"Art Should Try to Hover Above Our Humanity a Bit and Not Wallow in It" - An Interview with Damon Smith

The Free Jazz Collective 0

NM: What is the improvised music scene like in St. Louis? Who are the most active and/or influential musicians in that area?

It's interesting because there's more audience than players, which is pretty odd, because they have the oldest presenting organization in the US, which is called New Music Circle, I believe it started in the 50s. And obviously it's the home of the Black Artist Group, which is pretty exciting, but only two people who used to be super active are still around. George Sams is a trumpet player who's around. I've not played with him yet, but I met him a few times, and he was in a group that had an important history, the United Front, which was dealing with a part of the Asian improv group that's in San Francisco and also in Chicago. And the rhythm section was coming from the Asian improv side of things. Dr. Anthony Brown on drums, and Dr. Brown and I were in a trio with Wadada Leo Smith when I was in my mid 20’s, which was pretty exciting. But that rhythm section was Mark Izu, a fantastic bass player from the Bay Area, George Sams and Lewis Jordan But anyway, they had a record on SÅJ, the FMP side label and some other stuff. And George Sams has an album, an LP on Hat Art. And I don't know how nerdy you go into the Hat Art LPs, but there's a period of the LPs between right before the red boxes, or maybe concurrently with the red boxes, where there are single LPs. They were all doubles for a long time and there's a Jimmy Lyons LP and a few other things. But George Sam's is in there. And anyway, it's an old Hat Art LP. And then Darryl Mixon, who's on some of those Human Arts Ensemble releases, he's still around. And there's some great older players like Fred Tomkins and Greg Mills. And then a trombonist named Jeremey Melsah, Alex Cunningham, the violin player, is probably the person I've played with the most here. There was a trio of some young guys, Jake Edens, Chris Muether, and Drew Gowran, and they were doing outdoor concerts that were pretty great throughout the pandemic. St. Louis has all this incredible architecture because it's an old city and there was this 100 year old pool pavilion that had totally open sides and a cover so you can play there when it rains. And they just started doing the series on Sundays, kind of guerilla, but the park people were into it because a lot worse things happen in parks in St. Louis than Free Jazz. And it was really great. And then Drew moved to New Mexico, which is kind of a bummer, because I really was into playing with him. He has a really great feel. Then there's some people doing more electronic music and noise like Janet Xmas and JoAnn McNeil, some good people around like that and Eric Hall. It's an interesting scene and I think that I only got to see about a year and a half of it before this whole thing shut down. And so we'll see what's going on (after). There's another band called Heavy Pauses. I just did a double bill with them.

 NM: You were a friend and collaborator of both Peter Kowald and Wolfgang Fuchs, speaking of legends. What can you tell us about them as people and what did they mean to you as mentors? How have they and the other mentors in your life (musical and otherwise) shaped your work and your outlook?

Kowald was interesting because Gianni Gebbia connected me to him, and I was only around him for a couple of weeks on his big tour. It's the only time I got to be with him in person. We're supposed to do a duo at the Vision Festival,in 2001, and that's when he first got sick and had some of his intestines removed and we didn't get to play that gig. But he was amazing to be around. I learned so much from him. And, of course, the way that he was putting the instrument into the music was really important for me. He was still involved in free jazz. And we get into these differences of (what is) free jazz, free improvisation. But, of course he was really involved in free improvisation as well. And he was a good model of how to straddle that as a bass player because not only was I interested in free jazz, but if I wanted to play free music of any high quality, there were a lot of the Masters of free jazz still around, like in the Bay Area at that time. The great Glenn Spearman was still around. Marco Eneidi was sort of my musical mentor, my teacher, Lisle Ellis. But Glenn and Marco I got to play with a lot. Eddie Gale was around. I played in Eddie Gale's bands for years. I'm kind of sad I never actually recorded with Eddie, that I know of. But Eddie was around. John Tchicai was around. I got to play some gigs with John Tchicai. People like that were around and playing, and you could play with them.

One of the things I think is brilliant about Kowald really is how he was able to do, like, a trio with Fred Anderson and Hamid Drake and bring in all these sound elements from European free improvisation and still maintain a free jazz situation. I think the Germans, in particular, with the fact that they feel like the Nazis took their music from them, they had this impetus of finding a new music and finding different music and finding music that's a little bit outside of their culture, because the music of their culture has been sort of cut off in a way which has to be pretty brutal. And you can even think about the difference between somebody like Barry Guy who has no fears or problems with classical music. He played in classical orchestras for years and uses it in his free playing, and so do I. And that's one of the things that separates me from Kowald, I have a classical education from the bass teachers I studied with. And I don't mind playing classical things with the bow.

Fuchs was an interesting story. Bryerton & me were trying to think of our ideal person to have a trio with. John Butcher was playing with my friend Matt Sperry, who was killed in a car accident and with Gino Robair. I'd been playing for a few years when I started playing with Jerome Bryerton and I think he started playing this music at the same time. We really developed something together and we played a lot around the Bay Area before he ended up moving to Chicago. And so we said, Well, if we want to work together, it has to be on a bigger scale. So who of all the people in the world would we like to play with? We start talking about it. Mats Gustafsson was making incredible records in that time period, like “Mouth Eating Trees” and stuff like that and his solos and his duos with Gunter Christmann, incredible music, right in line with what prior to now we're wanting to work on. But we really loved Fuchs, he was our favorite. And I think Fuchs, as far as the post Evan Parker (saxophonist), he's the most distinctive and just had this incredible sound, sopranino saxophone, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, and he was a very serious person. And one of the things that I really loved about him is that he was way more into music than friendship. And so he had pissed off a lot of people and gotten shut out of certain things at different times in his life because he was so into the music. It’s like Morton Feldman never speaking to (Philip) Guston again because of the cartoon paintings, and they were best friends. I feel like in our world as it is now, you don't want everybody to be like that, but it's a bit welcome. And Fuchs was just so hardcore. He was so focused on the music and focused on the problems of improvising. I’ve been to dinner with him and Paul Lytton and listened to what those guys are talking about. They're so engaged. And it was a fantastic experience to work with him. Sometimes he would sit us down and criticize what we did the night before when we were touring with him. But he was really funny, sometimes not even intentionally. He had an incredible sense of humor. And so even though he was grumpy, he was cracking jokes all the time, too. There were hilarious things he would say, he was a great person to be around. I still think he's one of the most important voices on the reed instruments in free improvisation, he was really into having your own material that you're responding to. I don't know if I put this one in the CD titles, but I asked him once about a bass clarinet player who was very young at that time who I thought was really good, and Fuchs said, “Besides Dolphy, who is good?”

The other mentor I’ve had, of course, is Lisle Ellis. I was pretty quickly able to meet Bertram Turetzky, who is one of the most important bass players of 20th and 21st century new music, and he is really focused on improvisation, and his most famous student, Mark Dresser, has been a really great source of information. Dresser mapped out all the harmonics and multiphonics and sub-tones (for the double bass) and has written it all down. A lot of the stuff that I do now involves Mark Dresser's research of the instrument, (it’s) right at the core of what I'm doing. What's so cool about it is it doesn't make you sound like him at all. I want to have a good sound and a good tone, and I want to play well, but I feel like his ideas have led me to totally different places than they led him, which is part of what’s great about it.

And going back to Kowald, when I heard the way Kowald was playing - there's certain people like the sculptor Richard Serra, where he takes an idea to its absolute end - but listening to Kowald, you hear so many other things that could happen. It's almost like he opened up doors to all these worlds with all these different things that he did. And it’s the same with Dresser's research, it just pushes all of us that are engaged in it further and further. What happens is because of the way he's mapped things out. If you do discover a sound, it's immediately a lot more portable than it was before he mapped these things out. You can do it in other keys and other pitch areas and registers that you wouldn't have been able to without it. I'm really into playing with a piano, but not being subservient to piano the whole time, but relating to it. So you don't want to just be unrelated, because that's no fun. But I feel like with Dresser's research, I can take these sonic things that Kowald and others did and bring them back and forth between tempered tuning and work with the piano as much as I want or go against things as much as you want to.

My first free improvisation gig of all time was with Marco Eneidi and Gino Robair. Everybody went home after the gig and we didn't have to rehearse. We didn't have to hang out. Being in a rock band is a bit like herding cats. There's the one person who's a little more engaged and you're trying to get people to come rehearse and do things. And I go play with these two, and the music was ten times better than my rock band, and I didn't even have to talk to these guys until ten minutes before we played. Gino and Marco come in pretty early. Marco played with Don Cherry and studied with Jimmy Lyons. Marco ended up being a real mentor of mine right up until he passed. He was someone that I stayed in touch with and he really knew the music and taught me so much about the music, made me practice a lot. I lived with him for a while, and I had one of those houses where musicians were coming through, like a three bedroom apartment that people were rotating through in Oakland.

My third improv gig was at the same place, this little coffee shop that I found, with Henry Kaiser and Gino and a bass player named George Cremaschi. Kaiser and I are still working together. He’s one of my closest collaborators, even though we're far away. There’s some Plane Crash work, which is Weasel Walter, Henry, and myself coming up soon. Sandy (Ewen) I started playing with in Houston when I first moved there in 2010, and she has a really original sound and original way of playing. And there were certain things that I had been working on that were parallel to hers. We didn't know each other at all before, so there was no question of influence. I've got a big wood screw also, you know. You start playing with (different) people and you see who you can get projects over the finish line with, and Houston is a really great place to play the music. Right around 2004, Weasel had been in Oakland for a year and had lost interest in free improvised music and free jazz, and then got it rekindled in Europe somewhere. He was going through all these free jazz records and DJing, I think it might have been Austria, and then he got in touch with me. He actually got in touch with me. This is a cool thing about Weasel that I'll never forget, my first emails from Weasel Walter came to me when I was playing at the Total Music Meeting with Fuchs and Bryerton, and it took us a little bit of time to get together. But then when we finally did we played together really well right from the start. At that time CDs were a bit harder to make because you still had to choose between 1000 or 500 (units), and things were starting to get a little shaky with the digital stuff. My label was doing okay then, but he had different connections and it was a lot easier for him to put out an album at that time. So he puts out all these albums of what we're doing, and it was pretty great. I feel like there was a period where I started to let Weasel drive the boat. I was involved in these things with him, and I would set some stuff up, too, like our trio with (John) Butcher and some of this stuff, and I started to have him play with me (and) with the Europeans that came through and we ended up doing stuff with Vinny Golia and Gianni Gebbia. I don't know how many records we’ve made together, but I think it's 60 or 70. It's up there. The playing is always really easy, because the way that he's thinking about the time and the texture kind of matches up with mine. But then he's got these other influences. One of the things I've always thought about is how my interaction with death metal is through Weasel's bass drum. I don't listen to it (Death Metal), but I get it there, and I like to lock in. We're just able to get projects done, even to this day. He's my main mixing and mastering person also, as well as one of my favorite drummers to play with, when we can play together.

The other important person that I should really talk about is Alvin Fielder. His daughter lived near me in Houston, and he would often stay with me because he liked to listen to records. So he'd be in town for family stuff and he'd stay with me and listen to records and hang out, and we ended up doing a ton of playing together. Being able to get my swing feel directly from his ride cymbal was priceless, (from) somebody with that much history. He was also really into Paul Lytton. He loved Paul Lytton. He loved a lot of European free drummers, as well as being a total scholar of Bebop drumming and free jazz. We were talking about drummers (who played) with Cecil driving to a gig in Birmingham, Alabama, and I said, oh, I really like Tony Oxley, and he said, I like Tony, too, he's got all those beautiful sounds and that’s really incredible - but the thing is - underneath it is a pretty straightforward swing, and then he said, Andrew Cyrille is more adventurous with swing. He liked Andrew, and this idea that swing was something to push the boundaries of, and to push forward, was really a big eye-opener right then. Especially having this person to work that out with, this person who could swing, like, as much as Max Roach. Then he put forward this idea and that defined our work until the end. How can we push these things? How can we engage with them? And it ultimately drove us to doing the gig. We did one gig, but it was enough, with Joe McPhee, and I think that album (“ Six Situations ”, 2017) really expressed a lot of what Alvin and I were working on, which is this dichotomy rather than free jazz. It was more free improvisation than (free) jazz. There's a way that Joe plays on that album that is not in the notes, and not in the style, but there's a certain authority and rhythmic power that's related to Sonny Rollins that Joe McPhee plays with on that album. And then we veer into total free improvisation. And then back to this kind of jazz idea, which has really been interesting and really to look at the rhythmic underpinnings of these things. The last few years it has been Ra Kalam Bob Moses. I learn so much from him.

NM: Something I didn’t realize until recently was that you worked on the soundtracks for the Herzog films Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. What were those experiences like? How is improvising for a score different from improvising with, say, a dancer or performing artist? As I understand it Thompson led the effort for ‘Grizzly’ and Kaiser/Lindsey on ‘Encounters…’ How much free reign was given to the ensemble and did it feel restrictive compared with your normal practice?

(Henry) Kaiser and Herzog were fairly tight and knew each other, and when Grizzly Man came up, Kaiser put the band together. Richard Thompson was the main person providing the music, and Kaiser was directing things, he didn't play on Grizzly Man. We were given a fair amount of free reign. The interesting thing was Herzog sat with us, he was sitting between me and the cellist, and he was giving suggestions and directions. There's a funny moment, I think it's on the DVD, where the drummer John Haynes - a fantastic drummer - is playing hand drums and then Herzog says, no, this is too much like the hippies in Golden Gate Park. There was also a moment in there where they were trying to tell us to improvise, but they actually wanted a pretty straight, like, twelve-eight rock thing, and I got a quick lesson in how rock precision is very different from jazz precision. And I kind of struggled, and it was tough not having thought about that kind of playing in years. What was really nice is Jim O'Rourke was there and Jim had played double bass in high school, and I remember being relaxed enough to just say, Jim, what would you play here? He ended up taking my bass away and he played it. I got to see the genius of Jim O'Rourke in action in that whole session. He's not playing a ton on it, but he's there sort of connecting the dots a lot.

I gave him (Herzog) my duo with Kowald, and I started talking to him about the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who he is clearly very influenced by, and he gave me these little Post-It notes with German writers on it that I should read. And then when we did Herzog’s film about Antarctica, it was the second time I got to work on the soundtrack. But the second one, he wasn't there. And David Lindley was kind of leading the session in a way. Henry was there. Henry was playing on it, actually. And I had gotten my friend Jen Baker to play trombone. And Cheryl Leonard - who's a fantastic musician - and she was doing a lot of things with tuned glasses at the time. And I was able to get these tunings from Cheryl's glasses and make sort of fake Giacinto Scelsi music out of them, and I got to direct things a bit with the tunings and I re-tuned my bass, so I'm doing a lot of open strings that specially tuned to the other instruments, and Lindley tuned to them.That was pretty fun. I also got to direct the music we made for The Volcano. I think what happened was they asked for fake Scelsi, and I actually worked up one of the Scelsi solo pieces, so I got to take over a bit and say, okay, we're going to do this tuning into these notes, going to play like this. It was pretty fun. That one's got a little bit more of my music in it. For Grizzly Man we didn't play to the film, we just played to Herzog for the most part. I want to play for The Bear Fight, but Werner didn't want to use music there. It was recorded anyway and then when Werner cut the film, he thought, oh, yeah, I need a little bit of music there. So there's, like, 15 seconds. But it's my idea. It's me and Daniel de Gruttola on the cello scraping around. And so that's pretty exciting, too, to kind of have that on there. There were a lot of things that were different from the work that I normally do, but it was a really great experience to have. Kaiser is the only person who I would agree to play a Pink Floyd cover with because I know that the outcome would get us to somewhere interesting.

NM: Being that list making season was recently upon us, would you mind sharing with our readers some of your favorite music from 2021, both brand new as well as new-to-you?

I think the IST box set is really great, there's also a fantastic trio with Steve Beresford on Confront. Rafał Mazur made a great four CD set of solo bass (“ The Great Tone Has No Sound”, 2020). Joelle (Leandre) has a three CD set (“Beauty/Resistance”, 2021) and one of the duos is with Rafael. There's a great double CD from Barry Guy, Augusti Fernandez and Lucia Martinez (“Bosque de Niebla”, 2021). And then, of course, all these Wadada albums, Great Lakes Quartet (“The Chicago Symphonies”, 2021), Wadada’s solo trumpet CD. Wadada with Milford Graves and Bill Laswell (“Sacred Ceremonies”, 2021). And then there's the great quartet XPACT that was resuscitated (XPACTII, 2021) - with Stefan Keune, Erhard Hirt, Hans Schneider, and Paul Lytton - that’s a great group. The Kontrabassduo Studer-Frey made a new one, “Zip”, which is great. Astral Spirits has been doing all those great albums. Ahmed, that's the (Free Jazz Blog) record of the year, I agree with that for sure. I think one of the most important albums of the year is the Tom Prehns Kvartet (“Centrifuga”, 2021). I'm always interested in everything Jon Abbey is doing on Erstwhile. Then there's been these really wonderful Feldman CDs with Judith Wegmann doing “Triadic Memories” and “For John Cage”. The John Cage number pieces on Another Timbre are really fantastic. One of the things that did change me at the beginning of the pandemic is I just got less interested in digital music. I order the CD, and for the most part, I'll hang back and wait until I get the real CD. The only time I've gotten so excited about an album that I've broken (that rule) was recently, there's a new album coming out with Enrico Rava, William Parker, and Andrew Cyrille (“2 Blues for Cecil”, 2022) and I got a digital promo of that and I listened to it.

NM: Part of free improvisation is how the music is interpreted by the listener. I would argue that listening to an album is a step removed from the experience you would get at a live show. What insights can you give our readers on ways to bridge this disconnect? In your opinion what should they listen for and expect from quality free improvisation?

I think this gets into the meaning of art and what we're trying to do with all of this. The text artist, Lawrence Weiner, is somebody who I'm really into. He did these texts on the wall that he said were sculptures, and he said that he's always trying to make something useful. Somebody once asked Morton Feldman about a structure, and he said, it's not a bridge, you don't have to walk on it. The idea is that you can have things that don't work functionally, in art. It's a place to take ideas.That's why there is an importance on not putting a function on these ideas and to let the ideas just be. So the idea is to be open ended enough so the ideas can be useful, if not functional. Then maybe in another context, they can give an answer to something else. Einstein said he improvised on the piano every day. These last two years have been the most crazy social situations that I've seen, and a lot of times you want your music to respond to those things. There's this impetus to respond to it. But the processes of being an artist are so much slower than that. So in a way, it's better to just respond to those things as a person and then not abandon your post with your work and let your work take that slower path. It's hopefully feeding systems that could lead to some kind of change. Maybe. But it's a much slower, much bigger idea. And in some ways, you would argue that listening to an album is a step removed from the experience you're getting at a live show. I wouldn't call it a step removed. In some ways, I would say that you're removing a step from it because you're getting the pure audio experience when you listen to an album. And I'm definitely one of the few people that is going to say that an album is ten times more important than a concert and especially an album that you can go back to over and over again, that's going to reveal its secrets slowly over time is really incredible. The album I mentioned earlier, (Butch Morris’) “When the Sun Is Out, You Don't See Stars”, I’ve never had a concert that's given me what that album has because you can just keep revisiting it. And I think in this music, any of the free improvisation and experimental music that's worth hearing. One of the ideas is the details, and they just go by too quickly in the concert. And then sometimes the performative things with the musicians, maybe they're making sex faces or they're squirming around or whatever, and then you actually listen to what they're doing and what they're actually playing isn't all that much.

So there's that aspect of really just connecting with the sound. And over time, what you can get out of it. And in my opinion, what people should listen for and expect from quality free improvisation is that it's an open ended thing that's interesting. What they should listen for is whatever they're trying to work on in their work or in their life. If there's a solution for it in there somehow, there's things even if you're not a musician, there's still solutions for other things in these other art forms. And I think that's what's interesting, somebody could think improvised music is great because it doesn't expire. If I have a concert coming up, I might find a solution in something Derek Bailey recorded in the 70s, or I might find an idea that could be expanded on. And so in my own work, I'm trying not to judge the music in the way that I used to before, like when I would try to make a good record. I'm trying to just make sure that the ideas are presented well and played well, right? Because it's not up to me whether the work is going to be useful to the listener, that's the listener's job. You decide if you can get something out of a particular recording, and maybe in 20 years, there’ll be a young musician trying to think differently about bass and percussion and maybe there's some answers in some of those that I was involved in. And I think that's what's interesting and that's what it could be.

NM: You recently called us out for having too much ‘pop music’ on our year end lists, which I thought was an interesting thing to say, all things considered. Being that pop is a fairly loaded word, can you elaborate a little bit more on what you meant?

In that case, I'm not talking about the quality of the music - I can’t stress that enough. I'm not saying not being free jazz means anything more than that. It was also said in the context of there being many outlets for that music vs. very few or really only one for free jazz! And lastly, it was said in the context of having released an album with one of the few foundational figures still with us of the music that got passed over by all the writers on the blog. I do think that definitions are important. I think the meanings of words are important. I think that there are limits to everything, and it's interesting to see what you can do. But one of the things that happens is when you include another element that's outside of the boundary, then you get the critical ideas behind that element. A good example would be Joseph Beuys made a sculpture called 7000 Oaks. And it's 7000 Oak trees planted around the city of Kassel. And there's a basalt stone next to each one, 4ft high or something, and so the stone ends up being the sculpture. And then the idea of it is, that it's Greening the city, it's a social project as well. Well, 7000 trees actually does make a significant difference in how many trees. Whereas if you said your art project is a community garden that produces four radishes at the end of the year, it's not a very good garden. It fails. This garden is not a super interesting art project because it's just a garden like anybody else would have. Right?

I think for example, Fire!, beautiful music and a good band. Nobody knows the music better than Mats Gustafson, he's a total scholar of the music, and he knows he's not making free jazz when he makes a Fire! record. He knows that he's exploring his interest in indie rock and pop music. And those have backbeats, those have bass lines, and I think people who are interested in it would say that the reason it's interesting is because of that. It's interesting because this person who usually makes free music is doing this other thing, same with Natural Information Society. Joshua Abrams is on probably 50 or so great free jazz records, he knows when he's making these records that that's not what he's doing (making free jazz). I don’t think we can call consonant music that is in time free jazz - and again, that doesn’t mean anything else about the music.

So when you do have these elements, one of the things that is not talked about as much is just the absolute power that music has over human beings. And the reason why we're talking today only has to do with that. It’s the same with so many people in my life, it's only because of that power. When I was younger, a lot of my peers were really Braxton-obsessed and walking around trying to talk about being in control of your forces. And I think that is something that is a way to think about this, when you engage in these things.

NM: Deeper in the same thread you said the following, “One of the issues with pop elements like back beats is not just what it is but how addictive those elements are and how much power they have over human beings. One of the aims of free music is to let the other elements of music shine without those elements in the way…” Can you talk about this a little bit more? Particularly as it pertains to the aims of free music, which aren’t always known to the listener.

When you bring in a backbeat, it's so addictive to human beings, it takes control over us. And when you look at anything you might call “bad” pop music, it's usually just whatever with a backbeat. And then you start to bring in tonal harmony, which total harmony actually has to do with the way our ears work and the overtone series and things like that. Our ears love this sound. And so when you bring those things into the music, it's almost like bringing in a shotgun to a boxing match like, well, you should win. And so if we are talking about things from a competitive perspective, yeah, you should be able to make a more pleasant album to listen to with the backbeat than without. So that's a little bit on “pop” elements. And then the ECM records, the last free jazz records they made were probably the Hal Russell records in the 90’s, and before that probably Marion Brown. I listened to two new ECM records this morning. I love that music, but I think it's pretty far from free jazz, and I don't use pop music in my life. I don't use it as a musician or as a listener. But I understand people who do because I use bad TV and comedy and things like that, and things that aren't high art that are outside of music. I just tend to go away from music for those things instead of getting into other music. So it's not like I don't understand. I understand people who do it. And I don't mind you're in a bar and some great pop music that comes on. It's great. It's perfect. So then if we elaborate a little further on it, if we think about the problem with the addictive quality of these elements, when you let them in it's really hard to control. It's really the self control of the musicians, of the presenters, of the listeners. It's beyond what we're capable of as human beings a lot of times. And that's why the older improvisers sort of shunned it 100% because there are few instances where it can be really interesting. Once we actually recognize the power music has, we have to take responsibility when we harness that power for our work.

NM: What do you think about when you are improvising? How is your process different when you play in a group versus playing solo?

Mark Dresser has a really great phrase about how he came to all the stuff that he's figured out for the bass, in which he talks about analyzing his intuition. So a lot of these things came from him improvising on his ideas and then mapping out what they are more technically. You get into things which would be more of a subconscious area when you're listening, when you're bringing things in. Or maybe you've thought about the combination of people and you have ideas you want to bring to the session. I had that recently. You let things happen in their way. And then at a certain point you pull yourself out of that, and look at what's going on. And then for me, I'm often placing things historically, what historically has happened here in this combination since I have the great catalog of improvised music in my head. And then I think, how can I move that somewhere different? Because I like to think of things not as influences, but as starting points. I want to start where Kowald left off, things like that. And then recently I started to think about a recording that I did, and I thought about ideas of time to make sure that it's not rhythmic. So I broke down the patterns to make them asymmetrical and I found that I could do that and do my regular improvising around. It was nice to have this new idea to start with.

And then I suppose the difference between solo and a group is that when you're playing solo, you can really focus on what you're doing, whereas when you're playing in a group, your ear has to divide between what you're doing and what everyone else is doing. And even if you're holding your ground, which I think is an important thing to do as an improviser, you're still noticing where the other people are, even if you're not trying to link up with them perfectly.

NM: Who would you like to work with that you haven’t had the opportunity to yet?

If there was a way I'd really like to play with the great European drummers like Paul Lovens or Roger Turner or somebody like that. That's something I'd like to do. There's a lot of these people that I'd really love to play with like Gunter Christmann, if that's possible. And then another thing I'd like to do is I'd like to make an album with two pianos. I really like mass pianos. One of my favorite things around this time of the year is John Cage's Winter Music, which is for 1-20 pianos. I would love to do a trio with Steve Bereseford & Sven-Åke Johansson. I would love to play with the Swiss Pianist Judith Wegman, also the French pianist Sophie Agnel. I've played with Shelley Hirsch but I'd like to do more playing with Shelley Hirsch, maybe an album with her. I'd like to do some more things with Joe McPhee, because I really love his music. Hopefully I'll be able to play with Gabby Fluke Mogul this year or the next, we'll see. I would really like to play Brotzmann again, but in the context of my work with Jaap Blonk - either just trio or the quartet with Jeb Bishop & Weasel.

NM: As a musician who also runs a label, do you find you sell more albums during years where you have more new releases? How has the pandemic impacted the revenue split between what you bring in for concerts versus recorded music (if you don’t mind me asking of course, just rough percentages nothing explicit, this is a hazy topic amongst us at FJB that we would like to learn more about)? Do you note any buying trends besides Bandcamp day? More sales during the Summer, etc?

So this is an interesting topic. I definitely sell more when I have new releases. I think being a collector of the music helps me sell my music a little better as well, knowing what they (other labels) do. If I'm ordering something specially from overseas, I'm almost always going to get two things because I feel like if something's coming from Austria I should get another item in that envelope. I find that when I make a new release, then my back catalog sells a little better, and I think it is a good policy. If you like a musician, buy some back catalog stuff along with new releases, it gives you a better picture of what they're doing. There's a certain period in the music, 2010-on where I don't have many of the CDs left. A lot of those are just all-the-way sold out, I just have a few. But the period right up until then, from 2000 to 2008, I might have a lot of. I’m finally getting low, but I’ve had some for years because you have to make a thousand CDs. So there's the thing in the thousand CD period. I've been at it for so long and starting out with a release with me and Peter Kowald and then immediately having Fuchs, it's kind of clear what I was up for post FMP, if you want to call it. There's a clear audience who buys those CDs, and I've got people who've really been with me since the very first one who are still buying stuff and have kept it going. I feel like I'm in a good place, setting up my own label in 2000 and keeping it going. People like me are set up like, well, I can just do it myself. You know, there's certain things, if I want a nicer production working with a label can really help, but maybe a production I couldn't afford or something like that or, something for visibility. I like to work with Astral Spirits on certain projects for a couple of reasons. I think Astral Spirits is a great label and they're going to get it to a different audience, and I also think it's good for them. I like what they're doing with their money, putting it back in these younger musicians.

Obviously, at concerts you sell a lot of CDs, but Bandcamp Fridays almost compensated for that. I'm (currently) selling as much as if I was playing and releasing the albums, mainly just because of Bandcamp Friday, they made that happen. And what I can say about numbers is that my releases pretty much pay for themselves; there's not a ton of money being made, but the money goes right back into the label. There's enough money that I'm able to do a little more, make a little bit nicer productions when it's time, things like that. I don't really see differences in sales during the summer or winter, I don't really see anything like that. Maybe in the fall there ends up being more, but there always seems to be more concerts. Even in these times, I've been able to play some, whether it's outside, whether it's online, whether in the little window where we were able to go out and do concerts these last couple of years. There are definitely days where a review moves some CDs or when I've done a pre order.Then that day I'll do better. And then other times when I run sales at my label or I do bundles, I'll notice I've got a bunch of CDs that are related to this one, so I'll make a bundle and then those move pretty well, but my audience is pretty loyal and they've been making this all possible, which is great in kind of talking about how I sort of prefer records to concerts. I prefer making records. I love to play concerts. It's great.

From Keith Prosk: How much exchange there is between the plastic/visual arts and your musical practice; I know you are deeply attuned to the arts world and I wonder how this feeds back into your playing, particularly in the context of something like the collaboration with Keith Rowe, who has also taken significant inspiration from the visual arts.

There's a fair amount of exchange, but I think it's a bit more like a Venn diagram. And I think there's that area where, let's say poetry and music and art all meet and the mechanics are sort of off to the side. They're important. But that meeting point is where the art really happens. There's a difference between why Cy Twombly’s thing goes beyond a scribble, and why Brotzmann never seems awkward. Brotzmann can play some really sideways stuff, but he understands art and he knows how to place it, where another musician is just not going to sound as good. There's an aspect of art that really translates to music and then there's aspects that don't, obviously.

I got into art as a way to understand more about music, but it's also become its own sort of hobby. I'm looking into art and allowing it to be what it is and see what it is. And I think that there are different ways of taking it in art. Even though I've got a big collection of art books, I think seeing a painting in person makes it a little easier to understand, whereas in music I think the record is going to give you a better overview, but there's a lot of exchange. Keith Rowe is one of my favorite musicians and I collect his work in depth. I stay up with whatever the newest release has been. His last solo guitar LP (“Absence”, 2021) would be one of the releases of the year. I would say it's really great. I bonded with him personally around art and things like that and talking about Cy Twombly and different artists. And one of the greatest days of my life I spent about 2-3 hours in a late Barnett Newman exhibition at the Menil, which I would say is my favorite Museum in the world, the Menil in Houston, Texas, and just going through that with Keith and talking about Barnett Newman. And then we talked about music and other things and that's where the idea for the trio with Sandy came about, we (Smith, Ewen, & Rowe) were just out drinking in Houston. Eventually I got an email from him saying he was going to be on tour and, but nothing in Houston. He asked if I wanted to work in a trio with Sandy. Then we did that whole project, which ended up being pretty nice.

NM: I saw you were in Chicago not so long ago at the Art Institute. What are some of your favorite art museums? Who are some of your favorite visual artists? To close out the topic, how about your favorite cinema and associated artists?

The Menil in Houston is probably my favorite Museum in the country. And then the Brandhorst in Munich is probably a close 2nd, those are both the places with the most Cy Twombly. I'm living in St. Louis now and they've got the Pulitzer Art Museum, and it's a really beautiful Museum. It's got Richard Serra’s first Torqued Ellipses outside of the Tado Ando building. And whatever exhibition they have is just installed in the most pristine way. Everything's perfect. The building is amazing. The attendants are all people who are super into art and really nice and happy to talk to you. Same with Houston, the gallery attendants were all really cool. These museums are free too, you can just walk in. And sometimes you can go to one room and leave or do the whole museum. Those are probably my two favorites. The Fort Worth Modern (also an Ando building with Serra!) is a really great Museum. The New York museums are great, of course, all of them pretty much the Guggenheim, the MoMA, the Met Breuer, the Whitney. I was just at the Whitney and saw the big Jasper Johns Show. It was fantastic. And the Art Institute of Chicago is a great museum; fantastic collection. The SFMOMA is the first Museum where I really got into art, and so I have an affection for that. The Rose just outside of Boston is a really beautiful small museum that does great shows.

NM: You seem to be an avid reader of poetry as well, can you share some of your favorite poets and comment on how poetry has influenced your music?

I think for anybody who's just kind of starting out in the music, a great guiding light is Steve Lacy. There's just absolute clarity on what Steve Lacy does and talks about. And he was really interested in poetry, he was really interested in art too. So some of those interests came from him, some from other places. But when I came to the music I was living in the Bay Area and Berkeley has some of the greatest bookstores in the world, great poetry sections. The other thing about that is, I was dealing with public transit. And what I really liked about poetry is you could knock out a poem between your train stops, or whatever. There's the brevity of it, I really liked the closure of it. And then, of course, like visual art, it becomes its own interest. Now I'm interested in poetry. You get really interested in language. As far as favorite poets? This could even be considered a release of the year, but Nathaniel Mackey's “Double Trio”. It's a box set of three poetry books, and the name comes from Glenn Spearman's “Double Trio”. Tons of free jazz references in it. If there's ever a book of poetry that could also be considered a free jazz release, this is one of them. Fred Moten, who is another favorite poet, has a book called “ The Feel Trio”, which is great.

One of the things that I like to do with poetry is get titles from little phrases of poets. What I really like is to use translation, because then I feel like you're not taking directly from the poet. Octavio Paz is one of my favorite poets. Paul Celan is one of my favorite poets. My favorite living poets, though, would probably be Fred Moten, Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe, who does these fantastic concrete poems. Jaap Blonk is another one. His poetry is fantastic. An exciting thing for me on the subject; I wanted to steal titles from Fred Moten for the last Alvin Fielder Quartet album ( The Shape Finds Its Own Space , 2016) and (for “ The Very Cup of Trembling ”) I was able to ask Fred to name the record and the tracks for us, and he did. I don't think anyone has ever done that before. He gave us some nice names and named the album with a beautiful title, “The Very Cup of Trembling”. These poetic titles are really great and it helps the record shine a bit if you have a nice, strong title. On the Roscoe Mitchell Quartet release Sandy uses railroad spikes on the guitar. There’s a book from Blank Forms of Joseph Jarman's poetry (Black Case Vol I & II : Return from Exile, 2019). It's a fantastic book, and I would recommend it to everybody. That phrase, “The Railroad Spike Forms the Voice” came from a Joseph Jarman poem. Poetry is something I'm just engaged with every day. I read some poetry and there's the brevity of it. And even if I'm dealing with long form poems, I'll just take a little bit of time, and I think that's helped my music and finding titles for it, but also finding those edges of making it go beyond math, making it go beyond traditional music. I think the lyrics used to help shape more traditional music a bit because the syllables would push it a little this way or that. So it's not just a direct rhythm, which is math in classical music and even in folk music. I think the lyrics could do that. And then having that sense of what poetry means to me helps the music go forward. But then again, it's it’s own practice, and in some ways it can be a break from music, but obviously it helps..

I read this great essay called “Dan Flavin and The Catastrophe of Minimalism” and then we named an album “The Catastrophe of Minimalism” (with John Butcher and Weasel Walter). And got great cover art from the late Cor Fuhler, he had posted his art and gave us permission to use it and then it all came together in that album, it had been nine years since we recorded it. When Cy Twombly talked about using poetry in his paintings and his titles, he said he's never illustrating the poem or the mythology. A lot of it's Greek mythology and things, but he's looking for an atmosphere. I think that poetry can help you find those atmospheres. When I play in my practice, maybe some Bach or learn to play a Mingus tune, the idea is that you're playing great music so that you can recognize great music when you play it yourself.

NM: Part of the charm of your Facebook page is your enthusiasm for offal and BBQ. We would be interested to know if rituals of the pit or eating or cooking or turning poor man's meats into delicacies or something else informs your musical practice in some way?

So,thinking about being a broke musician and trying to map out what your life is going to be, what do you want to have as a marker for success? One of the things I think is important for me is I wanted to have an art collection and so having things like Joseph Beuy’s “Multiples” and prints by artists like Bruce Conner and (Roy) Lichtenstein. I've got a Jasper Johns print. You can get these things for not much money if you’re looking. I feel like it's really important (to have an art collection) and to also eat interesting food. This idea of taking an off-cut and mastering it, finding out what this element is like. What does a goat kidney taste like? Some of it is just curiosity but you do find some keepers. Some people might be surprised to hear that I would recommend most testicles, (they) are pretty damn good if they're prepared well. Goat and lamb kidneys are really wonderful if they're done right. There are other things, like pork kidneys, that are really for the hardcore. There are certain other things that are used in a lot of Asian cooking, like pig uterus, and you can go buy one. So a lot of this has to do with if there's one available, I see it as a challenge. Goat heads are $4, and a goat head or a pig head or a sheep's head can be really delicious if you do it well. Other times you find things that are for the hardcore only. Like bull penis, you don't really need to mess with. The regular person doesn't need to put that in their diet. But I would say testicles are generally great. I think livers are usually good, hearts are usually good, especially when you are able to make them really well. And some of it is about getting control over these things and trying to make them really good. Now I live in St. Louis, and there's a great farmers market near here, and I'll be able to get a frozen raccoon for $12. And these have been trapped for their fur. So I think there's also an ethical side. Years ago I was vegan, and when I went back to eating meat, I thought, okay well, I'm going to try everything. The cooking, a lot of times, does come down to understanding the properties of what you're working with. If you just go get that raccoon and cook it up like you would something else, it's not going to be happening. But if you understand the properties of what you're working with, you can get something really good out of that. Raccoon is pretty good. Beaver is less gamey than beef. It's a very clean, delicious red meat that you could do anything with. It's not hard to work with at all, but people are afraid of it because it's not common. It’s about curiosity and having a new and interesting experience and finding out what the keepers are. There are some real keepers I know how to make, like, the way that I make raccoon. I do a pressure cooked, BBQ pulled raccoon. It's fantastic, so that's a keeper, and some of the other stuff is just for fun.

NM: What can you tell us about your enthusiasm for BMX (or as Paul calls them, little bikes)? How long have you been involved with the hobby? Riding is pretty much improvising, would you agree, any read-across there?

I started when I was 13 and I did it until my mid-20s. And it's interesting because Paul calls them little bikes. In the last maybe ten years, they've taken all those bikes and scaled them up. So the bikes that I ride now have 29 inch wheels on one and 29 inch wheels on the other - standard BMX bikes have 20” wheels. So they're big boy versions of these BMX bikes. The first thing that I did with Peter Kowald when he first got to the Bay Area, he was working with Mikhail Baryshnikov's lighting guy and a Swiss dancer, and they were doing this big performance. And he said, come to the rehearsals, you can come and watch. Kowald was a sweet guy, really nice. They're doing an improvised version of a big solo dance piece, and then at a certain point, they're saying, oh, you know what, at 45 minutes this thing gets really boring. And Kowald says, yes, we need somebody hammering nails into wood. And then the Swiss dude says, we need someone to come through on a bicycle on one wheel and spin around. I was 28 then and I had stopped. I wasn't riding every day, but I could still do everything. And I had a bike. I said, oh, you know, I could do that and Kowald is like, are you serious? Yeah. That's what I used to do. I can do this. The first collaboration I did with Peter Kowald was in the middle of this dance piece. I come in and I roll around on the front wheel, whip the frame around and jump over. It was basically a hang five to a tailwhip to a swivel to a decade. And that was my very first performance with Peter Kowald, on a BMX bike.

Some friends I rode with did really well. One of my friends, Gabe Weed, went on to be a really great pro, and he gave me the bike that I used with Kowald. I had to keep it outside in Houston, and the weather got to it. But then when I moved to St. Louis, there's a garage, and I was able to get some of these big bikes that they make now. They're a bit expensive and it's like, yeah, I needed another expensive hobby besides double bass, vinyl, free jazz LPs and CDs, collecting art and books (laughing). As a broke musician, I needed one more expensive hobby. These things are worse than records. They're additions of 200. They sell out right away. There's all these dudes pushing 50 who did this when they were kids and then some of these people will just get the bike and not even ride it. Just put it in their house. But I try to ride every day. And with these bigger bikes, the tricks are much harder, but the ride is much easier, so I can go out and ride every day. As far as improvising, the hardcore flatland that I was doing before was a lot more choreographed because you had to be really clear about what you're doing and you're going to get hurt, right? But I do some trail riding on the big BMX bike. My girlfriend has a mountain bike, and we'll go out and do some basic trail riding, and then you're improvising because you're getting a tree root here and a turn here that you're not sure about. You're navigating it. What riding flatland oddly did was develop my sensitivity to sound. We had our bikes set up so if we picked it up and dropped it onto the tires it sounded like a basketball. No rattles! We were always listening to the bike to hear how it was working and what it was doing. Even now, I don’t like music on my rides because I love the sound of a perfectly running BMX bike. It also really developed my interest in experimenting and taking things to extremes. I came up in a time when so many things were just not possible with a bike and then I watched them become commonplace and was even able to do many of them. One example was riding a bike up a wall. When I was in Jr. High it was not even possible, a few years later I was doing a wall ride on my way to school!. I think it also relates to how athletic my approach to the bass is.

I took flatland riding to a pretty high level and we were doing some pretty complex things that are sort of the foundations of what the really great pro riders are doing now, really complex rolling tricks that were really fast with the bike underneath you was the Northern California style. Just living in a world where a certain trick was impossible and then living through the period where everyone's doing it was a big revelation. And getting control over an object to that degree. The practicing was so difficult because at that time, we'd find some big, long parking lot and we'd get pedaling really fast and we'd go through a sequence of things and maybe five tricks into the sequence is the part you're working on. You fall, you go back, you do that three times, and then you've got a problem with the bike. You've got it flipped over, you're working on it. And then in that time period, I get a bass guitar, and I'm working on something and mess up, but your hand just goes back here. The time commitment that it takes to do these bike tricks, to do the same amount on a musical instrument, is so much longer. We were in the parking lot all the time. I worked at gas stations and stuff and then went out and did that the rest of the time and then slept. And that was it. So we'd be in the parking lot 8-10 hours and you learn discipline, obviously. And the discipline is interesting because it's coming from the bike. It's not coming from anything else. The bike is going to hurt you. The ground is going to hurt you. So the bike tells you where the problems are by digging into your shins. So then that put me in a position to really listen to the bass. I think it was maybe Barre Phillips or somebody that said, the instrument is always going to humble you.

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Nick Metzger

Damon Smith is a bassist, improvisor, and teacher currently residing in St. Louis. A student of Lisle Ellis, he is the proprietor of the Balance Point Acoustics label which he initiated in 2001 and which is now quickly closing in on 60 releases. Active since the early nineties Damon has been a part of several free improvisation scenes across the United States, including Oakland (1993-2010), Houston (2010-2016), Boston (2016-2019), and now in the Mid-West United States (2019-present). His bass playing contains echoes of the gritty experimentalism of the 70’s German free improvising tradition, but with a strong American jazz impetus that propels the improvisations in a very distinct and rhythmic way. His collaborators are legion, as we’ll get to in the interview and in the accompanying Balance Point Acoustics Round-up, which makes listening to his music a very diverse experience. Damon is an art and poetry enthusiast, as well as a voracious listener, and so there are loads of references contained herein and I’ve included links where available. Below we discuss Damon’s background in BMX and his transition to music, his teachers and mentors, working with Werner Herzog, the challenges and triumphs of running a small label, the various scenes he’s contributed to, what listener’s bring with them to improvised music, art museums, poetry and poets, expensive hobbies, pleasures of the off-cut, and much more. In addition to the interview, as I just mentioned, there is an accompanying Round-up discussion of recent Smith/Balance Point Acoustic releases that Lee Rice Epstein joined us for, the diversity of which guarantees you’ll find something that’s right-up-your-alley. I’d like to thank Damon for all the time he spent talking with us and for all the great recommendations that he shared. Without further ado…

NM: When and why did you decide that music, specifically free improvisation, would be your profession? What internal and external factors have most influenced your path?

What I was doing as I became an adult is I was still really involved in freestyle BMX, and it was in what's now called the Dark Ages of it because there were no X-Games and the magazines for it had started to fall off, and it was a very underground version of this flatland stuff that I was doing. But I was doing it at a very high level. If there were contests, I would have entered a pro contest and not won. But I would have competed at that level. I think there was one that I entered, and I entered the pro class, but there was nothing going on. And in a way, it sort of prepared me for this music because it was just you and the bike in the parking lot.

There was no glory. Like, maybe your friends saw you do this trick. We didn't have video cameras. Sometimes there was one around, but it was just like that whole thing. And so the music we were listening to at that time were things that were tuneful but complex, and the Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr., Firehose were really in rotation. My friend and I went to see a Firehose concert. I don't know if it was Joanna Hatfield opening or the band that she was in opening, and then it was Firehose and then Primus and we were really into Firehose. We just would play those over and over again on our Boombox and we're just listening to that, and we kind of thought, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but it's really tuneful, sort of indie rock. We thought, oh, maybe it'll be a sit down show, who knows? And then you go there and we've been going to punk shows that time. We'd been to a lot of punk shows, my friend Mike Woods and I and been out to see music and stuff. But the performance of Firehose was so punk rock, and they were just ripping in concert, which is funny about things that I'll say later about live versus recorded music. And he's (Mike Watt) just playing the shit out of the bass, and he's playing it with his teeth. And he's got, like, a beer in his pocket and things are going everywhere. My mom is a composer and classical pianist and studied classical guitar and piano, and so music was in the house, but I never even thought of doing music.

I'm like, 18. And then I see that. And I'm like, ‘whoa’ that's a thing to do. And one of the other things was that I wasn't attracted to guitars. So seeing this bass player kind of go nuts made me go out and get a bass within a week or two. But then I get into the whole SST catalog. Saccharine Trust is still an important band for me. And then that led me to Elliott Sharp and Henry Kaiser and stuff like that. And I'm listening to Coltrane and Mingus and some other stuff. And, of course, Weather Report just to hear Jaco. I really loved Coltrane at that point. I really loved hearing Jimmy Garrison, really loved Mingus. But I thought this is black music. It's not for me. And this goes into kind of an interesting side of the less sinister side of these things, because there's all kinds of terrible things about access to music and stuff and why and what. But then the guy I was living with had to escape the IRS and moved to Florida from California and left me his whole record collection. And I pulled out this Peter Kowald record Duos Europa.

And there's that big kind of goofy picture of Kowald, his bald head and all that when you pull it out. And I was like, well, this guy's doing this stuff, so maybe I can, too. And what was kind of great about having him as an entry point was that his whole concept was that, yes, it is black music. He was very adamant about that as well, but that he felt he could contribute. So there was this nice mix of that. So there's that aspect of just like, seeing someone who looks like you doing it.

And we definitely noticed in the Bay Area and in Houston where you have more women in the concerts for example, and more women to come out in the audience to see them play. And there is that small matter of just seeing someone, like you, doing it. It doesn't soften the blow of the more sinister side of these things. But there's that idea of seeing someone like you and that sort of gives you the right to participate or the invitation to participate. So Kowald played a big part in my ideas on that. I play his musical ideas more and more now, I'll do something more straight out of what he does because I feel like he's gone. And if there was a context with someone that he would like to have played in I might use some of his material because that's the only way it can live on. And I don't mind doing that. The first bass teacher I had was a guy named Bill Douglas, who's on some ECM records and (other) stuff. Great player. But then my first major bass teacher was Lisle Ellis, who I don't know if you know his work. He's got some Hat Art records with the piano player Paul Plimley. And my favorite one is still Paul Plimley and him and Joe McPhee doing the music of Max Roach. It's on Hat Art (Sweet Freedom - Now What?). No drums. I think Lisle lives in Arizona now, he was in a band called What We Live with the guy from ROVA, Larry Ochs, and kind of playing around. But at that time, he was in Cecil Taylor's band, and so he was my first bass teacher. And he had studied with, I think, Miroslav Vitous’ classical teacher and Dave Holland and people like that, he was Canadian. So studying with him gave me a really good foundation and also having a person with a whole other style kind of kept me from sounding directly like Kowald out of the gate, which was nice.

And then if we move on to the next part of the question, this is somewhat interesting here regarding the improvisation aspect because I'm not as hardcore as people like Jack Wright and Daniel Carter about composition. I've got some new music pieces that I play. I play the Ben Patterson double bass solo as well as a work by Scelsi, which maybe we'll talk about later and I do some work with old masters. I did an album with Georg Graewe and Michael Vatcher on Nuscope recordings that I'm really proud of, and we do a few of Georg’s compositions on that. And we do a Carla Bley tune and an Annette Peacock tune. So I'm not totally averse to playing composition, but in general, I'm one of the only full time free improvisers in America. There's a few others, Jack Wright, Daniel Carter, Sandy (Ewen), and a few other people who just don't engage. And the way that I got to that is a bit interesting. I was listening to a record. I might tell you what it is off the record, but I'm not going to say who it is. And it was a saxophone player's record, and it was the compositional form that I hate the most, and you can print this, which is a tricky head and a one chord vamp. And the bass player on the album was a great famous bass player. And the bass line was, I felt, beneath that bass player. And I thought, when you have musicians at this caliber, you shouldn't tell them what to play. And a little bit of that comes from the privilege of being a bass player. So even at that time, I wasn't even good. I was young, I just had a bass and I was super interested and enthusiastic. But because I was a bass player, I could play with all the greatest players in the area.

We'll talk about who I was playing with when we get down to your question about the mentors and stuff. But yeah, at that moment, hearing that album and imagining this person handing a piece of music to this other great player. I just realized that you're just going to get better results if you pick somebody who has a better idea than you do about their instrument. If you can think about the people that I'm playing with a lot, I mean, a good example is somebody like Jeb Bishop, who I was playing with a lot in Boston. Telling him what to play is sort of silly because he's going to orchestrate himself so beautifully and get to places you could never imagine in your little idea about your piece. And then that idea of free improvisation evolved into something different than the founders’ thinking, Derek Bailey and John Stevens and all those people where the primacy of improvisation was the main thing. And in my generation, I feel like it's a compositional practice where I can sort of express my ideas on the bass. And that's one of the things that I try to do, is make sure that my compositional ideas are contained on the instrument. One of my biggest influences, probably, is Bill Dixon. And there's a great quote from Bill Dixon, where he says the lines of Barry Guy, William Parker, Tony Oxley, are their own, the compositions are by Bill Dixon. And then he says, ‘If I want them to do something, I'll suggest it on the horn’. And then also, of course, the bass has so much structural power that I've got a little more power to enforce structure than other instruments, maybe. So that's my personal philosophy of free improvisation.

NM: How did you settle on the double bass as your preferred means of expression?

So how did I settle on the double bass? It was a bit cowardly, in my opinion now, because I think there's a big challenge in getting the (electric) bass guitar to speak. That's a tougher instrument. It's a much easier instrument to learn to play than the double bass. But getting it to speak in a really interesting way, the way that Mike Watt and (Jamaaladeen) Tacuma, Rafal Mazur and Bill Laswell, and people like that can play, it's a much taller order than the double bass. But the thing about the double bass that really did it for me was the bow . And specifically, I was listening to Bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the basses come in with the bow, and it's just so beautiful. And I was sitting there with the bass guitar and, like, man, this thing just doesn't do that. And I sort of fell out of love with the bass guitar right there. And now since I'm really back into it, but I don't have a voice on it. I teach it for money. And because I put that time into it I like to stay in touch with it. And I like playing it sort of as a hobby or something, but I don't have a way to put it into the music very well. Then the double bass just with the bow and everything, it just sort of took over and I even sold my bass guitar. I didn't even have one. For the first 15 years of playing double bass, I just had a double bass and I just stayed with that. It's really about that bow and what the bow can do. There's so much in it. And even every few weeks, you're finding something, not every day anymore, but every few weeks, something else coming forward.

NM: Tell us how your imprint Balance Point Acoustics came about. What is it like running a small imprint, both the rewarding and challenging aspects? What are your hopes for Balance Point in the long term?

Basically, when Peter Kowald came to town in 2000 on his big US tour, I wanted to do a quartet with Marco Eneidi and the drummer Spirit, and that came out on Not Two, it's called Ghetto Calypso, and that was my idea. Marco and Kowald had recorded together on Bill Dixon's “Thoughts”, and so I thought of getting them back together, I was playing with Marco a lot at that time. But Kowald wanted to do a bass duo. So the bass duo was his idea. And then he just kind of, I don't know if he said it or if I just always knew I was going to start my own label at that time, but that was the first thing that I put out. And right in that time period, I did a trio recording with Scott Looney and Tony Bevan on bass saxophone (The Sale Of Tickets For Money Was Abolished). So those were the first two albums that came out (on Balance Point Acoustics). My first album that came out was a trio with Gianni Gebbia and Garth Powell called People In Motion, and I just trusted the drummer to come up with the cover art and stuff like that. And when I finally saw it, at that point in my life I wouldn't say this anymore, but in my early 20’s it was literally the worst thing that had happened to me. And I was really thinking about all the traumatic things, which weren't too many. But I was looking at it. I was like, I'll do 30 days in juvenile hall again to have this thing go away. I'll have my thumb broken, which are things that happen, BMX things. And I was like, any of these things I'll live through over this. And so the atrocious cover art was part of just kind of getting control of that sort of thing.

So, in retrospect it was a really good move, because now let's say if there's a label and maybe their cover concept isn't mine, I can let go and just let it happen. Let them take care of it, you know, like let them have theirs because I've got so many releases that look exactly how I want and sound exactly how I want. If someone else wants to have another vision, I'll respect it and it's fine. I don't have to get worried about it. Where other people, when they don't have that control in their life, and this is one of the worst things about running a record label, can be musicians trying to get involved in the design. My designer Alan Anzalone started with me and he's still doing my releases, and there's been a few that weren't designed by him. But basically the label identity is his design and my input, which is minimal. And you can't really have an album designed by committee. So if you have an album with four people on it, they can't all have a say. So it's basically it's just me and Alan that have the say. And then the cover artist will have a say and if they feel like their art is being disrupted, maybe we'll change something. But you have to explain to the musicians that, look, this label identity is important. I need to maintain this. I'm not going to correct him. It's not that much, but it's more than you think. And it's not that they ever have a problem with how it looks, because he does great work and everybody kind of knows that going in. But people just always want to change some little thing and you just can't have it, it just takes too long. It's like having the mix done by committee, too, which can take forever. And there can be trouble with that too often. That's worth it, but that's the most challenging aspect of it. In the old days the challenging aspect used to be going to the post office and filling out customs forms by hand. But now PayPal has got that taken care of. So packaging things is pretty automated. You just print the thing out and put it on there and put it in the mailbox. That's pretty great. The hope is just that it can keep going. It's great that our audience still values physical objects, and that's a really important thing. So some people are trying to declare CDs as dead, and I'm making more than I used to. So I think that's it in the long term.

---

 Jump to: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

The Free Jazz Collective 0

NM: Being that list making season was recently upon us, would you mind sharing with our readers some of your favorite music from 2021, both brand new as well as new-to-you?

I think the IST box set is really great, there's also a fantastic trio with Steve Beresford on Confront. Rafał Mazur made a great four CD set of solo bass (The Great Tone Has No Sound, 2020). Joelle (Leandre) has a three CD set (Beauty/Resistance, 2021) and one of the duos is with Rafael. There's a great double CD from Barry Guy, Augusti Fernandez and Lucia Martinez (Bosque de Niebla, 2021). And then, of course, all these Wadada albums, Great Lakes Quartet (The Chicago Symphonies, 2021), Wadada’s solo trumpet CD. Wadada with Milford Graves and Bill Laswell (Sacred Ceremonies, 2021). And then there's the great quartet XPACT that was resuscitated (XPACTII, 2021) - with Stefan Keune, Erhard Hirt, Hans Schneider, and Paul Lytton - that’s a great group. The Kontrabassduo Studer-Frey made a new one, Zip, which is great. Astral Spirits has been doing all those great albums. Ahmed, that's the (Free Jazz Blog) record of the year, I agree with that for sure. I think one of the most important albums of the year is the Tom Prehns Kvartet (Centrifuga, 2021). I'm always interested in everything Jon Abbey is doing on Erstwhile. Then there's been these really wonderful Feldman CDs with Judith Wegmann doing Triadic Memories and For John Cage. The John Cage number pieces on Another Timbre are really fantastic. One of the things that did change me at the beginning of the pandemic is I just got less interested in digital music. I order the CD, and for the most part, I'll hang back and wait until I get the real CD. The only time I've gotten so excited about an album that I've broken (that rule) was recently, there's a new album coming out with Enrico Rava, William Parker, and Andrew Cyrille (2 Blues for Cecil, 2022) and I got a digital promo of that and I listened to it.

NM: Part of free improvisation is how the music is interpreted by the listener. I would argue that listening to an album is a step removed from the experience you would get at a live show. What insights can you give our readers on ways to bridge this disconnect? In your opinion what should they listen for and expect from quality free improvisation?

I think this gets into the meaning of art and what we're trying to do with all of this. The text artist, Lawrence Weiner, is somebody who I'm really into. He did these texts on the wall that he said were sculptures, and he said that he's always trying to make something useful. Somebody once asked Morton Feldman about a structure, and he said, it's not a bridge, you don't have to walk on it. The idea is that you can have things that don't work functionally, in art. It's a place to take ideas.That's why there is an importance on not putting a function on these ideas and to let the ideas just be. So the idea is to be open ended enough so the ideas can be useful, if not functional. Then maybe in another context, they can give an answer to something else. Einstein said he improvised on the piano every day. These last two years have been the most crazy social situations that I've seen, and a lot of times you want your music to respond to those things. There's this impetus to respond to it. But the processes of being an artist are so much slower than that. So in a way, it's better to just respond to those things as a person and then not abandon your post with your work and let your work take that slower path. It's hopefully feeding systems that could lead to some kind of change. Maybe. But it's a much slower, much bigger idea. And in some ways, you would argue that listening to an album is a step removed from the experience you're getting at a live show. I wouldn't call it a step removed. In some ways, I would say that you're removing a step from it because you're getting the pure audio experience when you listen to an album. And I'm definitely one of the few people that is going to say that an album is ten times more important than a concert and especially an album that you can go back to over and over again, that's going to reveal its secrets slowly over time is really incredible. The album I mentioned earlier, (Butch Morris’) When the Sun is Out, You Don't See Stars, I’ve never had a concert that's given me what that album has because you can just keep revisiting it. And I think in this music, any of the free improvisation and experimental music that's worth hearing. One of the ideas is the details, and they just go by too quickly in the concert. And then sometimes the performative things with the musicians, maybe they're making sex faces or they're squirming around or whatever, and then you actually listen to what they're doing and what they're actually playing isn't all that much.

So there's that aspect of really just connecting with the sound. And over time, what you can get out of it. And in my opinion, what people should listen for and expect from quality free improvisation is that it's an open ended thing that's interesting. What they should listen for is whatever they're trying to work on in their work or in their life. If there's a solution for it in there somehow, there's things even if you're not a musician, there's still solutions for other things in these other art forms. And I think that's what's interesting, somebody could think improvised music is great because it doesn't expire. If I have a concert coming up, I might find a solution in something Derek Bailey recorded in the 70s, or I might find an idea that could be expanded on. And so in my own work, I'm trying not to judge the music in the way that I used to before, like when I would try to make a good record. I'm trying to just make sure that the ideas are presented well and played well, right? Because it's not up to me whether the work is going to be useful to the listener, that's the listener's job. You decide if you can get something out of a particular recording, and maybe in 20 years, there’ll be a young musician trying to think differently about bass and percussion and maybe there's some answers in some of those that I was involved in. And I think that's what's interesting and that's what it could be.

NM: You recently called us out for having too much ‘pop music’ on our year end lists, which I thought was an interesting thing to say, all things considered. Being that pop is a fairly loaded word, can you elaborate a little bit more on what you meant?

In that case, I'm not talking about the quality of the music - I can’t stress that enough. I'm not saying not being free jazz means anything more than that. It was also said in the context of there being many outlets for that music vs. very few or really only one for free jazz! And lastly, it was said in the context of having released an album with one of the few foundational figures still with us of the music that got passed over by all the writers on the blog. I do think that definitions are important. I think the meanings of words are important. I think that there are limits to everything, and it's interesting to see what you can do. But one of the things that happens is when you include another element that's outside of the boundary, then you get the critical ideas behind that element. A good example would be Joseph Beuys made a sculpture called 7000 Oaks. And it's 7000 Oak trees planted around the city of Kassel. And there's a basalt stone next to each one, 4ft high or something, and so the stone ends up being the sculpture. And then the idea of it is, that it's Greening the city, it's a social project as well. Well, 7000 trees actually does make a significant difference in how many trees. Whereas if you said your art project is a community garden that produces four radishes at the end of the year, it's not a very good garden. It fails. This garden is not a super interesting art project because it's just a garden like anybody else would have. Right?

I think for example, Fire!, beautiful music and a good band. Nobody knows the music better than Mats Gustafson, he's a total scholar of the music, and he knows he's not making free jazz when he makes a Fire! record. He knows that he's exploring his interest in indie rock and pop music. And those have backbeats, those have bass lines, and I think people who are interested in it would say that the reason it's interesting is because of that. It's interesting because this person who usually makes free music is doing this other thing, same with Natural Information Society. Joshua Abrams is on probably 50 or so great free jazz records, he knows when he's making these records that that's not what he's doing (making free jazz). I don’t think we can call consonant music that is in time free jazz - and again, that doesn’t mean anything else about the music.

So when you do have these elements, one of the things that is not talked about as much is just the absolute power that music has over human beings. And the reason why we're talking today only has to do with that. It’s the same with so many people in my life, it's only because of that power. When I was younger, a lot of my peers were really Braxton-obsessed and walking around trying to talk about being in control of your forces. And I think that is something that is a way to think about this, when you engage in these things.

NM: Deeper in the same thread you said the following, “One of the issues with pop elements like back beats is not just what it is but how addictive those elements are and how much power they have over human beings. One of the aims of free music is to let the other elements of music shine without those elements in the way…” Can you talk about this a little bit more? Particularly as it pertains to the aims of free music, which aren’t always known to the listener.

When you bring in a backbeat, it's so addictive to human beings, it takes control over us. And when you look at anything you might call “bad” pop music, it's usually just whatever with a backbeat. And then you start to bring in tonal harmony, which total harmony actually has to do with the way our ears work and the overtone series and things like that. Our ears love this sound. And so when you bring those things into the music, it's almost like bringing in a shotgun to a boxing match like, well, you should win. And so if we are talking about things from a competitive perspective, yeah, you should be able to make a more pleasant album to listen to with the backbeat than without. So that's a little bit on “pop” elements. And then the ECM records, the last free jazz records they made were probably the Hal Russell records in the 90’s, and before that probably Marion Brown. I listened to two new ECM records this morning. I love that music, but I think it's pretty far from free jazz, and I don't use pop music in my life. I don't use it as a musician or as a listener. But I understand people who do because I use bad TV and comedy and things like that, and things that aren't high art that are outside of music. I just tend to go away from music for those things instead of getting into other music. So it's not like I don't understand. I understand people who do it. And I don't mind you're in a bar and some great pop music that comes on. It's great. It's perfect. So then if we elaborate a little further on it, if we think about the problem with the addictive quality of these elements, when you let them in it's really hard to control. It's really the self control of the musicians, of the presenters, of the listeners. It's beyond what we're capable of as human beings a lot of times. And that's why the older improvisers sort of shunned it 100% because there are few instances where it can be really interesting. Once we actually recognize the power music has, we have to take responsibility when we harness that power for our work.

NM: What do you think about when you are improvising? How is your process different when you play in a group versus playing solo?

Mark Dresser has a really great phrase about how he came to all the stuff that he's figured out for the bass, in which he talks about analyzing his intuition. So a lot of these things came from him improvising on his ideas and then mapping out what they are more technically. You get into things which would be more of a subconscious area when you're listening, when you're bringing things in. Or maybe you've thought about the combination of people and you have ideas you want to bring to the session. I had that recently. You let things happen in their way. And then at a certain point you pull yourself out of that, and look at what's going on. And then for me, I'm often placing things historically, what historically has happened here in this combination since I have the great catalog of improvised music in my head. And then I think, how can I move that somewhere different? Because I like to think of things not as influences, but as starting points. I want to start where Kowald left off, things like that. And then recently I started to think about a recording that I did, and I thought about ideas of time to make sure that it's not rhythmic. So I broke down the patterns to make them asymmetrical and I found that I could do that and do my regular improvising around. It was nice to have this new idea to start with.

And then I suppose the difference between solo and a group is that when you're playing solo, you can really focus on what you're doing, whereas when you're playing in a group, your ear has to divide between what you're doing and what everyone else is doing. And even if you're holding your ground, which I think is an important thing to do as an improviser, you're still noticing where the other people are, even if you're not trying to link up with them perfectly.

NM: Who would you like to work with that you haven’t had the opportunity to yet?

If there was a way I'd really like to play with the great European drummers like Paul Lovens or Roger Turner or somebody like that. That's something I'd like to do. There's a lot of these people that I'd really love to play with like Gunter Christmann, if that's possible. And then another thing I'd like to do is I'd like to make an album with two pianos. I really like mass pianos. One of my favorite things around this time of the year is John Cage's Winter Music, which is for 1-20 pianos. I would love to do a trio with Steve Bereseford & Sven-Åke Johansson. I would love to play with the Swiss Pianist Judith Wegman, also the French pianist Sophie Agnel. I've played with Shelley Hirsch but I'd like to do more playing with Shelley Hirsch, maybe an album with her. I'd like to do some more things with Joe McPhee, because I really love his music. Hopefully I'll be able to play with Gabby Fluke Mogul this year or the next, we'll see. I would really like to play Brotzmann again, but in the context of my work with Jaap Blonk - either just trio or the quartet with Jeb Bishop & Weasel.

NM: As a musician who also runs a label, do you find you sell more albums during years where you have more new releases? How has the pandemic impacted the revenue split between what you bring in for concerts versus recorded music (if you don’t mind me asking of course, just rough percentages nothing explicit, this is a hazy topic amongst us at FJB that we would like to learn more about)? Do you note any buying trends besides Bandcamp day? More sales during the Summer, etc?

So this is an interesting topic. I definitely sell more when I have new releases. I think being a collector of the music helps me sell my music a little better as well, knowing what they (other labels) do. If I'm ordering something specially from overseas, I'm almost always going to get two things because I feel like if something's coming from Austria I should get another item in that envelope. I find that when I make a new release, then my back catalog sells a little better, and I think it is a good policy. If you like a musician, buy some back catalog stuff along with new releases, it gives you a better picture of what they're doing. There's a certain period in the music, 2010-on where I don't have many of the CDs left. A lot of those are just all-the-way sold out, I just have a few. But the period right up until then, from 2000 to 2008, I might have a lot of. I’m finally getting low, but I’ve had some for years because you have to make a thousand CDs. So there's the thing in the thousand CD period. I've been at it for so long and starting out with a release with me and Peter Kowald and then immediately having Fuchs, it's kind of clear what I was up for post FMP, if you want to call it. There's a clear audience who buys those CDs, and I've got people who've really been with me since the very first one who are still buying stuff and have kept it going. I feel like I'm in a good place, setting up my own label in 2000 and keeping it going. People like me are set up like, well, I can just do it myself. You know, there's certain things, if I want a nicer production working with a label can really help, but maybe a production I couldn't afford or something like that or, something for visibility. I like to work with Astral Spirits on certain projects for a couple of reasons. I think Astral Spirits is a great label and they're going to get it to a different audience, and I also think it's good for them. I like what they're doing with their money, putting it back in these younger musicians.

Obviously, at concerts you sell a lot of CDs, but Bandcamp Fridays almost compensated for that. I'm (currently) selling as much as if I was playing and releasing the albums, mainly just because of Bandcamp Friday, they made that happen. And what I can say about numbers is that my releases pretty much pay for themselves; there's not a ton of money being made, but the money goes right back into the label. There's enough money that I'm able to do a little more, make a little bit nicer productions when it's time, things like that. I don't really see differences in sales during the summer or winter, I don't really see anything like that. Maybe in the fall there ends up being more, but there always seems to be more concerts. Even in these times, I've been able to play some, whether it's outside, whether it's online, whether in the little window where we were able to go out and do concerts these last couple of years. There are definitely days where a review moves some CDs or when I've done a pre order.Then that day I'll do better. And then other times when I run sales at my label or I do bundles, I'll notice I've got a bunch of CDs that are related to this one, so I'll make a bundle and then those move pretty well, but my audience is pretty loyal and they've been making this all possible, which is great in kind of talking about how I sort of prefer records to concerts. I prefer making records. I love to play concerts. It's great. 

---

 Jump to: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

The Free Jazz Collective 0

From Keith Prosk: How much exchange there is between the plastic/visual arts and your musical practice; I know you are deeply attuned to the arts world and I wonder how this feeds back into your playing, particularly in the context of something like the collaboration with Keith Rowe, who has also taken significant inspiration from the visual arts.

There's a fair amount of exchange, but I think it's a bit more like a Venn diagram. And I think there's that area where, let's say poetry and music and art all meet and the mechanics are sort of off to the side. They're important. But that meeting point is where the art really happens. There's a difference between why Cy Twombly’s thing goes beyond a scribble, and why Brotzmann never seems awkward. Brotzmann can play some really sideways stuff, but he understands art and he knows how to place it, where another musician is just not going to sound as good. There's an aspect of art that really translates to music and then there's aspects that don't, obviously.

I got into art as a way to understand more about music, but it's also become its own sort of hobby. I'm looking into art and allowing it to be what it is and see what it is. And I think that there are different ways of taking it in art. Even though I've got a big collection of art books, I think seeing a painting in person makes it a little easier to understand, whereas in music I think the record is going to give you a better overview, but there's a lot of exchange. Keith Rowe is one of my favorite musicians and I collect his work in depth. I stay up with whatever the newest release has been. His last solo guitar LP (Absence, 2021) would be one of the releases of the year. I would say it's really great. I bonded with him personally around art and things like that and talking about Cy Twombly and different artists. And one of the greatest days of my life I spent about 2-3 hours in a late Barnett Newman exhibition at the Menil, which I would say is my favorite Museum in the world, the Menil in Houston, Texas, and just going through that with Keith and talking about Barnett Newman. And then we talked about music and other things and that's where the idea for the trio with Sandy came about, we (Smith, Ewen, & Rowe) were just out drinking in Houston. Eventually I got an email from him saying he was going to be on tour and, but nothing in Houston. He asked if I wanted to work in a trio with Sandy. Then we did that whole project, which ended up being pretty nice.

NM: I saw you were in Chicago not so long ago at the Art Institute. What are some of your favorite art museums? Who are some of your favorite visual artists? To close out the topic, how about your favorite cinema and associated artists?

The Menil in Houston is probably my favorite Museum in the country. And then the Brandhorst in Munich is probably a close 2nd, those are both the places with the most Cy Twombly. I'm living in St. Louis now and they've got the Pulitzer Art Museum, and it's a really beautiful Museum. It's got Richard Serra’s first Torqued Ellipses outside of the Tado Ando building. And whatever exhibition they have is just installed in the most pristine way. Everything's perfect. The building is amazing. The attendants are all people who are super into art and really nice and happy to talk to you. Same with Houston, the gallery attendants were all really cool. These museums are free too, you can just walk in. And sometimes you can go to one room and leave or do the whole museum. Those are probably my two favorites. The Fort Worth Modern (also an Ando building with Serra!) is a really great Museum. The New York museums are great, of course, all of them pretty much the Guggenheim, the MoMA, the Met Breuer, the Whitney. I was just at the Whitney and saw the big Jasper Johns Show. It was fantastic. And the Art Institute of Chicago is a great museum; fantastic collection. The SFMOMA is the first Museum where I really got into art, and so I have an affection for that. The Rose just outside of Boston is a really beautiful small museum that does great shows.

NM: You seem to be an avid reader of poetry as well, can you share some of your favorite poets and comment on how poetry has influenced your music?

I think for anybody who's just kind of starting out in the music, a great guiding light is Steve Lacy. There's just absolute clarity on what Steve Lacy does and talks about. And he was really interested in poetry, he was really interested in art too. So some of those interests came from him, some from other places. But when I came to the music I was living in the Bay Area and Berkeley has some of the greatest bookstores in the world, great poetry sections. The other thing about that is, I was dealing with public transit. And what I really liked about poetry is you could knock out a poem between your train stops, or whatever. There's the brevity of it, I really liked the closure of it. And then, of course, like visual art, it becomes its own interest. Now I'm interested in poetry. You get really interested in language. As far as favorite poets? This could even be considered a release of the year, but Nathaniel Mackey's Double Trio. It's a box set of three poetry books, and the name comes from Glenn Spearman's “Double Trio”. Tons of free jazz references in it. If there's ever a book of poetry that could also be considered a free jazz release, this is one of them. Fred Moten, who is another favorite poet, has a book called The Feel Trio, which is great.

One of the things that I like to do with poetry is get titles from little phrases of poets. What I really like is to use translation, because then I feel like you're not taking directly from the poet. Octavio Paz is one of my favorite poets. Paul Celan is one of my favorite poets. My favorite living poets, though, would probably be Fred Moten, Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe, who does these fantastic concrete poems. Jaap Blonk is another one. His poetry is fantastic. An exciting thing for me on the subject; I wanted to steal titles from Fred Moten for the last Alvin Fielder Quartet album (The Shape Finds Its Own Space, 2016) and (for The Very Cup of Trembling) I was able to ask Fred to name the record and the tracks for us, and he did. I don't think anyone has ever done that before. He gave us some nice names and named the album with a beautiful title, “The Very Cup of Trembling”. These poetic titles are really great and it helps the record shine a bit if you have a nice, strong title. On the Roscoe Mitchell Quartet release Sandy uses railroad spikes on the guitar. There’s a book from Blank Forms of Joseph Jarman's poetry (Black Case Vol I & II: Return from Exile, 2019). It's a fantastic book, and I would recommend it to everybody. That phrase, "The Railroad Spike Forms the Voice" came from a Joseph Jarman poem. Poetry is something I'm just engaged with every day. I read some poetry and there's the brevity of it. And even if I'm dealing with long form poems, I'll just take a little bit of time, and I think that's helped my music and finding titles for it, but also finding those edges of making it go beyond math, making it go beyond traditional music. I think the lyrics used to help shape more traditional music a bit because the syllables would push it a little this way or that. So it's not just a direct rhythm, which is math in classical music and even in folk music. I think the lyrics could do that. And then having that sense of what poetry means to me helps the music go forward. But then again, it's it’s own practice, and in some ways it can be a break from music, but obviously it helps..

I read this great essay called "Dan Flavin and The Catastrophe of Minimalism" and then we named an album "The Catastrophe of Minimalism" (with John Butcher and Weasel Walter). And got great cover art from the late Cor Fuhler, he had posted his art and gave us permission to use it and then it all came together in that album, it had been nine years since we recorded it. When Cy Twombly talked about using poetry in his paintings and his titles, he said he's never illustrating the poem or the mythology. A lot of it's Greek mythology and things, but he's looking for an atmosphere. I think that poetry can help you find those atmospheres. When I play in my practice, maybe some Bach or learn to play a Mingus tune, the idea is that you're playing great music so that you can recognize great music when you play it yourself.

NM: Part of the charm of your Facebook page is your enthusiasm for offal and BBQ. We would be interested to know if rituals of the pit or eating or cooking or turning poor man's meats into delicacies or something else informs your musical practice in some way?

So,thinking about being a broke musician and trying to map out what your life is going to be, what do you want to have as a marker for success? One of the things I think is important for me is I wanted to have an art collection and so having things like Joseph Beuy’s "Multiples" and prints by artists like Bruce Conner and (Roy) Lichtenstein. I've got a Jasper Johns print. You can get these things for not much money if you’re looking. I feel like it's really important (to have an art collection) and to also eat interesting food. This idea of taking an off-cut and mastering it, finding out what this element is like. What does a goat kidney taste like? Some of it is just curiosity but you do find some keepers. Some people might be surprised to hear that I would recommend most testicles, (they) are pretty damn good if they're prepared well. Goat and lamb kidneys are really wonderful if they're done right. There are other things, like pork kidneys, that are really for the hardcore. There are certain other things that are used in a lot of Asian cooking, like pig uterus, and you can go buy one. So a lot of this has to do with if there's one available, I see it as a challenge. Goat heads are $4, and a goat head or a pig head or a sheep's head can be really delicious if you do it well. Other times you find things that are for the hardcore only. Like bull penis, you don't really need to mess with. The regular person doesn't need to put that in their diet. But I would say testicles are generally great. I think livers are usually good, hearts are usually good, especially when you are able to make them really well. And some of it is about getting control over these things and trying to make them really good. Now I live in St. Louis, and there's a great farmers market near here, and I'll be able to get a frozen raccoon for $12. And these have been trapped for their fur. So I think there's also an ethical side. Years ago I was vegan, and when I went back to eating meat, I thought, okay well, I'm going to try everything. The cooking, a lot of times, does come down to understanding the properties of what you're working with. If you just go get that raccoon and cook it up like you would something else, it's not going to be happening. But if you understand the properties of what you're working with, you can get something really good out of that. Raccoon is pretty good. Beaver is less gamey than beef. It's a very clean, delicious red meat that you could do anything with. It's not hard to work with at all, but people are afraid of it because it's not common. It’s about curiosity and having a new and interesting experience and finding out what the keepers are. There are some real keepers I know how to make, like, the way that I make raccoon. I do a pressure cooked, BBQ pulled raccoon. It's fantastic, so that's a keeper, and some of the other stuff is just for fun.

NM: What can you tell us about your enthusiasm for BMX (or as Paul calls them, little bikes)? How long have you been involved with the hobby? Riding is pretty much improvising, would you agree, any read-across there?

I started when I was 13 and I did it until my mid-20s. And it's interesting because Paul calls them little bikes. In the last maybe ten years, they've taken all those bikes and scaled them up. So the bikes that I ride now have 29 inch wheels on one and 29 inch wheels on the other - standard BMX bikes have 20” wheels. So they're big boy versions of these BMX bikes. The first thing that I did with Peter Kowald when he first got to the Bay Area, he was working with Mikhail Baryshnikov's lighting guy and a Swiss dancer, and they were doing this big performance. And he said, come to the rehearsals, you can come and watch. Kowald was a sweet guy, really nice. They're doing an improvised version of a big solo dance piece, and then at a certain point, they're saying, oh, you know what, at 45 minutes this thing gets really boring. And Kowald says, yes, we need somebody hammering nails into wood. And then the Swiss dude says, we need someone to come through on a bicycle on one wheel and spin around. I was 28 then and I had stopped. I wasn't riding every day, but I could still do everything. And I had a bike. I said, oh, you know, I could do that and Kowald is like, are you serious? Yeah. That's what I used to do. I can do this. The first collaboration I did with Peter Kowald was in the middle of this dance piece. I come in and I roll around on the front wheel, whip the frame around and jump over. It was basically a hang five to a tailwhip to a swivel to a decade. And that was my very first performance with Peter Kowald, on a BMX bike.

Some friends I rode with did really well. One of my friends, Gabe Weed, went on to be a really great pro, and he gave me the bike that I used with Kowald. I had to keep it outside in Houston, and the weather got to it. But then when I moved to St. Louis, there's a garage, and I was able to get some of these big bikes that they make now. They're a bit expensive and it's like, yeah, I needed another expensive hobby besides double bass, vinyl, free jazz LPs and CDs, collecting art and books (laughing). As a broke musician, I needed one more expensive hobby. These things are worse than records. They're additions of 200. They sell out right away. There's all these dudes pushing 50 who did this when they were kids and then some of these people will just get the bike and not even ride it. Just put it in their house. But I try to ride every day. And with these bigger bikes, the tricks are much harder, but the ride is much easier, so I can go out and ride every day. As far as improvising, the hardcore flatland that I was doing before was a lot more choreographed because you had to be really clear about what you're doing and you're going to get hurt, right? But I do some trail riding on the big BMX bike. My girlfriend has a mountain bike, and we'll go out and do some basic trail riding, and then you're improvising because you're getting a tree root here and a turn here that you're not sure about. You're navigating it. What riding flatland oddly did was develop my sensitivity to sound. We had our bikes set up so if we picked it up and dropped it onto the tires it sounded like a basketball. No rattles! We were always listening to the bike to hear how it was working and what it was doing. Even now, I don’t like music on my rides because I love the sound of a perfectly running BMX bike. It also really developed my interest in experimenting and taking things to extremes. I came up in a time when so many things were just not possible with a bike and then I watched them become commonplace and was even able to do many of them. One example was riding a bike up a wall. When I was in Jr. High it was not even possible, a few years later I was doing a wall ride on my way to school!. I think it also relates to how athletic my approach to the bass is.

I took flatland riding to a pretty high level and we were doing some pretty complex things that are sort of the foundations of what the really great pro riders are doing now, really complex rolling tricks that were really fast with the bike underneath you was the Northern California style. Just living in a world where a certain trick was impossible and then living through the period where everyone's doing it was a big revelation. And getting control over an object to that degree. The practicing was so difficult because at that time, we'd find some big, long parking lot and we'd get pedaling really fast and we'd go through a sequence of things and maybe five tricks into the sequence is the part you're working on. You fall, you go back, you do that three times, and then you've got a problem with the bike. You've got it flipped over, you're working on it. And then in that time period, I get a bass guitar, and I'm working on something and mess up, but your hand just goes back here. The time commitment that it takes to do these bike tricks, to do the same amount on a musical instrument, is so much longer. We were in the parking lot all the time. I worked at gas stations and stuff and then went out and did that the rest of the time and then slept. And that was it. So we'd be in the parking lot 8-10 hours and you learn discipline, obviously. And the discipline is interesting because it's coming from the bike. It's not coming from anything else. The bike is going to hurt you. The ground is going to hurt you. So the bike tells you where the problems are by digging into your shins. So then that put me in a position to really listen to the bass. I think it was maybe Barre Phillips or somebody that said, the instrument is always going to humble you. 

---

 Jump to: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4