Joe Morris
guitarist, improviser, bassist (interview conducted via e-mail)
Lowell Davidson
I met Lowell in 1980. My friend Jack Powers who owned the Stone Soup Gallery on Cambridge St in Boston invited me to hear Lowell play a solo set. He told me that Lowell had played piano with Ornette. I had never heard of Lowell and I thought that Paul Bley was the only piano player to play with Ornette. Lowell’s set was really unique. Never heard anything like it before that. I introduced myself to him and asked him if we could play sometime and he said yes. That didn’t happen for about a year though. In 1981 I went to Europe for a few months. I had some good gigs there and when I came back to Boston I had a new sense of determination for my music, and a top priority was to connect with Lowell. I ran into him in Harvard Square one day and asked him again if we could play. He said “sure, sure” (he said that a lot) and gave me his phone number. I called him and we made plans. I arrived on the day we planned at the scheduled time, and he wasn’t there. I waited with his family then left. I tried again and the next time he was there and we played. He decided after that day that he would play bass with me instead of piano. I took it to mean that he didn’t like the way I played, but he invited me back and we played together a lot after that for years.
Lowell was an unusual person in many different ways. After being a star student in Boston Latin High School he was one of 18 black men admitted to Harvard in 1960, the biggest group of African-American students there up to that point. He studied biochemistry and was a track star. He left without graduating a few years later. His parents were pastors of the Zion Fire Holiness Baptist Church in Roxbury. He played the church services for his whole life.
During his college years he wrote pieces that were like Herbie Nichol’s work. Eventually he connected with Ornette and played a lot with him during his retirement period. Ornette recommended that ESP record Lowell which resulted in his only commercial recording made in his lifetime. The record featured Milford Graves and Gary Peacock. Lowell also played saxophones with the New York Art Quartet, drums with Keith Jarrett (when he was in Boston, and piano with Michael Mantler. He had long affiliations with Buell Niedlinger and Paul Motion, to name just a few.
Lowell and I played duos and trios with the drummer Laurence Cook. I arranged a few gigs for us in Boston and we played one duo in New York at the Club Chandelier, a squat theater on Ave C that was booked by John Zorn.
Two very important things to know about Lowell, he was a genius and he suffered from a psychotic disorder that caused his behavior to be strange and erratic. But most of the time he was a beautiful, kind, hilarious, sweet, and incredibly brilliant person. The mix of his mental illness and his genius made him hard to understand at first. His language was of a very rarified type and he rarely spoke of mundane things.
It was clear early on that his interest in biochemistry and music were intertwined. He was very interested in how music altered the chemistry of the human brain, how our intelligence evolved through listening to new sounds. This was the subject that steered his musical activities. As someone who was intrigued by musical genius—in particular those in the so-called jazz scene, I found Lowell to be completely unique in every way and quite possibly more brilliant than the rest.
Our playing together was mostly about sound made in tremolos and controlled sustain. It was quite different from my other playing. Lowell played an aluminium acoustic bass, mostly arco sometimes with an amp. This caused me to rethink every idea I had about improvisation and music making. I have a few cassette recordings of us performing that I hope to release someday.
In 1985 I organized a concert for us and the violinist Malcomb Goldstein. Butch Morris was in Boston then so I asked him to join us. I called the concert “Graffiti in Two Parts”. The recording of that concert was released on the French label Rogue Art a few years ago. Lowell plays bass and drums on it. I made another record with John Voigt on bass and Tom Plsek on trombone for Riti Records called MVP-LSD the graphic scores of Lowell Skinner Davidson.John knew Lowell longer than nearly anyone, Tom had worked a lot with Lowell. After Lowell died his scores were given to John. Most of them were done on index cards. There were hundreds of them. We did a few. Lowell also made books of graphic notation that were amazing. More information about these recordings and the material is available in the liner notes I wrote for both of these records.
There is a lot more to say about Lowell. It’s a bit overwhelming to consider it all really. He was a lovely guy, a beautiful artist and musician, and also a confounding and terribly difficult person due to his mental illness. But he was like no one else and I still feel and hear his influence in my own music all the time.
Anthony Braxton
People don’t realize that back in the early 70’s the link to Braxton for most people was through Chick Corea, and the link to Chick Corea was Miles Davis. So it just made sense that if you liked Miles, you know about Chick and if you liked Chick you knew about the group Circleand that group featured Anthony Braxton and that is how I learned about him. After Circle I just followed everything Braxton did and said. Besides making great, demanding music that was mind-boggling and super cool, he said some of the most informative things about music, life, racial issues, tradition, art and the logic that supported his methodology that were said in that decade. He and the other members of the AACM changed everything about how I thought about nearly everything, especially regarding the history and development of jazz.
The 70’s were a tough time. Unemployment was high, interest rates were high, Like every guy my age I had to deal with the expectation that I would be drafted and sent to VietNam until 73’ when I was lucky enough to get a high draft number and even luckier when they ended the draft that year. But before that it was always there as a threat to my life and my future. There wasn’t much point in planning to live a normal regular life that was like they said life used to be. The future looked bleak and many of us were determined to carve out our own version of life, of art, of music and of survival and success. Braxton was one of the people who gave me direction, who showed me how to think and organize my thoughts and my life. While much of that was about making music, it is also about much more than making music.
Braxton has been a hero to me since then. I am very grateful that we became friends.
In 2007 through the suggestion of Taylor Ho Bynum and Mary Halvorson, Braxton invited me to record with him. He put it this way, we would improvise for one hour, timed by his hourglass then take a break for lunch, record another hour then go back the next day and do the same thing. We would use everything we played and release all of it in a 4 cd set. The box set was released on Clean Feed records in 2008.
Two weeks before the session, I was in Chicago recording with Hamid Drake. I had flown there via Laguardia airport because upon my return I was scheduled to play two nights with David S. Ware at Iridium in Times Square. My return flight was late. Sound check was at 6pm. I arrived at 5pm and it was a friday, so traffic was bad. This was my first gig with David and I didn’t want to be late. I had parked my car in the parking lot at the airport and when I got to it I noticed it had a flat tire. I figured I could change it quickly. But the spare tire fell over and the rim landed on the middle finger of my right hand. This caused a huge hematoma under the nail and my finger swelled up and I couldn’t move it. I changed the tire and sped to the club in time for the sound check and immediately got a cup of ice and stuck my finger in it.
I figured it would be ok, but I also thought it might be broken. But I had this gig, and then bass gigs for two weeks and then my duo with Braxton, so I just ignored the pain, practiced, iced it and carried on like nothing was wrong. Then came the duo session with Braxton. My finger was ok, not perfect but ok. We did the two days of recording and then went to lunch. Over lunch I showed Anthony my finger and said that I thought it might be broken. He said “You did that with a broken finger?!” I said that I couldn’t risk postponing it so I toughed it out and got it done.
On the way home I bought a splint for my finger and the next day I saw a doctor who told me that it was broken and would now have to be re-broken because it wasn’t healing properly. Anyway, I wore a splint for 7 months after that, but it was worth it. Those 7 months included a few tours with David S. Ware. On the last one he asked me “How do you play with that thing on your finger?”
Every encounter with Braxton is a lesson that stays with me. I think he is one of the greatest artists of our time and one of the most brilliant thinkers in the world. He’s really kind, and unbelievably funny. I think we would make a decent comedy team. We can improvise jokes with the best of them. Watching the way he treated his students was a real inspiration. He was always very encouraging and supportive. I try to do the same.
Braxton has described and named in some way every detail of his methodology. He has applied precise language to what would otherwise be unidentified abstract notions. He’s made coherent, descriptive symbols and named them. He’s invented a detailed scoring system that encourages and allows players to engage in spontaneous actions of all kinds while performing his compositions. He has taken material that is often dismissed with terms like “experimental” and “conceptual”, and encoded them so that they are now cogent operational objects, techniques, that can be controlled and also transformed.
Braxton gave me a packet of his music and I’ve used it to teach my students for 16 years. This has given them the advantage of having new capabilities that free them from the burden of having to rely on overused ideas that are the part and parcel of most jazz and improvisation studies. And while those ideas are important and meaningful they are not everything. Braxton, like every great artist, but in his own manifestation of greatness has proven that point for 50 years.
The Guitar
Like millions of people my age the Beatles caused me to think about the guitar. Although my first guitar was a windup Popeye version I had when I was 3. When I was 8 the neighbors who lived in the apartment downstairs had a guitar with no strings in the basement that I would fake play.
I knew I needed to play music. I had some trumpet lessons in school when I was twelve, but circumstances ended that. At 14 my best friend’s cousin who was visiting at Christmas showed me some chords on the guitar. This changed everything for me. That little bit of knowledge of the guitar gave me a completely new focus. I was a smart kid, but life was beating me down. Guitar and music immediately lifted me up. I have a vivid memory of understanding that as long as I had music to think about and study I could concentrate and that gave me hope. It was like an epiphany that I have relied on to keep me going since it happened. I worked and saved $50 and my brother loaned me another $50 and I bought a guitar and an amp from Lafayette Electronics for $100. It wasn’t a good instrument but I played that thing for eight hours a day for 2 years. Starting at 16 I had a job as a short order cook and eventually saved enough to buy a brand new Gibson SG.
The guitar was the instrument of the counterculture then. Playing it meant something. It was transforming music and society then. It’s roots in the blues connected it with issues of civil rights and a general subversive truth to power sensibility. It was like a tool for change through music. Unfortunately with some exceptions that idea pretty quickly dissolved into bad showbiz rock nonsense, so by the time I was 16 I was looking at other music that wasn’t going that way. I practiced constantly. I became a decent blues guitarist, I liked Johnny Winter, B.B. King and Buddy Guy. Listening to them and trying to play like them really got things moving for me. I copied solos off of records and could play some of Hendrix’s solos from Band of Gypsys. Hendrix died when I was 15, and much of what happened after that didn’t interest me. At some point a friend played Miles’ In a Silent Way for me and soon after I heard the Mahavishnu Orchestra which played in New Haven on their first tour. That was a thrilling and confusing experience for all of us. We all got books of scales and decided we had to learn to play jazz just to have a chance to be involved. We also got every Miles Davis record, every Coltrane, Monk, Dolphy, everything. We all got books of scales and decided we had to learn to play jazz just to have a chance to be involved.
Eventually I took a few lessons from Tony Lombardozzi who had been a student of Sal Salvador. Tony showed me scales, and standards. By that time I was already deeply into late Coltrane, Dolphy, Ayler and Cecil Taylor the AACM and the English Improvisers, and while Tony was respectful of all that he wasn’t interested in helping me to play it. There wasn’t anyone to help. So I set about learning it on my own.
Being interested in those artists and being very aware of some transformational guitarists like Derek Bailey, Sonny Sharock, Keith Rowe, at the time gave me a different perspective, one that was more concerned with invention than interpretation. So when I listened to Wes Montgomery or Jim Hall I heard them as inventors of a way to play the instrument. I heard everyone on every instrument that way. Either you had your own way to play or you copied someone’s way of playing. I studied all of them. In jazz, blues, country, rock, and improvised music and did what I could to sort out what was missing. As I determined what hadn’t been done by listening to all of the other instruments, I noticed a lot of the post-bop language of piano and especially alto saxophone hadn’t really been dealt with by guitarists. The players I liked the most Charlie Christian, Django, Wes, Grant Green, Barry Galbraith, John Mclaughlin and Rene Thomas really played with a lot of the same fluidity of horn players even if they weren’t dealing with Free Jazz,
I think it’s very important to point out that in the 1970’s music was looking forward not backward. Miles Davis wasn’t doing Nefertiti. He was playing loud, raw, electric music with guitarists. One of them was Pete Cosey who was also a member of the AACM. He was tremendous. I find it very strange that in all the talk about Miles Davis in music school it doesn’t include the fact that Miles had moved forward and never went back. I also find it strange that while there is a lot of attention given to John Scofield for playing guitar (and I have nothing against him at all) with Miles little is said about Cosey. I can show anyone Cosey’s influence on parts of my playing. Also, one of the axioms of the AACM in that period and they were major influencers then, was “no Tin Pan Alley”. They were determined to play their own music. That and moving forward were clear expectations then from all sources.
I have stayed with that idea for about 47 years. My goal the entire time was to simply sound like myself. It dawned on me one day while practicing again for hours playing John Mclaughlin solos, that if I really wanted to be like him, I should be myself. I had already been trying other things, just playing, improvising what I heard in my head, things that were inspired by Cecil, Coltrane, everyone and I decided then and there that I was gonna just play that. I was gonna learn how to use that over harmony, in every rhythmic sense, to express whatever I wanted to say and use that as the way into this area of music. This is one of the things I try to pass onto students. I don’t force it on anyone, but I offer the idea that everything done on the guitar was invented by someone, and that they can work on that too. They don’t have to be 100% original, no one is, everyone learns from what already exists, but some have the determination to add something new to that.
The steel string guitar has no classical pedagogy. Everything played on it was invented by the people who played it. Charlie Patton is as important as Jim Hall who is only as important as Pete Cosey and Bern Nix is the same. The highest level of playing it is arrived at by inventing something new.
Cecil Taylor
Cecil was and still is a major hero and influence on me, my music and my life. Anthony Braxton called Cecil a “super genius”. I agree. Again, like Lowell and Braxton, Cecil was a person with a serious idea. It was rooted in that subversive proposition that demanded equality and brought truth to power and he manifested all of it in brilliant, beautiful, original music. His music challenges everyone who encounters it and like every great artist connected to jazz he expanded on the ideas that came before him. He wasn’t afraid of complexity and he defied the racist notion that as a black man he shouldn’t draw from any source that interested him. He configured a magnificent methodology, an original compositional technique, and invented a platform that allowed him and his ensemble to create their own version of virtuosity—exactly what Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and every great jazz artist has done. He understood the “tradition as innovation” perspective differently than his predecessors and articulated it and many other unique ideas about art, life, humanity, injustice and race, with remarkable eloquence.
I encountered his music when I was 18. While it was clear that guitar players had dealt with diatonic harmony, and modal harmony and there were monumental versions of those things being done on guitar, it was pretty hard to find anyone playing like Cecil on guitar. Some elements of that were present in Sonny Sharrock’s playing, the density and intensity but that was more in the free modal version. My focus initially was on the great alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons who was Cecil’s primary collaborator for years. I learned so much from Jimmy. He was the master interpreter of Cecil’s methodology. Jimmy had been a bebopper before playing with Cecil and he retained the articulation of that music but put it in an open tonality and built his playing off of the cells of composed and improvised material present in the groups music. So one very special thing I got from Cecil was learning about Jimmy Lyons.
At around 20 years old I began working on solo guitar music and it dawned on me that while much jazz guitar music was done as solo versions that emulated great pianists, one example was Jim Hall who obviously emulated Bill Evans, I figured that my burden was to do that and emulate Cecil’s piano music and so I set out to do that. This allowed me to rethink the guitar, improvisation, and caused me to study the blues and West African string music so that I could get the technical control I needed to play this way. Combined with the influence of Jimmy Lyons it opened a whole new world of music for me.
I came close to being in Cecil’s group, which had been a goal of mine for years. The closer I got the less it seemed to matter, which had little to do with the music and more to do with what was happening in my life then and the complexities of dealing with Cecil. But I love him and what he stands for 100%
Jazz
I only call what I do Jazz when it’s more convenient than what I prefer to call it, which is Free Music. The term Jazz is so burdened by opinion, confusion, and frankly, racism that I just think it’s too limiting on everyone. It dumbs down so many of the ideas that inform the music. I know that many great musicians rejected the name and some prefer Creative Music, which is certainly better, but to me that is also confusing and has become a term associated with one period in this music. I say Free Music meaning music made by people who are not burdened by the oversight of any institution, critical, or commercial establishment. In other words, music made any way people want to make it.
Also, Jazz implies a linear tradition and that isn’t true. It’s a non-linear continuum, being done without a legitimizing or empirical review on a global scale in a myriad of ways, in small communities of people. But the nodes of that non-linear configuration are connected by a subversive and transformative disposition that is always present in some way, to some degree by everyone involved. If jazz is the music of African Americans, a race of people who suffered and still endure centuries of the worst oppression inflicted on any people in human history, then any engagement with it, whether that is enjoying it in the audience at brunch, or playing it to transform the audience and anything in between is an act of alignment with the people who created it, a statement of support for the best traits of mankind, and a defiance of those who use the worst traits to control people.
All of Free Music has this embedded in it, no matter what the operational methodology is, no matter the level of performance, the geographical locale, even when it is played by the least original interpreter of the least known original inventor. It isn’t possible to avoid that. Jazz is music of liberation invented by people who have had to improvise every aspect of life in order to survive. It’s one of the greatest examples of the transformative nature of art that has ever existed. By engaging with it and by learning from those who invented it, we eradicate the notion of inequality. And in doing so we do what we can to solve to a small degree the sickness that has plagued mankind for centuries.
Greatest personal Influence
My wife Anne is my greatest personal influence. She and I share an outlook about life and what is important 100%. She is the most consistently creative person I have ever known. She’s a graphic designer, a designer of clothes, furniture, a maker of visual arts in nearly every medium at some time, a gardener, a chef, and a writer. She and I make most of the art for my recordings. My music and her design work are our family businesses which we do together as a team with great ease and pleasure. Our discussions are the deepest and most interesting I have ever had with anyone. She is brilliant and insightful. She makes me a better person.
The list of musicians who I think of as great influences is a mile long, but it always seems to have Albert Ayler in first place. I admire him tremendously. His artistic courage and the depth of his expression are endless sources of inspiration.
Derek Bailey
I consider Derek to be one of the most original inventors of guitar music. He poses a dilemma to a lot of people, which is one of the reasons I respect him so much. Some think he can’t play, he has no melody, no rhythm. Others think his music is the most free. Both of those ideas are wrong to me. First, he was a professional guitarist who played in nearly every kind of gig before he started to play his one way. He had a high level of skill in jazz and other genres. That is on display on his recording Balladswhich is a tour-de-force of technique and inventiveness. He told me that he decided to play the way he played because he never got to solo before he did that. He also said that he worked on his own thing because he couldn’t play like Oscar Moore. He wrote out the fingerings for the chromatic clusters he played planning to publish a book on technique. Second, the specifics of his music and the consistency of his career are proof that he had control of it and that he worked with an operational methodology that allowed for the free configuration of the music, but was very specific about what that meant and what was allowed. Therefore he wasn’t more freethan Oscar Moore, he just used different materials when he played.
I also admired his total lack of artifice and pretense in his performances. I once told him that and he leaned down, shook my hand and said “thank you!” with great sincerity.
He and I had one long conversation about jazz guitarists. He knew about everyone and had some favorites, but he was more interested in what hadn’t been done yet. I really admire him for both of those things. I was one of a big group of guitarists who liked him very much. He was a gentleman and had a kind of gravitas about him that helped to bring a cohesiveness to what all of us were trying to do, and he wasn’t a critic, his mind was open. The things he said to me about my playing were complementary and accurate about what I was reaching for. I savor the memory of his friendship. Out of the blue, like Django he invented a whole new way of playing. He knew exactly what he was doing and it was all built on very demanding technique.
In the mid 1980’s a critic asked me why I didn’t play like Derek, the first of many of those questions. I was used to hearing that question but usually it was about John Scofield, or Pat Metheny and my answer was the same with all of them “Because he plays like that” And I learned to take it as a compliment although they never meant it that way. When I first met Derek in Leeds, England I told him that I always answered that question the same way and he said “Thanks for that.”
New Haven
My hometown. I left in 1975 and moved back to the surrounding area 19 years ago. I love this place. My parents grew up here and their families were part of the Irish Catholic community that landed here in the 19th century. I can’t go anywhere in the city without having a vivid memory of my earlier life here or one concerning my ancestors. One of those memories concerns my Uncle Johnny Morris, my father’s oldest brother who became a professional drummer and singer in 1920. He went on to play with Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw (also from New Haven) Bix, Frankie Traumbauer, Eddie Lang, Paul Specht, Vincent Lopez. etc. He was featured in the movie The Big Broadcast of 1932, as was Cab Calloway. Johnny wrote the song Knock Knock which was recorded by Fletcher Henderson and others andParadiddle Joe which was recorded by Carmen McCrea and Dave Brubeck. His life had a huge impact on my father. Johnny got him a job as a road manager for swing bands when he was 18 and he did it for a few years. It was his favorite subject to talk about. On the road he met Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, Count Basie, etc. He even met Stuff Smith. My parents met at a dance Johnny played in New Haven. My mother had heard Johnny open with his band for Frank Sinatra at the Paramount in NY before that so she went to see him and her friend knew my father and introduced them. So I wouldn’t exist without jazz. Between my uncle and me there has been a professional improvising musician from New Haven in the family continuously for 100 years.
When I was 16 I attended an alternative school called the Unschool of New Haven. It was what was then called a Free School, and this one was mostly student run. We made our own course of studies. Mine focused on music. We were right on the edge of the Yale University campus and one block away from the School of Music. Besides regular school studies, I spent most of my time practicing and playing music, listening to records in the Public Library, going to concerts at Yale and around New Haven, looking at art in the Yale Art Gallery and going to see films at the Yale film societies. It was like the university of the streets. I would hitchhike to New York, to hear music at the Vanguard the Bottom Line, or some other place and then take the last train back to New Haven.
Anthony Davis played every Sunday night in New Haven. George Lewis was here. There was a decent free music thing happening and then in 73’ Leo Smith moved here and that made it stronger. But there was a lot of other music happening too. I saw Rashid Ali here. Keith Jarrett solo, Miles, Andrew Cyrille, Larry Coryell, Dizzy Gillespie, even Isaac Hayes. Every rock band came through here. The local clubs the Monterey and the Talk of the Town had regular organ/guitar trios led by Eddie Buster, and I went to those a lot too. It was a great place to be a kid interested in music.
Since I moved back here in 2001, I have done what I can to organize and present music. I ran a series in the public libraries that featured Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Roy Campbell and others. In 2007 Firehouse 12 opened and that filled a void which meant I didn’t have to do it. Also Carl Testa and others ran series, too. We all still do it as much as we can. In addition to Wadada Leo Smith moving back here, Anthony Braxton lives here, Tyshawn Sorey is here (he’s leaving for Philly soon), Taylor Ho Bynum, and a bunch of other notable musicians.
Downtown Music Scene
I was in the original Knitting Factory the night it opened, in the audience. Quickly after that it became the center of what is called the Downtown Scene, I played there quite a bit, I recorded for the label, played on a few of their festivals, including the first one called Tea and Comprovisation,and did a couple of tours through them but I was never a part of that scene. That was connected to Zorn, and I wasn’t. I was much more involved in the NY Free Jazz scene which was fundamentally different. I never did the genre-bending thing associated with that scene. My direction was and is quite different. I don’t have anything against it, I have many good friends who were involved but I wasn’t.
The 80’s
I bought a round trip ticket from NY to Brussels in March 1981 for $99. My first time there. I got off the plane and walked through the city with my guitar to the north side of town where the cheap hotels were. On the way a guy was putting up a poster announcing a James Blood Ulmer gig. He saw my guitar and asked me what kind of music I played. I said “that kind”. He asked me to drop by his club with a tape that night. I did and he hired me to open for Blood later that week. I stayed in Europe for 3 months and it changed my perspective. When I went back to Boston I had (as I mentioned in the Lowell Davidson section) a new perspective and I got to work. A year later I was introduced to the bassist Sebastian Steinberg. He and I worked together for about 8 years. Sebastian enabled me to do what I was trying to do by being a tremendous bassist with great skills and supreme musical intuition. In 83’ I started my label Riti and released 2 LPs and played a lot of gigs in Boston and New York with Sebastion, and a succession of drummers, Laurence Cook, Thurman Barker and Jerome Deupree, I did a bunch of other things like organizing the Boston Improvisers Group which lasted for about a year and a half, and a number of series around Boston, and in NY. I started the music program at Charlie’s Tap in Cambridge which ran for 20 years, but I left it the first year because the owners were not good partners, Chris Rich, Lewis Porter and I organized the Jazz Now Festival at Tufts University. My trio opened for Dewey Redman one night and he hired me to play with him. I also worked with Billy Bang, Peter Kowald, Andrew Cyrille and a bunch of other musicians in Boston and New York
I moved to NY in 1985 and split my time between a room in the city and the Catskills where my girlfriend and I had bought a small house for $21.000. It was tough to make a living but eventually I had a job as an art handler and installer in NYC which was kinda fun. I met a lot of great artists including Jean Michel Basquiat. Being in NY was great just because it was easy to see and hear so many great musicians. So being there did prepare me for what happened in the 90’s which was a great decade for me. My girlfriend and I split in early 89’ and I went back to Boston where I continued doing what I had been doing.
Improvisation
These questions are huge by the way!!!
Well, I wrote and published a book called “Perpetual Frontier: The properties of Free Music (riti pub 2012) that details my thoughts on improvisation. But simply put, I think that improvisation is a very practical and sensible way to make complex music if you know what you’re doing. And by that I mean that you know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to do it. Also, I view improvisation as a verb, an action word, not as a noun. I never make “an improvisation”.I improvise when I confront the contingencies that require action. And I do that to make music, not to make improvisation. The first one might appear as I make the first sound, because then I am faced with what that is and how to proceed.
All improvised music is made using some kind of operational methodology—the unplanned things are not planned, so there must be some plan for allowing them to happen and for dealing with them when they do. Some are based on a harmonic structure and some on melodic or sound structures. Bebop for instance has an operational methodology that is based on a harmonic structure. Without that methodology bebop wouldn’t exist. Free Jazz, free improvisation, etc is made up of 4 different methodologies based on melodic or sound structures. Their reliance on those things are what make them different from bebop. All of these forms of music that rely on improvisation require that players develop a high degree of facility (whether or not they see them the way I do) for a good performance.
I disagree with the idea that everyone who improvises does it their own way. Instead I believe that we all work off of what is already there, some with a very specific use of one or more methodology, and others perhaps with a total lack of any knowledge of any of them, but still engaged with existing practices because they already exist, invented by particular people. I give credit to the people who’ve invented these methodologies, including crediting them for arriving at a cogent, defined and unique one through deep study of what preceded theirs. A version of one of them doesn’t make it wholly unique.
Sunny Murray
Massive hero, super important artist. Totally undervalued, underrated, disregarded. He changed drumming. What is more important than that? Where was his Genius Grant? He didn’t “play ball” so people dismissed him as unworthy of their respect. He certainly wasn’t always polite, or easy on people, but he was a brilliant man who knew exactly what he was doing. I didn’t know him well, but my few interactions with him were great. Matthew Shipp and I (on bass) played a set with him and Marshall Allen at Yoshi’s in San Francisco once. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I was levitating atwerwards for weeks.
“If I could do it all over again, one thing I would do differently…”
I wish I started playing upright bass back when I was 20. I love playing it. The culture around the guitar is always contentious, but not so much around the bass. And it’s much easier to steer the music and build form in improvisation with the bass than it is with the guitar.
"A thing that irritates me…."
The linear interpretation of jazz tradition, which results in the promotion of the repetition of particular ways of playing, as if those that are condoned by particular people are the correct way to play.
The meaning of tradition
I prefer to think of free music as a non-linear tradition of innovation, made up of a myriad of methodologies that are connected in a multidimensional array of interconnected ideas, communities, platforms, and practices rendered in techniques that are invented or modified by those who are involved. The beginning isn’t a straight line either because the Black folks who invented it began by synthesizing interpreted objects that resulted in unique invented methodologies. Their non-linear perspective is inclusive and honors all people as equal. That point alone crushes the imperialist linear kind of tradition that was used to oppress them and so many other people. To me this is the meaning of the tradition as it relates to free music (Jazz). So forcing it to be less than how it is naturally configured devalues the deepest and most transformative value in it.
Underrated
I guess my answers make it clear as to what I think is underrated.
Overrated
I think my answers make it clear as to what I think is overrated.
My greatest artistic triumph
Surviving for 45 years as a mostly self-taught, and completely self-directed musician. Doing what I’ve done as a recording artist to never repeat myself. Finding a way to live better than I did as a kid, to own a home, have a family and keep my financial head above water while doing exactly what I wanted to do. Making music that challenges the notion of what is correct and placing it in the world where it can be heard by people. Never succumbing to the demands of the music business and maintaining my DIY approach. Doing my best and everything possible to make music that supports my primary artistic goal, which is to present something that encourages people to contemplate something elemental, something abstract, for the pure pleasure of doing that.
Social media
I use it as a bulletin board to announce my activities. I regret ever trying to use it for any other purpose. It amazes me that people reveal so much of themselves on it, and that anyone would think that having access to it should mean that spending their time offering their opinion on any subject matters more than doing something more productive.
One question that should have been asked but wasn't....
What is the most difficult thing to accomplish in music? Answer: Creating another way to swing.