John Berndt introduction:
In many ways The Red Room owes its existence to the inspiration, both
musical and methodological, from the example of Jack Wright. Considered
by many of the younger generation of American improvisers to be one
of the most significant figures in free improvised music (an obscure
figure, though ultimately perhaps more important than Zorn, Brotzmann,
Parker, and Braxton in the sheer strangeness and integrity of his
live improvisations), Wright has devoted himself solely to freely
improvised music since 1979. During this time he has toured the US,
and to a lesser extent Europe, and played an incredible number of
solo concerts (88 concerts in 1988 alone, at least half of which are
solos), playing very often with new players and open to playing with
just about anyone. Along the way, he also played with many well-known
players, while always remaining a sub-cultural and highly idealistic
presence in many grass-roots improvisation scenes. His activity seems
always characterized by a lack of professional rigidity, incredibly
strange yet communicative musicality, and a profound emotionality
which recalls John Coltrane in its endless searching and vulnerable
integrity--if not in its aesthetic. In 2001, he is 58 years old, and
lives in Boulder, Colorado, making frequent trips to the East and
West Coasts and Chicago.
John Berndt: I want to
start on a tangent here, and discuss your relationship with “ethnic”
or “world” music recordings. It has always struck me that
you have been hugely influenced in some way by field recordings and
that this shows up in your playing in a way which is hard to characterize.
What are some of your favorite field recordings, and how do you think
hearing these sounds has influenced your music aesthetics, if that
isn’t too broad a question.
Jack Wright: Funny you
should ask. The other day the gas man came through the house; I was
playing a recording of my music, and he said, "Let me guess.
You're an ethnomusicologist and you travel around the world collecting
recordings!" So that's how improvised music might appear to the
uninitiated.
Around 1980 I began noticing non-Western music for the first time,
and became a dj on the Philly radio station that had a slot for it
[Wright lived in Philadelphia before moving west in 1988]. I was attracted
only to the strangest sounds--instruments and vocal techniques—and
especially to the music of village life. I felt a kinship with the
setting of the music, for often you could hear insects, birds, children
laughing, people probably amazed at the recording gear and the earnest
ethnomusicologist. It was relaxed and matter-of-fact, to my mind a
more attractive relation of music and community than I found in the
Western avantguard, where I ambivalently located myself, which was
and is so full of its own importance. Perhaps I was drawn to this
unself-conscious musicality because it countered my own tendencies
to take my music so seriously. This, and not specific sounds or musical
ideas to be borrowed, was the influence, that somewhere backing me
up is this fragile village, rather than music school or the avantguard.
My partners and my listeners are this village to me; we know that,
more than most people, we need music to live, we need to be making
it. This is our vulnerability, and what connects us on a deep level,
past all the disconnections.
John Berndt: Apparently
when you began playing saxophone again in the early 70’s it
was conventional jazz for a few months, then into free-form jazz,
then beyond recognizable connection to jazz. What were some of the
crucial points or influences when your playing went off the map from
anything that could be considered Jazz? Were there personal influences,
or recordings you heard, or events in your life which provoked going
in a stranger direction?
Jack Wright: Whether one
is a jazz musician or not I would respond to first as a question of
one’s origins and roots. Unlike most of my partners, I would
say I am one, simply for reasons of my personal history. I have never
perceived myself as going off the road I began in the mid-fifties,
when I thought jazz was where I was headed. It doesn't make my playing
any better or worse, and I would never advocate jazz over other musics.
That is just my playing tradition, where my heart lies, rather than
classical music, which is my major listening music tradition, to which
others have been added. Cultural innovation neither renounces nor
sentimentalizes tradition, it grows out of it. That is what I and
my improvising friends are doing--linking, elaborating, and transforming
many traditions, including jazz. It's not surprising then that I rarely
listen to what is called contemporary jazz. It mostly bores and even
disgusts me--as if they were the ones who betrayed the tradition by
merely repeating it.
On the other hand, if someone says my playing is outside the boundaries
of jazz I would have to agree. That person would be looking at a certain
definition of jazz, as having meter, pulse, etc., that would distinguish
it from other musics. This is what we all do in common parlance, and
that is also the level of academic categories, such as the Ken Burns
series exemplifies. Category work like his can often provide useful
information and images, even if the approach is ultimately useless
to actual creative playing. What you and I and our other friends are
doing for the most part exceeds any category known by such historical
characteristics. Its character can only be known after the fact, and
we are in process of creating a form of music, the direction of which
is as unknown as jazz once was. Some players, with jazz origins like
myself, want to fight for their inclusion in the jazz category, but
I think that is misguided, a weak, defensive argument. When we are
playing music we are in love, in pursuit of our love, and there is
nothing to defend. Twenty years ago I said, "one thing I like
about jazz; there is no hall of fame"; hence no gatekeepers,
no academic specialists to draw the lines. Well, since then the hall
of fame has been created, Burns and his chosen critics are the gatekeepers,
and the least we can do is ignore it as fantasy irrelevant to our
own.
I see three major periods
of my playing, first of which was free-form, lyrical, boyish, full
of melodic ideas, jazzy, with shifting tonal centers. I had generally
one good normal tone throughout, that is, it was the center, rather
than one choice among many. A beautiful music, light and vital and
youthful, representing the rebirth of my life out of a huge darkness.
I was influenced especially by early Ornette and Eric Dolphy, with
the scalar intricacies of the late Coltrane. And, like many jazzers
whose roots are in the fifties, I loved speed; I was exceptionally
fast, much faster than I am now! But very early on (1980) I met Todd
Whitman, a reed player who introduced me to all the rough, hard sounds
of the contemporary Europeans, Brotzmann and Evan Parker, who were
pushing the envelope of saxophone sound wide open. I felt offended
by this, for my embouchure was trained to please people, that is to
be “pleasing”. Yet this raw music of Whitman's touched
my own emotions; I knew this was a door I had to open, a kind of loss
of innocence.
My music became more extreme and exploratory, and in my solos I felt
more fear and rage coming out than I ever could as the little boy,
freely bopping along. Yet I still felt I must demonstrate that I could
indeed "play" the instrument—at least, demonstrate
finger dexterity. I was pushing out, yet held back by the desire for
validation, protecting my flank from some ghost, an inner jazz critic
perhaps. And when I played with others, especially jazz-based drummers,
I couldn't keep from getting hooked on the drive energy of free jazz--the
fast pulse. This is like a moving train; when you're not on it you
feel you aren't going anywhere. It makes the music dependent on a
certain definition of energy, frenetic and powerful, and leads to
a sense of aimlessness when it is absent. In my opinion it was and
still is a form of attention-grabbing, like not allowing any slow-down
or lapse in the conversation, or else the other will start to ignore
you.
Soon after moving to Boulder from Philly I underwent a collapse, a
disgust with myself and my music and a desire to retreat from the
music world, and especially self-promotion. I found nothing fresh
in my playing, and went back to practicing scales. This was at a time
when there was little in the way of venues or interest in improv except
the Bay area, yet I kept coming east, eventually finding you and Baltimore.
Your enthusiasm for my music, John, really woke me up, I couldn't
understand why you didn't think I was a has-been, or didn't care if
I was!
Anyway, I was looking for a way out of my usual patterns when I heard
Bhob Rainey play, in '98, I think, and felt, now here is a completely
different approach--slow, sometimes almost inaudible, a different
kind of energy and tension in the music. Since then, his influence
has been equivalent to Todd Whitman's, opening up new possibilities.
I learned to play from a greater place of strength, to breathe differently
in the music, to take time. It also gave me a way to connect with
players who had no past in free jazz, and so it expanded my range
of desirable partners immensely. Yet I would see it more as an addition
to my music than a replacement, for what I find a hindrance is being
locked into a mode, dependent on it as an emotional need or an aesthetic
truth. I could describe my aesthetic as requiring always a larger
space to move around in. I find cubby holes that turn out to be amphitheatres,
but I don't disown where I've been, because it is all just the unfolding
of beauty, never finished. So I still play with a free jazz "drive
energy" at times, but feel free to drop it. It's what the jazz
musician would call my "roots music", that would get tiresome
if played to validate my relation to the tradition.
John Berndt: One of the
shocking things about your musicality is that you don’t seem
to have a “vocabulary” per se, a bag of tricks, yet your
playing is usually recognizable. What is your relationship with cultivating
extended technique sounds, and how does that work with practice and
performance?
Jack Wright: You are quite
generous to say that! In fact, I often squirm to
hear myself pull one trick after another out of my bag looking for
something
"interesting", especially in solo, where I have no influx
from others to bounce off of. Then I wake up to the sheer joy of playing,
the "why am I doing this, anyway!" This overcomes the self-consciousness
of trying to impress people, to hide my vulnerability under a supposedly
convincing display, which fortunately cannot quite convince me. For
all the silly games of the daily mind at work, at least as a musician
(and also in writing and painting) I'm in a way sworn to self-honesty,
a pact with myself. It's an island of safety from ego concerns, a
place where I know how to follow the rule and love the strictness
of it, and the results. No matter how humbling it is, sooner or later
it can't help but take me deeper into any creative work; in fact,
the humbling is inseparable from the work.
What amazes me when I listen back to a solo I like is the quick shifts
within an overarching flow of ideas. I don't know where they come
from, but often musical thoughts will overlap, as if competing for
attention from me. Some sound will begin to emerge, even accidentally;
I'll prick up my ears as if I am a bystander, and it gradually pushes
the dominant theme out of the way, rudely at times. I sense continuity,
without a piece having any concept or theme to unify it; it is melody,
yet does not repeat or produce self-conscious variations to validate
itself.
To answer your second question, my practice has been changing; for
the first time I am playing long tones, like they tell beginners to
do. I'm also consciously practicing multiphonics, which I never did
before. Mostly, however, I play scales, because I love the intricacy
of patterns, how much complexity you can fit into your head, so different
from "just playing" which I rarely do when I'm practicing.
Generally, I love concentrated practice; I do it for its own sake.
Practice is part of my private life, it is music, just a different
kind than standing in front of people. But I find it hard to keep
this perspective. I get away from it because practice is functional
to keeping the lip in shape, and it's easy for practice to devolve
into a functional role, under the demands of touring.
As for extended techniques in general, I have tended to avoid one
or another until I find some musical use for it. For instance, until
I dropped the "drive" energy as the universal goal of my
playing with others, I could find no valid use for multiphonics. Now
they make all the sense in the world; I am drawn into them by the
music context, rather than as a device. This follows what I'm seeing
around me today. In the early decades of free improv, when new techniques
were the mark of a fresh approach to traditional instruments, they
were often considered the new standard to be displayed. But at this
point I find players using a more integrated technique, where nothing
is "extended" because no technique by itself connotes a
radical departure. Contemporary improv is more and more dealing with
its own past, not the past of jazz. So now every technique tends to
be subordinate to the direction of the music, and pyrotechnics are
not flashed as a distinctive badge of mastery. Of course, there are
some in every audience who will be impressed by circular breathing,
the kind of “look, ma, he ain’t breathing!” reaction,
but if we want to stay on course we know we aren't about impressing
people but rather opening up our musical hearts. And for me, this
opening calls for the hugest range of sound the imagination can wring
out of body and instrument.
John Berndt: Can you say
a few words about how the emotionality of your music is related to
the failure of the revolutionary movement of the late sixties, or
other events in your life… what that transformation was like,
and where did it take you later?
Jack Wright: In the sixties
I was an academic, a European history teacher and student, and I was
gradually drawn into Marxist revolutionary groups. I threw myself
out of the middle class, you might say, and dedicated myself to the
overthrow of existing society, which seemed a reasonable dream due
to the situation at the time and our limited perceptions. Following
the huge disappointment of that dream, another kind of revolution
had to occur on an interior level for me; the chickens came home to
roost. As a result, and at times in spite of myself, I was not able
to treat music as a personal career, without a backlash feeling of
self-betrayal. I didn't want to leave the illusions of the political
avantguard only to pick up those of the Artist, behind which I saw
the approved social role.
Yet I have begun to see through this, to define artistic career apart
from the social reward system, in a way that makes sense for myself.
I am getting out from under the “outsider” role without
joining the pursuit of success, overcoming an old dualism of rebel
and conformist that has been with me for thirty years. This shift
is leading me to attempt contacting professional musicians as I did
briefly and unsuccessfully twenty years ago, but has not created an
interest in earning a living through music. At the time I committed
myself to music, I was quite happy to make my living outside music,
earning what I needed for physical existence with a different part
of my being. If I didn’t want to be an Artist I certainly didn’t
want to be an entrepreneur of my music! I didn’t have the dream
of one day living off of music; the dream was to live for music, and
I was living it, and still am. So, although I play for money I am
not a professional in the financial sense. Mine is not a career in
music but a musical career, in the sense of focused energy, reflective
awareness, development and change of my music and of my relation to
other players. I avoid doing things for business reasons, whether
it’s the choice of where to play or how to increase my “exposure”
or with whom to play. If I am recording more now it has nothing to
do with sales, but rather that I find the studio to be an environment
more friendly to musical growth and change than I did in the past.
And with self-recording, more realistic financially.
This sounds very idealistic and lofty, but it is far from the case.
The fact of the matter is that the desire for recognized artistic
success is very much a part of my makeup, at times overwhelming. Some
insistent voice in me wants me to be known as the greatest saxophonist,
not to mention achievement in my other pursuits. Moreover, in fantasy
I would revel in trouncing all other contenders, vindicated at last
in the world’s eyes. In fact I have to fight against this for
any space at all in which to appreciate those outside my circle of
partners; people who refuse to play with me are quite unrealistically
a kind of enemy. This dark side is quite a hindrance, and very embarrassing,
yet without noting it my approach to the music world would be misunderstood.
My music has a lot to do with an extreme confidence I have in my musical
abilities and destiny, an inner, rock-bottom security I have assumed
ever since earliest childhood. This confidence, however, runs up against
any calculation of actual interest others show in my music. This seeming
contradiction has created an emotional force so strong, that any effort
to actually enter the race of competitive career, or even signs of
comparison with others, only unleash bitterness, antagonism, envy,
malicious gossip, and despair. I obviously care, get hurt by rejection,
as if I had no confidence in my ability at all. On some level I cannot
imagine others not having the same enthusiasm for my music as I have,
which could be a supreme egoism.
This would be crushing, except that I also see in this the refusal
to bow to the notion that music is a private and subjective matter
of the marketplace. If that were so it wouldn’t connect us except
as consumers, and music overflows that. I know it is possible to gain
an audience through commercial shrewdness, but I don’t want
that kind of audience. My faith in my music, by itself, does not require
people to choose me ahead of others, which is the consumer choice,
but to open listeners to the depths of musical feeling, which I share
with them and other players. The commercial game opens the door for
one person at a time, and I am sure this could happen with me if I
let it, if I worked for it, created the right image, played with the
right people. But I am too proud, you might say. And it offends the
collectivity I have with my partners, which is by no means a narrow
or closed group; I would have to choose which ones to bring with me,
and an old communist/anarchist like me would not do that. For me the
very form of music itself, free improv, implies a non-commercial collectivity.
So here perhaps is some continuity with my political past, something
better than the “underground” role.
If I don't engage in some of the sordid games of getting ahead of
the next guy, it is in the last analysis because it obliterates my
happiness simply with playing music. I might get tied in knots at
the slightest hint of my static, low level on the hit parade, ashamed
of my minuscule discography and lack of high-visibility partners,
enraged at the ladder-climbers. Then I remember, "oh yes, I don't
have to enter the race at all”, and all that native confidence
in my playing comes on as a strength and not a curse. With this comes
the realism, the objective discrimination that allows me to see that
we are all, professionals and non-professionals, just in love with
music, and disguising and confusing it with the games we play. My
music grows by this love and artistic discipline, this overriding
confidence and happiness with where I am, and not by efforts to put
myself on the map, or despair at the one-horse town I represent in
the scale of things.
With regard to the shape
of my music itself, in the mid-eighties my music had a hard assertive
edge, probably reflecting both my war with the music world and my
disappointment with the revolutionary collapse. Don't let those bastards
off the hook, was the message—to some extent my rage played
the music. I feared becoming soft and accommodating, or mellowed with
age. But I found that syndrome to be a trap, and partly through a
period of studying and writing in the nineties I worked at least towards
facing what was going on inside me. I came to a more balanced emotionality,
one that allows me a tenderness that would have been abhorrent to
me in my free jazz days, and at times closer to my earlier innocence.
I remember once around '93 in Chicago, I had told my partner, Bob
Marsh, that on that nite I wanted to play without my usual overwhelming
force. Once on stage, however, I couldn't help myself; I exploded,
or all my anxiety exploded. I was angry with myself afterwards, that
my emotions had such a hold on me. Now that doesn't happen. I think
it might roughly be the difference between acting out emotion and
playing from the center of feeling. So there has been some shift in
me, some melting into tears, which gave me the title my 1992 cd, THAW,
even though then it was largely a hope, that my intensity could transform
into something larger. Moreover, in the past ten years both parents
and my dear sister have died, and I was deeply engaged in caring for
each as they left. That time filled with weakness and death no doubt
has had an impact on me, especially since I had a great deal of solitude
in which to absorb it all.
As I've gotten older I've found that changes of musical direction
get "thicker", like a paper folded over and over. One gets
strangely used to being uncomfortable, awkward all over again, in
new ways: "how could this still be me?" But then I find
strange correspondences, messages I may have scribbled decades ago.
For instance, in 1980, in response to a questionnaire for a New York-
based improv organization, I wrote: "What do we want to be free
for?”, which had been my question while engaged in revolutionary
politics. It has no answer, but I am playing in pursuit of this still
today.
John Berndt: More than
any musician I know, you seem to like to be put in difficult, new
situations, at least after the fact. Are there any new trends in your
music, or the improvisational milieu, that you find particularly stimulating
or challenging these days?
Jack Wright: Maybe half
the mistakes we make in life are tied up with expectations. In the
mid-seventies my comrades and I sat around a table grieving our failed
revolution and wondering aloud if we could wait long enough for the
next swing of the pendulum to bring it in reach again. Well, here
we are now, and the idea of revolution has changed and deepened for
me, as something that flows between inside and outside, psyche or
mind and world, inseparable. I have spoken of the inside motions,
for myself; the outside is the extraordinary growth of interest in
improvisation among young musicians today and the proliferation of
directions. In the past five years there has seemed no end of new
and adventurous playing, and I find in it no nostalgia for the good
old days of the last cultural upheaval, in the sixties. For some reason
people have come upon this form of music that has no seal of approval,
barely even a public acknowledgment. It has virtually been reborn,
with a new energy, the most positive development I can think of in
our otherwise academic and moribund culture. There is nothing to equal
it; an art-form that has no controlling superego of standards. All
power to the imagination--a visionary like Blake would be delighted.
I don't call it "revolutionary,” but it is perhaps a harbinger
or indication of greater cultural change coming, the pendulum has
got to swing sometime. I myself wasn't ready for the cultural thrills
of the sixties when they happened; this time, I am ready and giving
my all. It is an exciting time to be making music.
John Berndt: Any famous
last words?
Jack Wright: Twenty years
ago I figured I would normally have an audience of six to eight, and
I often felt sorry for myself, angry and betrayed. Or that I would
be vindicated in the future. Now is that future, and the audience
is about the same size, but I am content enough with this not to envision
or seek change. Somewhere in there I realized that I have all I need--plenty
of challenging partners, freedom of movement, and venues where I am
welcome--if not always paid!--to play. Nothing heroic here, my path
is to accept the current situation without complaining--improvise
with what is here. More audience? Sure, I'll just set up more chairs.
But they won't be of help to find the source of music within me, when
I get confused or disgusted. So to any of my partners who think they're
stuck on the lower stages of an upward path, and to myself in my forgetful
moments, I suggest that we've got everything we need to reach the
highest level of music right here and now. Improvisation dispenses
with preliminaries; we only need to be consistent about that. Just
as an earlier group of artists had to dispense with the honor awarded
to masterpieces, we have to abandon our longing for recognition, our
place in the sun, or at least deal with these needs separately. Difficult,
beyond speaking of it, to stay on the track of our love of music,
yet our music entitles us only to more and richer music, and we should
not belittle this gift. Let's just do what we're here for, to play
for our sensual delight, our expanding beauty, and to share it with
those who have ears to hear it.