| Interview with Ken Weiss, Cadence Magazine, July 2017, p. 55-73 "Trying Hard Not to be Significant" Cadence: You begrudgingly agreed to an interview. You really didn’t want to talk about yourself. Why so? Jack Wright: [Laughs] I do like to talk, and I appreciate the opportunity to do this. I was just apprehensive because most interviews focus on the person, and are aimed at the music public. I’m more interested in communicating my ideas about playing music, and encouraging some fresh thinking. Also, interviews are aimed at the music public, but I’m more interested to communicate with musicians. I’m wary of becoming significant in the music world, or more significant than I need to be. [Laughs] That is, any attention from the press helps get your name out there, and there aren’t many paying gigs for those without a name that’s gotten attention. Musicians get paid for their name more than for their actual music—just a fact of life. And the best strategy is for names to play with other such names. My preference is to play with people strictly out of musical interest and curiosity. That has included very few well-known musicians. If I think there’s some possibility of a good musical meeting with them I will get in touch, but from my experience, the more a musician’s name evokes audience and press attention, the less interesting they are to actually play with. Their music may be sparkling but they’re not the best collaborators. Their ideas come from outside the moment of playing. There are some wonderful exceptions, but in general that’s the case. Anyway, I’m at least ambivalent about an interview in a widely-read publication—here he is, finally getting the attention he deserves, getting his career off the ground. I think that kind of thing, that image, distorts you and cuts you off from your music. Cadence: I asked that question because in person you’re such a colorful character, you’re very funny and personable but there isn’t a lot of information out on you so I’m hoping to fill in some of the gaps while also talking about the music. One thing that’s apparent to me, as someone who’s been present for your performances through the years, and to those close to you, are your engaging and unique eccentricities. You tend to wear shorts as deep into winter as possible. You sometimes perform in pajama pants and have a reputation for scouring refrigerators for neglected leftovers. You’ve made a mixtape entirely of the repeating patterns of vinyl pops that are heard when an LP has ended but is still spinning, and have played it in the morning when you get up and danced to it. Anything else to admit to? Wright: [Laughs] Well, I don’t think of myself as eccentric but yeah, those things are probably true. We don’t normally know the impression we make on others. I’ve heard some very funny Jack Wright stories, and it’s like they’re about someone else. I’m pretty conventional, but I do usually perform in colorful clothes. To me the serious musician image is laughable—like the dour looks of most band publicity shots. Eccentricities can come from a personal base of who you are, or they’re just practical. I wear shorts to mute the bell of the alto against my bare thigh. The same with pajama pants, since most pants can’t be raised high enough. If you want a good Jack Wright story, here’s one: I was playing in a radio studio with Bob Marsh and had long pants on, so I just took them off and played in my underwear. The guys in the control room got a good laugh, but I’d have felt more foolish if I’d sacrificed the music to the rules of decorum. Like many who are pointed out as being eccentric, I have no intention to be that, there’s an explanation for everything. [Laughs] Cadence: That technique where you use your bare thigh to mute your saxophone, did you develop that technique or did you see someone do it first? Other people are doing that same thing these days. Wright: I did follow others in putting bottles in the bell, but then I was frustrated that it either had that particular sound or it didn’t, nothing in between, and the interruption of doing it breaks the flow. Usually saxophonists use their pant leg, but I found the flesh is a much better seal, and by adjusting the amount of opening you have a huge range of sound you can control—pitch, volume, and multiphonics. I also sit when I play partly for that reason--it’s all about control, very functional. People—especially Americans—often think technique gets in the way of spontaneity. That’s true of technique handed down authoritatively from others, but not when it’s the result of your own investigation and standards. Anyway, I don’t think other people do the bare leg mute because they saw me doing it. But if you’re relatively unknown, it’s hard to imagine that people have picked up things from you. I claim to have a patent on it, but of course that’s a joke. Maybe someday we’ll see every sax player in shorts. Or better yet, their underwear! Cadence: You recently published The Free Musics [Spring Garden Music Edition, 2017, available from Amazon or directly from Jack Wright at his website]. It is an impressive book detailing much of what’s to know about free improvisation and it also discusses free Jazz. What inspired you to write the book? Wright: Well, don’t expect this one to be short! Since the ‘80s I’ve been writing about free playing in order to work out my own relationship to what I was doing. That is, thinking feeds right back into the playing and vice versa. When I was traveling around in the ‘80s, I took some things I’d written and handed them out to people, little booklets. I felt that to just play music – just do your thing and leave—was not enough. I liked the idea of presenting some kind of question about what this is--what do I think I’m doing, what would motivate someone to do what is obviously not very popular. I wanted to get to people’s subjectivity—hey, you can do this. Not only is free improv a strange phenomenon but it creates a very different kind of musician—not the career model—so questioning is natural. Then in the early ‘90s I had a period of collapse of confidence in my whole musical project. I felt I was becoming a performer and I didn’t want to be that, I just wanted to play music. A performer is aimed at the audience and personally needs to get a response from them. The best way is to develop some kind of shtick, however broad and imaginative it might be, something that will draw people and will give them a repeated experience, something their name will be known for. That’s assumed if you’re a soloist, and at the time I couldn’t find many partners so I was mostly playing solo. I felt the important thing to do is to play wherever you are at that very moment. Whatever is “free” in free improv, that’s part of it. It throws you off track to need to get something back from the audience at the same time. Anyway, my writing has this story background. I was part of the underground, that is non-advertised, self-determined, NY improv community in the 80s. I was one of those with career aspirations. In the NY atmosphere it’s hard not to imagine some day making it. My dream took the form of, ‘I’m in the tradition of saxophonists. People are gonna like this stuff once they hear it.’ Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn’t work that way. I didn’t doubt what I was doing was really good, so I couldn’t understand why I was being shut out of the NY upward ladder. Talk about living an illusion! I thought I could go over the heads of the avant-garde honchos, but I was repulsed by what you had to do to get the gigs. No matter how good or adventurous your music is you must be associated with the right people, and your playing shouldn’t be a threat to what they’re doing. In fact it must not appeal directly to people. It has to be mediated; music can’t stand on its own. Also, I had been living in Philly and wouldn’t consider moving to NY, which was a requirement to get in the game. After a while several musicians I was close to were augmenting improv with other forms, and I wasn’t about to start playing tunes or getting into conducted improv, like John Zorn’s game pieces. I’d been doing huge loops touring around the country, and in ‘88 I moved to Boulder, Colorado, and stayed there for fifteen years. I had a new love interest, but I was also in retreat from the NY scene, tail between my legs. Out there I looked in the mirror and saw myself becoming something like the “Wildman from Borneo” in the circus. I couldn’t stand that image. Not that I was very popular, but I could see where it was headed, the pattern where I would eventually succeed, like putting yourself on a conveyer belt. Boring! No audience in Colorado, but lots of people excited to improvise. That became FRIO, the Front Range Improv Orchestra, the first serious group of improvisers I’d been involved with. It wasn’t a band but a group actively playing privately together. We had a couple campout weekends in New Mexico, and in the early 90s Boulder had the vibrancy of a local scene of all kinds of artists. While I was out there I wrote about all the issues that had been bugging me. Like, what does it mean to want people to approve of you? Musicians especially get caught in this thing, like being caught in adolescence. It’s very difficult to escape, I mean for me too. Anyway, when I finally moved back east, in 2003, I felt like I was throwing myself back into the maelstrom, the real world. I was happy to do it, let’s see what happens this time around. There was a resurgence of improv going on, and for that reason I was willing to follow some of the rules, like get a website, put out CDs, build the bio, organize. But after a while I began to feel alienated from my music. You’ve got to sell yourself, and you’re not supposed to notice you’re doing it. The audience doesn’t understand what it takes for musicians to get gigs, like boiling yourself and your music down to an impressive bio. You have to select the best music, which means what you think people are gonna like. What really excites you gets lost. This confused me because I had this long period of focusing on being as honest as possible. So I pulled back a bit and used writing to get some perspective. Then in 2011, I was invited to the Colloquium of the Guelph Jazz Festival in Canada to speak on the situation of free improvisation and how it evolved into the present. It was an academic gathering, but it was mainly improvising musicians I wanted to address, and that would be through writing something more extensive. My concern was the conditions we are playing under, how our playing is affected by our role as artist entertainers. This has a lot to do with what kind of music gets paid and what is thought unworthy of attention and an audience. Can we be free of obligations to the audience and the music world, I mean internally, among ourselves, and play something that we don’t know is going to interest anyone other than ourselves? How do we relate to each other and to the music world, that frames what we do? I traced this back through sixties Free Jazz and its later revival, and free improvisation as it developed in the UK and then in this country. What I learned is that the situation we’re in now is very different from when Free Jazz and free improv originated, when these musics were made by a profession of performing musicians. Today the vast majority of musicians are not thinking at all of having a career—that has become irrelevant to the playing of music for most. Those coming out of music school are career-driven, but that when they have to face reality the career becomes teaching, not performing. When was the last time musicians actually earned a full income strictly from performing? What percentage of musicians are doing that? There are no statistics on this but I think at least the musicians know the answer, we just keep it to ourselves. [Laughs] Cadence: So the roots of your book go back many years and you started writing to understand the music. When did you get the idea to actually release a book? Wright: I knew there would be a book after that talk at Guelph; I appreciate the invite as a stimulus. I was writing the way I wanted to, a continuation of my first serious writing back in the 70s, but now I was also learning how to write for others. It’s interesting, that’s the opposite of what I do with music. I guess because if you want to present ideas and subject them to criticism you have to put them into prose. You have to aim to be understood. I have no such intention with music. [Laughs] Music is poetry; if people are scratching their heads it’s a good thing. Anyway, I couldn’t find anyone to read the book through to give me feedback. Now that it’s out, I’m amazed at the enthusiasm. That says something about print vs. a virtual book. I was afraid of the response because I said some things about jazz and free jazz that I was sure would offend people rather than persuade them. Of course mostly people just ignore or quietly dismiss whatever they don’t agree with. My interest is the big picture, how music and musicians fit with everything else, and how that changes. Jazz scholars don’t look at that, they focus on the details. I haven’t had any formal music study, just some private sax lessons when I was a kid. Maybe that was a good thing, since I was looking at music as an activity of a large number of people like me, whereas music courses are focused on the few individuals thought to represent the various genres. I do talk about such musicians in the period of sixties Free Jazz, only because they changed what other musicians were doing. The same can’t be said of contemporaries today—jazz and free jazz musicians have been giving repeat performances since the 80s, the golden oldies. But they’re not to blame; the entire cultural order has changed. The academics of jazz and free jazz haven’t noticed. They use the present tense to talk about the past. And teachers think playing Coltrane patterns is keeping jazz alive. Cadence: Would you briefly explain the difference between free Jazz and your preferred genre of free improvisation? Wright: First of all, I think of what I do as free playing, or “just playing,” which is not a genre but an approach. For musicians in general the genre name is just what we call our music so people will have some idea what to relate it to. This is part of the job of drawing an audience, helping out with publicity. For professionals it’s part of the contract to play the genre you’re billed to play. It’s an identity with specific characteristics. Jazz musicians used to say, it’s just music, forget the name. For these characteristics to be a genre it must be known to a wide number of audience, part of the culture. They will know it when they hear it, and not because publicity tags a musician with it. Free improvisation is an effective genre in the UK and Europe, where it has a long and known history, but not in the states. When the title is used here it is commonly classed under free jazz; that is, all improvisers are expected to be somehow doing jazz, and that isn’t true. I myself have a close relation to jazz but few of my partners do. Improvisers are likely to announce what they do as experimental improvisation to avoid confusion. I tell people promoting a show it’s free improv and they call it free jazz. That’s fine; they’ll just think this is what free jazz sounds like today. [Laughs] The two are very linked historically and the relation between them is a very important tension, I would say. What makes
the difference is four things. First of all, free jazz has a relatively
consistent form, often a loose composition. It begins usually slow
and quiet and leads to sustained high energy, a blur of beats and
notes, moderate to high volume, with no gap in the stream of sound.
All this shows the musicians’ strong emotional commitment. Secondly,
it follows jazz in featuring individuals with solo spots, and distinguishes
soloists and rhythm section, which plays constantly. Thirdly, instrumental
sound is traditional and mostly acoustic. When sound goes outside
the normal range of the instruments it is for emotive expression,
and electronics are rarely included, at least subordinate. Finally,
it is oriented towards performance; sessions are not essential. Given this, you might say there is another kind of music that has this range of freedom, and that’s new music composition. Some improvisers did take a relatively compositional direction in the late 90s. It was called reductionism, sometimes lower case music, and was centered in Berlin and London and Boston. I got very engaged in with these musicians, went to Europe to play with them, because I felt trapped in what I knew how to do. In fact I became as poor at reductionist playing as I am at jazz. [Laughs] It was about sparse and quiet sounds, often outside the normal tone of the instrument, an intensity completely opposite to jazz. An improvised performance had the kind of unity found in composed music. It took free improv further away from its association with free jazz. Like jazz it aimed for a specific aesthetic effect, by establishing parameters that were expected to be followed. The sounds you make don’t depend strictly on your relation to others in the midst of playing but on a prior form, which is similar to what happens in jazz. In free playing form comes from the immediate interaction of players, which can’t be predicted. To come back to the main question, the musicians know the distinction between free improv and free jazz because they have to choose who to play with. There are exceptions, but if you want to improvise freely you would hesitate to play with somebody expecting free jazz, since they will play a continuous high-energy stream. Maybe I know the difference because I used to do that myself, I’d be doing what I now avoid, playing parallel to others rather than with them. Cadence: Do the critics understand your playing? Wright: Sending out recordings for review has been the normal musician practice since the 80s, at least for those trying to grow an audience. The idea is that by “getting the critics on your side” and piling up reviews you slowly gain a following. I used to do that regularly but not now. Maybe I’m just bored with going through the motions of being a serious musician; after all it’s a front you have to keep up. Writers don’t often reflect back to me anything that provokes my own thinking—maybe that’s what “understanding” means. But also I think that sending out for reviews implies that there is a critical public for free improv. This is not the case unless it can be classed as far-out jazz. Practically speaking, do people come to these basement shows we play because they’ve read a review? Hardly. Today’s music writers are mainly publicists doing favors for people they think will make it, or already have an audience. Some are paid hefty sums to boost a CD—the sleaze of the music world that audience doesn’t want to know about. Reviews today mostly just confirm to musicians that they are worth something, self-gratification. In the ‘90s I was gratified when a writer wrote that another sax player was from the “Jack Wright School of Screech” and I thought – there’s a school? [Laughs] Someone else wrote that I was a post-Evan Parker saxophonist. That’s the old belief in a linear progression of saxophonists, a modernist idea—musical progress is being made. The fiction may have still functioned when I was starting out in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but no one I perform with or comes to my shows thinks in those terms. Cadence: You make it clear in your book that playing free improvisation does not lead to financial benefit, you cannot make a living off of playing it. There’s a blog posted on your website by Tom Djll that includes your quote – “I choose not to make a living from my music, and that freed me from having to tailor my music for any mass appeal. I’m not at the mercy of club bookers or agents or record producers.” In The Free Musics you note, “My true joy was to discover what is authentic strictly for myself.” Would you talk about dedicating your life to an art form with such a limited appeal to the public? That aspect is seemingly one of the major attractions of the music to you. Wright: In the late sixties I realized that my philosophic perspective on history did not conform with university job requirements. When I got involved with music it was easy to see the same would apply there. Working as a handyman, I could keep my needs for living simple and expenses low, and the balance of my time would favor what really motivated me. This was where radical politics had taken me—a break with middle class needs and modes of thinking. In the 80s I assumed that free improv would catch on, as in the avant-garde model. Eventually I realized this model was a matter of lip service. We live in a period of stagnancy and preservation of the past, when any new approach to art will fall on deaf ears. The avant-garde goes ahead as if nothing has changed, for instance thinking that musicians are professionals, like doctors. In fact we’re not getting paid. We’re hobbyists, playing first of all for each other. That’s not self-indulgence, it’s just common sense! If we’re basically paying to play, why not explore for music ourselves? Who says people won’t like it? Cadence: Recently you told me that you “don’t really know Jazz.” At a recent performance, you heard (guitarist) Lucas Brode and (percussionist) Julius Masri perform an unannounced [Thelonious] Monk tribute. It was interesting to hear you say that you recognized the music as Steve Lacy inspired [Lacy often covered Monk] rather than recognizing it as Monk’s music. Wright: Oh, I just meant they were quoting a Monk riff, just a couple intervals really, the way Lacy often did, rather than a jazz group playing a Monk tune. When I say that I don’t know Jazz, I mean not like people that know all the classic recordings, who the sidemen are, the legends and all that. I did spend a lot of time listening closely to Jazz in the ‘70s and early ‘80s especially. Jazz is still where I’m mainly coming from. It’s an identity rooted in the unconscious, not something I put out there. I’m not claiming jazz knowledge, but I’m not diluting or weakening straight-ahead jazz by what I’m doing. After five years of lessons it was clear to me that I wouldn’t ever be able to play jazz, and so I turned away from music. My story begins with Classical music. My mother was a pianist with aspirations to play professionally, and I just assumed I would do that, out of love and not obligation. It wasn’t until I was about thirty that I awakened to jazz, after the period of sixties Free Jazz. That’s when I first heard Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which literally knocked me down on the floor, a heavy experience. I went from Classical to that in one swift leap. It hit me not as a consumer but—this is what I’ve gotta do. Love is then what you’re doing, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of it. When I was living in NY in ’67 I heard Ornette play and I wasn’t prepared for it at all. I mean people today have very little understanding of what it was like to live in the ‘60s and get hit by what was going on politically and culturally, to experience this rush of culture that was just hitting you in the face. I ran away from Ornette, but then five years later, after having thrown myself into political activism I heard his recording Love Call and I knew that this was the same music and it was just beautiful. I understood it completely because I had a kind of transformation, which many people went through. We were hearing music we could not accept but in that strange period we were won over by anything that challenged us. It had nothing to do wih fashion. Cadence: What cultural impact does free improvisation make? Wright: None. [Laughs] I laugh because cultural means the big picture, and that’s not free improv. The only epigraph that I have in the book is from [Willem] de Kooning, who said, “We have no position in the world except that we just insist on being around.” Free improv is not known in our society as a distinct approach. This book is about a relative handful of people in the country who would call their music free improvisation, and we’re not going away. The field for touring is mostly the Midwest and the Northeast today, to some extent the Southeast, but those who hear us mostly come to hear the other, local groups, which themselves have only a small following. We just happen to be on the bill. Maybe a few come for “free improvisation,” but probably out of curiosity for what they know nothing about. They hear it and they’re like, “What d’you call this?” [Laughs] So there’s some curiosity about it but it’s not at the level of any cultural impact. On the East Coast, the audience is pretty much just the other musicians playing on the bill or their friends. This isn’t upsetting to us; to have an impact means big audiences, and a loss of intimacy. I’ve said since the 80’s, I’d rather play fifty concerts for ten people than one concert for five hundred. A mass audience and mass response is boring. It also leads to a hierarchy, with musicians wanting to play with you just because you’re a success, rather than a wide spread of musicians actually stimulated by what you do. Cadence: Apparently, you woke up one day in 1979 and started playing free improvisation while never having heard it before. You had no reason to even think that anyone else was playing it. What prompted you to play free? Wright: I had been playing with a local jazz group and trying to play within the chord changes. One day I played something a bit free, outside the strict limit of the changes. One of the guys in the group said to me, “Are you trying to sound like Eric Dolphy or something?” and from his tone I knew it was a criticism. I thought that I was finally catching on and got the impression that I had gone too far. I woke up the next morning and said to myself, ‘FUCK THIS, I’m just gonna play.’ I turned on the tape recorder and took off. To me that was the spirit of free playing, though it was full of little made-up tunes, moving from one idea to another spontaneously. It’s what I call following where the music is going. It was jazz-based, but not chord progressions. Like many free jazz musicians today, it went against that tired line: “You gotta learn the rules before you can break them.” Cadence: How did you become aware that other people were playing in the same fashion as you? Wright: I was looking for anyone in Philly who would do this; I asked everyone. The message I got was that to play freely, and this was 1979, was the kiss of death. I finally found a drummer, Jim Meneses, who was into this. He was coming from some of the British art Rock, Henry Cow and Art Bears, influenced by British free improvisation. Through him I realized that at least the British were doing this, and also some people in New York. Interesting that other people around the country were discovering it at the same time, all on their own. The time was right for it. Davey Williams, guitarist, and LaDonna Smith, violin, from Birmingham Alabama were coming up to NY often and inspired people to think of free improv as something anybody could do. If John Zorn didn’t need to come up through the ranks of established musicians neither did I. Eventually I found more people in Philly, like saxophonist Elliott Levin, who got started on his path through an invitation from Cecil Taylor. Elliott told me, “Music is my religion,” which I could relate to. Later Jim and I set up a Monday Night venue called the Wet Spot, which lasted until the building was to be torn down. So things were changing, people were coming into the music. Cadence: So free improvisation was developed by the British, one of whom was Derek Bailey. Did you have a relationship with him? Wright: I knew him and he was generally open to playing with people, but I couldn’t see how we could connect. It’s the difference between appreciating a musician and being able to engage with him musically. My approach at the time, like his, was fairly soloistic, but I wanted closer integration with partners than he did, more bending towards each other. For me, free playing has always meant mutual seduction and it’s very subjective who will turn you on. And unstable—over the decades subjectivity changes, so I might seek out very different people. Anyway, unlike Bailey’s playing mine had become increasingly emotive, forceful, direct, pushing out a lot, I guess pushing against the world. Around ’83 I started playing with William Parker; we’d play very hard for at least an hour without stopping, driven by a similar inexhaustible energy. At that time Bailey’s playing felt too cool for me. It would have been dishonest to play with him. I would be associating with him to advance myself, as many Americans were doing. People who think that music is based on models to be followed will naturally think they should play with those of highest reputation. Then they display them in their bio as if they were real partners. That would be the stepping stone career path, as I was beginning to see, and it totally repelled me—I didn’t yet realize it was being fostered in the schools. I did go to Europe for extended periods, since that’s where I found the most musicians I could relate to. I brought back some for touring in the US--Roger Turner, Wittwulf Malik, Andreas (now Max) Stehle, Lars Rudolph, and later others--but I was rooted in America and wasn’t about to move there. Cadence: When did you start performing free improvisation for an audience? Wright: It must have been the later 70s. There was a house down the street, a poor black neighborhood at the time, where a line of saxophonists got on stage one by one backed by a rhythm section. I knew the setup, anybody could come in and play. You got in line and took your turn. [Laughs] I was scared shitless to do this, but my girlfriend said, “You know you have to do this.” The sax players ahead of me were all trying to play in key. I just closed my eyes and [makes growling sounds]. [Laughs] When I ran out of juice, I stopped. I threw myself into it and was too scared to think. That was a fluke, at the time I was still vacillating about music. The first time after that must have been ’81 or so, and with a group, and I was hoping to reach people, as I still do. Cadence: Through the ‘80s you were the only one touring widely with this music, leading (guitarist) Davey Williams to title you the “Johnny Appleseed” of free improvisation. What kind of response were you getting from the public as you went about the country? Wright: There were very small audiences, places where there was not much else to do, is my impression. I did a tour through the Midwest in ’86 with a dancer, Bob Eisen, who got us into places I never would have been otherwise. A dance community was already in place, a few musicians would also come, and I’d meet them. In the ‘80s, the different arts audiences were not as segregated as now; this is also the difference between small towns and the big city. A musician in a Midwestern town might go to a dance concert. So I met people and then I had the contacts to go back again. I was happy with 5 or 10 people in the audience. I mean it was advertised and some people would come thinking it was Jazz, so I guess you could call it a public. For the fifteen years I lived in Boulder I was going back and forth to the East Coast twice a year. This meant I’d play in Lincoln, Nebraska. I remember a woman who came with her son because she had seen a sign announcing a saxophonist and she wanted to encourage her son, just starting to play. I was wearing a kind of death mask with a big mouth opening that allowed for the saxophone. So here’s this mother and her kid and I’m just going [BLAT!!!] I wonder what happened to this kid. [Laughs] So people came to concerts not really knowing what to expect. That was closer to the sixties thing than today, where art audiences are more likely to calculate whether they’re going to like it. People came who were really having a new experience of music because they just happened to be there. But the nature of the thing was that it didn’t build an audience for me in the career sense, that is, consumers. I just didn’t care enough about that. I loved being on the road, finding new people, places I’d never been, without being a tourist, which to me is deadly. Cadence: In your book, you estimate that there’s maybe 300 full and part-time players of free improvisation. Nothing excites you more than inspiring an audience member to play this form of music or when you find a new playing partner. Why is recruitment of others so important to you? Wright: 300 might actually be a stretch; there’s no way of knowing. For me frustration with whatever you’re doing has got to be part of the picture. You’re playing with partners you’re perfectly happy with, but then you can’t find anything new to do. It’s not their fault, you feel bored with your own playing. It’s like, you’re not exciting them enough to return the ball to you. Adding in a different person creates a new situation, or somebody who you haven’t played with for a long time. And finding new people, you never know what they’ll do and what they’ll make you do. I want other players to push me around. Like in a serious discussion, if the other person doesn’t push you a bit out of your normalcy, you’re just hearing your echo. Sometimes you have to let others know they can do that. They will hesitate if they look up to you too much. And especially being an older person, there’s that gap of respect. You have to let them know you’re missing something for yourself without them. You might get an intuition who will be interesting but you can’t know for sure. Somebody who may have no skill on an instrument and yet feels okay in playing, that could put you in a new situation that could be highly interesting. People ask me for a lesson sometimes and I say, let’s just play. I do sometimes stop and talk, but only when I feel a real possibility there with them. I am not particularly interested in improvisation becoming more popular but rather, very selfishly, in finding people who can open some new doors. I’d rather play with friends than the so-called best musicians. That is, first you feel you might like someone, then you play. Music is then the medium of a special kind of personal relationship, of love and trust. Cadence: So say tomorrow, you wake up and free improvisation is the new thing. The type of music you play is what everybody wants to hear, it’s the big rage. How would you feel about that? Wright: [Pause] I’d probably do something else. [Laughs] No, I’d try to ignore it, which would be difficult for it would probably mean my own personal success. That’s the really difficult situation, to play for people when you’re framed as a success. In the ‘80s I wanted that but had illusions of how I could use it. I said, “If they ever open the curtain for me, I’ll hold it open for everyone else.” That wasn’t idealism, I really didn’t want to be singled out. So it raises the question, in our world what are the chances for a collective musical form to establish itself with an audience, like, for free improv to be the new thing? It has come and gone twice now, as something that was catching on with musicians, but never as a popular thing. It finds new listeners for the moment but it has never been fashionable. Anyway, I think people knew my attitude and that I was not someone to be promoted, since I wouldn’t feel indebted to the promoters. I was at least ambivalent, and now it’s all clear to me that to be the next big thing is the worst thing to happen to musicians’ relation to their music, at least in our era. It promises to pay the bills, but doesn’t even do that very well. On the other hand, if it were the rage, as you say, for people to just start improvising freely, like at the lunch table at work, wouldn’t that be great! Cadence: There actually was a surge of interest in this music by the end of the ‘80s and more people started performing it. What caused that peak in popularity? Wright: I’m not aware of any such thing. There were bands with set lists of pieces that had improvised sections, John Zorn was performing his conducted pieces, “free improv” was used to advertise all kinds of things, but no group I know was drawing an audience for a set of just free playing. We were part of a large-scale resistance to the Reagan reaction. Wynton Marsalis joined it by attacking sixties Free Jazz and the New York avant-garde, which he called “improvised music.” His message was--“Let’s make sure we don’t go down that musical path ever again.” Punk was viscerally and explicitly anti-Reagan. Maybe what you’re thinking of is the resurrected free jazz of the late 80s. But that was the point where free jazz and free improv began to move apart. In my book I show how sixties Free Jazz was dead in the water by the early 80s as the contender for public space it had once been. It was resurrected later as a rejection of Marsalis’s Classic Jazz, which had drawn a line excluding it. It was impossible for free jazz to be adventurous and open to new ideas in that cultural atmosphere; it was frozen in place as a consistent classic style. The free improvisers, less tied to the identity of jazz and free jazz, had more reason to be inclusive. The next set in our little basement space after some wild crashing about might be five Casio piano players working together quietly, nothing free jazz about that at all. It was in the later 90s that the surge of musician interest in free improv occurred, the second wave, which died down around the time of the economic collapse of 2008. Cadence: Since the ‘80s, there’s been a proliferation of highly schooled musicians, some of whom play free improvisation. What effect does schooling have on performers of this music? Wright: Actually, there’s been a proliferation of all musicians, an important distinction. If you mean university training, I’d say the effect is negative, although that’s the main road people take today who think of playing jazz or classical. So it’s a dilemma—how to keep free improv from becoming institutionalized. In the early 80s some musicians were schooled, but when they discovered improv they rejected much of what they’d been taught. Today a career is impossible without a degree, and I see no rejection of schooling. In ’88, I did a workshop at the University of Michigan. In the classroom the musicians were just frozen, I think because their normal training made free improv a hard pill to swallow. That night, I played a concert with a group of student improvisers in the main rehearsal space and then asked all the music students in the audience to join us. So they started playing and it was like they’d been let out of a cage. They were banging on the big storage closets, moving chairs around, just what any improviser would do. The professors were there and were horrified. They wrote a letter criticizing the teacher who had invited me. I think he had no idea such a thing could happen. Today I go around and do workshops, presentations, at large and small schools where there are faculty-led improv groups. They are mostly coming from Classical music and composition, and are attracted to playing freely; it’s like a release from their serious work, although within the traditional bounds of performance. Jazz students, I think, believe they already know how to improvise; playing freely would be confusing. I found a Ph.D. student in improvisation who basically played a composition, while a composition major, who pointedly said he was not an improviser, was fabulous. Putting free playing at the center of your life, constantly reimagining how to play your instrument and staying close to your desire—there aren’t many people doing that. It’s a hard sell. I have yet to meet anyone coming from these improv programs really on fire for free playing, recklessly bursting out with it, like those Michigan students, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Cadence: What defines outstanding free improvisational playing versus unsuccessful playing? What’s art and what’s just strange? Wright: I have no idea. [Laughs] Your question is about judging it objectively and that’s not my job. I mean, it’s what the music world does, critics and curators and teachers, but playing is a different kind of engagement. When I’m listening to others playing I’m just thinking whether they would be interesting to play with. That doesn’t hinge on whether it’s art or successful or strange. Playing is very different from standing back and judging. I only care about what my partners think of it, though I’m curious about the audience response, beyond applause, that is. For instance, polite applause can easily mean that they didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe the playing was too outstanding for them. [Laughs] Cadence: How has your playing advanced over the years? What have you grasped that you’re most proud of? Wright: To be proud is to have achieved something you’ll defend. Against who? I don’t even defend my playing against myself. Just today I was playing a session with Zach [Darrup, Philadelphia guitarist] and I was frustrated with my playing in the first piece, then later I thought it was working well. Thirty years ago I had the same kind of judgments, so where’s the advance! Advance is an abstraction from the listener point of view, comparing now and then, advance or decline. I’m usually more happy with my playing now than I was twenty years ago, but that’s not the same thing. Listening back though, is a very interesting thing; we can hear ourselves outside of the immediacy of playing. We can listen to what we did ten years ago, forty years ago, and really struggle with our judgment. I mean, I was ecstatic with something at the time, so why am I dissing it now? Anyway, I’d say the book is closer to an achievement since it’s a solid material thing, can’t be erased. Even there, however, I say I could keep on editing and changing it, so how solid is that? I’m not proud enough to say, this is forever. Cadence: Is there a key skill that a player of free improvisation has to develop in order to play well with others? Wright:
No [Laughs] Not even listening—that’s a human act, not
a skill. To make it a skill is to tell people not to object if they’re
bored. That’s the academic approach. When I walked out on Ornette
back in ’67 it was because I was listening. I was not bored,
I was wide awake and afraid of what was coming in my ears. I say in the book that you are playing your own version of what others are doing. You can lose all self-awareness. For instance, when my lip is weak I’ll be aware of it and pissed off about it—not fun. I’d rather lose myself in what other people are doing. That helps loosen the great weakness of all serious music—ownership of your music and responsibility. To my mind, responsibility tightens us up—come on now, this is serious stuff, no fooling around. That’s what happens in an art concert—the more formality, the less the playing can take off in its own direction. Free playing is irresponsible in order to respond only to itself. Cadence: How does it make you feel to play free music? Are you seeking a spiritual place or getting rid of angst? Wright: Neither of these, and you’re not seeking something if you’re already there. It’s an irrational high but not like that from drugs, sex, or 16-hour work days. It’s something many musicians feel is our reason for being. Not a single hair separating you and the playing—it happens with all kinds of music. You are every sound you’re making, though maybe you’ve just pulled out of “this is total shit” a minute before. You can’t be happy about what you do unless you have felt the wind against you and now it’s miraculously at your back. I don’t know how else to say it. Cadence: As someone who thrives on playing with others, how do you feel about performing a solo set? Wright: I feel ambivalent. I am not and don’t want to be a soloist. To play a solo is always a specific decision, one I rarely make. Playing with others is first of all for them, stimulated by the audience, whereas with a solo you only have the audience to relate to. Without others throwing in different ideas, solos tend to become formulaic. It’s like, the audience wants the best, so here’s what I’ve worked out, what represents me. Our commercialized culture fully backs this up—the musicians’ job is to please the other, easily forgotten when engaging other musicians. For me, once something is being recorded, I know someone else could hear it, and it’s difficult not to feel I should do something good. This has led me to hold back while recording. Last summer I started playing alone and recording it, but not as a solo. I’d go to the basement early in the morning, turn on the recorder and just play. It was the first time I’d ever escaped the anxiety that accompanies recording. To just play without any nagging judgment was a huge liberating experience, something I didn’t plan on. After the summer, I scheduled a couple of solo performances to see if that confidence of “playing alone” would carry over. I was somewhat happy with them but not totally. Cadence: What’s the most unusual setting you’ve performed in? Wright: Probably when I played in a minimum security prison in Toledo, Ohio with guitarist Chris Cochrane in 1985. All the prisoners were there, a huge audience of black, male prisoners and in front, a few whites. Chris and I were playing this totally crazy stuff and then one of the black prisoners interrupted, saying, “You guys can obviously play music, so why don’t you?” Suddenly, everybody was engaged in a passionate inquiry into the philosophy of music. Never before had someone stopped a show of mine and said “This is not music.” But he was saying this knowing jazz and other music, and telling us his ears were hurt by what we were doing. Some people seemed to agree with this guy and some white prisoners in the front were saying, “Don’t listen to him. We’re behind you.” [Laughs] They probably didn’t like it either but were taking sides. I found out later that the prisoners went back to their cells and debated this all night. Music mattered vitally to them. Our playing made an impact—there’s your cultural impact! [Laughs] Anyway, the upshot was that my friend who was teaching poetry there and got us the gig got fired for it. When people talk of art disturbing the peace and having consequences this is what it means. It’s rare, accidental when it happens. That guy couldn’t walk out. Makes you think, what if after an audience has come in we post a guard at the door and say, no matter what we do you aren’t allowed to leave. No more consumer choice! Cadence: You play in Europe fairly often. Do you find Europe to be more supportive of this music? Wright: Yeah, free improvisation is a distinct genre there, with an audience capable of making its own judgments. It’s an art music and many more musicians do it exclusively than here. The main thing is that it’s possible for Europeans to make a living doing it. Many European governments provide financial support, at least for venues. Here, if it isn’t jazz-oriented then it’s DIY and underground. Cadence: What differences have you noticed when performing with Europeans versus American musicians? Wright: That’s hard to generalize. Maybe the Europeans don’t play quite as wild, all over the map, as my partners here. [Laughs] They’re more restrained in general—technically very trained. However, they don’t bring some model of proper music into their improvising. Cadence: You have a new CD out. How do you decide when it’s time to release a new recording? Wright: Part of the recording is with Zach and Evan Lipson on double bass from a tour [Fall, 2016], and the other part is my “playing alone.” I had it made to be inserted in the book, when people order it from me, a kind of bonus. CDs are very cheap to get manufactured without the packaging, but still a waste of money if there’s no market—the name is the market. CDRs copied one at a time are the answer, and the reason to make them is just to sell on tour. Or Bandcamp and Soundcloud, a good way to let tell potential bookers what you’re about, and potential audiences. It’s not so much a matter of the right time but of whether I’m going on tour and with whom. All that really matters is playing live. A recording is not the music, it’s just a hint of it. But that recording should make it plain that free playing doesn’t translate as sloppy technique. Our playing shows a huge vocabulary and is highly precise in both what we play and what we don’t play. Cadence: We’re doing this interview at the Philadelphia home you mentioned on Spring Garden Street that you bought in the ‘70s and have turned into a home for free improvisers. What goes on at this house? Wright: I had musicians here through the ‘80s when I was living here. When I moved back in 2003 I tossed out the people who weren’t paying rent—quite a bit of that—and made it strictly improvisers. It stayed that way until a few years ago. Now Zach lives here and Jim Strong, an improviser and instrument builder, and soon a dancer downstairs, an improviser. There’s also a musician on the first floor who’s coming from punk but is not an improviser. I come regularly from my home north of here to play sessions with Zach and others we invite. Cadence: There’s sort of a Sun Ra thing going on here. Wright:
[Laughs] Sun Ra had an orchestra of fixed membership; this isn’t
like that. Cadence: The last questions have been given to me by other artists to ask you: Ben Bennett (percussion) asked – “Has having kids had an effect on your work?” Wright: Well, my son Ben has been a very close partner, a double bass player who had a punk band with his brother. I asked him once why he took so naturally to improvising and he said, “I was just listening to you playing all the time,” through the ‘80s when he lived with me in Philly. Captive audience kind of thing, like the prisoners, but he didn’t tell me to stop playing! Bhob Rainey (saxophone/sound design) asked – “How you might view the socioeconomic position of the "fringe" artist as a potential site of effective collectivity.” Wright: I don’t identify as a fringe artist myself—Bhob is thinking in market terms, like “marginalized.” A fringe points to the mainstream, in fact fringe festivals everywhere are part of mainstream urban culture. It’s the cultural left, out to make the world more liberal-minded, using all the entrepreneurial techniques. Free playing is not on the fringe of anything but right at the heart of music. Musicians are directly engaged with other musicians rather than looking to the marketplace. It’s true that in the ‘80s I saw free improv as an extension of activism in some way. I thought it had broken through the conventional social order and had some potential for transformation. It scared those who thought it threatened Music. Since then the social order has adjusted; music is now just a consumer item, doesn’t challenge people in any meaningful way. Someday it might be part of a cultural transformation, but not as a fringe. In political terms the fringe is integrationist, and I’m more the separatist—musicians for musicians! That’s the collectivity I know about. Bob Marsh (multi-instrumentalist) said – “I’ve known Jack for over 30 years and played with him at least twice a year for a long time, plus we toured every other year for many years. We wound up on opposite coasts but I’ve spent many hours talking to him, so I don’t have much in the way of a question for him, it’s more of a conjecture. Did you know that Jack was a doctoral student in medieval and Reformation French history? He had a really interesting thesis topic. I can’t remember what it was but I remember being impressed by it. His thesis adviser however, wouldn’t let him pursue it. This led Jack to jump out of the past and into the sixties and radical politics and then free improvisation. So the conjecture: What would have happened to me and hundreds of other musicians without that personal contact with Jack’s endless and everywhere touring and his incredible generosity if he had gone on to become a medieval French history scholar in an ivory tower somewhere?” Wright: Well, that’s nice to hear, and one of those “what if” questions that can’t be answered. I do think it’s true that I had some impact on that earlier generation of musicians and a few audience. I get emails from people, “remember when you came through and we played a session?” But improv went through a decline and resurgence of interest in the later 90s, at least on the east coast, and interest in musicians like myself did not carry over. We were the forgotten past. That was fine with me; young players could treat me as a peer and not someone who knew how to do it better than they did. That’s what’s important with me; we’re all peers, dealing just with what’s happening. Cadence: Do you have any final statements to make and perhaps you’d like to say something about playing this form of music that might peak someone’s interest in performing it? Wright: Earlier I said that free playing has lacked cultural impact; it’s been absorbed into art music in Europe and assimilated to free jazz here. However, something can be historically significant even though culturally its edge is blunted. That free playing exists at all is a phenomenon. People are creating something very similar to acceptable music in results but from the ground up rather than the top down. That is, out of their immediate relations in real time, not composed in advance and not corrected according to some idea of what people want to hear. The sound-makers have taken over the making of sound, and for their own purposes. That they have no interest in making a mark means that of course it will be culturally insignificant. This is no heroic avant-garde, the next big thing—our culture has absorbed the avant-garde and turned it into a routine. What is historically significant is what is not routine, not expected of the human animal. In the US it has gone through two periods of growth and decline, when it attracted musicians who then got bored with it, the mid-70s-late 80s, and late-90s to late 00’s. Each period was marked by its cultural and social environment, and we can’t say what the next will be like. We do know that what is called the “world leadership” has been shaken down to its boots, and that the elite of music professionalism has already become a joke, unable to deliver on its promises. It’s hard to say what the culture will look like when the present arrangement is more widely and openly known to be no longer viable. I would say, we’re on the verge of a Copernican Revolution, all bets are off. The seeds are planted and we can’t know what the fruit will taste like, but history, the organic process itself, is clearly not twiddling its thumbs with nothing to do.
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