RHYS CHATHAM
Interviewed February 1999 (via e-mail) by Rob Young.
RY: You tend to describe the period in the 70s and 80s as a time of
productive confusion - of styles, genres, and musical direction for a
large number of composers/improvisors/rock and jazz and classical
musicians. In your more recent commentaries on the state of music and
your own position within it, you state that it's important to move on
from this zone of slippage and move into something with more fixed
boundaries. Why is it important, now, to resolve that earlier
confusion?
RC: I think the piece you are referring to was something I wrote in
1990 called "A Musical Agenda For The 90s: Composer's Notebook". It
was indeed a time of productive confusion for a large number of
composers and musicans coming out of many musical contexts whose
musical concerns, for a unique set of historical reasons, had reached
a point of intersection. We could even play in each other's venues
without raising any eyebrows whatsoever, it was wonderful. By 1990,
this had become the norm in NY and I was beginning to be fed up with
the lack of definition. I would walk into a space like the Kitchen
and it would sometimes feel more like a variety show (a bit of
improvised music, a bit of rap, a bit of rock- derived music, etc). I
felt at the time that perhaps we could begin to redefine things
again. It's ten years later now. I no longer feel this way. The music
scene that I was part of in NY has largely disappeared, although
happily the musicians themselves certainly haven't! And I think the
musical boundaries that I was speaking of have redefined themselves
quite nicely.
I also find that many of the most talented young composers and
emerging musicians are tending to work in the fields of drum 'n' bass
and Techstep. At least that's where most of the interesting new music
I hear these days seems to be coming from. For the most part. These
areas of music are very tightly defined. While it's possible to bend
the definition of what drum 'n' bass or Techstep step is, if one
takes it too far, its no longer within the style. Plenty of room for
transgression there, eh? I mean, the minute one puts, for example, an
electric trumpet, over a drum 'n' bass line, it ceases to be drum 'n'
bass! Why is that? I've been interested in exploring this question.
It turns into something completely different, I'm always amazed at
how this is so.
We're at the end of the 90s; it's the turn of the century: I believe
it's a good time for mixing everything we've learned in this century
up as much as possible, so I remain completely in favour of positive
musical confusion and am a firm advocate of musical
cross-dressing.
RY: Reading through the material and essays on your Website, I
wondered if you have always felt like an observer of contemporary
(music) culture in parallel with your life as a composer, or whether
this has come to the fore later on? Can it hamper your individual
creativity to be constantly assessing one's place within the shifting
land masses of late 20C music?
RC: I founded the music program at the Kitchen Center in New York in
1971 and was its music director throughout most of the 70s, making a
living primarily as a concert producer. This enabled me to hear a lot
of music and situated me ideally as an observer. I was more than an
observer, though. I was a fan! I loved what I was hearing. I made my
own music, as well, and eventually I found that producing other
people's music interfered with my work as a touring musician and
composer, so I had to stop. The last thing I produced was the New
Music, New York Festival, which was the prototype the New Music
America Festival was based on. After this point, I focused my concert
producing skills on producing my own work.
On the other hand, just because I stopped producing concerts didn't
mean that I lost interest in the work going on around me. I've never
felt that I operated in a vacuum, I've always felt part of a group or
a movement of some kind. So the work of my colleagues has always been
important to me in that we're all working to advance the definition
of what music can be in some way, each in our own fashion. The group
that I was a part of in NY during the 80s consisted of Peter Gordon,
Scott Johnson, Elliott Sharp, Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca and John
Zorn. We were coming from vastly different contexts, yet at one point
we found ourselves playing in the same venues and that our interests
somehow coincided. I've always found this kind of thing fascinating,
attempting to define how our respective work was similar and how it
was different.
There are times when it is important to completely let go of
theoretical concerns and just make music, to let the unconscious
mind, the "artist", as it were, take over. This is of course
essential. But I think after one has created a body of work it's
important to take a step back and have a look at it, to try to figure
out what one has done. The French visual artist Daniel Buren wrote an
interesting essay called "Three Texts". He talks about how words
support the art and art supports the words. He said that while it's
true that one can never completely succeed in describing art with
words, it's somehow wildly important to try! I agree with him. So I
keep an eye on what's going on around me and attempt to define myself
in relation to what I see. It keeps me on my toes.
RY: The Downtown NYC scene which you describe from the 70s and 80s
sounds like a fascinating place of fusion in many areas. Can you
account for why (if at all) it has to some extent burnt out, and what
took you to France? Does Paris offer anything like the same
climate?
RC: I moved to France in 1988. I didn't move because I was unhappy
with the music scene in NY. My guitar stuff was peaking at the time
and I loved the scene there. The problem was that I was born and
raised in Manhattan and I had simply lived there for too long. I'd be
walking down First Avenue in the East Village and scenes would flash
back to me from when I was 14 years old, I found it depressing and
decided I needed a change. It wasn't the music scene I wanted to get
away from, it was the actual scenery! I needed a change. I had
married a French choreographer who wanted to move back to Paris, I
thought that sounded like fun, so that's what we did. Boy, was it
ever an adventure! I didn't even speak any French when I moved over
here. Whew!
Almost as soon as I moved to France, I found that I missed my musical
friends in NY. I couldn't consider moving back because of my scenery
problem, but I'd play there quite often, it took people almost five
years to even realise I had moved! I would make sure that I played
there once or twice a year. It's still a great town, I didn't think
the scene had burned out until there until only two years ago,
although my friends who live there had been telling me horror stories
for a bit longer than that.
I was shocked when I went back in 1996, things had really taken a
turn for the worse. The coverage of interesting music of most kinds
by the NY Times and Village Voice, which used to be quite good, had
dropped significantly and the budget crunch for the arts was causing
the funded places to fold up. That was the bad news. The good news
was that the beginning of the 90s saw a musical revolution in Europe
in the field of electronica. I would tune in to my local radio
stations in Paris (Radio FG and Radio Nova) and hear amazing
instrumental electronic music (ie no vocals, just amazing music!)
from Aphex Twin, Neotropic, Atari Teenage Riot, Hedfunk and later
from people like Mixmaster Morris, DJ Loik, DJ Vadim, Squarepusher
and Photek. I was so used to NY being the leader in whatever new
field of music happened to be interesting at any given moment in
time, I was shocked to go back there in 1996 and find that the
electronic scene was relatively tiny, with only a few people like DJ
Olive & Spooky and the crew from SoundLab doing interesting
stuff. It was the first time, since the Darmstadt school had its
heydays in the 1950s really, where I felt that Europe was the true
pioneer and leader in a field of music that I was vitally concerned
with and actively a part of, and I realised that I was in the right
place, no question. So yes, I think I'll stay in Europe, thank you. I
still miss many of my friends in NY, though.
RY: How did you come to tune La Monte Young's piano? What did you
learn from him? What was it that drew so many of you around his
circle and that of Pandit Pran Nath in the early 70s? Do you think
people managed to construct something solid from what was learnt?
RC: In 1971, I wanted to produce a concert of La Monte at the
Kitchen, so I went over to his house to discuss this with him and he
played me an early version of his piece, The Well Tuned Piano. I had
worked my way through my student years by tuning pianos and
harpsichords. I loved La Monte's piece but made a comment that, as a
professional piano tuner, I thought his piano was a bit out of tune
and that maybe I should tune it for him! La Monte thought this was
very funny because he knew that I was trying to scam him for a way to
study with him without paying. He was very generous and let me tune
his piano in exchange for lessons.
I came to work with La Monte & Marian Zazeela from, I think,
around 1971-73. During this period I sang in his group, the Theater
of Eternal Music. Jon Hassell was on trumpet and Garrett List on
trombone during this period. Terry Riley would drop in to sing when
he was in town.
La Monte taught me how to tune in just intonation as well as his
special way of tuning very small intervals, like 63/64 or the comma
of Pythagoras, 83/84. Also higher intervals like 126/127. We would
refer to these intervals as "keys" and I would tune a series of
pitches in the "key" of 83 and another set of pitches in the key of
84. The difference in sound was almost felt rather than heard. All
this influenced my work with electric guitar of course.
I should mention that before I ever played with La Monte, that I was
doing concerts of long duration with Tony Conrad and Charlemagne
Palestine. We had formed a trio at one point in the early 70s. One
concert we did lasted ten hours. Charlemagne was singing in his
Balinese style, Tony played violin and I played harmonium and
transverse flute. It was heady stuff and it had a profound influence
on my later work.
I don't say this to denigrate in any way the work I did with La
Monte, I just want to make it perfectly clear that I love all of
these guys, who were my role models. It was through my work with
Charlemagne, Tony and La Monte that I broke out of the idea of a
composer as a kind of dictator who tells musicians what to do and
bosses them around. I mean, it's one way of composing, right? But
it's certainly not the only way and I'd suspect of anyone who says it
is as having fascist tendencies! Along with Terry Riley, it was
Charlemagne, Tony and La Monte who turned me on to the idea of being
a composer/performer in a real-time context, working with a group of
musicians to arrive at ideas rather than sitting alone in a room at
one's desk with pencil, eraser and manuscript paper.
I don't remember anymore exactly how I met Pandit Pran Nath, I think
it was in 1970. I had read about him in the Village Voice and went to
a concert at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Soho. It was Indian
classical music in slow motion, I had never heard anything so
beautiful in my life. He was offering classes at the time, which is
how I came to study with him.
RY: You say the Ramones at CBGBs woke you up to the raw power of
minimalist rock, and turned you onto the path that saw you play in
groups like Arsenal for a while. Nowadays, of course, rock has its
own traditions and techniques which are pretty much set in stone;
were you aware of this at the time, or are those rules that have
fossilised in the intervening decades? Is what you do with people
like Martin Wheeler, Septile, Gary/Pat et al another type of process
again, or do you see it as a continuation of the rock based work of
the 70s and 80s?
RC: I agree that by the middle 70s the techniques of rock had become
pretty much set in stone. It felt unapproachable, that one would have
to study guitar for years before one could play in a rock band. Then
Patti Smith came along. I knew Patti as a poet on the St Mark's
poetry scene in the East Village before I ever knew of her as a rock
musician. When she started playing at CBGBs, it was encouraging to a
lot of us. We thought, if Patti can do it, maybe we can do it, too. I
was living at the time on East 12th Street, it was in Alan Ginsberg's
building. There were these strange guys I'd say hello to in the
hallway all dressed in black and wearing shades. They turned out to
be in Television! 1975 and 76 saw an opening up for people on the
rock scene. Even non-musicians who were coming out of the poetry
scene like Richard Hell and Patti Smith could play in rock bands
making truly amazing music.
When I first heard The Ramones play, it was a revelation to me. I had
never seen a rock band play live before (it was at CBGBs). I thought,
"Hey, these guys are playing only three chords!" That might have been
one or two more chords than I was using in my music at the time, but
I could see the similarities and thought that maybe I had more in
common with this music than I thought. So I borrowed a friend's
Telecaster, learned how to play bar chords and solo a bit and joined
a band. It was with Nina Canal, an art student from London, (who
later formed Ut, released on the Blast First Label) and a bass player
named Robert Appleton. We basically learned how to play our
instruments together, played a couple of gigs, and then split up to
join other groups.
After working pretty much as a rock musician in various groups for
about a year, I felt I was ready to incorporate everything I was as a
musician in a rock context, including my experience as a composer and
a piano tuner. The result was Guitar Trio, which was composed in
early 1977. It was for three electric guitars in special tunings,
whose vocabulary consisted entirely of the overtones being generated
by playing one chord on the guitar. It was an E minor 7. It was the
first piece I made which I felt broke past my teachers and really
reflected my individuality as a musician and composer.
My point is that a special set of circumstances had converged on the
rock and art music scenes in NY which allowed musicians out of what
then seemed like mutually exclusive contexts to mingle and merge in a
way that hadn't really been possible before or since. People who were
basically coming out of the rock scene like Robert Fripp were playing
in places like the Kitchen, people coming out of a classical context
where playing in rock clubs, jazz musicians like Oliver Lake and The
Art Ensemble Of Chicago were playing in what before were considered
bastions of classical music. There was a feeling back then of
transgression and almost palpable danger present when these musicians
crossed contexts. It ruffled feathers and was a cause of concern
within the circles that were transgressed upon.
I don't see what I'm doing with the present set of musicians I am
working with as a continuation of my interest in contextual issues.
I'm not interested in contextual issues very much these days. I'm
mainly interested in finding music that sounds fresh and that's fun
to play trumpet with. That's all I care about, really.
RY: Is it possible to be a transgressive musician at this point in
time? What are the lines still to be crossed? You say you have found
a set of 'sound foundations' that work for you - can you define them,
and would you say that everyone now has to define their own
boundaries to cross or not?
RC: Yes, I think the boundaries have been redrawn since the time I
wrote my essay in 1990 and that transgression, or at least a bending
of definition is possible within genres, and certainly within the
field of electronica. I must repeat, though, that the idea of
"transgression" doesn't interest me so much today as it did in the
late 70s. These days, I'm more interested in simply making music
which expresses as fully as possible my wide range of interests.
In 1993, I decided to stop composing for guitar ensembles. I wanted
to focus all my attention on electric trumpet and took up a
collaboration with English composer Martin Wheeler.
My experience with Martin was the first time I collaborated with
another composer, it worked out well. Also, for various astrological
reasons, I felt it was time to open myself to other people's
compositional ideas. Up to 1993, I had been spending weeks upon weeks
in my studio by myself composing, I was getting tired of it. I wanted
to breath some fresh air into my work by embracing the work of other
musicians whose music I liked to play with.
By 1993, I was very pleased with the body of work I had made for
various electric guitar ensembles, but I felt that I was starting to
repeat myself, that my work was beginning to sound the same rather
than continuing to grow. I'm mean, playing 14 years in a single
musical style would seem like enough by any standard, wouldn't it?
Also, there is a certain harmonic identity that my music from this
period shares with the NY post-minimalists, it's a kind of dorian
mode harmony with suspended 4th chords, one hears it a lot in Terry
Riley and Philip Glass's early music. It's in a lot of my guitar
music, too.
I never thought of this as a problem before because I am, after all,
a New Yorker... and if I'm not a direct descendent of early
minimalism, then no one is! But I'm at a point in my musical life
where categories aren't so important to me as they were when I was in
my twenties, I'm interested in so many different kinds of music. So I
started working with other kinds of approaches by playing with
musicians like Apache 61, DJ Loik, Jonathan Kane and DJ Elated System
(of Septile), Gary Smith, or Pat Thomas, for example. I've put myself
in a kind of compositional freefall by doing this. And now, as I'm
coming out, I find my music is not the same at all as it used to be,
which I think is a wonderful state of affairs!
RY: I'm interested in this duality of synthesis/amalgamation in sound
versus hard drawn lines/sharp collage type aesthetics. Is this a
distinct choice that has to be made by musicians/composers?
RC: It's a choice, of course. Amalgamation is harder to do well. You
have to really know the music you're working with. And I don't mean
just intellectually, I mean one has to be able to play it and to feel
it in order for it to go through enough of a personal filter so that
it morphs into something really new. I mean, it's one thing to
superimpose styles or paste them together one after another in a
collage. The result is a pastiche of ideas that can be interesting in
that the contrast is ironic, or cynical, or surprising. But once the
surprise has worn off, is it still interesting? I don't think so, not
unless it has gone through what I call the composer's or musician's
personal filter or voice. And if it has managed to do this then it
isn't a collage anymore, it's an amalgamation or a true synthesis of
ideas, stitched together so tightly that only the tiniest pair of
critical scissors could pick the various ideas or components
apart.
I consider the improvisations that I did with Pat and Gary to be
amalgamous. Gary and I had many dinner table conversations about
music and life before we ever played together. Pat, in addition to
being an improvisor, has a deep love and understanding of drum 'n'
bass, which is a love we both share. So when we walked into the
studio and played together for the first time, it was a matter of the
sum total of everyone's contributions being greater than what any one
of us could produce by ourselves.
RY: You played your first trumpet gig on the day you bought your
horn. Would that have sounded very different from the way you play
now?
RC: I barely remember what I played on that first gig, I wish I had
made a recording of it!
My history as a trumpet player has an evolution to it. I fell in love
with the instrument in 1982 when I wrote a brass octet that came out
on the Moers Music Label. Sinclair Acey, Ron Tooley and Olu Dara were
on trumpet/cornet. I heard them play and decided to switch from
guitar to trumpet. I had grown up playing wind instruments and found
that I wanted to get back to playing something requiring
respiration.
I found that the electric guitar was much too hard to play, it has
all these frets, I could never figure out where to put my fingers. It
was much too taxing on my poor brain, so I was really relieved to
find that the trumpet only has three valves. You can get ten or 11
different pitches with the same fingering position, sometimes more,
so it was a lot less to worry about. And there are only seven
different possible fingering positions on trumpet. I had a friend who
was playing in my guitar band who was getting his doctorate in
baroque trumpet playing, I think this was in 83. He showed me how the
classical guys played and I tried that for a while, but soon decided
to abandon it. I wasn't interested in classical technique, I had
already done that on other instruments. So I just practised blues
scales in all 12 keys and at different tempos; I figured if
practising like this was good enough for Charlie Parker, it was good
enough for me!
After I moved to France, I hooked up with a trumpet player named
Andrew Crocker, who has a great jazz group in Paris called Quartet
Elan. Andrew turned me on to a technique taught by a French
trumpetist of the old school, his name is Robert Picheureau, who died
recently of old age. It's a way of playing trumpet that was used by a
lot of players before the war, it turns out that Dizzy Gillespie was
using the same technique. The technique is kind of about
non-thinking, we just sort of feel the note and it comes out.
When I practise today, I play over standard era and bebop changes. So
my technique on trumpet is coming entirely out of big band music and
jazz. When I decided to come out of the closet as a trumpet player in
1993, I realised that I needed to work on what my individual "voice"
was going to be on the instrument. What made the most sense at the
time, since I was known primarily as an electric guitarist, was to
arrive at a trumpet sound that would be as much as possible like a
distorted electric guitar, so that's what I did.
RY: Can you expand on your statement about "compositions which tell a
story to the listener, but somehow it is the listener's story"? Are
the Hard Edge style pieces treated as works which give the listener
space to move around? (As well as the trumpet)?
RC: I used that statement to describe Guitar Trio (1977) and Drastic
Classicism (1982). Both of these pieces are incredibly rich in
overtones and, depending on where you are sitting in the room, each
listener literally hears something different. It's to do with the
varying air pressure levels in the room one plays in. Also, there was
a cultural aspect. What an art world audience might have heard as a
radical new brand of minimalism, the rock audience we played for was
hearing as pure unadulterated noise. Everyone heard the pieces in a
different way. The Hard Edge group is much more specific about what
it is saying. Remember, trumpet is a melodic instrument, not a
harmonic one, the way guitar is, at least the way I played it back in
the 70s. As soon as I articulate a melodic line on trumpet, the story
gets much more specific.
RY: Are you still doing 'field work' in the area of electronica/drum
'n' bass as you did with Arsenal in the 70s? Is composing, for you,
always field work, in fact? Do you ever feel cobwebbed by the rapidly
updating/augmenting technology involved in creating electronic
music?
RC: I don't feel I'm doing field work today, I simply feel that I'm
playing with the music that I love. When I first worked with rock in
1976, I didn't have any experience playing popular music. I wanted to
work as a composer using a rock instrumentation, but I didn't want to
simply appropriate the instruments and do something shallow with
them. So I had to do "field work" by actually learning to play the
music and hanging out with the musicians and learning how they worked
as well as adopting the lifestyle.
My relationship to electronica was very different. First of all, I'm
not a classical composer/musician anymore since I've spent the
majority of my working life as a musician playing in rock or jazz
clubs. Contextual questions are no longer an issue for me, it's
simply a matter, for me, of staying curious and interested, so I only
work with music I like working with. If I get bored with what I'm
working with, I won't hesitate to learn a new style that does
interest me. As far as electronica goes, it makes complete sense that
I'm attracted to it. I studied electronic music with Morton Subotnick
and worked with the first Buchla synthesizer series in the late 60s
when I was 15 years old. I put down electronic music in 1973 in order
to get more into live music, but got back into it again when the Akai
S900 was invented along with cheap Atari computers. I had been
following rap, Detroit House music, Techno, Jungle, drum 'n' bass and
Techstep step almost as soon as they came out, so my relationship to
these styles has always been very close, certainly much closer than
my relationship to rock was when I first approached it.
I first started playing trumpet with rap electronic rhythms around
1984, but I was in weird position. I was already a fully developed
musician, but I had only been playing trumpet for a year when I got
into rap rhythms. So I wasn't ready to play out on the instrument,
even though I wanted to. So what I decided to do was keep my trumpet
playing in the closet for the most part until I was ready on a
technical level to come out. In the meantime, I continued to develop
my work with electric guitars that I had started in 1977. But by
1993, I felt I was ready to make the switch over, so that's what I
did.
RY: The first Neon release featured some pretty ball-busting horn
playing - in fact you turned the trumpet into a massive elephantine
blast of energy! The tracks on Hard Edge explore different subtleties
and pressure levels on the instrument. Did making that specific album
help you develop new approaches to playing, or would you describe it
as a consolidation of your skills thus far?
RC: With Neon, I felt I accomplished what I wanted to do on trumpet,
which was to develop and showcase a personal voice on the instrument.
When I was playing guitar, I always wanted to play like the guitarist
of Black Sabbath (Tony Iommi), but I could never quite arrive at it.
I have less than average digital dexterity and I simply couldn't move
my fingers fast enough or figure out where to put them on the guitar:
and I tried, I tried really hard, it's one of the main reasons I
switched to trumpet. As I was saying earlier, trumpet has only three
valves and you can get at least ten pitches out of each fingering
position, so this made things much easier for a guy like me. Since I
didn't have to worry about the fingering so much, all I had to do was
kind of "will" the notes to come out, and that's what would happen.
So I arrived at a sound that was very much like a fuzzed out Tony
Iommi, except it was on trumpet. It was really like a dream come true
when I finally got the sound down. Another advantage is that on
trumpet, you can get a 7th harmonic overtone in just intonation in
the high register of the instrument. The 11th and 13th harmonics are
also possible, I use them all the time in my playing. I love to work
with the small intervals that define the difference between, for
example, an equal tempered minor 7th and one that's in just
intonation. It's a very beautiful interval, I'm surprised more
trumpet players don't make use of it, but then, they're not many
trumpet players who have also been piano tuners!
Making the Hard Edge album was a completely different story. I had
accomplished what I originally set out to do on the Neon CD, which
was to make the trumpet sound a bit like a guitar. For the Wire
Edition CD, I wanted to achieve as much variety as possible in the
playing I did, where some of the tracks would be open trumpet, some
with mute, and some completely fuzzed out and distorted. However,
another element came into play...
The Neon CD was a completely produced studio album. Martin and I
spent three years working on it, trying many things, going through a
long process or trial and error to come up with a sound we really
liked. For the Wire CD, the producer, Trevor Manwaring, was pushing
me to do something more spontaneous, for something almost approaching
free improvisation.
Now, I've done a lot of free Improv in the past. At the start of the
70s I had played in Frederic Rzewski's NY version of MEV. This
experience brought me into contact with many jazz musicians: Anthony
Braxton, Karl Berger, Sam Rivers, Carla Bley, Steve Lacy, Cecil
Taylor. I started playing on the free jazz scene and even ended up
playing guitar in a group with Keshavan Maslak, Charlie Moffett and
his son Charnette. Loft jazz had become so pervasive in NY by the
middle 70s, so by the time the punk rock explosion happened in 75/76,
I decided to go off on my guitar band explorations. When free Improv
came back into style with the Knitting Factory crew in the mid- 80s,
I didn't take part in it because I felt I had already been there and
done it. And in any case I was more interested in playing with
electronic grooves.
So when Trevor suggested that I go into a studio with Gary Smith ,
Pat Thomas, Lou Ciccotelli and Gary Jeff and do a "first take" kind
of approach, I was kind of nervous about this. But after an initial
playing session in London with the musicians in question, I loosened
up and decided to go for it. It's a different kind of sound than I
would normally go for, and I ended up being very pleased with the
result.
I had forgotten how much I like playing with live musicians,
especially drums and bass. It was a real pleasure working with Lou
and Gary Jeff, who were coming out of the band God/Ice as well as
playing in Mass. Drum 'n' bass is all very well, but nothing replaces
the energy of a live drummer and bass player on stage. I had almost
forgotten this until I played with these guys.
RY: When you play/record with the Hard Edge group, do you feel like a
leader on the instrument; is the music more of a conversation, or is
it pure unchoked autonomy for everyone?
RC: Since I'm playing the only exclusively melodic instrument, and
since it is, after all, my CD, I took on the band leader
responsibilities for the group. I gave general indications for the
kind of feeling and tempo I wanted for each of the tunes we recorded,
after which the sessions became conversational in nature. I had
listened to all of Gary Smith's records before going into the studio,
so I knew his vocabulary pretty well in advance of playing with him.
Same thing for Pat. Lou really surprised me with his versatility, I
had only heard him in the context of Mass, I hadn't realised he had
such a wide playing range, which I didn't hesitate to take full
advantage of, I love working with powerful drummers like Lou. Gary
Jeff has a kind of minimalist, bardo death- trance approach to
playing bass which fits right in with my trumpet aesthetic, it was a
match made in heaven as far as I was concerned.
On one of the pieces I asked Gary to play his characteristic stereo
"wave" shape for the track called, appropriately enough, "Wave". As
he was doing it, I unmuted my trumpet, closed my eyes, and pretended
I was back in Hawaii during my surfing days. It was so cool. I really
felt like I was on my surf board riding within a huge crescent shape
while I was playing with Gary.
So to answer your question, I think if left to my own devices, I
probably would have just played in my fuzzed-out trumpet playing
style over primarily electronic grooves for the entire CD, but Trevor
really encouraged me to broaden my horizons a bit and put more of my
background as an improvisor into my playing. The CD has a more
spontaneous sound as a result, even for the studio sessions that we
did with Pat. I should mention at this point that we used two working
methods in making the hard edge CD. Half of the music was recorded at
the Moat Studio in Brixton with Gary, Pat, Lou Ciccotelli and Gary
Jeff. These were essentially first-take structured improvisations.
The other half of the CD consisted of Pat sending me his basic
tracks, which he composed and which were of the drum 'n' bass variety
and consisted of all the sounds on the track that weren't trumpet or
electric guitar. Gary and I overdubbed our tracks at a later date. It
made more sense doing things like this since there was more emphasis
on the drum 'n' bass element for these tracks. In order to make sure
the CD sounded unified, I approached my overdubbing pretty much the
same way I approached the Moat sessions. Virtually everything I
recorded was a first take. And the one tune I recorded that was a
second take I ended up not using because my reaction was no longer
spontaneous. The end result is that all the pieces on the CD sound
like they belong together, rather than being a compilation of totally
different things.
RY: Astrology seems to figure pretty large in your life - can you
explain when this first became interesting to you and how you use it?
Does it have any part to play in composition, or the substance of
your music at all?
RC: My aunt and uncle were rather well known astrologers working in
America, they had a column in the Daily News in NY for many years,
which helped support their more serious activities. My uncle, Charles
Jayne, predicted that a new planet would be discovered in 1975 near
its own node, with an orbit of about fifty years. Chiron was found
within four degrees of its south Node, only two years later than the
predicted discovery time, and its orbital period was indeed 50 years.
He was a heavyweight. I grew up around astrology and it kind of
rubbed off on me. I believe that the natal chart is an expression of
what the Soul desires to grow into, it's a useful map to look at from
time to time when things become confused. It's a way of viewing the
world, which is how I use it. I don't use it directly in music,
although music certainly figures largely in my Uranus rising, Pisces
mid-heaven chart! In my chart I have Saturn, which represents
structure, sitting on Neptune, which symbolises the unconscious and
music. Many composers, writers and artists have this aspect. It makes
sense, when you think about it. Music is certainly a way of
structuring the unconscious, especially the way I play. I'm not going
to talk about it anymore, it gets too frightening!
RY: Can you comment on the working method that gave rise to Hard
Edge? How did you find that gradual accumulative process of
recording? You have other collaborations on the go, too, don't you
(Kaffe, Apache?) - is this your favoured method right now, that
alchemy of different personalities?
RC: Oops, I covered most of this, didn't I? I decided to start
working with other people when transiting Saturn went into the upper
hemisphere of my natal chart. The composer's art is a lonely one, I
wanted to get back to being a musician, which is more sociable. There
was another factor that influenced this decision as well...
During the 90s I was paying a mortgage off on the house I live in,
which is in a suburb of Paris. I wanted to pay it off as soon as
possible, so I accepted all kinds of commissions, mostly from dance
and theatre companies, in order to make a lot of money so I could pay
off the mortgage debt. Some of the stuff I did was really jive, like
writing a version of Monteverdi's "Vespers of 1610" for brass band
and drums. The straw that broke the camel's back was when a
choreographer asked me to do a cut-up in the style of Kathy Acker,
but a musical version based on the work of Brahms. It was an
interesting idea, but it was for full orchestra and took me nearly a
year of working full time to complete. I kind of burned out on
writing music in the traditional fashion after that point, I had
spent too much time in front of my computer entering notes into
Finale! After the piece was done, I got heavily back into playing
trumpet and made a big effort to spend as little time as possible in
front of my computer and as much time as possible playing trumpet
live. My mortgage was paid up, I was ready to go!
RY: Do you still make a living as a composer? Are you still getting
commissions, and what do people typically look to you to supply?
RC: Since 1996, I've made a career switch. From 1984 on, I was
primarily a composer/conductor, and from 1989 on my band was
exclusively the 100 guitars. I made my living from touring,
commissions and royalties of various kinds. Since 1996, I don't
accept commissions anymore unless they involve me playing trumpet, I
just don't have the time or patience for anything else. And I've also
been making the transition from my 100 guitar band to playing live in
various contexts on trumpet. The transition has been a bit rough on
my pocketbook, so I've had to take on a part time teaching gig here
in Paris to make ends meet, but this is preferable to me because I
need to be free to pursue whatever my current musical interests are
without being overly concerned about their commercial potential.
Things are coming together, though. I'm hoping to tour with the Hard
Edge band and I have other projects in the works. The nice thing
about being a trumpet player is that it allows me to work with
interesting musicians. Besides my continuing work with Apache 61 and
Martin Wheeler, I was on a Slip and Slide compilation called The
French Underground with DJ Loik, who Catherine Piault of Crammed
Disks hooked me up with. Paul Schütze and I have also been
talking about getting together to play; Kaffe Matthews and I have a
project in mind; something might be coming up with Bill Laswell as
well, we'll see. I'm working on a little project with David Toop.
It's all very exciting. And I'm doing what I like best, playing
trumpet.
A feature based on the above interview appeared in The
Wire 182 (April 99) -
To visit The Wire's excellent homepage, which contains this transcript as well as many articles, links, and other items of interest to music lovers, click on THE WIRE Home Page.