bar with Julianne Carney, violin, & Sara Schoenbeck, bassoon.

Actually, my favorite location was outside in front of the Conflux office, but there were no pictures.

As Cage knew well, time is the commonality in sound & silence. Taken a step further, it’s easy to see that temporal structure is the commonality in all music, no matter from which culture or even from which species. Generally speaking, it could be said that the ways of organizing pitch is what distinguishes each music tradition, while the ways of organizing time is what unifies them. All sound/silence exists in time and what turns it into “music” or “sound art” is the acknowledgment of some sort of temporal landmark. Mozart’s cadences, Indian music’s “sam,” gamelan’s gong structure are all ways of saying, “we have arrived here and now we’re off again.”

I’m thinking of this these days because I have a job transcribing some of Gerry Mulligan’s solos and have been struck not only by the beauty of his playing, but by the beauty of his compositional structures. One’s not really aware of these structures unless you sit there counting out the beats and the measures. That’s one of the reasons I love Indian music concerts; most of the audience is following the rhythmic cycle with hand gestures. But in most temporal art, structure is much more subliminal. A friend of mine once sped up The Rite of Spring to where the entire piece lasted about 5 minutes. You no longer heard pitches, rhythms and orchestration. You were able to listen to the structure of the piece as a you would a melody. Jim Tenney writes about these sort of perceptual “gestalts” in his Meta-Hodos.

As I wrote out the structure of Mulligan’s K-4 Pacific in numbers of measures (8,1 // 8,4,1 // 8,4,8,4, etc), it reminded me of some of Cage’s pre-1950 rhythmic structures as well as that of some flute music from Borneo I analyzed years ago. Perhaps this says more about my analytic process than it does about these musics. But I do believe that if we expand our perceptual gestalt and eliminate those pesky (and subjective) issues like “emotion” and “content,” we are left with some fundamental truths about perception and communication.

Am I being too simplistic here? What do you think? (You can write comments if you’d like.)

John Cage was born on this day 95 years ago.
He continues to give us many good reasons and opportunities to simply listen.

Thank you, John.

David Tudor performs 4′33″

I went to The Stone last night to see legendary guitarist Eugene Chadbourne playing with equally legendary drummer Jimmy Carl Black. It was a wonderfully enjoyable concert. For those not “in the know,” JCB was the original drummer in Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. If you were one of the many who could not stop listening to We’re Only In It For The Money when they first discovered it, you know him from his line: “I’m Jimmy Carl Black and I’m the Indian of the group.”

And then there’s Chadbourne, the quintessential North American free improvising guitarist. He took Derek Bailey’s guitar explorations to a whole new level. I first saw (and played with) him over 30 years ago in Toronto (he was living in Canada as a US draft-dodger). He was the first person I ever saw play a prepared guitar, and he even took that a step further by adding kalimba tines on to the body of a few of his many guitars. So then President Carter granted immunity to all the draft-dodgers and Chadbourne came back to the US. To make a long story short, he has been integrating Country Music into his improvisations over the last many years (coined the term “Shockabilly”), and, judging from last night, has been having a grand ol’ time doing so.

Last night’s concert was all songs; some blues, some Texas ballads, and even some Zappa covers (an amazing version of Mom and Dad from …In It For The Money). EC & JCB have a great rapport; singing together, talking to each other during the songs. When EC would start getting “out” JCB would be right there with him, and again, with him when they seamlessly returned to the tune. I’m always happy when I hear music that simultaneously refers to and defies styles, but still knows exactly where it is at any given point.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a million:

Eugene Chadbourne (but no Jimmy Carl Black):

Yup, you read it right. I just found a comment the legendary Woody Guthrie made about one of Cage’s early prepared piano pieces; the solos from Amores. I found it in this very thorough article by Mark Swed on James Tenney’s 2002 performance of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes (videos below). For me, these quotes were a revelation. I always wanted to do a piece juxtaposing Cage’s writings with Bob Dylan’s lyrics, somehow exposing an oddly shared vision. (I was discouraged by Remy Charlip, who was, in effect, Cage & Cunningham’s rebellious son. I’m easily swayed.) Anyway, I feel I have found a bridge between two music traditions that apparently share little but are both equally important to me. (It’s just that one got gobbled up by Big Business. Guess which one.)Here’s the quote from Mark Swed’s article:

In 1947, Maro Ajemian, for whom “Sonatas and Interludes” was written, recorded the prepared piano solos from Cage’s “Amores.” One evening that summer, folk legend Woody Guthrie wrote a fan letter to the Disc Co. of America, as he listened to the scratchy 78 rpm disc. “I need something like this oddstriking music,” he began in the postscript, “to match the things I feel in my soul tonight.” (The singer also wrote that that morning, his wife, Marjorie, had “given birth to a big 7-pound boy” –Arlo.)

“So let me say my thanks one more time to you, Maro,” he concluded, “for recording up and down for me all of this virgin unsettled and wild wide open sounding dancy music there on the keys of your big piano.”

Quite a wonderful and deeply felt description of Cage’s early music.

Also a very insightful way of closing an article on Tenney & Cage. Jim definitely had a sort of western US, folksy quality about him. He was from Colorado after all. Maybe I’m clutching at straws here, but it also seems Jim & Woody shared a single minded devotion to one’s personal truth, consequences be damned. Comparisons are always shaky, but something just feels right about saying Jim Tenney is new music’s Woody Guthrie. (Which would put Larry Polansky in the role of Pete Seeger. But then who would be Jim’s “Bob Dylan”? Nick Didkovsky?)

You can hear this “wild wide open sounding dancy music” for yourself.

James Tenney plays John Cage, part 1:

part 2:

In my post about Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (I just added a video, below), I mentioned they could well be the offspring of Glenn Branca. I think I misspoke. The more appropriate connection is with the honorable Captain Beefheart. I think it’s a “mass of sound” vs. “rhythmic complexity” issue. CB & SGM seem to work with those two aspects equally, while GB works more with the former. (Then of course there’s the whole singing thing.)

I found a bunch of the good captain’s old videos on youtube the other day. Genius. I’ve included a relatively recent one (1980). I also found a solo Branca video from ‘78. He is of course known for his huge amplified ensembles, not quite right for youtube viewing, but this solo comes across well.

But, man, that Captain B! I just can’t get enough of him. It’s like It is beautifully complex chamber music.

Ashtray Heart from 1980.

Glenn Branca solo 1978

(Check out the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum video, a few posts down.)

The night before last I went to hear SGM at the Highline Ballroom here in NY. If you haven’t heard of them, well, I’m not sure what labels to use; thrash pre-apocalypse post-nihilist metal perhaps? Let’s just say I was one of the very few people there without piercings or tatoos (and perhaps the only one whose hairless head was not the result of shaving). But I gotta tell ya’ I have not heard such precise and well executed metric-modulations since…, well, since the last time I heard SGM. But little surprise here, seeing that my dear friend and consummate musician Carla Kihlstedt is one of the creative forces in the band. I couldn’t really understand the words they were scream-singing, but they were nice enough to give a hint of the content before each song. One was about trees, one about rocks, or the “mineral kingdom,” and one sincerely and touchingly dedicated to the guitarist’s dying father. They also used a bunch of home-made instruments and a few songs had some microtonal guitar work. I don’t know if they are aware of this connection, but they could be Glenn Branca’s offspring. Also, they were joined by my dancer friend Tanya Calamoneri who did some wonderful and appropriate rocked-out butoh movement (how slowly can one dance fast). All in all a very enjoyable, albeit very loud, evening. It made me proud of my recently-former home town of Oakland, CA (where they hail from). I find their material is best heard live, so if you get a chance, check ‘em out (don’t forget your earplugs).

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - “Helpless Corpses Enactment”