 |
[Music: G. Lewis/B. Mixon, "View From Skates in Berkeley" (1994)] TP: Our guests are George Lewis and Leo Smith, who will be participating in the AACM 30th Anniversary Series concert, next installment, Saturday, September 16th, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture at 2 West 64th Street. The concert starts at 8 p.m. The music of George Lewis and Leo Smith will be performed by the S.E.M. Ensemble, Petr Kotik, conductor, with guest artists Quincy Troupe, poet; William Brown, voice; Warren Smith, percussion; J.D. Parran, reeds.
It's an honor to have Leo Smith and George Lewis in the same room together. They are both very important figures in the development of improvised music. In Leo's case, the recorded history begins in the mid 1960s, and in George's case in the 1970s. You both were members of the AACM, and joined it through very different paths, I would imagine. In Leo's case, you came from Mississippi to Chicago and found the AACM. Was that more or less the trajectory for you?
SMITH: Well, I left Mississippi and ended up in Chicago, but it took a couple of years; I went from there to the Army and places like that. TP: Tell us about some of the specifics of that journey. You come from a blues background. SMITH: Well, yes. Essentially in Mississippi, the art of blues music is practiced with voice and instrument. When I began to play the trumpet, my first exposure to music was dealing with blues. I would say in that beginning of learning the blues as such, it was also the beginning of the trumpet for me, meaning that I learned how to play music while playing blues on the trumpet -- if people understand what that means. It's not that I went there as a musician. I learned how to become a musician while I was playing the blues. So it's kind of unique. TP: What type of situations were you playing in after you began to reach your maturity as a musician? SMITH: Well, just . . . TP: Name some names, too. SMITH: I don't like names, basically. TP: No? Okay. SMITH: No. Basically, it's a question of remembering names and things like that.But I started out in the AACM in '67, and I consider that to be the beginning of my mature moments of playing music. And all of those guys are renowned now, like George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins -- all of them.
TP: And Leo Smith as well. SMITH: Yeah. We all grew up in an environment and in a time when expectations were held very high for us, and we went out and achieved them. Meaning that we looked at the musical scene and we looked at the environment which we lived in, and we figured out some of the things that would give us a bridge across an environment that had a lot of problems in it, you see. And one of them was being able to be creative without the luxury of funds and money to do whatever your dream was, but the creativeness where you would have to design systems and stuff like that that didn't cost you a dime, you see. So that's a challenge and a fulfillment that everyone is proud of today. TP: What were the circumstances that brought you to the AACM? SMITH: I was in the Army, about to get out, and of course, I was kind of despised by the people that I played amongst. There was one fellow there that knew another fellow that was despised in the Army amongst the guys he played about -- and his name happened to be Anthony Braxton. So he gave me a telephone number and said, "Well, I think you guys would get along great!" And he was right. Anthony is, I would say, one of my most favorite partners in performing duet music. Somehow we complemented each other. And we went through a lot of different kinds of things in Chicago that some people may have gone through, but we didn't know about them, and we kind of felt like we went through them alone, but they were like very sharp and pointed things. TP: Now, you and he linked up in a performing group. Because out of the larger body of the AACM, there were a number of smaller performance situations wherein all of the musicians would contribute ideas, and there was a real flow, I guess. SMITH: Uh-huh. TP: I guess Leroy Jenkins was the third member of that, and Three Compositions of New Jazz emanated from that situation. SMITH: Right. TP: Talk about some of the ideas that you were working with explicitly at that time in their gestative period, as it were. SMITH: Well, we wanted to look at music that would give us a chance to express exactly who we were. And once you make that particular commitment, you have to find out how you're going to do this. So we decided that we would write for instruments and write for ensembles. And in this particular juncture of writing for instruments and ensembles, we didn't have to accept the history that was given to us before, and we didn't even have to expect some kind of present history or future history. We were able to contemplate the real essence of creative music. We were able to come in with projects, for example, like . . . "Silence" is a piece that has silence in it, and it came after John Cage's "Silence," but the philosophical connection of silence in this case was to materialize music within the space, and whatever was heard in the environment, whereas in the Cage piece there was absolutely no music in the space, and the gestures were the moments of the environment, you see. So creating a piece that seemed that it would look like and feel like a piece that came out of Cage's tradition, in fact, we didn't have that problem, because as I say, we are not bound by what came in the past or this particular ensemble's history -- you know, like a classical ensemble has a history that's specifically European. We didn't have to worry about that. If you have an ensemble that's essentially Asian, let's say it has instruments for India, Korea and Pakistan, you don't have to worry about the history of that. Because you function as a creative artist, you function in a zone where you can choose and pick anything that makes a music object. TP: At the time you got to Chicago in 1967, George Lewis was 14 years old, I guess, and a student at the University of Chicago Lab School. You'd picked up the trombone at that time. Were you aware of the AACM? Did you know about Leo Smith when you were a teenager in Hyde Park? LEWIS: Not really. No, no. Am I supposed to admit that? [Laughs] SMITH: Well, if you admit that, that's true! See, the beauty is, you may not have known me, but in fact you knew me all your life. Because now that you meet me, you realize that you were never a stranger to me. LEWIS: Yeah, I guess that was the feeling when I first came to the AACM, that boy, these are people doing the same thing I'm doing . . . SMITH: Exactly. LEWIS: . . .or something I thought I was doing or something like that. Yeah. I mean, I did get to hear Fred Anderson at that time, and I remember being very frightened going to an Art Ensemble concert and having Joseph playing these marimbas right up in my face. I thought he was going to drop one of these mallets, and then I'd lose my sight forever. A very intense situation, all these people painted up. I said, "God, who are these people, man?" I guess I didn't connect it with my future life, but now I can't imagine life without, you know, Leo and Muhal and Joseph and Braxton. I can't imagine it. TP: Well, most of the members of the AACM were raised in Chicago, but really they came from all over the country. SMITH: That's right. TP: From Arkansas, Mississipi, even New York City and New Jersey out to the AACM. A connecting thread for just about everyone is Muhal Richard Abrams. . . SMITH: That's right. TP: . . . now living in New York. Leo, what was your first encounter with Muhal like? If you can just describe a little of the circumstances, the environment, the scene. SMITH: Oh, it was dramatic. It was dramatic! TP: Please be more specific than that. SMITH: Well, I had met Roscoe and Lester Bowie at Joseph's concert on the North Side. They said, "Come to the AACM," and Roscoe said, "Bring your horn." So I went to the AACM that Monday night, and I brought my horn, but I left it in the car. I went in, I sat down, and they were rehearsing. I had been introduced to Muhal earlier that evening. So they were rehearsing some piece, and Muhal jumped up and he . . . Well, what was actually happening, whoever was playing trumpets, they wasn't quite making it. Lester Bowie was there, too, actually. So the guy said, "Hey, man, where's your horn? Go get your horn." And it was an order. I just jumped up and ran out to the car and got my horn, and took it out, ran back in, sat in the seat, and he kicked it off. I didn't even look at it; I just kind of played what I thought I saw -- and it came out right. And he said, "That's the way to play it!" So I've been playing with them since. That's how I met Muhal. TP: George, how about your first encounter? LEWIS: I think it was kind of a random encounter. I was passing by where they were rehearsing, at Child City [a Chicago community center]. Now, this was much later, of course. This was maybe '71 or something. I saw all these people, some of them were wearing dashikis and all that, and I said, "Hmm." They had horns. I said, "Well, let's go down there and see who these people are, man." [Laughs] I said, "Well, who are you guys?" They said, "Well, we're musicians." I remember saying a funny thing. I said, "Well, I'm a musician, too," which was not really true. I mean, I played an instrument; that's not the same thing. And they said, "Okay, bring your horn to the next rehearsal." That was it. SMITH: Mmm-hmm. That's the generous thing. Like, whenever someone did indicate that they wanted to play, they were always open to see if you could play. LEWIS: Right. SMITH: And if you could play, then you were set, because they were going to do everything in their way to help. TP: Kulture Jazz is the most recent release by Leo Smith, and it extends a concept that you . . . Well, your first manifestation was in 1971. . .? SMITH: Released in 1971, yes. TP: Your first solo recording. Now, of course, with digitization and the technological means available, we can hear eight different voices of Leo Smith -- trumpet, flugelhorn, koto, mbira, harmonica, bamboo notched flute, percussion and vocal, sometimes performed singularly and in multiple combinations in Kulture Jazz, recorded in 1993. The first track we'll hear is "Song of Humanity," which I believe is a song you've recorded a few times before. SMITH: A very old song. Well, it's actually my first composition, to be truthful, that survived a booklet of 16 that started out. I started out with 16, and ended up with that particular piece as the one that survived. TP: This has been performed by many of your groups, including . . . SMITH: Every one of them. TP: . . .the first edition of New Dalta Akhri, I believe. SMITH: This is the first solo version I've ever done. But it's my oldest composition. [Music: Leo Smith, "Song of Humanity"; "Albert Ayler In A Spiritual Light" (1993)] TP: Several issues came up while the music was on, and Leo made some very interesting comments about the relationship of melody to solo, and about Miles Davis, the way he improvised, what made him so special as well. Are those things we can get back to on the on-air segment? I'm assuming you assimilated his music pretty thoroughly, Leo, as a young musician. SMITH: Yeah, I had to look at Miles Davis, because you know, like, how do you face a mountain when you live in the delsert . . .the desert, you know? TP: Well, you almost said when you live in the delta, and actually that's somewhat apropos, because Miles Davis came up at the top of the delta, really, in East St. Louis. SMITH: Well, that's right! That's exactly right. TP: In the entrepot for the Delta, the shipping . . . Anyway, go ahead. LEWIS: Go for it, Ted. SMITH: Anyway, all I was saying is that when you look at the way Miles Davis made music, and particularly when you look at melody, he was gifted in a way where he could make the melody move along as if it was actually notated, but incorporate phrases or structure within that melody that would simply be natural within the curve, and you would not know . . . It would be seamless, in other words. You wouldn't know exactly where the melody was coming, or where these extra phrases was being moved in. And that's a type of free melodicism or free melody where everything depends upon a single note. Because a single note has so many other relationships above and below it, it becomes a wide area to just fuse these kinds of elements. So melody without time that's implicitly held together through time, but yet free and still open. TP: It sounds like an idea also of pitch values or timbral values having infinite application . . . SMITH: It's the very same thing. TP: . . .which is certainly the principle of the blues. SMITH: Yes, it's exactly the same thing. And the psychological implication is also there. TP: What is the psychological implication? SMITH: Well, for example, the blues itself is something that's culturally hooked up, you see, and it expresses a particular psychic . . .well, how you relate and make your decisions in life. And a jazzman that's gifted or an improviser that's gifted with this connection with the blues, their process of making musical decisions is based off of that kind of psychological feeling. TP: So again, we're talking about the blues more as a style of life or a way of thinking about making music rather than . . . SMITH: It's a philosophy. It's a philosophy, you see. All those guys are actually philosophers -- living philosophers. TP: George Lewis, do you have any interpolations here? LEWIS: About the blues? TP: Yes. LEWIS: Well, I don't know. Leo, I think he said it, man. I don't know what I have to add to it. I could always add something. TP: Yes, I know. LEWIS: [Laughs] SMITH: Go on, George! LEWIS: I just was waiting for Wadada to say the next thing he's going to say! SMITH: No, go ahead. Because that's the blues, too. You know, you just go on as you're saying. LEWIS: I guess one of the things . . . Actually, lately I have had to sort of confront the blues in a more direct way, and I find that the more I confront it, the more I see that the blues can be a part of all kinds of media and all kinds of experiences. I had to confront the blues element in Voyager, the computer piece, and I had to sort of confront that in a very . . .and look at that in a light to say . . . You know, this stuff that Olly Wilson was talking about, about characteristics of African or Afro-American music being things like multiple meter, and there's lots of contrasting timbres and all of that. I'm thinking, "Hey, this is Voyager. Boy!" So I finally had to look at this fake European orchestra on there as kind of, like, signifying on the orchestra rather than appropriating it. So we start to get into the blues from that standpoint.So once I found it there, I began to see, well, I have all these . . . I can sort of confront the blues in many different types of doing music. For instance, in the concert on Saturday, both your piece and mine confront the blues in different ways.
SMITH: Exactly. LEWIS: You know, it's not just the easy lick, you know, you just put in a little lick and a flatted fifth or a third or whatever, and you say, "Okay, that's it, we've got it now." SMITH: No. It connects with the inner structure and the inner function of the relationship of the piece. So it becomes really a dynamic within the piece, moreso than something that somebody is looking to hear. LEWIS: Yes. So in that way, it could reflect the people who are the blues. I mean, we are that, you know. SMITH: Right. TP: Leo comes from the delta, and George comes from I guess the northern outpost, as it's often been described, of Mississippi, the South Side of Chicago. LEWIS: Yes. TP: Was that a major part of your experience coming up, the blues scene on the South Side of Chicago? LEWIS: Well, no, because my parents didn't allow me to go those kinds of places. [Laughs] I mean, they had enough of a time letting me go to the AACM concert! So, no, it wasn't a major part of it. But at home we listened quite a bit. But we listened more to religious music. I'm not saying that my parents were like religious fanatics or anything. But you could rely on hearing Clay Evans every Sunday without fail. You know that song, "It Is No Secret What God Can Do"? SMITH: Right. I heard him, too. LEWIS: Every Sunday that was required listening. TP: Well, although Leo Smith and George Lewis were occupying the same physical space, although of different ages, you first met in New Haven, where Leo moved in the early 1970s, and where George was situated as an undergraduate at Yale. So actually, George, you first encountered Leo in New Haven? LEWIS: Yes. I encountered him there. I encountered the music in Chicago. TP: You said there was a funny story. LEWIS: I don't remember the funny story. Do you remember the funny story? SMITH: Well, it wasn't funny. It's just that I was standing up on the street, and George was going, and he said, "Hey, are you Leo Smith?" And I said, "Yeah. How are you doing?" We talked for a few minutes, and he said, "Well, I know the AACM," and blah-blah-blah, and then he gave me his room number, and I think in the next couple of days I came by. LEWIS: Yeah! SMITH: That was it. Because basically, I couldn't visit nobody in town. There was nobody to talk to except Marion Brown. And when George came to town, I went by George's and hung out there, and turned him over and he turned me over. Then I'd go by and hang out with Anthony Davis. And after that, that was it. TP: I'd say that was quite an interesting group of young musicians to be working with. SMITH: Oh, it was. We had a good time in there. LEWIS: Well, if you look at New Haven at that time, like if you read Willie Ruff's book A Call To Assembly . . . If you were around New Haven in that period, in '72, '71, just for a few years, an incredible number of people were around. You were living there, I think Oliver Lake was around, Marion Brown was around, I mean just in the neighborhood. And there were all these students. Alvin Singleton was a student, Robert Dick was a student, Anthony Davis was a student, Mark Helias was a student, Gerry Hemingway was from the town -- he wasn't a student, but he was from there. And then they had people visiting. SMITH: Dwight Andrews. LEWIS: Oh, that's right. Dwight, and Pheeroan ak Laff was in there. Then they had people . . .this Duke Ellington fellowship. So Duke came, and Willie T "The Lion" Smith came, and Max [Roach] came, and Mingus came, Diz and William Warfield, Slam Stewart, Tony Williams, all these people. I just remember the list was so long. You know, those things tend to have a half-life, and I'm not sure it's the same now as it was then. But you look at a guy like Willie Ruff, and you have to say that he helped put that together in an incredible way and used the power of the institution to do something which really affected a lot of people's lives. I mean, certainly mine. SMITH: Yeah, that was a powerful moment. TP: George, you said that you were very much, however, aware of Leo. You'd encountered the music in Chicago, you said before I interrupted you. LEWIS: Yes. TP: . . .and you were intimate with the recording, Three Compositions of New Jazz. You were just describing how intimate you were with that very vividly! LEWIS: I listened to it the way Beavis and Butthead listen to their videos. [Laughs] TP: What was it that struck you so much about that recording at that time? LEWIS: God, it's really hard to say. I don't know. Don Moye gave it to me. He said, "Well, this is for you, man. This is your kind of thing." And he was right. It was! SMITH: [Laughs] LEWIS: I don't know what it was. I mean, if you look at those pieces, you see incredible things. It's like one of those records that keeps giving back to you. But in terms of some specific situation, the only thing I could say was, well, it was just a reality that I hadn't been exposed to, and I guess getting it full force like that caused me to think about other kinds of things. I guess that's all you can really say about it. TP: I guess the implications of those three compositions are still resonating in the work of Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins.George Lewis has developed a computer program that improvises according to certain parameters. Any time I talk to various musicians about this, or to many of them about George, they sort of just say, "Man, it's unbelievable, it's on a level I can't . . ." I was saying sort of offhandedly to George that perhaps at the end of the concert Saturday we could perhaps get an improvised duo between Leo Smith and the computer, and George said, "Well, it's not as simple as that; you really have to do some work with it." Can you talk about the type of parameters that go into preparing the Voyager program for a specific musical encounter?
LEWIS: Well, you know, you don't really prepare it for a specific musical encounter. What you really do is, you're making a piece that can go in a lot of different directions. But of course, it's not infinite. You're going to encounter situations, and all musicians encounter situations where they don't function quite as well as in other situations. Some people are more versatile than others, of course, but no . . . It's just one of those things where even if they can do it, they might feel more comfortable doing something else.So what I began to find was that . . . I think actually it was John Oswald who sort of made me think about this a little bit, that basically, Voyager makes a different kind of music from what John is doing -- or was doing at that time. So basically, I would have to make a another kind of a piece, like a different piece, in order to have it work well and be coherent with him. So I began to find that, in fact . . . And this is a funny thing, because some people who are maybe . . . Well, I don't know what their familiarity is with computers. But there is a school of thought that believes that you're sort of making the computer to sort of play like you. And all I can say is that I've found that certain people actually sound better with my computer than I do. So I don't really know if that theory holds any water.
But basically, if you want to boil it down, we're talking very simple signals: high and low (pitch, that is), soft and loud, fast and slow, dense and sparse. Those are the big four. Everything else is a variation of that. So it's looking at all of those things, and then it makes its own judgment on what it sees out there, and then tries to respond with something basically similar to what that is. So when that similarity of response comes, at least you get the feeling that the machine is paying attention to you. See, the thing is that there are areas, of course . . . There are many areas of music, and those are just the very simplest ones. At a certain point, you might find that it wouldn't respond in a certain way, that for whatever reason the machine is not going to respond, and you don't get any information in that area.
So what I've found was you really had to sort of look at the situation of Voyager, look at it as an environment, and then pick people who would fit into that environment. And that's really what it is. Because finally, it's kind of a piece, and you want the piece to go well, so you look for people to fit into that environment. And if they don't fit in Voyager, well, I'm still programming, so maybe another piece will work.
TP: George mentioned specifically that Roscoe Mitchell is a musician who seems to work better with Voyager than George . . . LEWIS: That's what I think, anyway! TP: And the results of a collaboration between George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell singly and in tandem with Voyager, and then finally in an acoustic duet, are available on a 1993 release on Avan, under the title Voyager. There are eight duos with Voyager, and then "Homecoming," an acoustic duo. We'll hear "Voyager 8," which is Roscoe Mitchell and Voyager, and then Roscoe and George in "Homecoming," concluding this CD. [Music: Roscoe-Voyager, "Voyager #8", Roscoe-George, "Homecoming" (1993)] TP: It's a unique occasion to get George Lewis and Leo Smith in the studio singly, and having them together is almost more than I can handle! LEWIS: [Laughs] TP: No, not really. We've spoken to George and Leo about Chicago and New Haven, where they lived, and I got to talk with George about the here-and-now with the Voyager program. But I haven't spoken much with Leo about current events, except for playing selections from Kulture Jazz, his new release on ECM, which seems to be a very summational presentation, extending ideas from different situations you've been involved with over the last 25 years really. SMITH: Mmm-hmm. TP: Talk a little bit about your conception of this release, and your use of the overdubbing and multi-tracking possibilities and potentials. SMITH: Well, for example, "Louis Armstrong Counter-Pointing". It was my intention to make a piece in the studio. I knew it would sort of represent somebody that was important to me, but when I got in the studio and started warming up, I knew it would be Louis Armstrong. So what I did, I made the first line, because it's a trio, and then I immediately recorded the second line. Then I listened to the first and second line, and made the third line. In other words, like, I didn't listen to see what they were, basically. I only listened and responded to them. So essentially the counterpointing is that one line is made and the other line is supplied to it, but it's a spontaneous kind of counterpoint. TP: Did you improvise a lot in the studio in making Kulture Jazz? SMITH: That piece is one of those pieces that's a studio piece. I made it in the studio. What I'm trying to say is, it's a kind of improvisation that you have information on what has been played before because you played it, but you're not actually using that in order to play the next line. You're only using that next line to come in contact with it and respond in some kind of play and display, and connect and disunity, which would give the concept of counterpoint -- in this case, and not in the classical sense. TP: Several of the titles have very explicit references to improvising musicians, like Louis Armstrong, Albert Ayler, Billie Holiday and John Coltrane. A few words about each of those musicians in relation to your conception of music. SMITH: Well, for me, I feel it's important when you make a piece of music or a music object or something that you really care about, to give it lots of special care. And one of them is poetry. And one of the extensions of poetry is through suggestions. When I make my piece, "Love Supreme," and I dedicate it to John Coltrane, I'm dedicating it to someone that serves as a spiritual guide, so to speak. So the connection of the piece and the dedication is all one thing. It's a kind of poetry that lets me understand my deepest self.Like Billie Holiday, for example. I like a lot of singers. But her voice and the way that she looked at making a sound with the voice clearly distinguishes her on the outside as somebody very different. And not just different because she's creative, but her difference is actually made in the way she shaped the volume and the weight and the release of a tone. So if I make the piece, and I say that she is the Queen or she is the Empress or something like that, I'm referring to the dynamic in which she makes her entrance or her mark in creation as a creative artist. And also as a mother. Also as someone I deeply respect. When I think about being original, and when I think about singing, and thinking about singing, I think about those people like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. I don't know of anyone else that excites me such with voice, except Jeanne Lee.
TP: As a young musician, Leo, were you listening to all of these artists? Were these people you were assimilating? SMITH: No. I saw my first jazz master, I must have been 20-something, in Italy. Of course, it was Miles Davis and a few guys. I never grew up around jazz artists or creative artists or classic artists. I kind of grew up around rhythm&blues people, and always wondered what jazz artists sounded like. And sometimes guys would tell me, "Well, you sound like you play jazz," and I said, "Wow, I want to know what in the hell is that."The first time I heard jazz, though, I think I was graduating from high school, and we had had this band that played a few numbers that night where the trumpet player actually made a solo. After that, I walked up to the guy and said, "Look, is that jazz?" He said, "It's jazz." I said, "Wow, that's what I want to do."
LEWIS: [Laughs] Wow. SMITH: And he wasn't a great jazz player. He was improvising. That's the dynamic that struck me. Not what he was playing, but the fact that he was making up his music right then, and he didn't have to plan it. That seemed like to me a complete weight could never be upon my shoulders, because I wanted to make music that you didn't have to carry around, but you just released straight out with your naturalness. TP: I recollect an interview where you said you began playing trumpet in I guess school marching ensembles . . . SMITH: Yes. TP: . . .and you got your conception of the sound of the trumpet from projecting your trumpet sound into a wide-open space. SMITH: Exactly. Exactly. I still like to play the horn outside. Because you see, when you blow a trumpet, or any wind instrument, your projection is not well . . . I don't know if you know Dizzy Gillespie's description of that, but you have to be tightening the bottom . . . TP: I think I've heard a more descriptive . . . SMITH: Yes, exactly. Well, if your diaphragm is not properly done and your weight of balance is not properly centered in your gut, and you blow that trumpet or whatever wind instrument, once it reaches the end of your bell, it rolls right off like a drop of spit . . . LEWIS: [Laughs] SMITH: . . .you see. So the wise guy centers in, gets set, and blows that sound, and makes it go all the way through the horn, you see. And if it goes all the way through, it's going to come out of the horn. And once it comes out, because of the horn being filled and the thrust is not just coming from your lips or the cavity in your mouth, but coming from your diaphragm all the way through. The point of contact is not just the horn. It goes all the way out the horn, and the projection will come into the space. And the way to do that, you have to practice outside. You have to blow the horn outside. TP: As a young player playing with rhythm&blues people, what type of situations would you be playing in? Who were the people you were playing for? SMITH: Two guitars, a drummer, and me. And one of the guitar players sings, and none of them knew which key they were playing in, and none of them cared. In fact, it wasn't even important. We played blues in the tradition of Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James and Muddy Waters. If somebody said, "Play some of B.B. King . . ." Any kind of blues, these guys had the ability to articulate and make it come across. But no arrangement at all. My part, just like their part, had to be made up as we went along, because all that was known was the song, the verse of the song. So I had to make up riffs.I started out at 13. I had to make up riffs and make solos in this kind of music of two guitars and a drum and one of them singing, with no keys, or no specific tonality -- but definitely making a register within the spectrum of sound.
TP: Describe some of the types of places you'd be playing in. SMITH: Well, we'd call them honky-tonks, or juke joints, or bottom houses. They had a lot of names for them. But essentially they were large rooms that had a band standing in the back, that could hold three or four people, and the dance floor was really big. We would start at like 9 o'clock and go until the next morning almost. So a really big space, people dancing, and generally they were gambling in the joint -- and of course, if there's gambling, there's probably other things that go along with that. There were fights, and there were confrontations. It was grim. I learned how to live, you know. TP: Learned how to live young. SMITH: Yeah. But also I learned how to live, because . . . You see, I was in high school then. I played three nights a week, sometimes four. I would go to school every day. If we drove 150 miles from the performance or the gig, I would still go to school. So I was learning how to do what I had to do, and live at the same time, and hold up my responsibility in my family. I didn't have to go to the cotton field -- because that's what we had to do if you didn't have no talent. So I got out of there when I was 13; I didn't have to do that no more. So I learned how to live with that music. [Music: Leo Smith: "Louis Armstrong Counter-Pointing," "The Kemet Omega (For Billie Holiday)" (1993)] TP: We've had a lot of conversation with Leo and George about various aspects of the past. But in the here-and-now it's a fresh concert with new music, again, this Saturday at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. I'll ask each of you to briefly describe the music you're presenting this week. SMITH: Well, the big piece is called "Black Church: A First World Gathering In The Spirits" -- something close to that. It's a work with voice, where voice and three different types of ensembles are somewhat coming together. There's a string quartet in high voice, there's a trombone, trumpet and percussion trio, and there is the music in the speakers, which is four pianos. All I can say is that it's a piece for multiple ensembles. It's non-metrical; therefore, we could consider it to be graphic in construction, but very detailed. It's dramatic in content and also in gesture. It's not an opera or a pseudo-opera; it's just music with a dramatic connection hooked up with these different kinds of sounding ensembles coming in, into the space. It's a new piece. It was done over the summer. I spent the last six weeks deeply into it. It's a considerable amount of music, a lot of music. TP: George Lewis? LEWIS: Well, you know, this is sort of amazing. I look at this, and I think, "Well, the AACM, 30 years old?" It's sort of astonishing, the record of the organization and what's been accomplished, the people who have really maintained the spirit of it with such tremendous tenacity. I mean, people look at it as being, well, the AACM is like . . . People are very protective of it, in a certain way; the idea of it -- the idea of it and the organization of it. So that when I start to see the variety of events that have come out of this . . . I mean, we've got the recent Experimental Band performance in Chicago, where a lot of the membership came together to perform; the upcoming AACM 30th anniversary event, which is going to take place in Chicago, where membership will all gather there; and various other events that have taken place.So I mean, I am looking at this in that light, although the piece is not . . . Well, it's not an anniversary type of celebration. Well, I'll put it this way. Quincy Troupe and I, since I have been out in San Diego . . .we're teaching at the same school out there, the University of California in San Diego. He is in literature and I am in music, and we sort of hooked up right away, and have started making these pieces, one of which maybe people heard earlier on Changing Of The Times, which is based on one of his recent poems, "The View From Skates in Berkeley." This piece, the piece I wrote for this concert, is based on Quincy's piece, "Collage".
Quincy lately has been putting together some pretty complex pieces which are very varied, and the range of imagery is much greater than maybe even stuff he's been doing before -- I mean, the complexity. So in a way, the challenge for me was to try to reflect some of that complexity in the music. I mean, there are rapid changes in orchestration and mood that you'll see in the poetry that's got to be reflected in the music. So it ended up being quite a tussle to get these things out there.
And it is for me very much an experimental situation, I mean on a personal level, in that I sort of became interested through Quincy in the interface of poetry and music, but particularly in the interface of poetry with ensemble music of varying sizes, of bigger than a bread-box. That is to say that we quickly got tired of the poet-and-trombone thing. I mean, I got bored with that almost immediately. And so, we started to figure out how we could get some sort of orchestral conception into the poetry. Because the thing is, the poetry is coming from an orchestral conception, and so we really started to find out that we need the forces to match. I don't see any contradiction in having, you know, Quincy Troupe and Orchestra or whatever. I mean, that seems like something I'd be interested in. So that's really the spirit in which this piece was composed, to try to bring the musical forces up to the level of the imagery that we find in the poetry.
TP: I believe you mentioned that the Voyager program will be involved as one of the musical components? LEWIS: It's not, no. This is an acoustic piece. I am playing Voyager on the concert as well, as a separate piece. But this piece is acoustic. TP: Is it performed by the Ensemble, or are you performing on trombone? LEWIS: I sit and watch. Quincy does it, and Petr Kotik conducts it, which is a wonderful thing, because I've known Petr for a really long time and have always been a great admirer of his work as a composer, and lately as a conductor. I just have to say that he has really provided an atmosphere in which the pieces can be done well, and the S.E.M. Ensemble is a tremendous group, and people seem very fearless. Petr has such a wide range of musical experiences that his suggestions about how to change things around, how to make this part work better, not just orchestrational things, but also interactional things and improvisational things. I mean, usually conductors, in my experience, might not be able to enter that area with the authority that Petr has done. So I'm really pretty excited about the whole experience.Also, I am performing in Leo's piece, which is very hard. [Laughs] I finally get to perform with William Brown, who is super, a tenor. And J.D. Parran is performing in my piece. So overall, it's just a great experience for me, and it's I hope for the AACM here in New York, too. Muhal Richard Abrams and Leroy Jenkins have been the primary coordinators of the event, for which I thank them, too. I'm sure we both do . . .
SMITH: Yeah, we do. LEWIS: . . .for all the work they've put into this whole event, and to make it come off. It's not an easy thing getting sort of a chamber ensemble piece going. It takes a lot of work, there are a lot of pitfalls -- and it's kind of expensive! The people who coordinated the work, the Helen W. Buckner Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts . . . It's been a considerable undertaking. But I am sort of happy to be here. I don't come here that much, and I have never gotten to come here and play any of this kind of music, so it's kind of exciting for me. TP: Before I let you go, you both mentioned the Experimental Band, from, from which emerged the AACM Big Band in Chicago, which met weekly and often more than that from 1971 and on through the '70s. Leo, what were your early experiences like? Was the AACM Big Band the focal point of your first contact with the AACM? SMITH: Yeah, it was a focal point. You see, one of the things that made it unique was that whoever was in the AACM was also in the Orchestra, and whoever was in the Orchestra also had the possibility, if they desired, to write for it. So essentially, when I went there, I accepted the AACM Orchestra as a residence orchestra, and I began to write music immediately. In fact, it was the greatest moment of experiment for me, because I learned a lot about instruments, and the weight of instruments, both vertically and horizontally, form, I learned how to rehearse people. A lot of different things I learned in the AACM, because that orchestra met every Saturday, and there was no restriction on who could write music. TP: Or I guess the way that you would write . . . SMITH: And the way. TP: . . .because you could learn almost by the seat of your pants. SMITH: One restriction. You had to write your own music. LEWIS: Ha-ha! SMITH: You couldn't bring no arrangement in and no . . . You had to write an original piece of music. That was the only restriction. And thank God for that. TP: George Lewis, talk about your early interactions with the AACM Big Band. LEWIS: I hate to say it, but I find myself repeating ten years later the exact same experience that Leo Smith had. You know, Muhal let everyone write music, and he encouraged people to do it, and I started writing music. SMITH: Right. LEWIS: And those were my first experiences hearing large ensemble pieces. Like Leo said, you learned how to rehearse, how to make the parts, how to negotiate with the players about how it had to be played -- all those sorts of things. Practical information. It just added to the diversity. And I believe that Muhal is still interested in having this sort of open situation with regard to people writing music for an experimental band that he might make today. So it's the atmosphere of nurturance that really made a difference, I think, for both of us. TP: Well, I think with Leo Smith and George Lewis, we have two people born ten or 12 years apart, raised in very different . . . SMITH: We're ten years apart. Ten or 11, somewhere in there. TP: . . .raised in very different circumstances, and nurtured to the point where they are now, as we've heard just a very meager sample of over the past two hours, through an extraordinary institution in Chicago called the AACM. And particularly, both were influenced by the vision of Muhal Richard Abrams, which has remained constant for more than three decades within this particular institution. And I think that hearing what they say and the way their music manifests is a testament to the strength of that institution. I'd like to thank both George Lewis and Leo Smith for joining me in tandem. It's been a fascinating interaction. SMITH: I wanted to say thanks a million for offering the space and the time and letting us speak about the things that we think about. You know, I don't come to New York often. I live in California, and I love living in California. So whenever I do come, I'll look you up, Ted. TP: When I first heard George Lewis, it was around 1974, and I was attending the University of Chicago, and I was going to hear the Fred Anderson group on campus. LEWIS: Oh, yes. TP: I heard this trombone player . . . I had some familiarity with jazz, and I knew everything by Sonny Rollins . . . I went in and I heard this trombone player playing the most extraordinary things I had ever heard. I just couldn't believe it. And it was George Lewis. I got to know him a little bit then. And although he's gone into so many different directions, my initial impression of you as flying over the trombone and doing all of this stuff has always remained with me. So I was very excited when earlier this summer, the four-trombone group Slide Ride assembled at the Knitting Factory for a night, one night only, to be followed by one night in Burlington, Vermont, and that's it -- and a record. The group is Ray Anderson (and as has been repeated ad nauseam, he and George Lewis were in high school and junior high school together, playing trombone), Craig Harris and Gary Valente. We get to hear George in the acoustic, improvatorial milieu, just playing no-holds-barred trombone. Has the Slide Ride group been an enjoyable experience for you? LEWIS: Well, Ted, before I answer that, I'd just like everyone to know what Ted had to do to listen to this Fred Anderson group. For one thing, we started playing at twelve o'clock at night and we ended at 6 a.m., and often Ted was the only person in the audience. [Loud laugh] TP: Well, this is what's known as a tall tale, or perhaps a fictional extrapolation or something. Actually, I think this one was in the daytime, George. LEWIS: I don't know, man. You remember those sets I'm talking about, right? Those midnight sets. TP: No, I couldn't get to the North Side. This was on the University of Chicago campus. I didn't have a car . . . LEWIS: I guess I have to strike that, then. I tried to make you a legendary figure, Ted, but you'll just have to settle for mortality! TP: I think I prefer that. But let's get back to some more sober ruminations on Slide Ride. LEWIS: Well, you know, Slide Ride turned out to be an amazing situation. I guess I've been in trombone quartets that haven't been quite as interesting as Slide Ride, and I think maybe the reasons why they weren't quite as interesting usually could be put down to various kinds of competitiveness, or ego, or simply lack of community -- in other words, they were ad hoc situations. Whereas you have to say . . . I think that interacting with Gary and Craig and Ray as a group, and realizing that we all come from a similar musical community, we were all around New York at about the same time playing trombone, we all played in the same groups, we often played together . . . And to see that history . . . And I think Craig of us is probably the most aware of that history, and has done the most to sort of realize that history in terms of the group, in a certain way. But everybody makes their contribution.So what I started to find was that around about the concerts that you've mentioned, the one at the Knitting Factory and the one in Vermont, the music started to reach this level which I didn't expect. It was kind of a wonderful thing. It started to get to the point where you transcended this thing of just having trombone players doing things. I guess when Robin Eubanks was here earlier, he started talking about the trombone and what people think about it, and I have to say it's . . . I mean, I care about what happens to the trombone, but maybe a lot of people don't. Robin does. But I guess what I started to see in that group, it really wasn't about . . . It just became people playing music, and expressing themselves, and being creative, and using their creativity in the moment, as Leo was saying about Miles Davis. So that became pretty amazing for me.
On the other hand, I read the German liner notes, and there's a whole section on how I hate to travel. [Laughs] Which is true. [Laughs] Well, like you said, I'm happy to be here, but I also like being at home and all that. So anyway, I like this . . . Well, I love this band. I think it's fabulous.
[Music: Slide Ride, "Sweeps." "Unison" (1994)] include("comx"); ?>