Triangle Bounce ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Artist Disclair:

Most sales pitches & most promo for artists go for the bigger than life mythic, more important than breakfast kind of blitz. I really prefer to keep all this much more human scale.

I also don't really believe in that esoteric, "this music is too hard for you to understand or listen to" stuff. Communication and understanding always take time & learning. These are adventures we all share.

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DIY adventures & then some...

I've always been interested in going after that extra something just around the corner: something felt, but not yet heard. To me, the whole point of creative activity is to come up with something different than what's already here.

This can invite some upstream swimming and at times, more than just a little DIY.

Some of these inclinations grew out out of unexpected experiences.

I came up just long enough ago when it was a little bit more likely that you could hear some music that was absolutely unlike anything you'd ever heard (or even imagined). This was becase unusual, fringe, marginal non-standard & non---Western musics were a lot harder to come by at the time and thus weren't heard so easily or often - unless you really went out of your way.

Sonic encounters with these could completely turn your head around and make you look at everything differently. It happened to me.

In my case, it was late Coltrane, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Eric Dolphy, Rahsaan, Albert Ayler and especially Ornette Coleman, whose music taught me a whole other human worldview than what I'd been exposed to before. Then there was Xenakis and Cage and music from Japan, India, Africa, all kinds of sounds I'd never imagined could happen. Well, another world really was possible, so it seemed.

Following all this even led me into serious involvement with generating music myself, to learn, to understand, to explore. I'm still learning, & I'm still listening.

At that time, DIY often went by the name of self determination or kujichagulia, especially for many black artists. Chicago had the AACM. My hometown had the Detroit Artists Workshop, Bud Spangler at WDET, the Ibo Cultural Center and the Strata Concert Gallery, where Archie Shepp blew me away with the sound of 2 (!) Detroit drummers (Dan Spencer & Sadiq Abdu-Shahid, both whom played with my sonic openings under pressure group in NYC -- lucky I was). Never recovered from that sound. I heard Ornette levitate the room on 2 consecutive nights. And then there was the CJQ, whose metagroove (my name for it) music permanently changed my notions of musical time.

I got invited to play free energy music regularly up in Pontiac with Ubadiah McConner on North Ardmore St.; and meanwhile I went to Thomas Jefferson College near Grand Rapids and studied Euroclassical composition and theory with the wonderful Bob Shechtman (who also taught me how to play the bass straight ahead, which also kept me fed during those years).

I rented a loft as studio space with a few other painters (now the location of the Gerald Ford Presidentiial Library) and began the DIY practice of performing there with a trio every week. We had a small, but lively scene going.

Small is the important word. At the age of 20, I pulled out for New York City, hoping to find a larger community and hopefully, just a little bit less DIY.

Just a block north of CBGBs (this was before anyone there ever thought that that situation would confer so much fame upon them) was a much more radical -- and much more interesting -- creative music scene at the Tin Palace. Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea was down the street. Jo Lee Wilson's The Ladies' Fort was just down the block from there. & the Five Spot was bringing in Cecil Taylor, The Revolutionary Ensemble, Don Cherry, Jackie McLean & & &... AACM, St. Louis & California musicians were all hitting New York with amazing and very imaginative new sounds.

Playing everywhere. Money was scarce, but space was still cheap. I did the DIY again, got a loft, first on Cooper Square, then in Chelsea, started jam sessions and composers' sessions. Music all the time.

The original plan was to develop "naturally," work my way up the "ranks" gradually, learn, earn a place of sorts, and move on from there. Old school. After a few years, I noticed that I'd have to shake things up a little more on my own if things were ever to really get moving.

A band of sorts was beginning to form around my composers' sessions on W. 25 st.. I took the leap, further developed the compositions, recorded and released my first album on my own label, deep dish, financing it through bicycle messengering and an advance order campaign.

All of which involved a number of aesthetic and attitudinal decisions. The commitment to developing original music was primary. Secondly, the intent was to earn whatever success on the basis of the music itself, not on the basis of music world politics or some public relations hook. Thirdly, I decided to pursue a distinct musical language, and develop that with a regular, long term group (versus the more common and much easier vehicles offered by pick up bands playing either standard formats or sterotypical "free" music). Whether these were tactically "wise" decisions or not remains, in retrospect, pretty much up for grabs.

Day to day life was predominantly hand to mouth while juggling the usual conflicts of interest between time spent earning money outside of music and time dedicated to developing one's own work (with music getting the priority).

Thanks to New Music Distribution Service, the recording got some good reviews in major magazines and the record opened some regular opportunities for the band in the Canadian circuit around Montreal, But I was really too broke to subsidize the postage costs of mailing vinyl to Europe, where the "real" work (if not the money) was.

The trombonist in the band, Fred Parcells, convinced me (after much resistance) to record another session, this time gratis at his own Giant Studios on w. 38th st. It was a technical and financial disaster, but the band was very interesting (pedal inflected electric trombone, 2 basses, Bern Nix on guitar with James Weidman's piano); and it was at this point that I made some breakthoughs into the kind of musical language and issues that have stayed compelling for me ever since.

I wanted to develop something that built on the highly kinetic & tactile polyrhythm that Elvin Jones applied, but I wanted to get an entire band, not just the rhythm section, to coordinate on that level, to work out another kind of ensemble thinking that could accomodate not only that, but the open formal options of free playing while still being able to draw on more closely synchronized patterns & interactions

I built interfaces (what improvisers usually call "tunes" or "compositions") that placed different parts of the band in different rhythmic strata (basses in 3 with a melody in 4, for example). The trick is to develop melodic hooks strong, flexible & contrasting enough to anchor and convince the musicians rhythmically.

Through the 80s into the 90s, I expanded this, drawing on lessons from the examples of the CJQ. I'd string a number of strongly shaped, short, contrasting polyrhythmic cells, where they could work both as sequential narratives & as pivots or cycling worlds of their own.

This could instigate a non-linear signal system among the players that would allow the band to shape shift freely without giving up the connection/contrast instensities afforded by these cells. I call the structure and feel of these metagroove (a groove or feel that derives from movement among different grooves).

Creative activity in New York stayed pretty interesting, even exciting, through these years; but the practical reality of working at venues like the Knitting Factory was matter of playing for the door, which is a form of budget roulette usually at the musicians' expense. It was getting harder & harder, with the ever accelerating pressures of gentrification, to be able to pay a band enough to keep it together to really develop music like this so that it cold really sound & be heard.

I tried Europe. I got offers in Portugal, so that's where I went. And even there, the pay was a lot better than in the States. That helped in developing a band into a trio version of sonic openings under pressure which recorded the CD which way what (a series of septet compositions condensed into a trio format).

Regular travel to Morocco also introduced me to the Gnawa, and especially to M'allem Najib Soudani of Essaouira, with whom I've since enjoyed a long friendship and musical collaboration. We recorded the album Sudani together with drummer Nirankar Khalsa on my deep dish label.

Life and family led back home to New York where I reinvented yet another version of sonic openings with the steady & enthusiastic support of bassist Hill Greene, who patiently absorbed all the new complications I was introducing into his music practice.

Economics kept the band small, but we had a minute each with my good friend, Juma Santos Ayantola, who played talking drum with the group, and virtuoso trombonist Steve Swell (who'd also worked with the band during the late 80s and early 90s).

I lined up a recording session with CIMP in connection with a tour of the NE/midwest avant-garde chitlin circuit. However, by the time the date came to record the drum is honor enough (which wrapped new extended compositions around the talking drum), Juma had moved back to Ghana and was impossible to replace. We still recorded; but the imagined sound got away that time.

Shortly afterwards, Hill introduced me to his longtime collegue, drummer David Pleasant, as the guy to play this music. He was right. David's rhythmic concepts and capacities are way beyond mine -- and beyond just about any drummer I know of. This had a revolutionary effect on my thinking and composition because ideas that I'd always believed impossible to ask of a musician suddenly became doable.

I developed another family of compositions that were recorded on muhheankuntuk for the Clean Feed label. These began to explore polyrhythm and multidirectional music at another level. David's polyrhythmic fluidity invited me to explore stacks of tempos moving through a metagroove matrix, such as 3, 4 and 5 sounding simulataneously while followed by a tangentially linked 4 with 3 (& it goes on from there), or fractal extensions of temporal patterns. The elements of a "dream band" were definitely in motion: but before the group could make a real mark with an audience, it dissolved with yet unrealized ambitions to re-form as a collective.

This was a change in direction that demanded some serious rethinking. In trying to understand better why I do what I do, I began reading whatever literature about music I could find, some informative and a lot of it pretty frustrating in either its superficiality or exaggerated aesthetic Eurocentricism. This led to the writing being developed on the ways & sounds weblog.

The ideas being explored in the last sonic openings trio were both irresistable and almost impossible to develop through another group beause of the huge start up investment (whether of time or money). I decided in the meantime to try to assimilate these polyrhtymic, multilinear constructs directly into solo saxophone performance. That's just crazy; but it has stayed engaging; & it's beginning to sound pretty interesting on its own,

Thoughout this long experimental & creative process, I've also initiated a good number of parallel pilot projects that merit a quick mention.

Following the displacement of the sonic openings project, I formed present personic with Bern Nix & Lisle Ellis, two longtime friends & collegues who each have very personal melodic & improvisational approaches. Here, in place of explicit polyrhythm, we went for simulataneous multiple narratives. I liked that band.

After that, deep pedestrian was a group with 3 bass viols & a tapper as drummer. That was some interesting stuff that had a no budget weekly run in NY for a few months.

In the 80s, where the sonic op project was swelling up to 10 - 12 musicians, I did a spin off, conduction style, string orchestra with a great range of colors including electric & acoustic guitars, banjo, mandolin, violin, cello & bass. Nice, but just a little too expensive to sustain.

Juma Santos Ayantola asked me to do some Monk arrangements while I was in his band with Wadada & Rachiim Sahu, which later led to the group Remonkability (recompositions of Monk with a little Herbie Nichols) that could play more standard venues while I was in Europe. Good stuff that should still be recorded someday.

The transmedia band was a NYC pilot project that explored live reciprocal interaction between saxophone, dancer, painter & video. A lot of potential there.

Well, as Javier Antonio Quiñones Ortiz once quipped in a review of a recorded perfromance of mine in All About Jazz NY, "So much to play so little time..." How true this is. So, so many ideas; & how really wonderful it is to do any of it.

The triangle bounce project is the next (& being of this moment, of course, the most exciting) initiative.

& after that, I've got a series of songs that I want to record. I already have exactly the musicians in mind...