Gerry Hemingway: I'm looking forward to coming out to Chicago, although I'm a little road weary. But I'm sure that won't affect performing. One can be well rested and play terribly, or one can be completely exhausted and play fantastically. There's no rule when it comes to the results.
WNUR: The last time you were in Chicago was with Anthony Davis?
Yeah, that wasn't so long ago. I believe the Illinois Arts Council was the sponsor of a set of related lectures and concerts around the theme of love and marriage, and somehow Anthony Davis ended up in this program with his group Episteme, and in this case it was a quintet with Mark Feldman, Mark Dresser, myself, and J.D. Parran, and as well Cynthia Aronson, who sung some songs, and it was very nice... We played at, I believe Symphony Hall, and the acoustic in there was a real joy. I haven't been to Chicago for some time before that. The last time I remember being there was for a concert sponsored by Southend Musicworks. I also played in the Chicago Jazz Festival with Marilyn Crispell and Reggie Workman. That actually might have been more recently than the time I played at Southend. When I played at Southend I was there with Ernst Reijseger and Mark Helias. I think that was '88 or something like that. It was a while ago, those concerts. Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to a chance to present my own music there, particularly in this case the solo music.
WNUR: When did you start performing solo?
Music for the drums by themselves has been part of my interest pretty much ever since I started performing. I come from New Haven, Connecticut originally, and when I was living in New Haven I had the great fortune of meeting Leo Smith. Leo, who Chicago people will know quite well as an important member of the AACM, had a tremendous impact on me as a musician. One of the things that particularly struck me when I was living in New Haven was his solo concerts that he used to give at a little place called the Space. I attended many of them and found the experience of hearing a musician by themselves, combining their intuitive and creative powers as an improvisor as well as their intellectual and more structural sides of their music in their compositional point of view, I found that extremely interesting and exciting. Leo was always fascinating in this department to me, and so I certainly wanted to jump right on board and figure out some way of performing solo drum music in some way that followed suit with this inspiration. So in 1974 I gave my first solo concert, for a grand total of seven people. I think that includes my mother and my father. It was a small beginning to something that I never stopped exploring. Solo music certainly in some ways is the most revealing. It's where your music is pared down to its most essential values. I guess that's why I found Leo's performances so inspiring: I had a sense of who he was after coming to many of these performances. It meant a lot to me to have that kind of intimacy with someone else's musical being.
When I started these concerts, I always had some dedications to other masters of this idiom. I started out by dedicating a piece to Chick Webb, and in a later performance I did one for Max Roach, and another one for Sunny Murray. For the last dedication in my series of four people who I considered innovators in the field of drumming, I chose Tony Williams. Of course there were many others who I had to overlook in choosing just four.
WNUR: And then your first solo LP was dedicated to Baby Dodds.
That's true, yeah. He holds in a special place as far as recordings are concerned in that "Talking and Playing With Baby Dodds" was the very first solo drum record ever made. It was an old little 10" Folkways record, an absolute gem of a recording. I've transcribed some of the pieces and sometimes include them on my program. So since he was the first one to do a recording and because of course his music is so special, he seemed like a logical person to dedicate the first recording to. That recording, called Solo Works, which was released on my own Auricle record label in 1980, was a way of making my relationship to other composers who had influenced me in some way.
In 1979 I moved to New York, and as the years progressed, say from '80 to around '85, I spent quite a bit of time working on solo music, for a couple of different reasons. One was that there wasn't much else happening for me musically at that point. Some of the group things that I was involved had gone dormant. So it was a chance for me to think about my own composition and where it was going. By really focusing just on that music I got a clearer sense of my own identity as a musician. At that point I'd been performing professionally for seven or eight years, but I was still formulating my sense of who I was in the music. Solo music in some ways brought that to the fore in a way that no other experience could. Around 1984-1985, I produced quite a few solo pieces, some of which are still in my repertoire. The record that came from that period is called Tubworks, and it was on the Sound Aspects label.
WNUR: What methods do you use in composing the solo pieces?
I use a lot of different methods, I suppose you could say, as a composer. The one thing I was focused on in 1980 and up through 1985, and which I'm still interested, is extended techniques, which is a way of describing a vocabulary I developed as a drummer. Both as an improvisor and as a composer who was fond of experimentation, I would develop sound vocabulary that extended the possibilities of what the instrument was normally designed for. Percussion in general is designed for a particular kind of attack and decay, mostly a very strong attack followed by a very short or sometimes long decay depending on whether you're hitting metal or skin, and it does that job really really well. But I had an interest in pursuing other aspects of what a drumset could do, what myself and a drumset could express. One of the things I focused on was the notion of harmony as a musical ingredient. Now harmony is one of the last musical consierations one might think of when you think of a drumset, but for me it became a priority to develop music that had harmonic integrity to it. I found that as a composer, music that had harmonic integrity to it tended to be more compelling and had a way of reaching more deeply into our interest as listeners. So I worked on sounds that were continuous: rubs, different kinds of scrapes against the cymbals, bowing techniques, all kinds of different ways of eliciting sustained material from my instrument. I would try to combine the sustained materials in different ways to formulate something resembling chords or harmonic masses.
WNUR: Can you control the pitch of those kinds of sounds on a drum kit?
Yes and no. The drums of course come, depending on how you tune them, with a particular pitch or resonance. And if you pushed down into the skin or rubbed in different ways, you could actually produce different sets of pitches. Continuous sounds that had movement in them, in other words glissando, were also of interest to me. It wasn't that I was trying to make C major chords or anything like that. I was really working with the language that emanated from experimenting with these techniques. The result was something that wasn't necessarily so far afield from a major chord, it just wasn't constructed like notes on a scale. It was constructed from sound instead. When those sounds which were less definable than a pitch on a piano, but yet had definite pitch content, sometimes clusters of pitches and so forth depending on what instrument I was playing, when those sounds were combined definite "harmonic" material resulted. At the same time of course I was continuing to explore rhythmic and melodic and other ideas, but I was trying to integrate all of these elements when thinking about what would make sense as a composition for drums. I was trying to make material on the instrument that I thought held up as well and was as rigorous and as listenable and as lively and as full of possibility as music for solo piano. Of course piano has another kind of thing, it's like an orchestra unto itself. I could never be that, but I wanted to be something that had the richness of expressive possibilities. The drums are very, you know, it is a kind of orchestral instrument itself, it has a very diverse range of color. When you play the whole instrument all at once it's quite a barrage of sound that you can produce on it.
WNUR: Are the pieces you'll be performing at the Empty Bottle on the two new CD's that Random Acoustics is releasing?
Actually most of it is not from those CD's. One is a CD of acoustic music, and the other one is a CD of electroacoustic music. They comprise each a span of about ten years worth of work, since 1985 for the most part. But most of what I'm going to be performing at the Empty Bottle is new works, stuff that I'm currently interested in. One piece that I'm likely to perform is a setting of a poem by Andrew Levy, who is both a friend and I think a quite wonderful poet. He sent me one of his publications, and I was so knocked out by it that I decided that I should do a setting of some of his work. I found that his poetry was also extremely musical, the way the words worked, and the way his images and his ideas and the sounds of his words and the way he read them. I saw lots of possibilties. So I asked him to read his poetry and made a good recording of him reading. I love Andy's poetry, and I think he's a tremendous master as a poet. But as a performer, I think he has a long way to go in terms of the way he reads things. I've always had the feeling that I wish I could change the way that he said things. So that's why I asked him to record the best that he could give for these pieces. So then I took his reading and did all kinds of things to it --
WNUR: You can drown out the parts you don't like!
Well, no no no, it's not that he doesn't read well, it's just sometimes the tempo at which he reads things. One of the things that I did was that I slowed him down. I sampled his voice, I sampled him reading, and then I stretched him out over time. One of the things that samplers are capable of doing these days is a thing called time stretching, which means that the pitch of what you are saying will remain the same, but it will be stretched out over more time. It also creates a little bit of distortion, adds a kind of color to the voice, changes the voice to some degree.
WNUR: Will that be on a backing tape?
Yeah, his reading will be on a tape, but I play with him at the same time. It's like a piece for tape and drums. Most of what I'm accompanying him with are sounds that I devised out of his voice on the sampler. They don't sound at all like his voice anymore; I've done so much electronic manipulation that it's hard to tell that that's actually what it is. What I'm interested in doing these days a lot is combining electronic sampling with the acoustic instrument. So much so that I look at the sampler as a kind of extension of the drumset. So that the sounds that are acoustic and the sounds that are coming out of the sampler are intertwined, and also they just sort of create a bigger and wider instrument for me, more possibilities.
WNUR: In addition to those solo CD's, what other recordings of yours can we expect to see released this year?
The other main item on my plate as a composer is my work with my quintet, which has been growing and evolving now for about ten years, almost eleven years actually. At this point the personnel for the group includes three people who are based in Holland: Wolter Wierbos, the trombonist; Ernst Reijseger, the cellist; and Michael Moore, the saxophonist and clarinetist. Mark Dresser, the bassist, who resides in Brooklyn, is part of the band as well. That group has remained the same now for about four years. We've had a number of CD's now that have come out with this personnel, and another record that's already recorded and finished and due to come out in October or so, called Perfect World. That one, I'm not quite sure which label it's coming out on, but it will be coming out in coordination with a tour that we're going to be doing in October and November of this year.
There are many other projects that are in the works. The trio with Georg Graewe and Ernst Reijseger, which now has four CD's out, and the fifth CD, Saturn Cycle will be coming out on Music & Arts sometime this year. That is a quite wonderful CD and I'm very much looking forward to its release. That group continues to go on although we've been performing less and less. It's sort of a disturbing situation to me. I think it's one of the most interesting improvising projects I've ever been involved with, I think that the musical results of that band are quite strong, and yet it's very difficult to get it work. I think people are quite afraid of what we're doing for some reason. At least promoters are. They would prefer music that was a little more predictable than that group puts out.
WNUR: Georg Graewe is certainly not as well known in the United States as he should be.
Time will eventually heal the fact that he's been certainly underrated. He's a tremendous piano player. People often too quickly associate him with his strong interest in the sort of Schoenberg, Webern twelve tone area. They really miss so much else of what he's capable of doing. There's so much swing, and so many other aspects to what he does. I think he's a remarkable musician. I know that the record label that is based in Chicago, what's the label, you can probably tell me faster than I can tell you...
WNUR: OkkaDisk?
OkkaDisk, yeah, is putting out some of Georg's solo stuff, if I'm not mistaken, at least they plan to. That'll be worth looking out for.
Let's see, what else... Well, BassDrumBone will hopefully persuade someone to put out this new CD we've recorded while on this tour. That's a trio that dates back 19 years in its origin. It's a group with Ray Anderson on trombone, Mark Helias on bass, and myself on drums. I had so much fun with these guys. They're some of my oldest friends, and the repartee is quite strong.
There are others, but I can't think of them off the top of my head at the moment! It's certainly been pretty active as far as recordings are concerned. I have sitting in my possession two or three projects I hope I can find homes for. For instance I have a project called the Mix Quintet which includes Marilyn Crispell on piano, Mark Helias on bass, and J.D. Parran playing reeds and flute, and Erik Friedlander playing cello, and I'm playing the full gamut of vibraphone, marimba, steel drums, electronic percussion, and so forth, quite a wide variety of orchestral percussion. I also have a duo project with Earl Howard, who is one of the most under-documented musicians I can think of. He's had such an impact as a musician on me. He's an incredible saxophone player and perhaps one of the most interesting electronic musicians I've ever encountered. I felt so strongly about that that I dedicated my electroacoustic CD to him. I hope that more documentation will come out from him. He has only one solo CD out to date, but we have a duo CD that has been in the can for about three years now.
As a composer, there's a lot I want to do. The only other thing worth mentioning at this point is that John Zorn has invited me onto his label for a record of through-composed chamber music. For this I plan to write a string quartet, and along with it a second string quartet that I play with, and in addition to that I have a sextet and a quintet piece that are written for mixed reeds and strings. There's one other thing, and then I'll stop, I promise! I have a commission from the National Endowment for the Arts. That commission is for a piece for big band, traditional big band. You may or may not know the NEA is pretty much going out of business at this point, much to the dismay of every composer out there. This was a grant I received on their last round of grant-giving. It's a piece dedicated to Dizzy Gillespie, whose orchestral big band work I always always admired, particularly from the late forties. For this piece, I'm trying to negotiate or raise the money to use the Senegalese bass player Habib Saye, who's known for his tremendous bass playing for Youssou N'Dour, the wonderful singer also from Senegal. I'm hoping to use him and a few other interesting musicians to put together a pretty intense rhythm section, and combine that with some of my writing, some of my strange writing for big band. That's down the road a piece. That gives you a little bit of an overview of what I'm up to...
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