Click perspective to view full text

Design Q&A with Charles Eames

KEN VANDERMARK interview – Mutiny #13, by Raine Liimakka

Interview with Joe Maneri, by Stu Vandermark.

Eero Saarinen And The Analysis Of Creativity.

Evan Parker discusses John Coltrane

Interview with Ken Vandermark, Andrew Morgan and David Ryan.

KV 'Illustrated' part 1

KV 'Illustrated' part 2

IN ADDITION: Archive

AN ARGUMENT FOR JAZZ, by Ken Vandermark.

Exclaim! interview with Peter Brötzmann

'Verb List', 'Parcel Images' - Richard Serra

'Principles' - John Cage

Joe Morris Interview (from AudioOne, Vol.1)

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



MICHAEL ZERANG INTERVIEW
with Lazaro Vega of Blue Lake Public Radio
April 19, 1999
LAZARO VEGA: I have both the "First Meetings" CD on Buzz Records and the one you gave me the "Imp rovi sors" CD on Kontrans.

MICHAEL ZERANG: Jaap titled all the tunes on "Imp rovi sors" and titled the album. He's a sound poet.

VEGA: So all of these titles on the "Imp rovi sors" album, are those real words?

ZERANG: No, well, they might be. They're just things he probably made up or actually pulled that kind of consonant or vowel sound from something he did in that piece or something that was suggested in that particular piece. A lot of them have the little umlauts and things that they use in the Swedish language. So there‚s this way of pronouncing them that I'm not sure of. I know the umlaut over the "o" is pronounced "eeuw"...

Again, these are probably half made up, half real.

VEGA: Well, like I was saying earlier, I'm wondering what is a principle means of organizing your performances when you're with this trio?

ZERANG: The thing is, this "Imp rovi sors" CD was a recording that we did when we first met. I had never met Jaap or played with him, and I'd only at that point played with Mats once and that was in a recording session for "Parrot Fish Eye" on Okka Disc. So this was a first meeting, and it was a very peculiar first meeting.

I flew to Stockholm and met Mats for the first time since the recording session, the first time we played together, and Jaap was there the week before playing with Mats in different parts of Sweden.

We went straight to a bookstore called ŒAndra bocker och skivor‚ which is a pretty famous small book and record store in Stockholm. But the place was closed. So the owner, Harald Hult, let us in there to do this recording session.

We set up the recording. The CD is the actual entire recording session in order documenting the first meeting. When you ask how do we structure things, at that point it's all freely improvised music. We had never played together as a trio before and certainly I hadn‚t played with Jaap at all before. So it was really just an experiment, an exploration of what the three of us brought to the table at that particular time, in that moment in that little place.

The other caveat was that Harald let us use the store and it was Sunday night and kind of late, so then we had to play quietly. That was one major parameter that was set for us, even though about half way through the CD we started getting louder and louder as kids often do.

VEGA: So when you found yourself faced with Jaap Blonk's vocal utterances you're relying on your reflexes just to respond to them?

ZERANG: In a sense. Jaap is so versatile. He's a sound poet meaning that he's done a lot of what, at this point I would call them traditional, song text pieces from the 1920's and 1930's. And he does a lot of other singing kind of things. Also, as well as being a composer, when he functions as an improvisor, he functions like a lot of people who play freely improvised music. That is he'll use his voice and use extended techniques, just like one would on a given instrument, to coax different sounds and different textures out of it.

So for the most part, especially as evidenced on this record, he functions like an instrumentalist. There's very little usage of words, anyway real words. And not a great usage of singing in a traditional sense where you're just producing tones. (He's making) more textures and interplay between all three of us, just as you would as an instrumental improvising trio.

In that instance I felt really no different than playing with two other improvising instrumentalists.
He's done other things.

Since then we've played together as a trio several times. Also I've played with Mats and Jaap in different settings. And we've explored other areas. But basically that's a real straight-ahead, freely improvised session.

VEGA: You mentioned that Jaap would have sung sound texts from the '20's and '30's? Can you give me an example of that?

ZERANG: Well, the one's that I know, that I've heard him perform, is (spelling?) Kurt Schwitter's "Ursonate." He was a pretty prominent Dada figure and wrote these things called "sound poems." They were written where, as opposed to using words, he would just use syllables, phonetic sounds and fragments of words. Then of course a poet or some orator would recite these pieces that he wrote.

And he certainly wasn't the only one. There were plenty of people. I wish Jaap were here because he also knows the history of sound poetry through out this last century, anyway. Pretty thoroughly. Hugo Ball was another person that did that.

Jaap in his own right is quite a sound poet. He composes many things for voice.

VEGA: Then there's this whole tradition I'm not keyed on, but you've pushed me in the right direction so I can find out a little bit more on that by looking at Jaap Blonk's web site.

ZERANG: Actually, oddly enough, I don't think many people consider it a music form. Although I do, but it's really a literary form, an extension of some kind of literary orations. An experimental approach to reciting words. There's a whole gamut of ways sound poets work. I gave you an example of the Switter thing. But some people use texts and treat them in a certain way when they recite them that exaggerates certain aspects of vowels or consonants. Or certain underlying meanings they accentuate by giving a certain emphasis to them either one way or the other. It's really quite a broad field and it's actually been more prominent in Europe through this last century than in Europe. But it‚s happened here as well.

I know when I was in Stockholm, there's a place people formed there called Slykingen which is an artist collective that's been around for ages. In the 60's, early '60's even, they had festivals there specifically of sound poetry. They would bring in sound poets from all over the world.
To this day Jaap still finds these sound poetry festivals all over the world. He played one in Mexico City, one in Columbia, Latin America. It's not so prominent in the United States, but it certainly is in other parts of the world.

VEGA: So that was your first meeting between the three of you and you recorded it. Have you had opportunities since to play together often?

ZERANG: Yes we have. We did a tour of Europe in October. I think actually before that we did a couple of single performances in the United States, and we did a little tour in October of 1998 and we had a chance to explore some more things.

There's 14 dates on this tour. We're really looking forward to that as a way to get into it deeper.
Freely improvised music is something you practice. You do it and you perform with who ever you are working with in your city. Then you meet other people that are free improvisers.

There's always a first meeting and it's always a very crucial meeting because this is where you take everything you know, your skills, the way you've developed how to produce extended techniques and your sensibility of improvising and you mesh it with a new player. Mesh it with a new sensibility and a new take on things.

The results are often wonderful, especially for people who have been engaging in this form, because it's a collective form of music making. Completely. There's no leader, there's no accompanist, although those elements can happen during an improvisation. Primarily it's something you create as a group. You sort of give yourself up to the group and see what happens. It's always wonderful.

In this case we all felt this first session was great.

The once the first session happens, you move on to starting to explore other aspects of it and maybe even consciously working towards some kinds of general structures or different parameters that you might set collectively f or a different way to approach something. For instance a different instrument combination or a different textural combination. Just something's that you consciously decide that you want to try. That's when it starts to get interesting and when you start getting a little deeper into the music making.

We have done that, especially during this last tour in Europe we were able to perform, then have discussion and maybe listen to a tape, do another performance and start the process again. We go back and forth like that until something starts to get worked on.

VEGA: So you refine certain things you think really work?

ZERANG: It's not so much a process of editing and refining as much as it is just saying let's explore down this avenue. Let‚s go this way. Yesterday we tried this and it was effective, while this over here was maybe not so effective. But the part that was not so effective, let‚s explore that more and see what happens there.

That's the other wonderful thing about freely improvised music, it's probably the most demanding form of live performance that you can do because you could fail. You can fail very, very badly. It's sort of built-in thing if you're exploring, if you‚re experimenting you don't know what the end result will be. That's the nature of it. Sometimes you can wind down some dead end, if you will, and you have to either collectively navigate out of there, or do something to make it work or make it valid.

I'm using a lot of words. It's kind of hard to talk about. This isn't really a conscious thing that's happening while you're playing. It's something you discover later in the assessment of what you've done, like when you're listening to a tape or talking about a concert that just happened.

VEGA: So let's go to the beginning then. When you're getting ready to start a piece, you don't count it off.

ZERANG: No.

VEGA: There's no predisposed key center, song structure or structure at all, really.

Zerang: No. In a sense if you want to talk about the given parameters. The first parameter is the instrumentation that you're using, and the second parameter is the acoustics of the given space that you're in. Because if you ‚re using your ears, then how the sounds are happening in a certain acoustic environment are dictating durations, they're dictating the quality of the timbres. These are what you're feeding off of and responding to. Those two things are a given. And then aside from that there are really no parameters, unless you impose them. You know. Those are the two natural parameters.

You can even go as far as to saying the predisposition of the players, but that gets into such a vague area. Let's leave that for awhile.

VEGA: This, of course, isn't new, either: this has been going on in America since Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman opened the floodgates to exploring the music away from harmony.

ZERANG: That's true. Also I do a concert, for instance of 12th Century Persian Percussion playing that's all based on improvisation. Improvisation in music has obviously been going on since day one to varying degrees and for varying results. There are entire folk musics that are based on improvisation. There maybe not free improvisation in the sense that we're talking about it now in regards to this trio, but certainly improvisation is a crucial element in music.

Yeah, this second half of this century freely improvised music; maybe you want to call it non-idiomatic music. Even some of it's idiomatic when you have a free jazz group that's playing with no changes and no charts. That's something you can say is improvised music. On the other hand you have the sort of instrumentation that suggests a form or an idiom.

Improvisation is something that goes back.

What I find very exciting is the fact that it‚s a collective thing to do. It ‚s something that I can't create alone. I need other people in an ensemble and we create together, spontaneously, at the moment.

And it's taken so many different forms. You mentioned those artists, and certainly that's wonderful stuff.

VEGA: They just got the ball rolling.

ZERANG: Yeah, in a sense that's true.

VEGA: Then you've have everything that's happened in Europe for the last 25 years Globe Unity Orchestra, Tony Oxley and John Stevens in Britain, all of the music that's gone on in Germany.

ZERANG: From my experience in Europe, it's pretty well established through every country at this point.

The reason I bring up the ancient stuff is because this happens in countries that are non-Western. It certainly something that has been one of the crucial underpinnings in music in every culture, really.

VEGA: When we're talking about improvisation on the level you're at, it's like pure improvisation from the get go. Now in these ancient cultures, don't they have something else they improvise with, such, as structures are pre-existing, or are you talking about from the get-go, too?

ZERANG: Well, sure they do. For instance if you take a simple scale or mode and that becomes your basis. But then from that. You might have a scale that's four or five notes, something as simple as that, for instance in Arabic music they do this, and you can spin a whole hour and half improvisation from those four or five notes. Then it really becomes something so much more than limiting to those four or five notes. Even though that is your basic underpinning or basic structure you're using.

The 12th Century Persian drumming that I do basically, without getting into it too deeply, what they're doing is taking a rhythmic cycle with certain accents and they use that as their basic mode of expression. As something to say. But then they elaborate on it to such an extent that where a half-hour, 45 minutes, an hour and a half into it, you don't even recall that. Even though it‚s always there in some sense.

The musicians, the artists and the instrumentalists have gone so far from it, but somehow keeping a reign to it. But it really goes pretty far away.

I know what you're saying, though, this situation where we say we're playing free improvised music, well, there's a lot of debate on what's free‚ and what's not free. We all live in the same soup, so there are certain things that are going to happen that are bound to happen.

My best example for that is I played for this one freely improvising group called Liof Munimula for 15 years. That was an amazing experience because we ‚d play a year or so of concerts, and everything was wonderful, new and innovative. Then you got the point when you started to listen to tapes that pretty much we to tend towards something. We tended towards a certain time frame or a certain when he does that, I do this. We start to develop a common language, but also we start to develop these little idiosyncrasies.

After a while, if you don‚t look at the details and you just look at the broad macro picture, you start to realize we're playing the same piece over and over again. That‚s when you have to start to really assess and analyze, discuss and tear down some of these things so you can get to the next level. With that group for me, particularly, because it was such a long standing group we had to do that so many times in the course of the 15 years that I don't even know by the time we finished if you wanted to call it improvised music.

Although we were still operating from the same premise that we have our instrumentation, we have the acoustics of the space and now we will freely improvise.

There's so much to deal with, deal through and dig through. It's very difficult sometimes with music that's not notated in a traditional sense to identify the idiosyncrasies and the tendencies. Because when you‚re playing, of course, it's not really something you‚re consciously thinking of. It's really something, again, that you do afterwards when you're listening to tapes or assessing the session that we‚re falling into these patterns every time this kind of thing happens we respond this way. Maybe we should try to consciously avoid that.

Then all of a sudden you're playing from a perspective of not playing freely in that sense. You're consciously trying to break out of some mold you set for yourself. That's why I say, again, it's the most demanding form of performing. If one does it that thoroughly takes it seriously and does it as a way of expression.

Secondly, because it's collective it's not something that I can change. It has to be changed collectively; it has to evolve collectively.

So you get into a lot of gray areas with what's free and what's not free.

VEGA: What you're describing is similar to the sort of process that Sun Ra used. "The Magic City" is a freely arrived at improvisation that is totally full of structure. Through familiarity, rehearsals and constant playing together, Sun Ra and the Arkestra arrived to the point where they could improvise structures. It seemed when they found these tendencies they indulged them, developed and went to developing even more complex structures. That seems to me what "The Magic City" represents.

ZERANG: That's probably very true, and with Sun Ra's group I know that they played together so much. Not everybody all the time, but there was a core of people. I think you can get to places that way that you can't get to any other way, really. Through composition, or through just playing every now and then with a group, there‚s something really to be said for that (playing together often). Even if it's just a nuance, something that the listener doesn't even pick up.

I also believe with this kind of freely improvised music making that there's a certain telepathy that you develop. I don't think it's something either you're born with or not. I think it's almost like muscle: you can engage it, work it and develop it. So when you are in a music situation you can really get into it on that level.

For me, that has been the most exciting thing about being an improvisor, is exploring what happens with telepathy.

I hate to use that word because the associations are kind of weird to that word, but I mean really, it's not mind reading. But it is mind, spirit and soul reading. I'm convinced that's what the great improvisors are doing. The people that can just up on a stage with no score in front of them and no musical parameters then create a whole set or a whole evening of wondrous music, that's what's going on.

VEGA: I would not know that. It's a real mystery you can only arrive at as a musician.

ZERANG: With Sun Ra, a large group that's been together playing so much for so long, you can almost smell it on them.

VEGA: In terms of the audience, what can an audience get from this? I mean, for people that don't know. In Grand Rapids, we had Paul Lytton come in with Ken Vandermark and Kent Kessler and people dug it. But that's real energized, with a real kinetic coming at you kind of force that builds a head of steam and crescendos. People can relate to that kind of energy, you get swept up in it. It seems to me that your music is more fluid and particularized. We've talked about from the musician‚s point of view, but I‚ m wondering from the audience's point of view what do people say when they hear this? What have their responses been?

ZERANG: The response we get, in this trio in particular, is because we're also a very visual trio, we're fun to watch. Jaap, first off, is a very wonderful looking man: he‚s a big guy and does this vocal things, which contorts his face. He's just amazing to watch. Mats is a very physical player, as well. He moves around in a way that is very logical to the sounds that he‚s producing.

Myself as a percussionist I just have all these toys. So we're visually interesting to watch.
To see the interplay and how the sounds are being produced and at the same time how visually we're interacting. Audiences have commented on that more than anything, because that's something everyone can really get into.

As far as just the music goes, I know for myself when I was younger and I was starting to listen to music that I'd never heard before, or different approaches to music that I never heard before, I would try so much to analyze on the spot, try to understand what was happening and try to make historical references in my head. I realized I wasn't enjoying the music so much.

So I got to the point where it became like a meditation for me. I would just let my eyes and ears take in everything and just let it wash over me, and then see how it made me feel. Most of the time it would make me feel very good, very alive and energized to do that. Even if I didn't intellectually understand where this was coming from, or what the history of it was or anything like that.

You get to a place where you start to connect with it. When musicians are improvising there's so much listening and connecting going on that it's almost inescapable if you‚re open to it from an audience's point of view. You become a part of that.

Certainly as a performer, I know I can play with this trio in a recording studio or a setting where there's no audience and it can be a wonderful thing and we do this entire interaction. On the other hand, when we perform in front of an audience, the energies of the audience are so much a part of the canvas that they have to be taken into consideration and fed off of and dealt with on one level or another. An audience member in that setting also feels that. Someone that‚s open to being there and experiencing this is really a part of it. I find it very engaging from an audience‚s point of view on several levels.

Grand Rapids will be the third show in our tour. All three of us are very excited about this because it's the first time we had so many gigs back to back to back to back. We're going to Madison, first, then Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor at the Kerrytown Concert House, then Pittsburgh, Albany, NY, Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Louisville, KY, Bloomington, IN., and then we end at the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music in Chicago.

Then we go into the recording studio two days later. That should be a descent recording session. (Laughs).

This is the prime opportunity because not only are we playing every night, but also we're driving everyday. We'll have plenty of time to listen to tapes and discuss things and to really make something of this two-week tour. It's so rare. That‚s unfortunate. It's because Mats is in Sweden, Jaap is in Holland and I'm here. So when we get a chance to do this we really try to milk it for everything it's worth because who knows when the next opportunity will come up.
Vega: In terms of you percussion, do you play a drum-set?

Zerang: I'm playing sort of hybrid drum set on this tour. I was just taking this last week to set up a particular set-up for this group. I have tons of drum equipment. I usually play a regular drum kit when I play in the Brotzman Tentet and a bunch of different groups.

I also play hand drums, specifically Middle-Eastern percussion: dumbek, tambourines and frame drums. That's sort of my specialty, which is what I've done since I was young.

VEGA: How old are you now?

ZERANG: I'm forty. Mats is 35 and Jaap is 44. But for this I have sort of hybrid drum kit that is part drum-kit, part multiple percussion set-up. I'll probably bring a hand-drum, maybe some whistles.

VEGA: Is it sticks and brushes?

ZERANG: No, it's fingers, knitting needles, bells on bells: whatever. Percussion is a nice instrument for freely improvised music because it means anything you want it to mean.

VEGA: Paul Lytton when he was here said he thinks of it as vibrating surfaces.

ZERANG: He's dead on. Some people don‚t like to play certain styles of music, or certain genres of music, myself I don‚t care, because as long as I'm playing the drums (laughs). If you hit it and it vibrates I'm very happy. That‚s what it‚s so much about. The producing of sounds: that‚s the wondrous thing. If you have to do it in a certain pattern, O.K.! (Laughs). You can do it randomly, or freely, that's fine, too. I just love the whole sonic aspect of it. It's a real treat being a percussionist.




EVAN PARKER, as interviewed by Lloyd Peterson

JIMMY GIUFFRE INTERVIEW

PETER BRÖTZMANN INTERVIEW WITH KEN VANDERMARK

ARTIST STATEMENTS: ARCHIVE

IN ROTATION: ARCHIVE