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Joe Morris in conversation with Ken Vandermark
January 11, 2006

Transcribed by Jason Guthartz

PART 1:

KV: I was curious about your background here in Connecticut. You've talked to me a lot about being in an environment where there was a lot of interesting music happening and a lot of artistic resources, and I wonder how much that impacted your decision to be a musician and your ideas about being a musician, before heading to Boston and doing the work you did there.

JM: Well, in the early '70s, New Haven had a scene that had George Lewis, Anthony Davis, Gerry Hemingway, Mark Helias and Leo Smith. I was learning to play jazz at the time, and some fusion. I had been playing blues and was in a few rock bands. I went to an alternative high school in downtown New Haven (actually right around the corner from where we're playing) and I could do independent study on anything. So besides having an interest in jazz, I could go to the recitals at Yale School of Music. I remember one day when I was 16 or 17 hearing Rashied Ali play with some people at Sprague Hall at Yale, then going to a solo organ recital of Messiaen, then going to hear some Mozart, then going to hear the symphony, and then maybe going out and playing with a rock band. So I had kind of a conservatory listening education anyway when I was in alternative high school. I was teaching myself and I took some guitar lessons – less than ten, probably – but I was really listening a lot, going to the library. New Haven has a lot of interest in the arts, so I could go to the library and listen to all the classical stuff – Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and also Schoenberg and Hindemith (Hindemith had lived in New Haven). This is around the time of the Ives centennial, so there was a huge number of performances and they performed all of Ives's work in New Haven. Yale began the Duke Ellington Fellowship around that same period, and they performed all of Duke Ellington's works here. I used to go hear Chuck Wayne and Joe Puma play jazz guitar. There was a load of jazz guitarists around New Haven who played in a very simple way, in a traditional jazz way, with a very clear tone – they'd play bebop and stuff like that. At the same time, my friends and I were interested in Miles Davis, and I could hitchhike to New York and go hear Miles Davis, go to the Village Vanguard to hear Sonny Rollins, and still come home that night. I used to do that a lot. Yale brought in the Mahavishnu Orchestra... everything. Then I met Michael Gregory Jackson through a friend. Before I encountered all these avant-garde guys like Leo [Smith], Michael had played with all of them and told us about them. Somebody had an Art Ensemble record and we went from investigating the classic jazz catalog to investigating the AACM, the Black Artists Group, Derek Bailey, Albert Ayler... all that kind of stuff. I'm jumping ahead a little bit because while I was into Miles' music, my sister came home and brought me a copy of [John Coltrane's] Om.

KV: When you're talking about the Miles stuff, you're talking about the electric stuff?

JM: The electric stuff. From "In a Silent Way" on. I didn't really understand a lot of the other jazz stuff like Monk. My understanding was based on the guitar. I was into playing rock guitar. Then I got into Hendrix and I started improvising with people and learned to play the blues so I could understand Hendrix. And then I got into sound and things like that. Then we heard McLaughlin and I got into fusion. Then we heard about Coltrane, so I got into Coltrane. So I investigated that. Then I got a hold of a copy of that record I was telling you about, New Thing at Newport. A bunch of these things all happened within the span of a year, a year-and-a-half. It was just a barrage of this stuff, which is the kind of thing that happens when you're a kid and you have the freedom to investigate what you want and have a lot of resources to do it. I never had any doubt that I was going to see music as this big thing. I've been considered as somebody who wasn't interested in, say, European improvisers or straight-ahead jazz or classical music. But that's not true – I've always been, and I've known about that stuff since the early '70s. I had respect for the European scene. I had a copy of a Derek Bailey/Dave Holland record on ECM, which I think is still one of the greatest records either of those guys ever made. I looked at this whole thing in the kind of perspective that you could have in that era, which was to look at everything. One of the big things that inspired me was Gerry Hemingway's radio show.

KV: Oh wow.

JM: There was really good radio around here and Gerry had a radio show that was a combination of improvised music, jazz, really amazing new music, classical music, and world music.

KV: All these guys you mentioned – Leo Smith, Hemingway – were they studying at Yale, or...

JM: Anthony Davis and George Lewis... I only heard George Lewis one time, playing after the Miles Davis band played at Woolsey Hall. They played "Giant Steps." My friends and I were the only ones who stuck around. Everyone else left. It was a band called Advent. So Anthony Davis was there. I think Gerry was up at Berklee and he came back to New Haven because there was a scene there. I believe he did some studies at Wesleyan [University]. Wesleyan at that point had one of the best ethnomusicological departments in the world. They had African musicians, Indian musicians. They still do. They also had Ed Blackwell on faculty at the time. That was another place, 20 miles away. So it was a very interesting place to be. With all that, my friends and I would get together and play through the Real Book and things like that. Then we started doing other things, trying to write, listening to Braxton records. There was a place that Loren Mazzacane Connors ran called The Theater in the Space He would present concerts there like Julius Hemphill solo (I had moved before that happened), Oliver Lake... things were going on. So it wasn't really any different than the music scene is now, except that there was an expectation that you could be very inclusive in your view. Gradually, as I've stayed in this over the years, I've been bombarded with the expectation that I should reduce my view one way or another, and I've always had to fight that.

KV: So this is mid or late-'70s?

JM: I turned 20 and moved to Boston in 1975, so this would be from the summer of 1972 to the summer of 1975.

KV: Okay. And then you went to Boston.

JM: Then I went to Boston.

KV: And you met Lowell Davidson right around that time, or...

JM: No, I didn't meet Lowell until 1981.

KV: Oh, okay.

JM: The first thing I did in Boston was to connect through ads in the paper with some people who wanted to improvise. I had some friends who were in school up in Boston and they gradually left. I went from this environment with tons of activity and very easy access, to this really closed environment that didn't seem to have any interest in the stuff that I was just interested in.

KV: What motivated you to go to Boston?
JM: I had a girlfriend.

KV: [laughs] Ah!

JM: I was 20 years old and I had a girlfriend who wanted to live in Boston. And I wanted to get out of New Haven. It was hard to live in New Haven as a student-type but without being in college, because I wasn't in college. I got mugged on the street the year before I moved, and there was a lot of crime and I was really afraid to live there, so I was glad to get out. I was afraid to move to New York because I knew I didn't have my stuff together to go there, even though I wanted to. So I thought I'd go to Boston. I had friends in school and I was under the delusion that there was a good musical environment up there – there might have been, but when I got there it was more fusion, post-Coltrane, electric stuff, modal free jazz, things like that. There was a place called the Center for Great Black Music, run by Syd Smart and Stan Strickland, who had played with Sam Rivers. They had their own performances, but it was very hard to be involved with them. It was not the most open place, but that could have been just because they had their own business going on. So I set up things on my own. There was a bookstore and gallery called the Stone Soup Gallery, and I played there. Oliver Lake also played there and I met people like Jon Voigt. I met a lot of people from NEC at the time... that might have been a little bit later, that was more like around 1980. I played with this drummer named Tim Roberts who was tremendous. There were a few people who tried to do some things, and every now and then we'd play at the Stone Soup or do this and that. I sort of knocked around, trying to find things to do. I'd play with some people and play solo gigs, until about 1980. Then I went to Europe.

KV: During that whole period you were in Boston, even in New Haven, and you were working on the music, how were you supporting yourself?

JM: I drove a cab. In New Haven I worked in a restaurant. I was a housepainter. I used to baby-sit for my neighbor's kid to help pay my rent. I did construction. I moved furniture – that was a little bit later. I always tried to find things where I could work and not think about anything other than music. So I always liked doing really normal, working-stiff-type jobs, because it didn't occupy my brain. I had a lot of energy, so I could work long stretches and make enough money so that I didn't have to work for a long time.

KV: So you were basically working outside of commercial types of music...

JM: I didn't have any gigs that paid any money. I just played my own music. I wrote a whole bunch of tunes between 1976 and 1980 that are on a lot of my records. They sort of work as models, origins of things that I replicated in my own writing, and I recognize that they were probably the best ones. So I still play them.

KV: Were there influences toward the approach you had to writing those compositions?

JM: Yup. I tried really hard, first of all, to put the guitar in a particular environment. I really wanted it to be in what I'd call, for lack of a better term, a post-AACM sort of thing. Something that had a very open view with regard to the music of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Monk, Coltrane, Ellington. So I could write ballads that were very evocative, and very abstract, pulse-track-type pieces, modular things that had different sets of melodies that got played together, things that really affected the way the rhythm section played, things that were purely melodic, things that were about sound. I tried to investigate all those things like all the people I admired did – Threadgill, Leroy Jenkins, Braxton, Julius Hemphill, Jimmy Lyons, Cecil, Coltrane. I just tried to put the guitar in the environment so that I could try to play that kind of music.

KV: Was it mostly trio music?

JM: I did a bunch of different things. Duos with drummers, duos with trumpeters, a lot of strange configurations. More like what you'd see now, or what you might attribute to European improvised music.

KV: Was that out of the necessity of finding people to play with, or were you looking for certain unusual combinations to get out of the convention format for "jazz guitar"?

JM: No, I was just trying to find a way to make what I was trying to do useful in as many different environments as possible. So if I met somebody who I thought was interesting to play with, I would play with them and do a little concert. Absolutely no different than what I might do now. There wasn't a lot of thought that went into it... Well, that's not true – I was very calculating about what I was doing, but I didn't worry that one of those things would define me.

KV: "What you were doing" – do you mean the kind of approach you'd take to a certain performance, or a certain grouping of instruments, or...

JM: Well, I'd already broken up what I did into a few different approaches: I had solo music that was inspired by everything from West African music to John Fahey to Blind Lemon Jefferson to Cecil Taylor. I had compositional tunes that I wrote, things that worked as melodic structures for a group, for people to improvise on. I had situational things – what we might call rapid score things – where people behave in certain ways in different configurations. This is all in the '70s, before 1980. I had a trio with Samm Bennett and a bass player named Dana Moser. Also with Tim Roberts and Tim Wells a great bassist who's gone on to work with Charlie Mariano and Jon Lloyd. And I gradually found some people who were open to the same things. Tim Roberts was a great drummer. I asked him who were his favorite drummers and he said Sunny Murray and Steve McCall – that was in maybe '76 – so I was like, OK, we can play. We'd rehearse a couple of times a week and get a few gigs. But first I did a solo gig in '76 at Stone Soup. Later in '76 I did a trio with Tom Plsek, who I still play with, and Tim Roberts at Emmanuel Church. That was a really spectacular series (that was) run by Mark Harvey that no one ever talks about, that brought in people from out of town and presented people who were in town. Tom Varner was there, he did some interesting things. This guy Jim Hartog [sp] was there. Marty Ehrlich was there for a minute. There was a lot of stuff going on. It wasn't really organized. It was kind of hierarchical in a bad way.

KV: These are all musicians living and performing in Boston.

JM: In Boston.

KV: Not part of the series at Emanuel Church.

JM: No, sometimes they would be. They did all-night concerts where they had the Fringe, Ed Blackwell... 12-hour concerts once a year. That's all in the period between '75 and '80. There was a lot going on. I was trying to be involved in it, but I was always on the fringes for various reasons, mostly my own. I wasn't good enough, I'm sure. I had the desire, but not always the ability to play with some of these people. But I played fine. We did concerts at the Modern Theater. I remember sharing a bill with Tom Varner's group there, probably in '79, in downtown Boston. So in that period I did as much as I could do, and worked on my own playing a lot. I'd drive a cab at night and I'd practice probably eight hours a day. Learning tunes, listening to music, writing, practicing. Working on dissecting Eric Dolphy's music, Albert Ayler's music, the bass playing of Sirone versus Fred Hopkins versus Henry Grimes. I took every instrument and went down the trail. I was really interested in string players like Leroy Jenkins, Billy Bang, Abdul Wadud, and the bass players at the time. It was just an incredibly creative period in the music. There was always something new coming out that was inspiring.

KV: Were you going to New York at that time to check out music at all?

JM: Every time I could. I remember being one of three people at a Jerome Cooper concert in 1978 or '79.

KV: Wow. Did you go to the loft stuff that Sam Rivers was organizing?

JM: I never went to Studio Rivbea. I went to Enrivon, the Brook, a couple of clubs down there. I saw Air a few times in Boston, they came up there. Braxton was in Boston I think in '76, a night when Kenny Wheeler was playing with him at Palls Mall, I believe. I did everything I could. I would go to New York and stay in scary hotels to go out and hear music. In that period I always kept a focus on what was happening everywhere. I had Derek Bailey records, I was interested in Hans Reichel, Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn... everything.

KV: An open examination of all the stuff that was going on at the time.

JM: Yeah. You know, it was an interesting time. There were people who were very successful, it seemed, and then there were people who were struggling to get something going. What was interesting about it was that there was a real emphasis on how people played and how well they were able to play what they wanted to play. It was easy to determine that somebody was playing their ideas very well. And there was a big difference. There was a lot of bickering about which was the dominant approach, or which should succeed versus which shouldn't.

KV: In terms of the general conception of the ideas?

JM: Yeah. Should people like John Zorn's music if it's not connected to Coltrane? Should people like Braxton if it doesn't swing the same way as Coltrane? Should anybody like Eugene Chadbourne if he's deconstructing Monk tunes? Should anybody like what I'm doing? I wasn't a big part of this discussion, but from my point of view, why would anybody want to listen to a guitar player who was mainly influenced by Jimmy Lyons, Eric Dolphy and Leroy Jenkins? It was that kind of thing. But the point is you proved what your approach was, what your expression was, by how you played and you drew your influences from whatever you felt like drawing from. But it manifested itself in how you played, how you constructed the environment to play in as well.
KV: We were at the point right before you went to Europe in '80.

JM: Right, 1980. A lot of stuff changed then, I guess my attitude changed a lot around 1980. I had been pressured a lot not to play the way I did, which was only personal, and I overcame a lot of that stuff and pushed through. I'd been doing a lot of solo stuff. So I went to Europe, bought a ticket.

KV: Musicians you were working with in Boston were suggesting you should play differently?

JM: Yes. A lot of that. Not like, "Oh, isn't that wonderful that you're doing what you're
doing." More like, "Why are you doing that?" [laughs]

KV: "Why are you doing what you're doing?" Yeah.

JM: A lot of that. So in '80 I went to Europe. I landed in Brussels, because that was the
cheapest place to fly. I had no gig. I just wanted to go and see what it was like. I took my acoustic guitar and my mandolin (I'd been playing mandolin for a while already). I landed in Brussels – this is absolutely true – and saw a guy on the street putting up a flyer for James Blood Ulmer as I walked from the train station to the hotel. I asked him where the concert was and he told me [where it was]. I had my guitar, so he asked, "Do you play?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Oh, would you like to open for Blood on Sunday night?"

KV: [laughs] Wow, that's amazing.

JM: I said, "Sure." That was maybe Monday or Tuesday. So I hung around and went over and played solo on the bill with James Blood Ulmer that night. [KV laughs] Then I went to Amsterdam after that and gave the tape of that gig to Huub Van Reil at the Bimhuis, who hired me to play on the bill with Abdullah Ibrahim. So within two weeks I had two significant gigs that changed my attitude, really. Then I did a few other things – played with Earl Cross, Samm Bennett. I bummed around for a while and went back home with a totally different attitude. It was right before I went to Europe that I met Lowell Davidson, who was playing the upright piano at the Stone Soup Gallery. Jack Powers, who ran the gallery, said, "Hey, you should come over. This guy Lowell Davidson is playing." I said, "Who's he?" He said, "Oh, he played piano with Ornette Coleman." I said, "What?!" He said, "You don't know Lowell? He's a piano player who used to work with Ornette." I said, "I never knew there was such a person." He said, "Oh yeah. He lives in Boston." So I went to hear him. Lowell played this solo music on little cards – little scores – on the upright piano. He talked very quietly, in a very recondite fashion, about what he was doing at the piano and how he had changed his approach due to the overtones and how they sounded coming out of this old upright as opposed to a concert grand. It was just incredibly interesting. I talked to him and didn't understand a word he said. I asked him if we could get together and play, and he said, "Oh sure, sure" – he always said, "Oh sure, sure." So I called him up and he invited me to go over there... Actually, no, before that I didn't see him for a while and then I ran into him at Harvard Square a couple of months later and he didn't remember me. I asked him again if I could play with him – that was after I got back from Europe – and I told him I'd just been in Europe – as if, I guess I thought that would matter [laughs]...

KV: How long were you over in Europe, about three months?

JM: About three months, yeah. One of the things I saw while I was in Europe was that there was a very active scene in these little cities – these cities that weren't New York [laughs]. I thought if Amsterdam could have this scene that's functioning so well and they could be so proud of it, then why couldn't I have that kind of thing in Boston? I thought, well, I'm going back to Boston – I'm just gonna play in Boston. So I went there with this energy and then I ran into Lowell again, and I thought, here's exactly what they always said wasn't in Boston: a master improviser. Not somebody who's teaching at the conservatory or anything like that, but someone that had played piano with Ornette Coleman. He had a certain weight in his presence. He was brilliant, although he was very cryptic. It was very hard to understand what he said because he was kind of delusional and some of his speech sounded like gibberish. But it was fascinating. It made sense... You knew it was intelligent, but it was hard to understand. It was very high rhetoric. That's probably the best way to put it.

KV: When was he playing with Ornette?

JM: He played with Ornette in the early '60s.

KV: Wow.

JM: John Voigt really knows his history better than anybody and probably had the closest
relationship playing with him of anybody that's still around. He knew him when he was a student at Harvard. Lowell was the son of two pastors of a church in Dudley Station in Boston who were very prominent figures in the African-American community in Boston. They were pastors with the Zion Fire Holiness Baptist Church. Lowell was like a genius and a pianist. He went to Boston Latin High School, got a scholarship to Harvard where he studied biochemistry. John knew him during that period and says he wrote tunes that were like Herbie Nichols tunes. He started going to New York and I guess he worked with Ornette during Ornette's "retirement." He played with Ornette a lot – I don't know where he worked with him, but he worked with him a lot. Ornette was the person who recommended to Bernard Stollman that he make that ESP Disk record in 1965.

KV: Oh, okay.

JM. Yeah. Lowell had a very interesting life. He took a lot of hallucinogens; I guess a lot of amphetamines. He had very erratic behavior and his reputation for displaying it was kind of... I don't believe a lot of it, but I believe a lot of it. So when we finally got together he asked me to go over to his house. He lived in a house that he told me had been built by P.T. Barnum, like a mansion, a row house in the South End. But it was dilapidated. It had been the family church. There was one floor that had been the chapel, and he lived on the third floor with his companion and their daughter, in this small apartment. He had a piano, a lot of music, a lot of his scores, and not much else. There was a certain kind of elegant decrepitude that was really very beautiful. Like you knew you were in the home of some really brilliant person. A lot of the musicians – like Laurence Cook, D. Sharp, Voigt, Mark Harvey, Dan O'Brien – a lot of people in Boston would go over there and hang out. Maige McCray, a friend of Lowell's, would be there. We'd go there and hang out and drink – there was always some kind of beer or something to drink – and sit there and listen to tapes that Lowell had made, talk about music... it was amazing. Anyway, I went over there one time and he didn't show up. So then I finally got together and I played with him. He told me that I played too many notes to play with the piano, so he should play bass with me. So he started playing his aluminum bass and we started doing duos. Sometimes he'd play the old pump organ upstairs and I'd play guitar. We played with Laurence Cook [on drums] and him on bass – I recorded that, we did a couple of gigs. Every now and then he'd play piano, but mostly the aluminum bass. I worked with him quite a bit. I organized some concerts... one with Billy Bang... someone else, maybe Raphe Malik at a church in Cambridge and Lowell played on that. We did a few concerts around town and recorded. I tried to get some attention for him...

KV: The only music available [of Lowell's] is the ESP Disk [on which he plays piano]. How would you describe his bass playing? Was it related to the piano playing at all?

JM: Yeah, in a way. He didn't have a lot of technique, but had a really masterful way of using it. It was pretty simple – a lot of tremolos, very low. He was using an aluminum acoustic bass so he'd get overtones out of the thing that were... He was always trying to push through this sound wall. He would talk about manipulating the upper partials, so that things became like feedback. He would play things that were like acoustic feedback. I actually have recordings of it, quite a bit. A lot of it was simple arco tremolos and pizzicato tremolos. Not a lot of quarter notes. No time, necessarily...

KV: More of a textural approach...

JM: Textural and counterpoint and melody. It was really difficult to figure out what to play with him. Sometimes he'd argue with me – I didn't really argue back – but he'd tell me that I should find a solution to the eighth notes. At the time – it's kind of a big thing for me – I took that to mean that I should play harmonics a la Derek Bailey. And out of respect for Derek Bailey, I didn't want to do that. I figured I should come up with a solution to that that was different than the one Derek Bailey came up with – like I said, out of respect for him. So I had to go back and investigate what the guitar was to me, as opposed to what it was for Derek Bailey or anyone else. I went through the guitar as a blues instrument, the guitar as an African lute, and then African string instruments. Then I started hearing spike fiddles, koras, halams and things like that, and I applied a lot of that to the guitar. So I started bowing the guitar with a pick. I could serrate it a little bit by scratching it and I could actually get a fundamental and a harmonic by bowing. I'd bow chords and I'd bow single notes, and I could get two or three simulated voices going on at once. That's really the basis of the material I played with Lowell. Not a lot of single notes. Mostly arco guitar, harmonics that overlapped one another, rhythmic scrapings, things like that. It was different than what other people were doing. I don't know if it was better but it was a personal solution to dealing with extended techniques that brought sound out of the guitar. I didn't use effects. I didn't just play harmonics. I did some other things.

KV: You got some of the ideas for that approach from working your way historically backwards through the string instruments?

JM: Yeah. I realized that the origins of what I was interested in with the guitar weren't
European, they were African-American. They were rock guitar, blues guitar, Delta blues guitar, jazz guitar... going all the way back to African lutes. The way the guitar played rhythms. The way the guitar played clusters. I'd been dealing with a lot of different technical issues, one of which was: How do you play the guitar and use clusters of notes without only playing chords. Obviously the piano had done that since the '50s with Cecil and everybody like him or interested in that kind of idea. So instead of just playing chords on the guitar, I played clusters: stacks of minor seconds, stacks of major sevenths. A lot of dissonance: third, minor third, fourth, fifth, stacks of fifths, things like that. Just to think of it in terms different than working through a harmonic progression. I took all of these ideas that were traditional on the guitar and I tried to deal with them in a way that would not separate them from that tradition, but extend that tradition. Which was a relevant idea at the time – and it's still relevant to me. But it's been clouded by so much aesthetic rhetoric that it seems to be too conservative for some people's thoughts or just a completely alien idea that such a thing could happen.

KV: When you were using these clusters, were you thinking in terms of the way the sounds work as a cluster, and not in terms of progressions? Was it more about giving the guitar a broader, thicker sound?

JM: I'm really into melody. Melody and harmony. I think my playing is very traditional, even when I use extended techniques. I try to make melody with extended techniques. Rather than play chord progressions, I would say I play cluster progressions.

KV: So you're looking for the impact of traditional tonal harmony on the motion of a progression, moving the music forward in a piece – you're trying to do that with a different set of sound tools...

JM: Well, yeah. That's true. I think I was trying to do what Cecil Taylor did, which was to figure out a way to play groups of notes in a constantly open tonality. To suggest harmony and a constantly shifting tonal center, so that I didn't play off of a root except when I wanted to play off of a root. I didn't have to resolve anywhere. Obviously, all that kind of music went first to dominant a lot because that's where the real energy is, so a lot of times you end up doing that. I worked a lot to not always do that, to not resolve. Not to think like, "OK, I'm at the VII, I better go down to the I." I just stopped thinking like that. I tried to make that work – and I still play chords all the time – but a big part of my playing has been about getting the guitar to move at the same pace, the same density, the same level of energy that someone like Cecil Taylor did on the piano. And it's very hard to do [on guitar] because you don't have ten fingers or elbows, and you don't have all the notes in front of you. Things are stacked and you have to carve them out to get things moving with a linear progression, with a rhythmic pulse and trajectory, a drive. It's very hard to do that. You have to put a lot of time into thinking about how to do it. There are other people who have worked on it, too, and I could spend a day explaining why I think we all did different things. But that's what I tried to do, to make the guitar fit into the environment that I liked in music, which was the extension of the jazz tradition. I like Jim Hall, but I thought, "How do you extend Jim Hall?" Well, maybe you don't play tunes and you don't play chord progressions the way he might, but you don't want to just play single notes all the time. It's a funny thing. I like Joe Pass. I see all those traditional ways of playing as inventions. No one really knew how to play like Joe Pass until he did. Somebody who thinks they like Derek Bailey and therefore could not possibly like Joe Pass should know that Derek Bailey liked Joe Pass and talked to me about Joe Pass. He knew that Joe Pass invented the way he played, just like Derek Bailey invented the way he played. So I try to invent the way I play, to come up with solutions to deal with the improvisational issues as they come up.

KV: Would you say – I know you're working on all these things now, because the way you play is always developing – but did this kind of approach, this integration of all these levels of ideas, did that start happening more specifically around 1980 when you returned to Boston and were thinking about making Boston an active center for the music, or was it developing in those years from '75 to '80?

JM: It was developing from '75 to '80. I used all those things in my first performances. But I didn't really know how to talk about it. The extended technique things were always an issue because I was a pretty traditional guitar player – and I still am – but I was doing more open-tonality improvisation, not extended technique stuff. I felt I had to add something to the list, not just play like Eugene or Derek and say, "Hey, look, I'm just like Eugene or Derek." For that matter, I remember listening to John McLaughlin – who I think is a genius guitar player who has certainly extended the technique of the instrument – I remember listening to him when I was about 18 in the middle of the night, trying to copy his playing and thinking, "Wait, if I really admire this guy, why don't I try to come up with my own thing. That's what he did." That was when it really clicked. If I want to be a "jazz improviser" I should play a way that I invent, something I really believe in. I wanted to be an originator of something that sounded just like me. But I never thought that was better than being an interpreter of something that had been already established. I just thought it was different. So I've worked for a long time to delineate these ideas, to be respectful of how playing in a style like Coltrane doesn't make you a bad player, but it doesn't make you an originator. Playing in a way that might sound really free or really wild doesn't make you better than someone who's interpreting Coltrane's playing – unless it's good. [laughs] It might not be very good, it might just sound like somebody else who's copying something. All the stuff that's original is usually a very thoroughly-manifested set of ideas, and everything that's interpreted understands the codification of those thoroughly-manifested ideas. I don't think either of those things is less than the other – I just think they're different.

KV: And you made the decision to move towards more original playing...

JM: To try to...

KV: To try to, yeah. Can you explain why that was important to you?

JM: Because the experience is just more elemental to me. First of all, I identify with it. I'm drawn towards artistic things that express an elemental, contemplative state of mind. That's not to say that I'm a spiritual person – I don't think I am. I like things that are abstract in the way nature is abstract, that are a part of existence. And you can organize them the way nature organizes things. I'm not like a woodsy, type of person at all. It's just that the things I'm drawn to in the arts – like Jackson Pollock, certain architectural things, photography, all kinds of things I've been interested in all my life – I've always been interested in the things that show a natural form that I'm surprised to find out about. I like the experience of that realization. I always think it's like contemplating my existence: a state of understanding that I get that, I appreciate that. Again, it's not a big deep, spiritual thing. It's just what I think I like to do and what I'd like to convey to people. I get a lot of pleasure out of that experience of seeing something or hearing something or experiencing something, and learning something and having it make me aware of what's going on for a second. So I'm trying to make something that can be that type of resource for someone else. In simple terms, I think that's the gig (you and I have talked about that). From my point of view, I can't understand any other reason I would do this. It just seems ridiculous [laughs]. Playing is fun. The pleasure of playing is just the greatest thing – you're in the middle of playing and something happens where you think, "What in the world is this?" We're looking for that every night. In the mean time, we play what we know how to play, hoping that it's fresh to other people. But we're looking every day for that thing to pop up that we've never encountered before, in a way to understand it like we never did before. I think that's why this is a really high art – we get to focus on that kind of surrealist sensibility where we're describing what's in our minds, in our subconscious mind, for people around us. And it manifests itself in music. Especially for people like you and me, who, if we didn't do this music, we'd be trying to do that in film or painting or writing – we're both very conscious of that kind of stuff. So that's why I was drawn to it. I found artists in this music who expressed those things, and it was like, "Oh, okay." Because I'd already investigated film and thought about getting into that, and acting, painting – I'm still interested in painting, I still want to do that. But I read about
people like Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman and they seemed to be talking about just these things. I just thought, "This is the thing I could make personal.. And because it's such a huge area to explore, I didn't have to get it all done by the time I was 21.

KV: Right.

JM. I could live to be 80 and still be figuring this out. That's what drew me to it. I liked the fact that it had a struggle in it, for some sick reason. [laughs] What's wrong with us when we're young? I liked that fact that you had to prove yourself strictly on the terms of music. It wasn't about whether you made more money than somebody else, or if you were better looking, or smarter, or from a better family, or anything like that. In fact, that didn't mean anything. The people I was looking up to couldn't claim any of those things, except. A lot of them were definitely not the most successful or the most welcomed people in this society. They were just artistic people who were doing it for the sake of doing it, trying to get paid, trying to find new ways to play. So it seemed like a very legitimate, real art form that – and this is big – that I was stupid enough to think was incorruptible [laughs]. I really thought, "This is not ever gonna be corrupted, so I'll get in it." And I've since found that a lot of it is pretty corrupt, but I've tried to take on the burden of at least hoping that maybe it not be...

KV: By "corruptible" do you mean because the notoriety and "fame" that goes with this music in the consciousness of the general public is so small, the money involved is so small, so the power and politics involved are so small that there wouldn't be a motivation to do it for reasons other than just wanting to make good music?

JM: Yes. I think a part of the music scene that I'm in is really exclusive, power driven and all about playing correctly instead of being creative. I got into this believing that people would do it for the sake of it and hopefully make a living at it. That's very naïve. I think the people who agree with what you just said are the ones who play the best music. And there are plenty of them out there. I think those of us who would agree with what you just said would all share the burden of trying to keep it like that – honest and open and flowing forward so that there is more and more to understand. And then try to pass that on to the next batch of people who have the naiveté and nerve to actually attempt such a thing.

KV: Is that what motivated you to try to get things organized in Boston in the '80s?

JM: Yeah, to add to it. I thought a lot about, "How do I pay dues to get in here?" I thought, "Well, I could go and carry somebody's luggage and hustle gigs." Or I could do what you're supposed to do – things I'd learned from the AACM and the lessons of those people – which was to try to organize a scene where I lived. So when I got back from Europe, I was inspired to do that even more. I'd been doing it and thought, "This is pointless." But then I got back and hooked up with Lowell, and Lowell had a certain weight to what he was doing that I thought was important. It made me want to stay in Boston. So I started organizing things and I thought, "Let's see what we can do to put the musicians here on the map, operating the way people did in Chicago, St. Louis, Amsterdam, London." Frank London and I started this group called the Boston Improvisers Groups, which was this very loose, short-lived umbrella group. We wrote a manifesto, "BIG – Boston Improvisers Group," and we organized some concerts and had a festival. We invited people who were playing to come in under the umbrella, whether or not they had the same trajectory we had or the same interest we had. Frank and I actually had very different interests...

KV: Is he a musician?

JM: He's a trumpeter. He's big in the klezmer scene – he worked with Lester Bowie after he left Boston – a really great trumpeter. So we tried to do that. I think I was a lot more aggressive about the meaning of it. I was much more of a combatant, I really wanted to make it happen. But it got tedious pretty fast because there were a bunch of people who would call us up and go, "Can we have a gig?" And we'd say, "Well, it doesn't really work that way – can you organize the thing and then put a bunch of us on." There were a few people in it who weren't like that, like Allan Chase – he understood, he organized some concerts – and Steve Adams. There were some really great musicians there who totally understood it. Allan had been at Creative Music Studio and wanted to do the same thing. So around that time things started opening up quite a bit. There was quite a bit of activity. We, the Boston Improvisers Group, started getting pressured to go legit so we could raise money to do things. I found in Boston that whenever that happened, people came in who were like corporate raiders, who were really there to shut us down. So that happened pretty fast. There certainly wasn't much interest in what we were doing among audiences. The press didn't pay any attention to us. We did it for maybe two years. I did it longer than other people. Different people came in: Glynis Loman, Greta Buck, Mimi Rapson, Alan Bern... I can't remember all the people. (I have documentation on all that stuff that I'd have to figure out a way to publish it some place.) Many of them have gone on to be recording artists and touring musicians and have pretty strong reputations. I was just the guy who wrote up the press releases. I guess I needed to have that kind of thing more than other people, but I also wanted to have it a lot for myself just to do something. And it did give us ways to play. It was a solution for a while – we found some places, it was working out. The next thing that happened was that I made a connection with Sebastian Steinberg – through Mark Harvey – who was a really good bass player and that helped me to get my trio music together. I'd wanted to have a trio for a long time, to use the rhythm section in the ways that I had composed my music to accomplish. So I started working with him and made a recording with him and Laurence Cook in 1983 called Wraparound, which I still think is one of the best records I've ever made...

KV: That's a great album.

JM: Thanks. And I think if I had been able to get it out, maybe I could have given up playing the guitar a long time ago [laughs]. Because I think it answers the questions that some people might have had about the guitar that I spent a lot of time trying to answer, in different ways. That got me some press around the country and a little in Europe: The first review of it was in Jazz Magazine. It was also in a review with Cecil and Bill Dixon, which was pretty great. I started playing in New York with that. I got enough press nationally that people were interested in it, and I met a lot of musicians from that. This was like '83 or '84, around the time the Sound Unity Festival started in New York with William Parker. With my friend Chris Rich, who had organized some concerts in Boston, we started bringing people up from New York. We brought William Parker up to play with Raphe Malik, and I played a duo with Peter Kowald. I was supposed to play one with Steve McCall the same week, but that didn't happen, we had the money but it didn't work out. And we brought Billy Bang up, eventually...

KV: Where were all these concerts taking place?

JM: Church halls, Tufts University, Brandeis University. We brought up John Zorn and Fred Frith for one concert – I brought up John Zorn, somebody else brought up Fred Frith. And Samm Bennett. I had a group called Magnetic String Trio ] – that was at Tufts. Chris brought in Peter Brotzmann, Peter Kowald, Andrew Cyrille – that would have been around the winter of '84, '85, at the Somerville Theater...

KV: Yeah, I saw them in Montreal on that same tour.

JM: You did? Yeah, they played in the Somerville Theater on a Saturday afternoon at twelve o'clock for about thirty people or something like that. A 600-seat theater...

KV: [laughs] Yeah.

JM: I was driving Peter over to the venue and I had a flyer in the back of the car for a gig I was doing with Lowell Davidson. He picked it up and said, "He lives here?" [both laugh] And I said, "Yeah, you know about him?" He goes, "Of course I know about him. He lives here?" And I said, "Yes." [laughs]

KV: How would you describe the scene in the early '80s in Boston? Were the audiences fairly small?

JM: Yeah, they were small. The thing with Peter Kowald was very small – there might have been five people who came to that. It was weird to be one of the five people in town who knew who one of the five people from Wuppertal is. [both laugh] You know? You'd think, "Well, this is great – I know who this guy is, so a lot of people will come." Ah, no. But the music was great. It was really good, really fun to play with him. Some gigs we'd get maybe 50 people. We may have had more at the gig with Billy Bang at the hall in Cambridge. But it was small. And there wasn't a lot of support for it.

KV: It was all a grassroots infrastructure of the musicians who were presenting the music along with the fans who'd hear about it?

JM: Yeah. I got some grant money to do a couple things. The rest was out of my pocket, or out of Chris Rich's pocket. Or Chris Rich would guarantee it and then it would be out of my pocket – that happened a few times [laughs].

KV: How did you try to get the word out?

JM: Flyers, mailing lists, press releases to the papers. Chris and I had radio shows on WMFO at Tufts once a week and they would help us a lot.

KV: How long did you do a radio show?

JM: Over a year. Steve Adams also did one, Michael Rosenstein did one, all because of Chris Rich. That was the beginning of it working. It took a few years to get it going. At that point people who were good musicians and wanted to play that kind of music didn't just think they had to go to New York to play – and the scene in New York was changing anyway – so they stuck around. And if they did stick around, they'd be playing. There wasn't any money in it or anything, but it seemed like you could at least put your work out there and have it be evaluated for what it was, in the same way that someone could from Los Angeles or the Bay Area – Chicago was kind of quiet then – or places in Europe or the scene in Birmingham and Alabama around LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams. So it was kind on the level of that. Pretty small. We'd get press in Op magazine, in Coda a little bit... there were five places to get press, but they were all pretty good. Now there's 500 and there's still five that are pretty good [laughs]. Not much different than what a lot of people go through now, people that age (25 or 30) who've gotten to the point where they're not going to give up and they're trying to make something happen. I don't think it's any different than it was back then. Except that it was much more difficult to make a recording on your own. I made my first record on my own label, Riti, and it cost more money than it cost to make a thousand CDs now. This was 22 years ago. It cost, I think, $1300 to press 650 LPs, or 500... it was really expensive. And there was one distribution company, New Music Distribution...

KV: Oh yeah....

JM: ...that would take everything, take 20 records and put 'em on a shelf and get a review. Cadence started up around then, so you could send them 30. I still have copies of those records.

KV: So what happened with your own music in that period? I was in school, so I started seeing you in the summertime...

JM: When did I meet you, when you were 17?

KV: Yeah, I was pretty young, probably right around the time I started college. So I'd seen the group with you and Sebastian...

JM: That was the second version of that band. The first one was with Laurence Cook...

KV: I never saw that group.

JM: Yeah, it was different. It had a different rhythmic drive – a little bit more bravado, a little bit more open rhythmically than the one with Jerome, which could be sort of either way. The one with Laurence, we'd get a few gigs. We used to play at Boston Film & Video Foundation – they had a nice theater over there. We did a gig on a bill with Dewey Redman at 1369. Right around that time the 1369 Club was bought by different people – Bob Pollack and Jay Hoffman– and they had an interest in new music and they let me advise them about some things. Before that I was the musical advisor at Charlie's Tap. That happened because the owner and I had a mutual friend who suggested that I go over there and talk to him. So I was sort of the curator there. He asked me, "How do we open this place and get people to pay attention?" So I said, "Get David Murray." So they did – with [Ed] Blackwell, Fred Hopkins and John Hicks. That established that place. So over the course of the first few months – as long as I could stand dealing with the owners, who never paid me any money and were unbelievably impossible – we had... I don't remember exactly who I brought in.. I remember Andrew Cyrille played there...I had Jenkins there... a lot of people. It was pretty thorough...

KV: You had Jimmy Lyons there...

JM: We had Jimmy at the "Jazz Now" festival at Tufts University. Jimmy, Leo Smith, Butch Morris, Jameel Moondoc. Jimmy's set from that festival is part of the box set released on Ayler. Chris Rich and Lewis Porter made that festival happen. I was involved with them in choosing the musicians. I turned the thing at Charlie's Tap over to Ed Hazell, He did a bunch of other things there.

KV: It was a great series.

JM: Yeah, it was a great series. But... no, wait... no, I did the Dewey Redman thing at the 1369 first, and then I played with Dewey Redman at Charlie's Tap – which got the guys at 1369 mad. We played in front of Dewey Redman and Dewey Redman came up to me and said he would like to have me play with him, which was a huge thrill. He was really complementary and really, really sweet. I did some gigs with him and that opened some things up. I remember one week in Boston in '85 I played with him and Fred and John Betsch, and then the next night I played with Lowell, Malcolm Goldstein and Butch Morris. To me, that summarizes everything I've ever tried to do. One was totally about groove and melody and time and swing and.. free jazz. The other one was nearly impossible to describe – free improvisation with four completely unique people. I'm still into that. That would happen then and it's still happening in my music in different ways.

KV: There was the trio where you were playing electric guitar but it was acoustic bass and drums, and then there was the same lineup, Sweatshop, with the same people – Sebastian and Jerome – but an electric group. What was the interest in doing that?

JM: Well, part of it was just a reaction. I'd been playing what I would call "big loud electric guitar" since I was a kid. I was pretty good at it. I went from playing pretty good "big loud electric guitar" to a jazz-rock period to playing pretty quiet, nearly acoustic-sounding electric guitar in the earlier part of my free jazz days. I made one of these records with the acoustic bass, which was all about how the melody worked and the jazz feel, the different grooves, playing over those and articulating over those. Somebody wrote a review that said that my group with acoustic bass and drums was a "weak power trio." And I thought, "OK, alright then... I'll show you." [KV laughs] Seriously. I wanted to do that anyway, so, "I'll show you." So we organized an electric band. I have huge respect for the "big loud electric guitar" lineage – that includes Hendrix, Blood Ulmer, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, Albert Collins and a huge number of guys. I have a huge interest and respect for that. There was McLaughlin and then there was Blood Ulmer, who I still don't think gets the respect he deserves for being such a kingpin in that "big loud electric guitar" (lineage). OK, what do you do now? So just like Blood Ulmer dealt with McLaughlin and Hendrix, I had to deal with Blood Ulmer. I was always aware that Blood Ulmer's view of things from Hendrix was the songs. My view of things from Hendrix was Band of Gypsies. I was the rare bird of my generation that liked Band of Gypsies the most, because it was Hendrix playing. I was always into that record, and I could improvise like that. So Sweatshop was kind of an open-tonality, harmolodic Band of Gypsies.

KV: That album is monstrous.

JM: Thanks. Sebastian and Jerome are unbelievable. They're incredible. I couldn't have had better people to do that. It was like water off a duck, to play that stuff with them. They knew that stuff better than me in their sleep. We played some great gigs and really blew the roof of the place...

KV: That group Sweatshop and then the other trio... Those two groups and the fact that they were so distinctive and the intensity and integrity those groups had, were one of the major impacts on me musically at the time...

JM: Oh, that's great.

KV: All the components, and the fact that they were the same musicians who had such distinct things happening, were really impressive.

JM: It was partly generational. When you listened to Hendrix when you were 14 years old in 1969, it wasn't like, "Oh, this is cool, I like Hendrix." If you're a guitar player it was like, "How did he do that?" We thought of Hendrix as this great musician. We listened to rock music as a technical lineage, not just as a style, all through fusion, when it kind of bottomed out when it was devoured by its own excesses. And then there's Blood who comes out and has a solution to that and makes it legitimate again – that "big loud electric guitar" lineage. No pretense, no fusion allowed. It's raw, brilliant, masterful technique. Incredible, right? So, who wouldn't want to play like that? [laughs] It's like, "I'll do that too!" As a matter of fact, if I had any sense I would have stayed with that kind of thing. I liked doing the other thing. I liked the more ad-hoc configuration with the different forms of groups. I love playing with a great acoustic bass player and a great jazz-type drummer. I love doing that. I love to swing. But standing there in front of a really incredible rock rhythm section that can improvise – as you know 'cause you've done it too – is like riding the front of a locomotive. It's a riot, isn't it?

KV: Yeah, no question.

JM: That band could do that really, really well. The problem was that Jerome got sick and couldn't do it. Then Sebastian, on the basis of having been in that band, got asked to join some other band in New York and wasn't available to do it. He went and played with Mike Rego, who heard him play in Sweatshop. Sebastian got another opportunity and he was gone. So the way that worked, as perfectly and as expansive as that was, ended because I didn't have those people anymore. Then I had Curt Newton and Nate [McBride]. Then Jerome started coming back. I realized that I had to try a different kind of thing, so I did Racket Club, which did one gig and recorded what I think is maybe the best record I ever made... so far – hopefully the next one is the best one. [KV laughs] It's the one that surprises me when I listen to it. Sweatshop was, like, pentatonic melodies – that's five-note melodies, the black keys on the piano in different keys – in an open tonality with a blues sensibility. Kind of a harmolodic, pentatonic, free jazz, "big loud electric guitar" funk band – there's a lot of things there. But it was about the guitar playing over an open bass with the drums laying down a regular beat. Racket Club was about the drums laying down a tribal sort of beat, with the bass playing vamps with very oddly-configured melodic lines over it, kind of modular. I'm working on my "big loud electric guitar" trilogy: The first one was the blues sensibility, playing lines over the rhythm section, pretty pentatonic. The next one was about vamps – the Miles Davis thing, the Hendrix thing, the blues thing, George Clinton – lots of electric guitar stuff is over vamps. So the second band was about vamps. And the third one has to be about sound, 'cause that's the other part of it – it has to be the psychedelic part – and I haven't found a solution to that yet. I'm working on it. I think I might have it. I made two parts of that as a separate part of my guitar...

KV: Parallel...

JM: Yeah. Just like the improvised music thing is different from the free jazz thing. The solo thing is different from the...

KV: You see all those all as running parallel concurrently?

JM: Yeah, unfortunately. I can integrate them – and I'm always working on integrating – but I like keeping them separate too, 'cause that's how my brain works. I don't want to waste musical ideas; I want to keep them really succinct, really clear. So if I want to play stuff that's about grooving with a really good rhythm section like Luther [Gray] and Timo [Shanko] then I don't want that to become the sound thing – I don't want to accompany myself. It's just like: let's go and play melody and solo and flow over that. Same with the acoustic stuff. I don't really want to do that. I'd like to explore the clusters and overlapped notes and try to play layers of ideas, and suggest that there is more going on than there is. It's a different way of playing that gives me a set of approaches I can explore and I don't have to have any of them define any part of me.

KV: That's part of the goal of trying to do these interviews. Because interviews frequently get edited in such a way that the ideas you articulate get reconstructed in a way that fulfill the goals of the person writing the article or the goals of the magazine. In my experience, all the musicians I've worked with, in their own way, are very articulate about how they work and how they think about the music. We're out playing. It's practical experience.

JM: Whatever the conceptual component of it, it has to be clear in its application for it to have any relevance.

KV: Yeah, yeah.

JM: Especially at this point, because we've already been through a big conceptual period – at least you and I have – and have acknowledged that as being something valid. Then it got to the point where we are now, which is back to being about technique. If concepts eliminate the process of playing, then they're kind of empty. If the playing eliminates the process of operating on the concept, then it's empty. If your concept means that you have to limit how you play, then the level where you want to be – which is in the realm of Jimi Hendrix and Louis Armstrong and anybody else you could name who was good...

KV: Yeah, I think it's important. Technique is a loaded word, I think, because for a lot of
people, when you say "technique" it means the conventional understanding of what "technique" is. And I think the way you're talking about it...

JM: Right.

KV. It's important to be clear about that. To me, technique is developing skills to express your ideas. And people have huge ranges of different kinds of technique that are extremely functional that do not fit into conventional "skill."

JM: Right. Absolutely. It's not about how well you play based on convention, it's about what you play based on your intention. That's all there is to it. That's why Albert Ayler is a technical master...

KV: Yeah, yeah.

JM: ...and so is John Coltrane and so is Joe Lovano. Even though the expression those guys are after – the intent for their expression – is all different, they have control over what they do so that they're able to express the ideas that help them out with it.

KV: And I think that's part of the challenge of dealing with new kinds of music. Every person who listens to something is bringing their own set of experiences to what they're hearing or seeing. And when you encounter things that are new, the realm of your experience doesn't always help you understand the materials you're present with. The challenge becomes trying to understand the goals of the person creating the music as best as you can, and see if they're fulfilling those goals through the way they're expressing them. You can't apply standards for bebop to the standards of Albert Ayler and have it be functional. From my point of view, I think that that's one of the problems of where we are right now with the critical analysis of the music that's happening now. It seems that very frequently there's very little ability for the people making those assessments to make the jump to new sets of territory and understand those things.

JM: Well, they don't have any textual model or devices to understand it. I do. I have an outline of a book I want to write in which I define things in a bunch of different ways – in a hierarchical way, not in a linear way. I don't think, "this begat that, begat that." I think hierarchically. So I believe there is an original approach to being an improviser, there's an interpretive approach, and there's a synthesis approach. Most people operate to some degree in all of them. Some people operate in some degree in less than all of them. Then some people specialize. I think it's impossible to be an originator without understanding interpretation and synthesis, because so much of what is original is an interpretation of what has occurred, synthesized through some other material. It's just about impossible. At the same time, if you deny the fact that there's a possibility of being original, you might only be interpretive. You might deny the fact that there's a synthesis that allows what you're interpreting to exist. Maybe that's a little weak. But I think the more you break those things down into a way that's hierarchical, a way of analyzing every aspect of what goes on, then you can qualify all those technical components. And that's the key. So that how someone plays – and how valid it is based on precedent, experience, uniqueness – can be easily understood if you put it through a few different processes and take it for what it is. If you only compare it to what's original without understanding what could possibly go into what is original, you're lost. If you only think that interpretation proves that you have technique and don't understand where that technique came from, then you're lost. And if you can only fuse things together or synthesize things without the idea that original aspects go into the components that create the synthesis, they you're totally lost. I know it's really far out, but it makes sense, right?

KV: It totally makes sense.

JM: And without thinking of it like that, that's really how I teach. Without thinking of it like that and what goes into all those things. How do you understand how to play the tenor saxophone? Well, first you have to listen to all the old saxophone players. If you respect what they do and understand how they do it, and review the results and the influences and look at their work, you're going to keep coming up with what's not there. You're going to still find something in the drums that hasn't been done. If you know what everyone has done, you're going to find out what they haven't done, including where they haven't done it. And if you can apply what they haven't done to where they haven't done it, then there's an opportunity. You don't have to be a genius to do that. You don't have to be spoken to through angels. [KV laughs] You can actually have an analytical, practical, human, research-type approach to understanding that and find a spot.

KV: I personally believe – having had conversations with some of the musicians involved – that a lot of the breakthroughs of the English scene in the '60s and early '70s to discover ways of playing that were very different from the American principles came out of that approach.

JM: Yeah.

KV: Definitely. An easy example is Derek Bailey: What were the conventions of guitar playing? How do I change those? How do I rewrite them? For Evan Parker, what were the conventions of saxophone playing? Or percussion, with [Tony] Oxley and later Paul Lytton and those guys. Creative choices through analysis. In certain cases, their respect for the American musicians was the same as what you were saying before about respecting these guys and having to find your own thing to do out of respect for that.

JM: And you and I and Luther [Gray] would feel the same way towards those guys. When I was 17 years old I heard [??] there was no way I could counter. Now what do you do? I wasn't like, "OK, I'll do exactly what he did, because he's the guy." It's like, "How do I get passed that? I thought it was hard before!"

KV: Yeah, yeah.

JM: And now he opened up this big field that I have to somehow get across. The trick is how do you get across it. That's a process. That's practical. That's evolutionary, in a sense, because you can chart the whole thing, you can say, "he did this and this and that." I think somehow people have forgotten the idea that history can actually have something to do with us. They think that history has already occurred, that this kind of process – that got people to the point where they could understand that there was more to do – is over. And I don't.

KV: I agree completely with that statement.

JM: The three of us don't. We can see tons of things that we can at least imagine doing. Then it's the question of having the time to get there.

KV: Well, that's one of my big problems with the post-modernist approach to art and music, the idea that it's all been done, so now we can only study what's been done and our contribution becomes cutting and pasting of those ideas. To me, it's a frequently superficial methodology. That means that it's all been done, and I don't believe that for a minute. Because each period of time raises its own set of issues, problems, and opportunities. If you spend time examining the history and the solutions that people came up with in different periods, then you're more informed to make choices. It's not the only way to do it, but it certainly helps to have an understanding of where it came from and why, as best you can. To set up possibilities and look for new places to do things.

JM: If everything's been done, then the world wouldn't be a mess. [KV laughs] If everything's been done, there wouldn't be wars all over the place and poor people and AIDS and everything else. I mean, we're artists. We're supposed to help people evolve to find a way to figure out how to solve the problems they have. If everything has already been done, then the problems would be solved. To say that, well, that part of improvised music is dead, it's only dead for the people who can't look past it.

KV: That's really true.

JM: It's evolutionary. If that weren't the case, it would have stopped with Louis Armstrong in 1930, because there wasn't anybody better than him then. But other people said, "Yeah, well, he's really great, but he didn't do it like this." And they played to different people who were affected by it. Sometimes you can't just duplicate what's happening, you have to replicate it, or you have to go in parallel to it. You have to have some way of understanding it that gives you the opportunity to do something. That's how we do everything. If we didn't do that, like Lowell Davidson said, we wouldn't know how to do anything. Every time somebody has an idea and creates a means to quantify it or to codify it and name it, once we have a name for it, our brain evolves and we understand it. That's why we know what "breathing" is and what "heat" is and what "weather" is. Because we conceptualize it and then give it a name, and that helps us to understand all the factors that identify it. It's no different than this, except that we play this music where you get excited about having the opportunity to investigate that level of abstraction. That's what we do, that's the gig, that's what's fun about it.


KV: I think that's one of the problems we're faced with now. We're in a period where all the terminology and definitions that used to work for this music don't really make sense – or most of them certainly don't apply to the kind of stuff we're doing now. That's a huge problem. Because to have a conversation outside of the musicians I work with... Lots of times the information is exchanged in reference to performers or certain recordings or certain concerts we saw: "Yeah, I remember where so-and-so did such-and-such," or, "I'm looking for this kind of playing" – "Oh yeah"...

JM: Yeah, a historical reference.

KV: We have a sense of what that means in terms of our reference points. But I don't see a lot of ways that people talk about specifics of the way Steve McCall played drums and how it's radically different than Andrew Cyrille, or radically different than Han Bennink. They all get lumped together as "free jazz" drummers, which is completely insane. Part of what I think needs to happen is that an effort has to be made – by some very intelligent people who have the time to do it – to try to make some kind of historical-analytical sense of the developments that have happened for the past thirty-five years. So that there's a way for other people to talk about this.

JM: I teach this stuff. I have to think about this kind of stuff because I get paid to think about it.

KV: How long have you been teaching at the New England Conservatory?

JM: I'm in my sixth year. I deal with this kind of thing a lot. I have this conversation with people who are trying to understand this. Part of that original/interpretive/synthesis thing is that, underneath those things there's all kinds of other things. If you want to understand the drums, you have to follow the lineage of the drums, and part of the lineage of the drums is the explanation that these artists gave, you have to read what they say. You have to respect the fact that they have said something, including the rationale that "I don't know what I'm doing – I just go out there and play." That's a rationale whether you like it or not. It's a legitimate rationale, it's a valid rationale. It's a way to operate – though it may not give you a lot of opportunity to vary things. [laughs] For instance, Andrew Cyrille has talked about how his playing is what he calls "conversational rhythms." It's obvious that Steve McCall solved the issue of phrase length – rather than doing it with eighth notes or quarter notes, he did it with swells. Han Bennink... I don't even know. – he's like an enigma. All those other guys operate in an African-American tradition. Han Bennink is outside of that – he plays with a lot of energy and specificity, he likes a lot of change and he likes things to be rhythmically tight. If you do any research you can find out what he means. Some of it is interpretation and some of it is incredibly specific. You just have to research the work. [In the current situation] it's as if people who analyze the music were studying scientific developments but never read any of the papers that the scientists publish.

KV: Yeah.

JM: I use the axiom that you can only play what you know how to play, if you can learn something while you're playing. So all you have to do is ask somebody, "What do you know how to play? What did you learn today? How do you play?" Ask them that. It's about seeking the information, how you get it. Telling them information doesn't have any information in it. It's a kind of recursive idea, that you've already been told, "Don't let these guys tell you anything." First it was, "Don't be [??]." Then it was, "Don't let them describe the music." Then it was, "If you let these guys describe the music, they'll get some press, they'll get some gigs." [??] That worked for a while when there was some good writing – [Bob] Blumenthal, John Corbett, [Kevin] Whitehead, Jim Macnie – a bunch of people who actually seemed to be excited about that process. They're gone. The new generation seems to be more hell-bent on discrediting us, so that they can turn this into something to make it successful in a way that happened with promoters in the '80s and ‘90s: "You guys start organizing the way I tell you, you can get some money." Every time I ever dealt with some of those people, nothing happened. I felt depressed, I had no gig. I got pushed out. I consider them a kind of bacteria. [laughs] I really do. They fester. They operate on the wrong premise. They try to make us work like we're in show business, when in fact we're high artists. We're dealing with formulated abstraction rendered in a way that is, hopefully, palatable to anybody. At least over time. And it's proven itself to be true, because if you listen to Louis Armstrong – man, anybody can like that. Little kids can listen to that. You listen to Monk now – my grandmother would like that. Coltrane – who wouldn't like that? You can sit there drinking white wine, listening to Coltrane, and be mellow. Over time these things age. They're completely normal, they're part of nature. Given the course of time, it all makes sense. And I think some other stuff that's more critically-based style-mongering – that stuff rots in a heartbeat and just sits on a shelf. People listen to bad rock and roll from the '80s with a sense of nostalgia but it doesn't elevate you. It's nostalgia.

KV: Certain kinds of experience are sociological. People like to listen to oldies radio or whatever because they're capturing a social impact or it reminds them of a certain time of their life or a certain experience, and they attach the music to that experience. But the art experience, although maybe it has that aspect as well, is also much more than that – it changes the way you perceive the world or reality.

JM: It's supposed to expand your understanding of your time. Don't get me wrong – I'm one of the most nostalgic people I know. I see old signage and I go, "Wow! Look at that – it's an old store!" I'm a total geek for stuff like that.

KV: But that's not art. Looking at an old sign isn't the same as looking at a great painting. That doesn't mean that the nostalgic experience is negated or unimportant, but to me it means that the experience of that painting is much broader because it encompasses much, much more of the totality of what it means to be...

JM: I think it goes back to that word "elemental." Some things can only be generally defined in the realm of the elements. You're not going to get much more specific about it than that. What we do, we want to investigate. We don't want to find solutions to things, because if we do then we've run out of ideas. So we like to investigate things and see an option or a potential that might be useful later. Though there's always an elusive component involved. That's part of the gig. You don't want to nail it down so perfectly that there's no element of chance in it. If you keep that element of chance in it, that's risky. And that's where we get a lot of flak. If we make things so organized that we can actually define that part of the challenge – or some version of it – then we get flak for making it too specific. If we keep that element of chance in there and don't define it enough, so that it disappears, then we get flak. And that's the thing: It's about balancing those things, where we know enough that we don't know.

KV: I think there are many ways to solve a problem. If you have a musical problem or issue to deal with in a performance, there are lots of different ways to solve the problem. Certain kinds of musicians use different solutions than others. Some of my favorite musicians are people who have a wide range of potential solutions, including ones that throw all those out because they've hit a wall with that investigation or search. For me, the idea of investigation is the primary drive, but I feel the need to try to solve the problems – enough to get to a place where they're functional solutions.

PART 2:

-Can you comment on your interests in African string music and Delta Blues, and any impact those forms may of had on your own music?

In the early 80's I was trying to figure out how to get some new technical things to happen in my guitar playing. I didn't want to just copy Derek Bailey and play harmonics and tell myself that I was innovative. I've always thought that everything played on electric guitar and steel-stringed guitar was invented by the people that played the instruments. There was no pedagogy for electric guitar; it was an oral tradition that was based on American popular music and rhythm and blues music. The fact that it had gone global pretty early was an indication that it was new music even if it was new without pretense. So while I was looking into all of this Samm Bennett, the drummer, turned me on to Kora music. Kora is a 21 stringed harp from West Africa. The connection in the music to Delta blues was obvious. I just looked further and discovered music for fiddles and lutes a more harps and I understood that this was the basis of everything I liked about playing guitar. So instead of trying to make my music more modern by making it more European I decided to try to add new material through the study of traditional African string music. Much of which was made on instruments that had an inherent limitation. Those limitations meant that the focus was on percussive rhythms, repetitive melodies and glottal sounds. I always try to include those elements in my guitar playing.

-What's your perception of how the current improvised music scene functions (i.e. differences between the U.S. and Europe/Japan scenes, coverage by the journalists, the impact of the internet, etc.)? I realize that this is a very broad question, I'm just curious what your impressions are regarding the current state of the music.

I'm not sure that I understand anything about how the music scene functions. I do see the things that I'm interested in being pretty misunderstood or ignored by the wider scene. I'm surprised at how little interest there is in expanding the parts of the music that I think are essential; like rhythm, melody, and a really unique and maybe spectacular kind of playing. The kind of "generalist" idea that all new music or improvised music can all be evaluated the same way, or that it is somehow all related is really confusing to me. The idea that Jazz or music that is influenced by jazz is dead or dated or exclusive is even more confusing to me. I've always thought that the aesthetic content of a person's art needed to be understood first, then the documented work should be evaluated based on how well it lives up to what is intended. In my case that puts me in a lineage that I've declared valuable to my work. Evaluating it without considering that is unfair and lazy. I understand why musicians don't like labels, but instead we are left with "improvised" music. A good name until it starts to include everything that has any improvised part. Based on that name I get my work compared to guitarists who play one note for a whole cd or guitarists who play open strings through a computer. Comparing my music to that is unfair to all of us. Those guys have reasons to do that and I respect those reasons, but I don't use those reasons. The internet has opened up the discussion about music but lowered the standards of the discussion. So now it's possible to have work evaluated instantly by people with no knowledge of the lineage of anything, but who want to be a tastemaker anyway. I've noticed a tendency to revise the accepted value, meaning, and interpretation of work that was made in the recent and not-so-recent past. There are blogs that operate like magazines. There is no editorial oversight. These blogs are exactly the same as the critiques posted on Amazon.com or any other retail web site. So our music is just a product rated by consumers. I admit that we make things to sell, but none of us expect our recordings to be rated like toasters. We expect the music to be considered based on the content and context.

I'm from the 70's. Back then musicians insisted that their work was evaluated based on what they intended it to be. I insist too on that too. I've written extensively about my music. It's shocking to me that internet or print "critics" can make judgments about my music without reading what I wrote about it.

-Are there any extra-musical interests that have influenced your artwork?

Everything influences me. Patterns in Nature and in design of all kinds. I'm very interested in the visual arts. I have kind of narrow tastes, but I really appreciate the way visual artists write and explain their work. I get a lot of inspiration from that kind of writing. I'm reading about Richard Serra and Eric Fischl right now. I really love Basquiat, Pollack, DeKooning. I was a serious film buff when I was in High School. I saw every great film made before 1975 before I was 20 years old. I read many books about film making. It was huge for me. These days I love B grade film noir. Seedy stories with clear endings.

I'm into decrepitude. Rundown towns and stuff. Rural, Urban, Industrial. Amusement park/Carnival/Circus decrepitude is great. Junk yards, old signage. Crummy little commercial districts knock me out. I don't like gentrification. I like old junk. Baseball. I love baseball. WC Fields, Groucho Marx. I've been teaching at New England Conservatory for the past 6 years. I love teaching. It's given me a completely different perspective on music. Many of my students are amazing. Seeing them grow and use their talents in new ways is fantastic. My wife and kids are the biggest thing for me. Way ahead of music.

-Any concerts of particular impact, either performed or witnessed, that you'd like to comment on?

Mal Waldron, Eddie Moore, Reggie Workman. 1989 Willow, Somerville Ma., Jerome Cooper solo Environ NYC 1978 Derek Bailey Worcester, Ma 1982 Anthony Braxton solo Wesleyan Sept. 2005 I played Duos with Barre Phillips in France Feb 2004. That's just a few off the top of my head.

-Why have you resumed work with your own record label, Riti? Can you comment on its importance to you as a musician, and the nuts and bolts of working as the director of an independent label?

I can record what I want, when I want, with whom I want. Plus I own the master. The business is rough but worth the hassle as long as I don't go overboard and do too many releases. I give a cut to Aum Fidelity to distribute the cds. It's easier that way.

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHIES FROM JOE MORRIS

-Personal work:

Wraparound - [live] (riti, 1984) LP
Flip and Spike - (riti, 1990)
Sweatshop - (riti, 1990)
Racket Club - (About Time, 1997)
Symbolic Gesture - (Soul Note, 1994)
You Be Me - (Soul Note, 1997)
No Vertigo - [solo] (Leo, 1995)
A Cloud of Black Birds - (AUM Fidelity, 1998)
Like Rays - (Knitting Factory, 1998)
Many Rings - (Knitting Factory, 1999)
Singularity - (AUM Fidelity, 2001)
"Fur" Natural History [JM - upright bass] (Skycap, 2005)

-Other artists:

'Spiritual Unity', Albert Ayler - (ESP-Disk, 1965)
Sunny Murray Trio w/Malachi Favors & David Murray (Moers Records 1979)
'Jump Up'/'What To Do About', Jimmy Lyons/Sunny Murray (Hat hut 1979)
'New Thing at Newport', J. Coltrane/ Archie Shepp [live] (Impulse, 1965)
'Montreux Suisse Air', Air [My favorite Air lp] (Arista/Novus, 1977)
Leroy Jenkins [solo], (India Navigation, 1977)
'Improvisation For Cello And Guitar', Derek Bailey/Dave Holland - (ECM, 1971)
'Science Fiction', Ornette Coleman (Columbia, 1971)
'Indent', Cecil Taylor - (Arista/Freedom, 1977)



Interview with Joe Morris (originally from AudioOne)

Brouillon For Socrate, by Erik Satie.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION, interview by Lloyd Peterson

GEORGE LEWIS, as interviewed by Lloyd Peterson

A CONVERSATION WITH HAMID DRAKE: Part 1

A CONVERSATION WITH HAMID DRAKE: Part 2

THIS IS OUR MUSIC: PETER BRÖTZMANN by John Corbett

MUSICIANS TALK ABOUT MUSICIANS

INTERVIEW: PAUL LYTTON

INTERVIEW: MICHAEL ZERANG

EVAN PARKER, as interviewed by Lloyd Peterson

JIMMY GIUFFRE INTERVIEW

PETER BRÖTZMANN INTERVIEW WITH KEN VANDERMARK

ARTIST STATEMENTS: ARCHIVE

IN ROTATION: ARCHIVE