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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 ON DISPARATE STRANDS AND COMMON THREADS IN EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN IMPROVISATION
by John Corbett
©2002 All Rights Reserved
It is commonplace, at this point, to discuss European and American improvised musics as distinct entities. Such an idea is not without some merit: in the mid-60s, musicians from various countries - chiefly England, Holland and Germany - began to grow weary of the imitative tendency in European jazz and sought to create a music more explicitly their own. The result, in some cases, was a music very far removed from American jazz in sound and in spirit.
But the relationship between American and European improvising is one of reciprocal stimulation. American - especially African-American - musical traditions have remained highly relevant to many European players (even if they don't acknowledge them), while over the past decade or so European improvised music has grown indispensable for younger American improvisors. Indeed, it seems that when the music begins to stagnate in one context, it is music from the other side of the Atlantic that poses a set of new challenges that snaps it back into action. One can observe this reciprocal spark in situations from tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins - who inspired countless Europeans in the '30s - to trumpeter Axel Dörner - who is currently collecting American acolytes at an alarming rate. In the U.S., for that matter, there are now musicians who openly discuss the imitative quality of their playing (copying, for instance, Paul Lovens and Peter Kowald), just as hordes of Europeans once unabashedly stole licks from Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Lee Konitz.
Part of this reciprocal attraction is romantic in nature, the result of different open-minded individuals looking longingly across the ocean in search of a mysterious and appealing otherness that might lurk over there. Take a German kid, for instance, born in Remscheid just six months before the U.S. declares war on his country, a boy who grows up in Wuppertal, begins listening to American traditional jazz and swing, perhaps as a rebellion against his father's taste in European classical music, perhaps as an adolescent swipe at his family's bourgeois standards, most likely some combination of the two. But this jazz music is compelling enough on its artistic merits, not only because of the lifestyle and counterculture it represents, and soon this youngster has started playing the music himself, gravitating away from a promising career as a painter to pursue improvised music full-time. This fellow, of course, is saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, one of the musicians who helped define the new musical currents just after the middle of the '60s, a European who has never ceased his love affair with classic American jazz. Brötzmann's music represents an outstanding example of the reciprocal stimulation between America and Europe (insofar as one allows such unwieldy geographic designations to stand); he never broke outright from the jazz tradition, could even still accurately be called a jazz musician, but also has never been satisfied making music that wasn't forcefully his own, music that is also, in some deep way, quite German.
Brötzmann has had actual working associations with American musicians almost since the beginning of his musical life. Early collaborations with Steve Lacy, Carla Bley and Don Cherry were extremely important to him, and he's played with most of the significant improvisors from America over the years. In the late '70s, Brötzmann began touring the States periodically. Over the last decade, this has become a central part of his yearly itinerary, and in 1997, inspired by Chicago's evolving young improvised music scene, he formed the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, a group that includes Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, from Poughkeepsie, New York, as well as seven of Chicago's finest players. These include saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark, arguably the central figure of the current Chicago improvised music scene, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, who studied with Morton Feldman and Anthony Braxton, and Hamid Drake, the powerhouse drummer with whom Brötzmann has maintained a longterm partnership.
On the day after the end of the Tentet's second U.S. tour, in June, 2002, Brötzmann and I sat down to discuss various aspects of improvised music in Europe and America. We started with certain differences that he perceives in the musical attitudes of members of the Tentet, some obstacles that presents to having the group play certain of his compositions, particularly a new piece that uses visual images on cards handed out to the members of the group, one of them a solo wildcard.
JOHN CORBETT: At one point on the tour, I overheard you saying to Mats that the pieces you first brought to the Tentet might have been easier for a European group. Can you expand on that?
PETER BRÖTZMANN: I think the education and the roots are different. I think the piece I brought in the first time, the card game, was in a way a kind of intellectual exercise playing music and filling that space with your own thing, independent of what the others are doing (they have different cards to play). I think I was asking too much. Most of my younger friends over here are still educated, which is no wonder, in the sense of American music - that means melodies, harmonies, scales, and the idea that whoever brings in the piece gives direction and everyone else does what he says. My little dream is: If you are together with three, ten, fourteen musicians, anybody is allowed or invited to bring in ideas, and everyone has a look and says "yes," and then he tries to fill what the idea gives him with his own kind of music. Of course this is a model which is not new, not at all. And you can even find sources of that in American art and music. Cage was working with this kind of indeterminacy. I was doing that over in Europe with the fluxus group, and a lot of contemporary composers worked with that system. The only time things were really done consequently in that way was in the time of the Fluxus movement, both in Europe and over here. And even if nowadays composers have adopted the system to compose their own things, in the end they tell the musicians, actors, or whoever is involved, just what to do. So that ends up again in a contradiction to the original idea. When I brought in that little piece, I immediately saw that I was in the shit, that it was not working. Maybe we will come to a point that it's easy to talk about and we'll do it. But I had to change the tune to quite a "normal" composition.
To come back to the question about the difference between American way of playing improvised music and the European way, in one way I agree with Mats that it would be easier to do it with a handful of European musicians, because it wouldn't have been so new for them. We worked like that in early Globe Unity Orchestra times, and all the guys have at least a little information about the contemporary music scene. Of course in the Tentet we have guys like Fred [Lonberg-Holm], and even if Ken [Vandermark] isn't used to playing these sorts of things, he's definitely able to understand what it's all about. But it wasn't the right time to do it.
The other side of it is that American musicians have - I don't want to say "swing," but a kind of pulse, a kind of movement, a kind of flow through the music, which I often miss with European musicians. Maybe I'm in a lucky position to have both sides. That might be one of the reasons the Tentet has been, in difficult situations, working for five years. We always try to go further, different directions, even if we fail sometimes. We try to open up, and in that way we are just at the beginning. There's a lot more to come, more work to do in that direction. I would like the day we all can burn the scores and just go onstage. That would be really an ideal situation, and I think it's possible. If we work hard enough and we have the chance to play. That's the main point. I was ready to risk it on this tour, and I think Mats would have been on my side, but I think Ken...he didn't say anything, but he was a bit, na, ja. We had that situation with Globe Unity Orchestra, and I know it's wrong to go back, but I learned in that situation that it is possible to get a bunch of guys together and, with all respect and love for the music, to create some wide-open music. It's always a risk, but no risk, no fun. Risk belongs to all kinds of art. I mean, it belongs to life.
JOHN CORBETT: Your 1968 record Machine Gun is sometimes discussed as a pivotal moment in the development of European improvised music, as the first presentation of music that was unique from, even a rejection of, earlier American models. But you don't see it that way, do you?
PETER BRÖTZMANN: The point is that I never broke off. It was never my purpose to kill some American music. Just the opposite, in these years I learned a lot of stuff from that music, but I did it in my way. Maybe it's a European way, but in fact I don't care. In the nowadays world, thirty-some years after Machine Gun, where the communication between the continents, between musicians, between all kind of cultures is getting so strong that even if you wanted you couldn't avoid it, it's hard to say where the differences are. I think the differences are in the person himself, where he grew up. American society forms you differently from the way post-war society in Europe does, that's for sure. On the other hand, I mean, music and especially if we still call it jazz music, is the only positive international language, in a way. For myself, I never had any kind of purpose to even go away from American music. I didn't like certain systems the music was working with, but that was never the musician, it was the way the music was organized and presented and sold. What would I have done without the help of Steve Lacy or Don Cherry? Or even my early contacts with musicians coming from the U.S.?
JOHN CORBETT: Especially in your large groups, the music was at least an anationalist or transnationalist music. You made a point of including players from Britain, Holland, Belgium, and when it became economically feasible to include some Americans, even folks like Frank Wright and later Hamid Drake and William Parker. It was never a nationalist endeavor. If anything, it seemed antinationalist.
PETER BRÖTZMANN: Yeah, for sure.
JOHN CORBETT: The barriers to working across the Atlantic were mostly economic?
PETER BRÖTZMANN: Economic and administrative - I'm still illegal here, in a way. And I must say, not all the American musicians were so open and friendly to us Europeans. I had to fight my way, but I learned it early and I must say a lot of thanks to Don Cherry, Lee Konitz, Eric Dolphy, people who sat and talked with me. These little things, they helped me to know that I have to go my way. The same as Nam June Paik, or with more distance Joseph Beuys told me on the other side of the art world. I got in quite funny situations playing with Americans in Europe. As a white, middle-class European asshole, some of them didn't take you seriously. But then you had to convince them that you take yourself and what you are doing seriously. And if they got that, there was no question. I worked hard and was fighting all the time, playing with Bennink and other strong guys, so if you came to New York or met the guys at Frankfurt's German Jazz Festival, they were nice and friendly but when it came to playing they thought: "These idiots can't play, it's our music." And in a way, a lot of the music is American music, and black American music still. But the world changed in the last 50 years. And if you tour around the colleges, play for young people, the blacks sometimes don't want to hear that their great-grandfather was picking cotton somewhere in the south. They don't want to hear about the blues. They are not interested in history. That's a shame. Of course, I never will have that history, that background, I can't. But I think every human being can have the blues in his own way. So I have the European blues or the after-war blues. Every person can be hurt and feel pain, or can feel pain with another person. I think that's the basis of the blues. And a social feeling, to develop a social feeling with other people, the other important thing. These are different in all cultures, but in the end it always comes to the same thing.
The question of the difference between European and American culture, it's tricky because there certainly are differences, but it's not enough to just say this represents American culture and this represents European culture. As if swing was the single defining feature of American musical sensibility, and Europe was responsible for the conceptual component. That's too simplistic, too pat. But one can instantly feel that there's something different about, let's say the Tentet, because of the mixture of Europeans and Americans. The band would have a very different feeling if it was all Europeans, and if there were no Europeans in the band, it would be a very different thing too, not simply because it wouldn't have your name on it. Paul Lytton told me recently that the last few years have really opened up the relevance of American music, the connections with people like Ken Vandermark have become very important after some period of working largely in isolation from Americans.
I think when Paul says that he says it from a very British point of view. The British especially were at that time, I have the feeling, much more anti-American than the Germans. Maybe for Paul there is a kind of opening going on here, in this country, with the audiences and with musicians. It's a new generation, they're more open, not so preoccupied with the last 30 years, they're just: "Hey, there's some music we haven't heard, some musicians that can show us something else!" Which is true. I think we can show a lot of facets added to the range of the music as it exists here. That always was the case, but I think the younger generation comes forward to us with it. On the other hand, it was funny sometimes to have some American musicians confronted with the Brotherhood of Breath, for example, the South African guys in that group. The Americans: "Oh, my brothers!" And the Africans: "Fuck you, I have nothing to do with you!" Really screaming, all kinds of nonsense. Mongezi [Feza] and Dudu [Pukwana] against Frank Lowe and others.
We shouldn't forget that our European feelings against America had to do with politics at that time - '60s to early '70s - and, much more (but nobody talks about it), because Americans always got paid three or four times more than we did. Or ten times, some of them a hundred times! That made us fucking sick. But that was the case. When we got our little festival, got paid a couple of hundred, they got paid a couple of thousand. And of course we came onstage with the same passion and love of the music as them. We didn't want to see why these systems worked the way they worked - and still work that way. I mean when we were sitting in the cantina at some radio station and some Americans were sitting at another table, we knew that they got paid five times more than we did, which made us angry. That was naive but understandable.
JOHN CORBETT: I have a feeling that interactions with people like you is helping shape the way that younger American musicians do business. They observe your egalitarian philosophy, the way you treat everyone equally when it comes to payment even though in America often you're the big marquee name.
PETER BRÖTZMANN: That was always my policy. I never had a guy in any of my bands who got paid more than the others, for any reason. He wouldn't be in my band, whatever his name was.
Ironically, there are some Europeans who seem to have learned from Americans how to comport themselves, to try to get the most they can and screw everyone else, even their bandmates. That's not exclusively an American attribute, I'm sure, but I think in this business we're especially well-schooled in that attitude. At base, it's a question of assuming that you're more important than someone else.
Yeah, but that is independent from continents, cultures. That's really a human being thing. You'll find everywhere someone who thinks he's worth more than the others. We have to calm down, and some of us have to come back to the ground and be a bit more modest about the terms we're thinking in. It's really incredible what kind of theater people make. If you deal with pop music, the entertainment industry, that's another world. The music we are talking about, people involved in it, if you start to think you're better than anybody else, it's already the first mistake. And if you start that way, it never will grow. It always falls back. When Carla [Bley] asked us to play with her [in 1966], it was shitty enough money anyway, but then she came to Wuppertal, we rehearsed, then she said okay, Michael [Mantler] and I, we get 50-percent, Aldo - who was a little bit more well-known, gets 20-percent, and you get 18-percent, and Kowald gets 12-percent. Some kind of scale. And I said no. I understood that it was a fair deal that they get a bit more, especially Carla, so we didn't argue about that, but then I said we will split the rest of the money. That was my first experience and at that moment I didn't understand it, or I didn't want to understand it. My idea was that whoever works, there is money in the pot, the money will be split. Somebody makes a composition, then the band plays his composition, and he might get some GEMA money, and some fame, whatever.
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