Patrick Zimmerli (V)
This interview with Patrick Zimmerli was conducted by email during January-March 2018.
Tony Reif: Clockworks is a composed suite of music for which you got a Chamber Music America commission, right? And it’s certainly not easy music to play. When you got the commission had you already determined who the performers would be? And if so, were you to some extent writing with the strengths, abilities and style of those players in mind, or did you compose more in the abstract? In any case, why these particular musicians? And when you started rehearsing did things come together more or less as you’d expected? Did you revise the compositions at all, or were rehearsals mainly about getting the players (and yourself) to internalize the polyrhythmic/melodic/harmonic/structural materials to the point where you could all creatively interpret and improvise on them?
Patrick Zimmerli: Yes, Clockworks was a CMA New Jazz Works commission. The full story is that I was preparing an application for the CMA NJW grant with my assistant at the time, Stephanie Chou. We were going through the archive and came across Twelves Sacred Dances, a CD I had released in the late 1990s. She opined that in fact it was better than the music I was writing currently! I reacted to this whippersnapper-ish snark by deciding to let the panel judge, and to send in an application both from my current self and my mid-20s self. I even dug up a bio that I was using at that time and sent that in with the “older” application. Turns out, it wasn’t legal to send in two applications, so we had to decide which to submit, and the younger-self application simply fit with the requirements in practical ways much better, so we sent that one in and, incredibly, it won. (We will never know who is actually better, my younger or my current self.)
So I called all the old band members from the 12SDs—John Hollenbeck, Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson. Reid was too busy working on laptop projects, but John and Ethan were very enthusiastic about a reunion. We brought in Chris Tordini, a young bassist who had played a lot with Hollenbeck and with whom I had been impressed ever since he did the reading rehearsal of my Aspects of Darkness and Light project with Josh Redman and the Escher String quartet.
To pull the music together, Ethan and I had a series of “sectionals,” just like old times (if much lighter in terms of schedule). In the months preceding the premiere we would get together regularly and work on the difficult rhythms and tricky passages. Finally we started adding Chris in, and then John came in for the intensive rehearsal days preceding the premiere. For John and Chris this kind of music is second nature, whereas for Ethan (for whom I wrote particularly challenging parts) and for myself, the music required a bit more time to get together.
The pieces were definitely modified in the course of the rehearsals. We added a bunch of solos, the guys put inspired little touches on arrangements, in fact I left some of the pieces open-ended in terms of form just to allow for that possibility.
The piece that underwent the biggest transformation is the Boogaloo. It was originally called “Scherzo” and was much faster and zanier in its conception, but Ethan resisted upping the tempo, insisting it worked better as a medium-tempo piece. John fashioned a cool pattern to play around it that was much more straight-ahead than what I’d originally conceived, and we joked at first that it sounded like a boogaloo. None of us was sure exactly what a boogaloo was, only that there was some Les Hooper big band chart that we played in high school with that as its marking. I later tracked down and emailed Les himself about this! He generously got back to me with some illustrations of a boogaloo, and we determined that the chart of his that we had played was named “Chickenscratch.” John Hollenbeck subsequently unearthed a clip of James Brown actually demonstrating what he calls the boogaloo dance. I’m still not sure if the piece really qualifies as a boogaloo, but we hope it’s close enough, anyway the title stuck.
So yes, definitely all the players really added a lot to this music. John is like the composers’-best-friend drummer, he makes your compositional ideas sound better than they are, he effortlessly does things that not only fit perfectly with but actually enhance the compositions themselves. Ethan brought some specific soloistic ideas to each piece that have a ton of character, he really approaches improvising in a very specific way. And with Chris, his improvising is so subtle you hardly notice how cleverly organic his ideas are to the compositions themselves. Not to mention his great sound and consistent support of the band.
In general when writing for musicians I like things to be as collaborative as possible. For guys like Ethan, Chris and John who are fountains of amazing musical ideas it would be silly not to exploit that aspect of who they are as musicians by constraining them too much to the written page. But I find even when writing for classical musicians, I’m very happy to accept any kind of suggestions and changes they have that make the music better. That often takes the form of making modifications according to what works best for their instrument, especially when I’m writing virtuosic passages for strings or something, but even formal suggestions I’m happy to adapt if they seem to make things better. For me music is always a collaborative process (unlike painting or novel-writing for instance) and that’s part of what makes it so fascinating and rewarding.
TR: What was the inspiration for this suite – musically, conceptually (the theme of time), in whatever ways? And what relation does this suite bear to your early “modernist” jazz that was influenced by your studies of music by the 2nd Viennese school and their American followers (Babbitt, Carter etc.)? In what ways does this music further develop those directions – specifically the ones you were exploring in the Shores Against Silence quartet and your Ensemble of the 1990s – and in what ways would you say the new music is looking in other directions (perhaps ones related to your more recent composing for classical ensembles)? How would you characterize the balance between jazz and classical (Romantic, modern etc.) elements in Clockworks?
PZ: Honestly, the inspiration for the suite was a decades-long “discussion”—perhaps more accurately put, an “argument”—I’ve been having with Ethan Iverson. I met Ethan when he was 17, to his recollection the first thing he did upon arriving in New York was attend the recording session for Shores Against Silence. I was a mentor to Ethan and we worked together really hard on nearly impossible music for many years. I think Ethan has always seen me as representing a kind of moralistic absolute in jazz, and he was a fervid admirer of my early style.
When I started writing music that was simpler and more understandable to the layperson, Ethan was one of the very very few who objected. He seemed to feel that I had watered down my style or somehow sold out.
But from my perspective, my classical phase was not about watering anything down, but rather using a different set of tools to convey essentially the same message, but in a way that would be comprehensible to a broader cross-section of humanity.
Believe it or not—and I’m necessarily not proud of this—sometimes my best writing can be motivated by the simple desire to prove a point. For example, during an early meeting between Ethan and me in Paris to discuss this project, Ethan went on a bit of a rant on how overused, trite and passé he found the Lydian chord to be.
Now you may call me sentimental or whatever you like but I love the Lydian chord! And Lydian is not mutually exclusive with a fairly “avant-garde,” or anyway extremely imaginative kind of expression. To prove this point, I wrote a movement I initially called “Learning to Love Lydian,” which consisted of a series of repeated G lydian chords played in quarter notes in the left hand of the piano. Around these chords I wrote a polyrhythmic obbligato for the piano right hand, and some bowed bass harmonics and other unusual ornaments. The tenor and percussion parts I left completely free to be improvised responses to these written gestures. This movement, to which an open tenor solo played into the piano strings for reverberance provides an introduction, became “The Center of the Clock.”
And if you think that’s petty as artistic motivation, you’ll be even more amazed to learn that the entire suite was born of a similar argumentative impulse. There’s an overall progression from the abstract to the melodic that takes place over the course of the piece, just as there has been over the course of my career. The evolution involves a series of permutations of the main theme, which is heard in its most explicit form in the finale. The same theme—the exact same notes—are the structure of the first movement, which is not very melodic-sounding and might even seem freely-composed. I achieved this by treating the theme as a kind of tone-row, manipulating it as would a post-Schoenbergian serialist, subjecting it to transformations via a complete series of durations, making it determinant of a series of meters, etc. Gradually, over the course of the piece, the theme settles—it MATURES—into its singable self.
So the very structure of Clockworks is a reflection and summary of my artistic path, and an attempt to unveil the process whereby music can retain its message even as its technical means become simplified.
Some of the other movements are also snarky digs at Ethan btw, the polyrhythmic palindromes for example are meant to really challenge him and pay him back for insisting I write difficult music.
This whole project can thus also be seen as a testament to what an amazingly good sport Ethan is. He understands and embraces me with all my perverse artistic impulses. Proof can be found all over the album, where he takes the extravagant forms I’ve concocted for him and plays over them in a style that fits them hand in glove. His improvisations are effectively internal compositions in themselves, full of wit and charm and purpose. My favourite example of this is the absolutely loving treatment he gives to the Harmonic Variation, where he plays that gorgeous opening chorus before playing the written portion. (The idea to approach that introduction as a kind of “chorus” came almost as an afterthought in the recording session itself.)
TR: What’s it been like to return to tenor sax after many years only performing on soprano? Why use tenor only in Clockworks?
PZ: Like coming in from the wilderness! I actually had been playing soprano for many years, mostly because that instrument, with its lighter sound, made for a better blend with string instruments.
But when I did this project the conceit was that I was going to more or less pretend it was 1996 again, and so I figured it was only logical to limit myself to tenor and do a classic jazz quartet record.
After a year of getting back into it, I found that the tenor is really natural as a voice for me. It is after all the instrument I’ve been playing since I was 12, and the one on which I spent the most endless hours of practice, particularly as a teenager and in my early 20s. It’s great to have the feeling of freedom that’s born of that much hard work.
TR: I remember you saying back in the late ‘90s something to the effect (correct me if I’m making some of this up!) that you considered the Ensemble’s music optimistic and positive and you hoped it would transport listeners into a new sonic world – that it wasn’t being complicated and difficult for its own sake, or to display intellectual mastery, but as a kind of challenge to a jazz tradition that was often limiting the music’s expressiveness. If this is a fair description of your point of view back then, do you think jazz has renewed itself or progressed much in the last 20 or 25 years, and are listeners today any more prepared to embrace this new music? And do you still embrace your younger self’s confidence in the future (if that’s the right way of putting it) and the role of art in our individual and collective lives?
PZ: Mmm, I’m going to go ahead and label that one as a hardball question! I can only answer it by breaking it down into its constituent parts.
4a. optimistic and positive. Then? Yes. Still? Certainly. It might be the biggest thing that sets my music off from, what shall we say, mainstream avant-garde jazz…
4b. transport listeners into a new sonic world. Then? Yes. Now? Newness is less of a priority as I grow older than simply taking listeners on a varied and satisfying emotional journey. (Even that idea, of being less concerned with originality as one grows older, isn’t particularly original, I’m echoing Mahler here.)
4c. Not complicated for its own sake or showoff-y. Then? Certainly not. Now? I guess I’d have to say yes! First of all, since I’ve been writing simpler music lately, I did make a conscious effort to ramp up the complexity here (as above explained) so there is definitely some complication for its own sake, and, as the complexity is closer to the earth as it were, as it’s an EASIER complexity than that of the 1990s ensemble music, it ironically is more evident, more audible to the casual listener, by comparison with the enormous but hard-to-parse complexity of, say, “Hemispheres.” So in that sense you could call it show-offy as well.
4d. challenge to a jazz tradition that was limiting music’s expressiveness. I can’t remember everything I said or thought back then, so I can’t say for sure, but I have no recollection saying or thinking that. I may have been opposing my music to traditional jazz, but I think my main concern back then was in forging a path that had the same kind of foundation in tradition but that was completely original. Then again, I was extremely ambitious and incredibly idealistic in those days. Bringing a new sound into the world was certainly a major priority.
4e. Has jazz renewed itself or progressed much in the last 20 or 25 years? Sure, though not always for the better. Definitely not in the direction of Explosion or Expansion, except in a very limited way. A kind of superficial rhythmic complexity has become much more common, and I should say there have been some cool rhythmic experiments, for example on Aaron Goldberg’s Bienestan, but if there’s been much in the way of music whose rhythmic complexity is on the level of those two CDs, and whose complexity has been sublimated to such a degree to a particular aesthetic/philosophical expression, I don’t know of it.
Reflecting back on that music, we were intent on creating a new sound for jazz with a valid intellectual substrate. This was new music, but (unlike much of the other “free” or “forward-thinking” jazz being created at the time) it was calculated, it was precise, it was economic, it had surprise and it had improvisation like all the best jazz, but it also had form, it had harmony, it had rhythm, and all those elements made sense and cohered to make a satisfying, meaningful whole. Despite the difficulty of the music, I always stressed the music’s dramatic intent with the guys, the emotional ebb and flow, and beyond that, Ben Stomu Sato and I had a kind of brother-ship going, we were completely bonded over this project (occasional fraternal quarrelling aside) and played with a deep, empathic ensemble unity, succeeding in our best moments—to enumerate lastly the most important component– to play it with heart and soul.
So if I was trying to make the entirety of jazz progress in any direction back then– and it’s quite possible I was, because for us to be so dedicated the mission had to be grandiose—on the one hand you can look at as simply a testament to my naïvete. But on the other hand, I still think that the music on Explosion consists of a real accomplishment, and I’m STILL surprised that it wasn’t more noticed at the time.
4f. Are listeners today any more prepared to embrace this new music? Well it depends which new music you’re talking about. There has been this superficial trend toward complexity, and at the same time my own above-mentioned trend (in this particular project at least) towards superficiality. In that sense I think the music and presentation of Clockworks are far more listener-friendly than some of my music from the past. The aesthetic of my 90s music btw was deeply influenced by mid-to-late Coltrane, you know the period of the 30-miute solos. That particular expression, a kind of will to freedom and transcendence of the everyday through the pushing of limits way past where they should politely be set, has gone radically out of style these days.
4g. do you still embrace your younger self’s confidence in the future. Oh, was I confident in the future? What future, for whom? If I expressed confidence in the future I was probably being, again, overly general and naïve. After all, the future doesn’t exist in the abstract, it’s particular to individual people, individual cities, states, countries, societies, all of which are on different (polyrhythmically related, if you will) trajectories of advancement and decline.
Maybe I was thinking of my own future; as I said before, I certainly expected Explosion to make a massive impact in the jazz world when it came out! Hence the title. I was like, here’s some music the likes of which no one has ever heard, this will cause an immediate sensation!
Instead it was more like the big bang, an enormous explosion in space that no being was around to hear.
I was so rabid, so intent, so fascinated by these musical thoughts and ideas that I was developing, that I just assumed everyone would get it and love it every bit as much as I did. Imagine my shock when no one, not even musicians, had a clue what was going on. I had simply gone way too far, way too deep, and no one could really follow what I was doing, with the exception of some few listeners who were able to tune that out and could get right to the deeper meaning of the music.
Another way of looking at this though is that the jury is still somewhat out. As naïve as I may have been in my 20s, I did always conceive of my music as having the potential for, temporally speaking, a vertical popularity rather than a horizontal popularity—by which I mean that even if only a handful of people were interested, that a similar handful would continue to be interested down future generations, which would give the music a continued life.
4h. (if that’s the right way of putting it) not so sure it is…
4i. and the role of art in our individual and collective lives? Definitely my ideas on the role of art in our individual and collective lives has been continually modified and updated as I’ve grown. How couldn’t they? Look around—people are more and more availing themselves of music in ways I never would’ve predicted. Plus jazz is, paradoxically, simultaneously both more and less popular than it ever has been.
As to the views of my younger self, they were perhaps naïve, but I would say that there’s a moral aspect to my project that continues to exist. At the same time maybe I’m always trying to enlarge my reach, by doing things better and by making the musical language clearer. So that’s an ongoing effort that will continue.
TR: If you do think that the jazz world has indeed caught up with the innovations that you were pioneering back then, what jazz being produced today do you feel an affinity with?
PZ: As I said, no I really don’t think it has. Look there’s all sorts of technically great, soulful, and really appealing jazz being made out there today, in a wild variety of sub-genres. So people should go check it out, that’s great! No issues there. But I’d love to be introduced to anything remotely like “Hemispheres,” or “Where Have I,” maybe especially “Where Have I,” with its thoroughly harmonic foundation expressed strictly contrapuntally, with its so-simple form swathed in high pointillist raiment, with its rangy melodies and crossing voices so clearly etching a tonal structure, with its openness and limpid use of sound and space, with its sense of unhurried directedness and purpose that you can’t quite locate, but that glues together and unifies the ensemble so perfectly, that draws such a clear line from the beginning of the piece to the end. Show me that, in what the kids today are writing!
Personally in terms of what I have an affinity for, I like music that’s really well-designed in a larger-scale sense, for that you more have to go to classical music. Bach Cantatas man! Beethoven 9! Ockeghem Missa Prolationum! Stuff like that.
TR: In the liner note you write: “The piece often avails itself of sophisticated compositional techniques, but there is throughout a secret, subversive pop melodicism that constantly calls into question the complexity, that brings the music back to its earthy melodic origins.” More specifically, are you talking about the origins of jazz in a merging of African and European traditions, or something else? Does blues tonality have a place in your music?
Well, I think my melodic sensibility ultimately comes from the ‘70s pop music I listened to as a really young child. I was into the few records my parents seem to have had—Jackson Five, some Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, and later, I somehow discovered muzak, with its great melodies and harmonies.
Blues isn’t a huge feature of my musical language. I played a lot of blues when I was younger actually, I would play a lot in blues bands in college. And I still have a certain inflection and color to my playing that comes from that, for sure. I definitely love all kinds of tenor tones. But that real kind of gritty playing, and the vocabulary associated with it—it began to seem like a cultural fraud for me to play too much like that, though I sometimes like to throw in fleeting moments of “tough tenor” (there’s one right in the middle of “Windup” for example).
TR: How does Clockworks relate (or not) to your other recent jazz composing and arranging, such as 2011’s Modern Music and your chamber concerto for Joshua Redman, Aspects of Darkness and Light (when will the recording of that be released?)
PZ: Well, those projects (Aspects is scheduled for 2018 release on Nonesuch) were in my more-recent style, so I didn’t really write any particularly challenging rhythms. Every now and then there’s some poly-metric writing. But those projects are more about the cultural mélange of jazz and classical. So there’s an emphasis on more-traditional lyricism, and especially Aspects has an interesting formal design. But, at their level, they remain challenging pieces to play.
TR: Clockworks is complete in itself – so do you have some ideas about where to go next, either with this quartet or other musicians you’d like to compose for and perform with?
PZ: Oh, I have such amazing and exciting projects coming up! For this ensemble, I got the idea into my head to do a CD of Duke Ellington tunes. Clockworks Quartet Plays Duke. I want to record it in Salina, Kansas, at a studio where you can record DIRECT TO VINYL! No mixing, no editing, no mastering, no figuring out times between takes even, no post-production at all! They have a pressing plant right nearby so basically you record Monday and the record is done Tuesday. I love the challenge of that, and I think the sound would be really special.
TR: Wow, I had no idea! Back to those heady direct-to-disc days just before 16/44.1 digital turned up and audio quality went down the tubes (for a while).
PZ: The original idea with this quartet was to have it be a repertoire ensemble, and play a bunch of my old “difficult” or “complex” music, including stuff from Shores and Twelve Sacred Dances in addition to Clockworks. But that’s proven impractical, and in any case I think it would be great to contrast Clockworks with a set of Duke tunes, perhaps arranged in a way that would trace the line between that repertoire, that’s so much at the core of the jazz tradition, and what we’re doing.
Then—I’m keen to record my Sappho Song Cycle with Luciana Souza and Gary Versace and Satoshi Takeishi. We premiered that cycle in 2014 at Wigmore Hall, performance wasn’t too hot, then I revived the project last year (adding Sato, it was trio at first) and really, the band was sounding great! Luciana was in fine form on the material, Sato and Gary had a real connection, we were set for a wonderful gig, but at the last minute Gary got some crazy heart condition and wound up in the hospital! He recovered quickly but not in time for our performance, so we had to resort to a sub who was sight reading the material. Still, from what I heard in the rehearsal I know that that music is ready to go.
And I’ve just started working on a beautiful project featuring Miranda Cuckson and Ben Monder. Miranda’s an incredible new music violinist but with a very strong traditional foundation that sometimes goes under the radar (she spent 8 years under the tutelage of Dorothy Delay at Juilliard, who fostered talents like Gil Shaham, Sarah Chang, Midori, etc) and Ben’s, well, Ben. While they’re both tall and thin, it’s for more than just that reason that I thought they’d make a really interesting pairing. Miranda plays a lot of Brian Ferneyhough’s music and similarly complex things, so some of the pieces center around that music, but treated in similar ways to how I treated Boulez’s music in the Shores pieces. And Ben of course writes some of the most sophisticated and unusual music that’s completely guitar-based, and I wanted to respond to that, as well as bringing him out of his normal “jazz” context.
Despite the simpler style I write in now I still can be inspired by dialogue and a gadfly-like interrogation of other composers’ musical ideas, and I’m thrilled by the opportunity that this project presents to explore some academic new music again. We’re going to add a percussionist as well.
I have quite a few other interesting commissions in the works, but something I just conceived, as a project for maybe a couple of years down the line, is to do a solo saxophone recording.
At the absolute apex of my avant-garde days—that would’ve been like 1991 I guess—I did a solo concert at the Cornelia Street Café. It was a program of standards—but like no one has ever heard them before, where I improvised not off of the musical elements, as is traditional, but rather poetically off of the lyrics of the pieces, did some interpretive dance, and then musical versions of the standards whose connections to the originals were wildly tenuous.
The idea here was to try and trace a line between two diametrically opposed genres, jazz and contemporary art, including installation and performance art. I also was interested in what was at the forefront of avant-garde poetry and theater at the time, writers like Peter Handke and Heiner Muller, John Ashbery and Ronald Sukenik. I was wondering if I could somehow incorporate all those fresh ideas into standards interpretation, which, given its traditional roots, for me feels like a locus for rendering the most radical ideas legible.
Anyway, having finally gotten on top of the massive saxophonistic challenges that Clockworks presents, I recently had the idea to go back to the solo saxophone format, and maybe do standard interpretations again as well. I doubt the presentation would be anywhere near as crazy as that 1991 concert, but there is an extraordinary flexibility, and an amazing theatricality, that you can achieve by playing solo, and the idea is very portable. Maybe I’m going to use it as a vehicle also to respond to contemporary visual artists, with whom I generally find less to agree now than ever, but in whom I still have an avid interest—artists like Karim Attia, Neo Rausch, Evi Keller, Kara Walker, a million zillion others.
I feel that solo would be a way for me to integrate all the things I know, all the artistic ideas to which I’ve been exposed and developed responses, with all the styles I’ve been working in musically over the past decades, and all the work I’ve done on the saxophone, which is only now really coming together. This is a very new idea and I expect it will evolve considerably over the next few years.
TR: You may be coming out to Vancouver this summer, and I suggested you play some standards with some amazing musicians out here, but you expressed resistance. What’s your attitude towards playing standards with people you’ve never played with before? You’ve said that you worked hard on the jazz tradition when you were younger (and it’s obvious from your records that you did), so I’d think that would be second nature to you?
PZ: I think this is a really important question and central to the difficulties I have communicating with younger jazz musicians. I’m doing some master classes at the Paris Conservatoire, for example, and most of these kids are really talented and brilliant players, but there’s something they don’t quite understand about me that needs to be clarified.
You’re absolutely right, as a teenager and into my early twenties I did work very hard on playing in the way that modern musicians think of to play on standards, transcribing the masters of course, and then working on swing, ideas, technique, and the ability to tell a story in the traditional sense, in a generic context where accompanists were more or less interchangeable.
But the entirety of my energy ever since has been directed towards going way, way beyond that, in a direction where there’s much more specificity to the approach, and a uniqueness to the group expression. After all, there IS something generic about playing a blues, or a rhythm changes. It’s been done a million times before. It still can sound good! But does it ever sound better than when Bird did it? Just sounding good in a “traditional,” or even a “modern” jazz context, has always struck me as an incredibly low bar, my ambition was to do much more for music.
You can start with Shores Against Silence, with “Conceptualysis” or “Three Dreams of Repose,” tunes that had not just a completely original sound, but required an original way of approaching improvisation itself. I didn’t achieve this easily, at least on the playing end (the writing, while work-intensive, came more easily somehow). I had to struggle, to work really hard at mining the implications of these tunes to find a different kind of improvisation that took an entirely new, substantive technique.
But even further back, when I was 20 or 21, I was already furiously shedding solo Milton Babbitt on clarinet and bass clarinet. The solo clarinet piece he wrote, My Ends are my Beginnings, is 15 minutes long and features some of his most intricate rhythms, and tricky passages, one after the next. I recall performing it from memory at Casa Italiana at Columbia University in the presence of members of Speculum Musicae, one of the greatest new music ensembles of their time, or any time. (Another one of my endeavors to be filed under “bite off more than you can chew.”) Whatever the results of that process, it did result in putting a certain distance between me and your everyday, run-of-the-mill jazz musician.
And then there were the compositions coming out of that early phase, for example “Blues Contexts,” a piece that substituted pitch-class-sets for changes. I was reading Allan Forte’s Structure of Atonal Music at the time, well what jazz musician wasn’t? And was very interested in his set-theoretical approach, so I would try to teach like Kevin Hays and Scott Colley pitch set theory so they could improvise with me reactively in that language, and I was really working hard on that. (Ben Monder and I worked quite a bit on it as well, and Ben later went on to make pitch class set theory fundamental to his compositional and improvisational approach).
And then I went on to write large pieces for classical ensembles, orchestras and chamber ensembles, and write larger pieces and just generally do all manner of unusual things, over the course of several decades. While I’m very proud of the results, one side effect is to create quite a real separation, you separate yourself from your jazz colleagues.
So but I guess I only have myself to blame when people are like, hey, want to play some standards with some incredible local musicians? After all, who KNOWS about “Blues Contexts?” For that matter, who knows about “Where Have I?” [on Explosion, with an alternate, more classical-feeling take on The Songlines Anthology]. “Where Have I” is one of my most profound early efforts, and I’m very proud of the performance on the recording as well. The piece integrates post-serial techniques but in such a deeply organic way, it has this flow that isn’t rhythmic per se and that you can’t quite pinpoint but that keeps going, that somehow creates a line that leads you right through from the beginning to the end with a total, absorbing inevitability. There is harmony here, there is rhythm, there is structure, the most basic jazz song form in fact, a simple AABA which repeats for solos– but also– there is space, there is sound, there is a telepathic unity in the ensemble, which plays seemingly effortlessly as one– and there is above all a saturation of heart and soul in that performance. I mean, you’ve got to go back and listen to that piece. I don’t think that anyone that truly comprehends the major accomplishment that is “Where Have I” would ever ask me to play a set of standards with people I don’t know!
But of course, the way I’ve always functioned—it’s the only way to live, I feel like—is to go from project to project, putting every ounce of energy, of knowledge, and of heart, into it, and then completely and totally moving on. There has to be a certain amnesia, or else you get stuck. To spend any amount of time basking in previous accomplishments, well that’s when you know it’s all over. Of course, I don’t put on airs! I don’t walk around like, “yeah, I’m that cat, the guy who wrote Where Have I.” Not only is that obviously not a very pragmatic attitude, in terms of getting along in the world— but how could I then have any of the humility and freshness that is essential to the success of any creative endeavor?
There’s always a tension between what you’ve already done and what you’re about to do. You can’t just abandon music that you’ve already written, I mean, even Clockworks is what, 2 years old already? But I recorded it, I shedded it like crazy, we all did, the CD’s coming out, there will be interviews and press, and hopefully many other opportunities to play the piece, and I have to do whatever work is necessary to make each of those occasions the best they can be!
But as the projects have multiplied in all different directions over the years, they start to take on a progressively heavier weight, relative to current writing. I just finished a piece for grand choir, based on Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The piece features anthems from five continents, and the word “joy” in 62 different languages! That took a ton of study, to dig up the translations and understand the pronunciations and balance the various languages from various parts of the world into a coherent whole. Then the conductor came to me a couple months later to do a review session on the score, and I found I’d completely forgotten all about all the work I’d done!
And that’s just one example, I have to prepare and help people with scores and notes for myriad older pieces I’ve written that are in various stages of being performed. As these pieces all have challenges, it takes a certain amount of study just to return back to the headspace. Of course, I certainly don’t mean to complain here, I’m delighted that my music is being played! I just mean to say it’s a bit different than when I only had Explosion in my recorded catalog.
It makes it increasingly difficult to give sufficient time and space to what I’m currently writing. When you embark on writing something new you fundamentally start from zero, you have to construct a world from scratch. Of course you bring your experience to it, but in terms of the total construction you don’t know where it’s going to end up when you start. That’s part of what’s fun and exciting, but also what keeps you humble, and you need to stay light on your feet for that.
And by the way I’ve never been able to do this with 100 percent success, particularly when working in a genre where I’ve already done something good, or that people have liked. You could say that Expansion, while everything on it is interesting, and maybe features our most complex ensemble feat of performance (Sand), is overall not on the exalted level of Explosion, either compositionally, in terms of the playing, or in terms of aesthetic unity. The same might be said of my 2nd piano trio relative to my first, probably my 2nd quintet relative to my first, and even my 2nd piano concerto relative to my first. There’s this weird second-sibling thing that happens, where the lack of freshness creates maybe a higher degree of mastery but a bit less of the magic of discovery. The intellect tends to take over from intuition somehow.
But—to veer gradually back to an answer to your question—there’s another issue at work here by the way. When your ambition is to transcend to this degree what’s traditional in your field, in this case jazz improvisation, you spend so much of your time focused on that mission that you actually let your traditional playing fall by the wayside. So I’m actually not as good at playing standards even as I was when a teenager, and certainly I was never as good at that as someone like Chris Potter, or Kevin Hays or any of those guys who I grew up with for that matter, guys whose entire thrust has been that. When you’re sweating over a solo Milton Babbitt clarinet piece you’re not working on your jazz playing, and indeed I have tapes from 1990 playing with Kevin, Bill Stewart, and Colley, we’re playing tunes, and I’m not really keeping up.
So the upshot of this is that not only is my entire raison d’être absent when I play music that hasn’t had sufficient time to develop, but I sound like an average jazz musician at best when playing common jazz repertoire. This makes it doubly difficult for me to deal with students for whom the benchmark of excellence is someone like Chris Potter, who went into that kind of normative music making and took it very far indeed (though he was already quite far along when I met him at age 14, playing alto).
And even when working with other people who have had such exotic paths as mine, it turns out that each exotic path is quite idiosyncratic, they don’t merge as easily as one might think. I remember collaborating with a great clarinetist named Anthony Burr, amazing, genius new music player who had spent many years in his native Brisbane (I believe it was) working with an insane guy named John Rogers, who played violin but who went deep into the exploration of polyrhythms. So Anthony had done some intense work in vaguely the same field, but—in this case because of his lack of jazz background— I found it difficult to collaborate with him, we had to work really hard to make something happen, and it was never really great.
For all these reasons, I’ve found collaborations without preparation to be consistently unsatisfying. This is not to say that I’m not interested in what other musicians are doing, I am. I’d of course be delighted to meet, talk with, and listen to the work of any musicians, so perhaps we can do something like that when I’m out there.