Zornkind (German Edition)

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Do you approach his music melodically in some way, or are you trying to play the changes? What I try to do with the Monk stuff is do my version of it but keep his framework, or some reference to it, because his music is unique. There's a lot of jazz that's not unique, the only thing about it is that it swings, or with free jazz that it's ferocious Sometimes I hear a bossa nova version of a Monk song which may be nice but it doesn't have the feeling of the Monk tune anymore.

I try to avoid that. Was jazz part of your life before country? What happened in the early formative years? I started with Herman's Hermits, that was the first record I ever bought. At that time the Top 40 charts were a mixture of country and rock, that was the unique thing about the American scene back then.

Now they have everything divided up, they have country stations you never hear country and western on rock stations anymore , but when I was growing up you'd hear the Beatles and then the latest Roger Miller or Johnny Cash, all mixed together in the same charts. As a result, country music was a big influence on rock: Chuck Berry's music was a kind of combination of elements from country and jazz, and later the Beatles were influenced--songs like "Nowhere Man" or "Act Naturally," which was a Buck Owens cover.

Of course the Byrds and Bob Dylan went completely country. You also played a Gram Parsons tune last night Gram Parsons was really important because when the musics started to go their separate ways, with the hippie backlash against country and western, he reached out and created a country music that brought the hippies back in. He's one of the best loved country guys now.

Translation by Vocabulix

When you talk to people that like country music, everybody really likes his songs and the feeling they have. Did you start guitar at an early age? Mostly because I noticed that girls liked the Beatles. My friends--the boys--all thought they were awful, that they were "queers" with those weird hairdos laughs I taught myself--I never really felt like I needed to take lessons: I was one of those geeks that got there early and sat in the front row.

I went to a lot of things when I was too young to get in, because I got there so early and I'd be hanging around until the musicians in the band figured that this was some kid who really liked music, and they let me stay. I remember going to see The Leaves like that, sitting on the front row for both sets; same with The Association--that group had a lot of hits but still used to play these little clubs--I remember seeing them on campus. There were some really great guitar players from the town I grew up in, Boulder Colorado.

Tommy Bolin was one of them--when he became famous I didn't think he was any good anymore, he was really fucked up with drugs and he played much less interesting stuff than when I used to see him with the local bands. Another guy that was really great was Rusty Young, later in Buffalo Springfield, who played pedal steel. I got to see a lot of really good players.

That's where I learned a lot of stuff. With all these types of music you have people that vary from being totally awesome to being like There was a lot of music back then I wished I could play; when Jimi Hendrix came along I would have given anything to be able to play that stuff, but it took me about fifteen years of practicing to be able to play a couple of notes like him, in terms of the sound and the technique. I was in all these psychedelic garage bands, and improvisation was encouraged back then; in the late sixties it was really popular, everybody was trying to outdo each other making weird albums: When rock changed and became more pop-oriented, I completely lost interest.

I liked it the other way: Why did you move away from Boulder? To avoid the Vietnam War. My father was really opposed to the war, and my mother had been running away from one dictator after another all her life, from Hitler, to Mussolini, to Nixon We went to Canada and I was up there until they had an amnesty, and by then I was interested in playing professionally.

I really wanted to play avant garde jazz. I really got into it, and I started thinking: That must have been a shock. I really liked it, because it didn't relate to jazz at all. It was something else, you could play it for people, and if they were good musicians they could tell he really knew what he was doing, but other people would think he was just an amateur. I used to like that--it was like a code, you could completely lose somebody.

They'd have no idea the person could even tune the guitar, but in fact they were really incredible musicians. I was really drawn to that idea. Why did you move to New York? I was living in a very remote part of western Canada, putting out my own records and writing about avant garde music. I'd been earning my living as a journalist, writing for a newspaper; one of the contacts I made was with an Italian percussionist and composer, Andrea Centazzo.

I heard he was putting out a series of albums to establish himself, so I reviewed them for some Canadian publication. This was the mid-seventies, and he had the top players: Steve Lacy, Derek Bailey I felt tremendously isolated, because there weren't that many people interested in that kind of music up in Canada, so I decided to go to the East Coast of the States and see who I could fall in with. My eldest brother was living in New York and there was a vacancy in his apartment.

When I moved there I got a phone call from Centazzo who was in town for some Latin percussion convention--they'd flown him over, because he was involved in some company that made gongs and cymbals--and I invited him to come over and stay at the apartment, and we got to be friends.

He said he could get me some gigs in Italy, and he set up quite a long tour. My playing was so extreme at that point, in terms of what was acceptable on the Italian jazz scene, that Centazzo always said afterwards he could never get another job in Italy! Promoters used to say: I walked out of the bank, and I was like: Did you end up playing with Bailey on that trip? When I finally made an album I sent it to him. One of the great things about Derek--and it's still true today--is that he reaches out to people: He wrote to me and when I took that trip to Europe to play with people, I got over to London and everybody was really nice.

Evan Parker put me up at his house for a few days, and Derek had a couple of concerts organized with different people. That was the first time I met him--I remember he was going out to some music shop to talk to someone about building him a guitar, and he asked me to tag along. It was really nice.

Before I went to England, some of the American musicians I knew like Anthony Braxton and Leo Smith had warned me not to play with Steve Beresford--they said he was insane and he couldn't play, so right away I sought him out! Laughs We got together and we've been good friends ever since. When you were in New York did you ever run into Sonny Sharrock? Yeah, every now and then. He always sounded good. What about those Herbie Mann albums? I read some jazz critic somewhere who said you could always tell when Sharrock was soloing because half the audience were outside on the sidewalk!

Laughs Herbie definitely liked him though, he was in his band for a long time. How did you meet John Zorn? I'd only been in New York about a week before I met him; it was through a mutual acquaintance from San Francisco, Larry Ochs from the Rova saxophone quartet this was well before Rova. He was in New York visiting his sister, and he went to a concert by another San Francisco musician and there were so few people there that they all got talking, and he met this guy John Zorn.

We had a lot in common for a long time. Back then there were only a handful of people we felt sympathetic playing with. One of whom was the violinist Polly Bradfield She had a lot of children and went out to California. She was never that driven to have a musical career. She was a really interesting musician though, I really liked her. I think her solo violin album is one of the best things I've ever heard. Do you know that?

I have to send you a copy. I've got lots of copies, because when she left New York, in a big hurry, she piled her records out in the street, so I kept them; every now and then I meet somebody who wants one or who I think ought to have one. We did a couple of concerts together in England and Belgium that came out on a record, "Torture Time"--that was another nice album. You were running your own label, Parachute, at the time. I started Parachute in Canada--when I got to New York a lot of people that wanted to put records out realized that if they were all on the same label they'd have more clout with distributors.

What that really meant was that one person was doing all the work, and that was me. I got tired of that pretty quickly. The most successful album ever released on Parachute was "There'll Be No Tears Tonight," my country album--that was the only one that was ever repressed, then licensed again and put out on CD. Right now I'm trying to find someone else to get more of that stuff re-released. Do you still have any control over Parachute material today? I notice Zorn doesn't mention you in the notes to the Parachute boxset Well, the tapes belong to the musicians, you know.

Pause Back then I was writing avant garde music, and jazz-like versions of it, and compositions for improvisers, though getting involved with Zorn kind of pushed me out of composition for a while, because I think that nobody else I knew created pieces as good as his: Were those rehearsals for his game pieces as grueling as legend has it? Worse, because there were so few people involved in this stuff. Zorn's music made me really uptight, not only because it had to be really precise, but also because he was really dictatorial about it. He'd get really angry with certain people if it didn't go a certain way.

There are composers that bring the best out of players in a sympathetic manner, and there are people who are really hard on you.

Archive for February, 2010

I think both methods work, though playing Zorn's pieces wasn't something I really enjoyed all that much. Eventually, about the time I left New York, he was starting to get a lot of people that he was comfortable playing with. The ranks really grew from two or three people to dozens. He got to the point where he could do his music with anybody, just call in some studio musicians and do it It's curious that his notes for the Parachute boxset, despite extracts from the sketches, don't go into much real detail as to exactly how the performers had to construct the music.

I have people ask me about how certain pieces were made, and to tell the truth I don't even remember. I don't remember how to play any of that stuff. Yet he wrote "The Book of Heads" for you--or did you commission it? I didn't ask for the piece. He was just writing a lot of music at that point, and he wrote that piece for me, and I performed it a few times in New York. There was some discussion about my recording it, but we had really divergent approaches to recording things.

I really like lo-tech, and he's always been drawn to those big-budget, pristine, studio kind of thing. Pause There are certain areas where people are unyielding, in a way. What do you think of Marc Ribot's recording of it? I haven't really listened to it that much. I like the little tribute in the liner notes; that was really nice--but that was after not speaking to him for five years.

He seems to have given commissions for Tzadik albums to all his old buddies except you Maybe he's just avoiding it because he doesn't like the way I do things, I don't know I like making records, I make records for all kinds of people and I make a lot of them.

I've approached him about certain things, one thing I've been working on is a kind of tribute to Leo Smith, with him playing on it and some performances of his compositions, but John wasn't interested. Pause He's a mysterious guy. Why did you finally leave New York? Well, there were two major factors that led me to leave. Firstly, my music started changing, I started playing the country stuff and nobody in New York could deal with that at all, there wasn't any tradition of playing country music in New York.

Musicians are a funny bunch; they can be really good at what they do, but some of them look down their noses at other things and think they're really easy when in fact they're not. To some people improvising is really easy, but then you get some classical musicians who practically throw up if they have to improvise two bars during a concert if they lose their place or whatever Other people can't read and think it's unimportant.

Typically the attitude I ran into was that people thought country and western was something anybody could do, there was nothing to it, so what was the point in it? But they didn't really know how to play it. There's a whole world you get into, just like any other kind of music.

The second reason was that I started raising children and I didn't think New York was a great place because nobody had any room to do anything. It wasn't very relaxing. Your kid couldn't just go outside and hang out with the junkies. We couldn't afford to live there anymore. I wanted to find a new locale, so we moved to North Carolina where I knew a drummer who could play any kind of music The band you formed became the Chadbournes Yeah, that's really true!

Laughs I had various country band line-ups, and we also started playing some psychedelic music too, because basically the only places we found to play were what we called the "new wave" scene, the punk clubs. The psychedelic material went over a little better with them. To me it was all the same anyway, I knew how to do it all. The band Shockabilly evolved when we found the right line-up; we had one trio with Tom Cora before Kramer, and when we tried it with him things kind of clicked and we started touring a lot.

Kramer stepped forward with a kind of concept about selling it, producing the albums and so forth That band really toured a lot, that went on for a while. How did Camper Van Chadbourne come about? After Shockabilly broke up, I became a kind of freelance. It was fun, I was doing a lot of solo concerts again and a lot of young bands approached me about playing and making records. I did a whole series of records with a lot of different bands.

I liked it in a way, because it was like the best of both worlds. In theory, you've got a band with that tight band sound where every night it's really fierce But you don't have to be in the band and deal with all their crises. That's the theory anyway How did that start? I played a concert in San Francisco and they were one of the opening acts, and one of the guys came up and said they'd turned down some other shows to do this one because they really liked me and would I play a Pink Floyd song with them?

Their records were doing quite well, and with bands like Camper Van Beethoven or the Violent Femmes I could get a fairly decent amount of money to make a record.

That was a really incredible tour. There were two studio albums and a double live album, and there's stuff still coming out. All the members of the band were doing their own things, it became quite complicated. On the subject of politics, how do you find America under Clinton as compared to under Bush or Reagan?

Well, things don't really change. When you have someone in power like Nixon or Reagan or Bush it makes you a bit paranoid, because they're constantly ranting and raving about things that bother you. They're more aggressive about it. But from experience, I know that Democrat presidents are just as bad in a lot of ways.

There's just as much sabre rattling; it was Lyndon Johnson who escalated the war in Vietnam, but at the same time he did a lot of social things that were really good, that were beneficial. Even Nixon had some beneficial social programs--he was so desperate to get the votes of blacks, he took the advice of any that would talk to him, like Sammy Davis Jr.! Were you never tempted to follow the free jazzmen of the sixties and move to Europe? I'd like to move away. I'm sick of living where I live because they don't care what I do. I moved there in the first place because I knew some musicians, it was really cheap, and they liked the stuff I was doing.

But now there are no clubs. The club scene is gone, and it doesn't look like there's any interest in reviving it. I hardly ever play there, I hardly ever make any money there. But it's difficult to find a place to live abroad, especially with children and everything You just can't show up and squat in someone's apartment.

This Italian percussionist was telling me about the English musician Mike Cooper, who now lives in Rome. I said I thought that must be difficult, but he told me he had an Italian girlfriend, and I said: After that, there's nothing to it. The Brits are quite good at being ex-patriots Fred Frith lives in Stuttgart Yeah, he's tried just about every country! Do you think the situation is much better for this kind of music in Europe than the States? It's better in the States than it was, but it's worse in Europe. A lot of things that used to make it better than the States have disappeared, particularly in Germany.

I used to do about fifty or sixty concerts a year in Germany, but since the reunification I play about three. These things tend to go up and down. This includes those tools that claim or appear to allow you to do "anything and everything". In terms of music, I'm thinking DAWs digital audio workstations and software environments here.

When we aren't jamming together, Scott will work on some rhythmic and low-end phrases, often with samples or loops to embellish. When we're together, we freestyle on top of that or throw everything out all together. David is keen on developing melodic phrases. The work is mostly down-tempo to mid-tempo, with what seems like psychedelic drone aspects. Yes, we're quite fine with creating musical ideas around a drone, whether that's a single tone or note, or a single "chord". But often, we'll pick a few notes and play around them.

You could say we are in a "key" of sorts but very limited in the number of notes we play. Sometimes only two notes and maybe a third note if we're feeling adventurous. But with mutliple synths going at once, and the sonic range possible even on one synth, you can get a lot of mileage out of even two notes, or a single chord. We are probably ascribing to the Lou Reed approach , where he was once quoted as saying "One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz. Our rhythm or dynamics are probably a lot more varied than our melodic efforts.

So sometimes we'll keep coming back to those few notes or tonal themes or textures, if you will, and revisit a rhythm that seems to match, and come back to all of that together for more than one jam session. If you think of it as we're creating pieces, or movements, it's probably a more accurate description. If you come to see us perform, or watch what we've done, and you're looking for verse-verse-chorus-verse, you're going to be disappointed. We never play the same thing, or a piece the same way, twice. Maybe what we are doing is conducive to some form of experimental jazz in some way -- maybe a John Zorn kind of way to be bold -- but we'd be careful about saying that.

Jazz is loaded with expectations, namely underlying talent, which we don't have, haha. Many times, we'll latch on to something really cool, go with it, swear that it's the best thing we've ever done, then forget how we did it and never get back to it. Hopefully this happens to others in their creative process, so we don't feel so inadequate. But there's a lot of spirit in the spontaneous. In a way the ephemerality of our process of composition could be frustrating, but we repeat that experience, even if not the specific piece, often enough that we realize we're doing something we are fond of -- even if we'd be cautious to say it's something "right".

We admire Japanese psych rock guru Keiji Haino's assertion of the idea l of the ephemeral nature not only of music, but of music performance itself. Just like sound waves themselves are ephemeral, the process of making music can benefit from such transience as well. Originally the notion of "Furnace Creek" was something Scott started considering, and composing little sketches for, in as a solo effort.

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It was an out-growth of his old industrial band Insect from the s. Over the years, work continued with different phrases and patterns and riffs, keeping stuff that was interesting, and later bringing everything up to Ableton Live, as it afforded a portable laptop solution to composition. The second, and current setup, is the result of us finally getting together in after saying for years that we should do so.

We both have a strong affinity for synthesizers, drum machines, and heavy metal guitar , though we don't really yet integrate the latter into our sound in a proper sense. We also share a similar aesthetic ideal in general, although personality-wise we are different in a lot of ways.

One great thing we have in common is that we're approaching this project in a laid back, "labor of love", highly collaborative fashion. A lot of that attitude just comes from our age too. Don't get too hung up on things.

Translation of edition in German

Where there's a tension, let it resolve creatively. We're here to have fun and we get on very easily with one another. They sound quite different from what we're doing, but they're awesome and inspirational. The amputation from that Ableton Live workflow environment was a good thing for sure as it wasn't conducive to playing live , despite the name of the software, or at least the way we were playing live or wanted to play live.

To some extent, and largely out of convenience since having lots of hardware takes up space, and confines you to not only that space but also place, as a function of not being portable. There seems to be a lot of interest nowadays in moving away from the laptop to a hardware-based production or performance experience -- especially with the popularity of Eurorack.

We're ultimately pragmatic and don't consider ourselves "hardware" or "analogue" elitists: But people who have known nothing but laptop production are enjoying all these new realities when they break away from the computer. It doesn't mean sequencing is out of the question. But it wasn't hard for us to ween off the laptop-based environment because it essentially transported us back to what we were accustomed to from over a decade earlier: A good understanding of the inner-workings of synthesis and MIDI is key to this kind of setup, and the way we compose. Over a decade before, we were jamming using [Alesis] MMT-8s to sequence, and have now moved to the [Korg] Electribe thanks to David's cajoling.

The laptop is long gone at this point, though it served us well in terms of some creation, if not performance. We just got together in the beginning and as is often the case, we hit it off and clicked as we suspected we would. There were slow starts and beautiful breakthroughs. It's not like we sat and wrote five great songs in one session, which can and does happen in perhaps a more traditional band setup, with the right chemistry.

But we muddled through and felt out the process more than anything and boy has it gone through many revisions. The evolution of our tools -- our gear -- there's a story there in itself, but too much to tell here [Editor's note: So anyway, we got more and more comfortable with the spontaneity, shifted things around gear-wise, and still retained some of the structures and motifs that Scott had developed over the years, as far back as early s.

There's a group in England called Furnace Creek. They got the Bandcamp web address which is how we found them. We have nothing to do with them. But the funny thing is, they do really great stuff and it even sounds a little like what we're doing. Actually they're probably better, ha. But it's weird how a name -- and the implicit tropes behind that -- can perhaps be a unifying force in a creative sense.

It's actually a place -- a very wonderful place. Scott visited, but it was a strange circumstance. It's a long story, but it has an extremely profound impact on me and my creativity. That coincidence resonated with me. When I finally got home to Tennessee, to decompress, I just threw all my belongings in storage and hit the road, literally driving from one coast to the other and back over the course of a couple of months. I remember arriving at these little roadside motels often owned by Asian-Indian families and nobody would be staying there. I believe a Sikh guy got shot in Texas.

I think it could have been worse, but it was bad enough. Anyway, I would talk to these people, these immigrants predominantly, sometimes as their only customer. I actually started going out of my way to visit the places that were owned by "non-Caucasian" Americans -- I guess quite the opposite consumer behavior of the otherwise fervent "America First" patronage.

Occasionally I would sit with these immigrant owners and have chai in the dingy little motel lobbies, watching all the anthrax scare and Islamo-phobia unfold on TV. By and large people were generally staying at home watching the news, and mostly weren't going out to stay in hotels thinking that these people were somehow affiliated with the "terrorists". There was no "immediate broadcast" in the Twitter sense.

At the same time, in between these visits with immigrants, I was frequenting National Parks, that were beautiful, and Native American reservations, which were by and large not so beautiful. It occurred to me that the land "given" to the Native Americans was, mostly, the worst possible land in the United States.

Non-arable, desolate, remote, and in many cases abused. It was a juxtaposition emotionally. Bring all of that together: Here I was out on a Fear-and-Loathing-David Lynch-meets-Paul Bowles "vacation" of sorts -- a surreal introspective American odyssey couched in what seemed like some over-hyped version of post-apocalyptic America. I ended up wandering to Furnace Creek in Death Valley and stayed there for a few days, sleeping in the desert.

The whole journey, not to mention the metaphors, had a big impact on me, but particularly that place. It's a couple of hundred feet below sea level. I guess the lowest place you can go in the United States Though I think we've trumped the old low point. But it was extremely hot and dry as you can imagine, while at the same time full of life and geological marvels if you looked past the "death".

Certainly not attempting to entertain people or make them feel good [laughs]. But actually that's a key point. We're realistic about what we're doing here and objectives are important, even if they shouldn't be overly constraining. We are not always trying to create an experience that we necessarily think others will "enjoy", from the perspective of getting their "entertainment dollar's worth".

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