New York, 5-9 June, 1979.
The Zu-place -- 3 small lofts and a basement full of junk in W.24th St. On the top floor Giorgio Gomelski is picking up the pieces in the final stages of a 34-date tour by GONG, MOTHER GONG, YOCH'KO SEFFER and the ZU BAND; economically disastrous and unthinkably chaotic, but nonetheless the first attempt to bring 'European' rock music to America on a co-ordinated 'alternative' basis and as such worthy of admiration. Actually he is asleep and remains so throughout most of the day.
On the middle floor his deprived dog stalks around, no doubt contemplating the final solution.
Below, a large orchestra of improvisors, assembled by guitarist Eugene Chadbourne to play two of his pieces and one by reed-player John Zorn, limber up for the first time.
The Orchestra consists of some students and alumni of Karl Berger's Creative Music Studio in Woodstock -- 'cellist Tom Cora, Chuck ver Stracton (trombone) and Mark Kramer (trombone and organ) -- plus Bob Ostertag (synthesizer) and Jim Katzin (violin) of Fall Mountain, Evan Gallagher, a percussionist from Mississippi, Davey Williams (guitar, banjo, mandolin) and LaDonna Smith (viola) from Alabama, John Zorn and Polly Bradfield (violin), Andrea Centazzo (drums), Toshinori Kondo and Lesli Dalaba (trumpet), Wayne Horvitz (piano and double bass), Mark Miller (percussion), myself, Steve Beresford and Chadbourne, presiding with his usual manic enthusiasm, jovial insults and energetic vagueness. The excitement in the air verges at times towards the atmosphere of a Boys Brigade Summer Camp.
The Schedule is 4 days rehearsal, with 3 concerts in the evenings at ZU. These will consist of small groups and solos in which nearly all the orchestra members are featured (why not all?). Finally a day in a recording studio to put down Eugene's 'English Channel', and a concert at Columbia University of the fruits of our work.
The only other written instructions are directions as to which instrument to play (for those with more than one) and hints as to ambience -- 'Texas Chain Massacre', 'I Walk The Line', 'An imitation of Anthony Braxton', 'Swing', 'R & B Trades', 'Noodling', etc. There are 3 more or less set pieces -- a fragment of West Coast jazz, a loony calypso entitled 'I am the Dentist' which Eugene sings inaudibly into a contact microphone, and the inevitable Disco section. Oh yes, and an Incus Records takeoff.
In the last 'movement', the idea is that a melody line moves around from instrument to instrument, but a melody line generated spontaneously by the musicians themselves. When the piece was performed by an orchestra of students at Woodstock, this was apparently very successful; here it remains unclear and Eugene decides to cut it from both the record and the concert.
There are some inevitable contradictions at work, especially the old favorite of the composer saying that fundamentally he'd like us to do what we want in the improvised sections, only later to reveal that he has quite specific ideas about what it should sound like. Why not write them down? Attempts to discuss this and related issues during and after rehearsals were generally unsuccessful. A popular response was to questions about structure and improvisation seems to be 'This is the way I work'. Frustrating.
The most helpful description of the piece for me was when Eugene said that what he was really after was for it to sound like him if he happened to be an orchestra. As such, it sounds pretty good in the end.
For me, this piece contained both too many instructions and too few. I mean I'd rather have had more specific things to do as in 'Stripsody' or just completely improvised a strip comic, which I've also seen done successfully. Anyway, we got bogged down and Eugene withdrew the piece after one rehearsal.
Players are identified by their initials. The 3 basic strands of the piece are clock events, duos-and-trios and solos. Every time the clock reaches zero, any number of players can 'improvise', in however sparse or dense a manner they please, for up to 60 seconds (in practice, it was usually between 5 and 20). These events take place during the first and last thirds of the piece, but not the middle third.
Duos-and-trios occur in order, by sections. The sections are labelled A to O and each is divided into 14 sub-sections (O has 12). Each sub-section corresponds to a specific duo or trio combination from the Orchestra. The duos-and-trios proceed in strict consequence, but they can overlap and be of any duration (in practice, mostly pretty short). They can also consist of, or end with 'fixed points' or 'help points'. Solos can be taken up at any moment in the piece, but only one at a time -- the soloist stands up or indicates to the 'prompter' that s/he is taking a solo.
That's the basic structure; there's a lot more, to do with 'divisi' -- other sections of 'clock events' (variously timed free sections), or other duos-and-trios, or events which divide the orchestra into different equal numbers of musicians who then improvise as a sequence of soloists (one at a time, each cuing the next). These 'divisi' are cued to the 'prompter' by specific players holding up cards; they override the basic structure (Archery), which has to stop at the next clock-zero to allow the cued section to happen; they are in turn overridden by any breaking of the rules (but in practice usually by a soloist standing up to signal a return to 'Archery' which happens, in theory, at once).
Since durations of duos-and-trios, cues of divisi, solos and choice of whether or not to play 'clock events' are all in the hands of the musicians, there are inevitable struggles; we only begin to touch on the possibilities. During rehearsals there's a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that this could be a lot more fun to play than to listen to; plus incomprehension at some of the claims John makes for his piece in his notes to us on improvisation. Can it be said, for example, that this piece constitutes 'an analysis of an improvisation' anymore that an improvisation constitutes an analysis of an improvisation? And shouldn't any improvised piece require the same alertness and care in making choices as we were required to exercise in 'Archery'?
The rehearsals are good-humoured but concentrated, intense; they have to be to enable us to play the thing at all. I think this concentration has a tangible effect on the concerts at Zu -- I've seldom seen such consistently good, diverse, surprising improvised music as there was over those three nights. It was as if we all felt the constraints of the days lifted, a sense of release.
For example, the solo performance by John Zorn. He used silence effectively and often, but it was not one of those tense, cerebral affairs. The tension has its element of wit, the technique, rather than hingeing on simultaneity of sound was linear, consisting of a rapid succession of quite different timbres and variations of dynamics, crammed into short moment's and interspersed with pauses, shuffling noises, quick changes from mouthpiece to mouthpiece. Rivetting.
I also really liked Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith's duo. They've reached a rare degree of telepathy and manage to be fiery without being aggressive, delicate without being ephemeral. LaDonna also manages beautifully to suggest the tension between the degree to which she is in command of her instrument and the degree to which it wilfully carries her off to some other planet.
Polly Bradfield's solo playing was quite different -- harder, less lyrical and treading a tightrope between controlled and contrived. I thought she had a lot of bottle actually, because she's chosen a difficult path; her playing is austere and uncompromising, a little stiff; she takes chances; her use of silence is similar to John Zorn's, though her humour's dryer (it's there though). After she'd played I felt mentally excited but earthbound.
Chadbourne, Centazzo and Kondo cropped up together and in various combinations with those already mentioned at Zu. The three of them fit together in my mind, seem to represent a particular side of what was going on, inseparable from each other. Chadbourne and Centazzo in particular rest in my memory of that week as a kind of joint venture in bad taste, colossal and hilarious, refined in the former case and crude in the latter, energetically imposing their obsessive and quite singular ideas on whatever context they found themselves in, playing jokes and insulting at least each other and simultaneously carrying the music headlong and head-on. Kondo perfectly suited their schemes in his sensitive, extrovert way and managed to hold the balance, preventing them from ever sinking into meaningless jive by his timing and talent, while appearing on the contrary to encourage their excesses. His performances were real tours de force. The sextet with these three, Zorn, Bradfield and Tom Cora was particularly good I thought.
Steve Beresford sat in with various groups. I like his playing very much when it's in shord burst like that, it becomes more concentrated and he doesn't have so much opportunity to get bored, an important factor in his longer concerts I always think. In the recording and at the final concert he played two great piano solos which gave me as much pleasure as anything that happened during the rest of the week.
Bob Ostertag is the first synthesizer player I've heard (Sun Ra always excepted) with any kind of an interesting approach to the instrument. He derives a lot of his raw material from the radio, and is careful and discriminating.
(It's clear that in remembering the concerts I've concentrated pretty much on personalities; but that's because for me, the concerts came across more sharply on that level than any other. Or is it a function of my memory? Of not having made notes about precise musical occurences at the time?)
Eugene entered into his mad genius persona ("That's really awful -- fantastic!"), pressing on in the face of our murmuring voices wanting to do things again. In the end there were no 2nd takes of anything at all. It probably wouldn't have made much difference under the circumstances. Lesli Dalaba played two fined trumpet solos, quiet, slow, subtle, sure; in fact all the solos went much better than the ensemble improvisations, which was entirely predictable as a lot of us couldn't hear what half of us were doing!
On leaving the studio I inadvertently broke a door. It cost us $100. I could have mended it myself for 2...
100 people in the audiences (it is a 1000 seater). There's a week-long festival of new music downtown, pretentiously packaged and extensively covered in the press, which has no doubt diverted many of the potentially curious.
It's hard not to be inhibited by the structure of the music. We have fun, there are stirring moments, but the contrast with the energy of the first night and now is clear. It never quite takes off. Eugene's piece seems entertaining but lightweight. Is this a criticism?
What most strikes me about John's magnum opus in its 1 1/4 hour performance is on the one hand the importance of the visual element, constant patterns of hand-gestures, holding-up of cards, eye-contact, concentration on the clock; and on the other, the degree to which the bones of the game dominate the flesh, players hurrying to exercise control, to counteract each others' cues, with little apparent thought as to the intended effect, what it will sound like.
Not that that mattered -- in fact it led to a few moments of hair-line humour when the prompter found himself desperately juggling pieces of card and paper while simultaneously trying to keep an eye on the clock, to the accompaniment of a strained and puzzled silence from the musicians and giggles from the audience. I enjoyed that bit!
By the end, when we all tiring, I felt that there was a tendency to respond to cues by making a noise, any noise, just to fulfil our obligations to the score on a minimal level, to bring it to a close. It was as if we were trapped inside the piece with a long slog ahead to get out of it. This was an obvious drawback, though a surmountable one -- provisions for ending could be much clearer. I'm looking forward to hearing the tape.
Reactions varied. A critic friend found it over-weight, old-fashioned and boring but enjoyed individual performances. Others thought it visually compelling, often startling to listen to, but much too long. It needs to be played some more. I can't make up my mind, not only about the piece but about the philosophy of this approach to improvising. Should we merely be 'open' to all different kinds of improvisation, or should we at least develop some kind of critique to discover what processes are at work and to discuss them? Is this imposition of structure an anachronism? A contradiction in terms? Are restrictions placed on improvisors legitimate means to specific ends or are they just interfering with a richer creative process? Does free improvisation relate to anarchy in the same way that structured improvisation relates, say, to democracy? These are other questions...