All About Jazz Italia – 18 April 2011
AAJI: I would like to open this interview with a few questions about your latest work, Outdoor spell. Outdoor spell seems to be a sort of long journey of initiation, not by chance that the two tracks "Corn Maidens Rite" and "The Magician" relate somehow to a super-natural dimension. If there was, what was the research you did to get these sounds? I think that in some parts you feel like you're doing almost a sort of mantra with your instrument.
RC: For the last ten years or so I’ve been involved in various kabbalistic practices that come out of an English tradition of magic having its roots in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. For the most part the practices are meditational, and for me there is a correlation between the inner states that I arrive at in the context of meditation and the states that the music that Outdoor Spell takes us to. While Outdoor Spell is by no means simply “music to meditate to”, the approach I take in kabbalistic meditation is highly intuitive, and I let my work in this area inform my approach to the music of Outdoor Spell.
AAJI: Which were the reasons that motivated you to choose to play with “no more distortion, wah-wah pedal no more, but just pure trumpet, making use of its entire range, from the lowest pedal tones to high triple”.
RC: During the early to mid 90s I had developed a style where I put trumpet through all the rock distortion devices that I had collected over the years as a guitar player. In fact, I made the trumpet sound suspiciously like an electric guitar, to such an extent that when I played a demo tape back in the nineties for the guys at Ninja Tune Records in London, they said, “wicked guitar, man!”. They actually thought it was an electric guitar! I explained to them that it was a trumpet going through heavy distortion and wah-wah. Happily, this fact did not stop them from putting out Neon, my first record with Ninja Tune.
In 2003, I put trumpet aside for a while to concentrate on my various 100 or 200 guitar (G100) projects, but then, a few years ago, I started to really miss playing trumpet, so I went back to playing it every day. I did a few gigs with a noise band from Brooklyn called Talibam! (Kevin Shea, who plays drums on the final track of Outdoor Spell, is the drummer of Talibam!).
Matt Motell, Jean-François Pauvros, Kevin Shea & Rhys after a Talibam! gig.
For these gigs, I played in essentially the same style that I had played during the 90s. After about a year, I realized that I needed to define a new voice; that I had to break past the style that I had defined in order to come up with something new. I hate doing the same thing all the time, I always like to do new things!
So I spent about six months recording every day and trying out approaches and trying to define a new “voice” on trumpet.
The normal range of a trumpet is F# below middle C to a high C or D, two octaves above the middle C. In the late 80s, I had studied with Carmine Caruso in NY, who had me play pedal tones on trumpet. Pedal tones are very low. They are about two octaves below middle C. They are not within the normal range of the instrument, and are usually used only to relax the lips. I liked them, a lot, and decided to use them in the new music I was doing.
While in Paris, I studied with a trumpet player named Andrew Crocker who was an advocate of a special technique developed by a Frenchman named Robert Pichaureau, which allows one to play in the extremely high register of the instrument without pressing the mouthpiece too hard against the lips. This technique allowed me to play easily and freely in the range of two octaves above middle C, going as high as three octaves above middle C. This is the range the Dizzy Gillespie often played in, to give you an idea. We hear examples of this style on the third track of Outdoor Spell, Corn Maiden’s Rite.
After the initial experimentation period, I realized that I had a wide range of sounds on trumpet available to me, a much wider range than I had been previously using.
Since I had already worked with distortion in the 90s, I decided to do something else and started to use digital looping devices to turn the phrases that I made on trumpet into repetitive patterns. This made sense in terms of my long history as a composer with repetitive music, starting with when I played in the respective bands of Tony Conrad (Inside the Dream Syndicate) and La Monte Young (The Theater of Eternal Music) during the early 70s.
Rhys Chatham with Tony Conrad after a TC gig in Paris.
After initial experimentation, I ended up with a setup that included three digital delay/looping devices, all of them set to different timings. So if I play a phrase on one device, it starts to loop at a specific rate. I then play exactly the same phrase on the second device, which is set to a different timing, so the phrase starts to go in and out of phase, making interesting and almost hypnotic melodic and rhythmic patterns. When using three devices, as I do, things get even more complex, and it sets up a form during the duration of the piece that one has to follow with one’s nose. The devices work in such a way that once the loops are set, they gradually die out, making room for new phrases to be added, working in a similar fashion to that of Terry Riley’s tape delay techniques used in his soprano saxophone pieces of the 60s.
I settled on three devices so that I could have the first come out of the speaker on the left side of the stage, the second goes out of the right speaker and the third is centered in the middle on a stereo system. Having my gear work like this allows me to make full compositional use of a stereo PA system, sending musical phrases and patterns wherever I want them spatially on stage.
After about three intense months of experimenting with gear of different types, I eventually arrived at a setup I liked, and this setup has become part of my current sound on trumpet. So my instrument these days is not only my trumpet, put rather it’s my trumpet in addition to all the gear that I put it through.
AAJI: Many people ask you what do you think of experimental music, what has influenced you and which are the musicians you've just had some influence in the downtown scene.
Frankly, I'm more interested about whether you look at the Afro-American music, free jazz (especially that of the early sixties), to blues. You can consider, in your search path, this type of music as a source of inspiration? It has been or still is?
I feel that in your veins flows much Don Cherry!!
RC: I wanted the music of Outdoor Spell to be a reflection of everything I was as a musician and trumpet player. Often when I write my guitar pieces, I conceptualize in advance of putting pen to paper, so to speak. That is to say, I conceptualize the piece that I am about to write in the sense of knowing the instrumentation, its duration, its form, etc., in advance of writing any music. By contrast, with Outdoor Spell, I decided to take a purely intuitive approach, and I let all my influences come out whilst I was playing. Essentially, I am simply following my heart and my nose, rather than trying to overly intellectualize things.
On the experimental side of things, of course we hear echoes of Tony Conrad, Charlemagne Palestine and La Monte Young, for this is where I am coming from as a composer. However, my training on trumpet, which I’ve been playing for almost 30 years now, comes completely out of the jazz tradition. When I was learning to play, I had to learn to improvise in every major and minor key at any and all tempos, just like any other jazz musician does.
When it came time to define my trumpet voice back in the nineties, I quite liked Jon Hassell’s playing, and on the jazz side of things I adored the playing of Don Cherry, particularly when he was playing with Ornette Coleman during the early 60s. All of these guys are my heroes.
I first learned to improvise when I was in Frederic Rzewski’s version of Musica Elettronica Viva, NY edition. This was back in the early 70s. Musica Elettronica Viva originated in 1966 in Rome and over the years had the likes of Alvin Curran, Richard Tietelbaum, Frederic Rewski, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor and Steve Lacy were participating in it, among others. They were playing basically free music, but MEV’s intention and thrust, at least initially, was to take the loosening of notation in a classical avant-garde context that was going on during the period (for example, pieces like Luciano Berio’s Sequenza series or John Cage’s Variations series). What composers like Berio and Cage were trying to do in the late 50s was to liberate classical musicians from the slavery of notated music by incorporating improvisatory elements into their written compositions through the use of graphic notation and the like. MEV built on this work by taking the idea to its logical conclusion by playing completely free!
When Frederic, who like myself comes originally out of a classical music background, brought an edition of MEV to NY, he played fortepiano. But he realized, “Hey, wait a minute! There’s this whole American tradition of people playing free long before us!”. He was talking about the playing that came out of Ornette and Don Cherry. So pretty soon Frederic was inviting people like Karl Berger and Anthony Braxton to play with us. Things got delightfully mixed up. With people like me coming out of avant-garde classical music starting to get heavily into jazz. This is actually how I got my start in jazz and is where I learned to play free jazz.
So yes! We can hear very easily this important influence in my trumpet playing, even today. So I’d say that when you listen to what I do, it’s a bit like “Jon Hassell meets Don Cherry”. It is an amalgamation of Don Cherry and Jon Hassell, all mixed into the playing of one person.
After I had defined the style and way of playing that I arrived at in Outdoor Spell, I discovered, because of my use of pedal tones (the very low “farting” sounds that we hear in the second piece, Crossing the Sword Bridge of the Abyss), that there was a relation to my playing and that pioneered by the trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon. So much so, in fact, that during performances I often dedicate at least one of the pieces to his memory, may he rest in peace.
AAJI: I read with great interest all the articles that you put on your website. It seems to me that there are at least two aspects to emphasize. The first, that is methodological, concerns the need to keep a memory of what happened during the 70-90, not or perhaps not at all or not only from an academic point of view. The other aspect relates to your personal memory of the musician. You want to say something about this.
RC: I wrote an essay on the experimental music scene from the 70s-90s entitled: Composer’s Notebook 1990.
Here’s the link to it:
< http://www.rhyschatham.net/nintiesRCwebsite/Essay_1970-90.html >
It’s a rather long essay. I wrote it because there existed in NY a particular mindset, that in 1990 I realized was disappearing. What I mean to say is that the issues that were important to the composer/performers and musicians working in an experimental context were quite specific in the 70s, and then they moved into something else during the 80s. I had moved to France by that time and there were many exciting things happening in electronica, which I wanted to be part of, so I decided to write down my memories of NY in the 70s and 80s before I forgot them.
AAJI: On your website there is no longer a detailed "report "on what happened in the last ten years. The narrative of the memory of previous years has given way to the new or better to a narrative closer to daily events. Do you think we need time to read, understand, listen and speak about the music of the recent years?
RC: My essay takes us up to 1990. It’s now 20 years later. I’ve been thinking about writing a new report, but I’m waiting to see what happens as there are many exciting things happening both in Europe and the States (noise, free music, freak folk, “Weird America” rock and the like) that I want to give a chance to come to fruition before I comment on them.
AAJI: A Crimson Grail is an awesome work both the number of musicians that you have involved, for both field works you've done. Do you think of other similar projects for the future?
RC: I have two pieces now for 100 electric guitars, both of which have been performed in Italy. An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, made in 1989, was performed in Milan and Palermo. A Secret Rose, made a couple of years ago, was recently performed in Rome, and there is talk about performing A Crimson Grail (from 2005, new version 2009) in Rome, too! A Crimson Grail is my piece for 200 electric guitars and 16 basses, although I’m working on a new version of Crimson that can be performed by “only” 100 electric guitars.
I’d like to perform these G100 pieces a bit more before I start writing new ones for G100 ensembles. I need to assimilate the experience that only live performances can give before moving on and writing a new G100 piece. So in the meantime, I’ve decided to focus on new works for my smaller guitar ensembles, using the same instrumentation as my piece Die Donnergötter from 1986 for six electric guitars, el. bass and drums. I’m going to start work on that quite soon in fact. Although, my god! I have an electric guitar solo that I need to work up soon because I’m opening for Pere Ubu in May in Paris. OMG! I had better get started!
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