Bob Gluck's Blog

I am returning from a three week break from my work on the Mwandishi book, during which I celebrated a big number wedding anniversary by traveling abroad. The primary work that I am returning to now is editing; moving what is a solid draft of the book into something closer to its final shape.

While traveling, I picked up a copy of Herbie Hancock’s latest recording, “The Imagine Project” at an airport kiosk. I had heard some of the music performed lived twice during the past six months, but the drive home from the airport offered my first opportunity to hear the studio recording. As I do not consider myself a music critic – but rather a musician who composes and performs and also writes about music – I am not going to offer a review of the CD (which I really enjoyed). A few blog entries back, I did offer some reflections about the show at Tanglewood, in the Western Massachusetts, largely in response to a slew of negative reviews that appeared in publications within a two-hour radius of the concert venue. Here, I’d like to explore one important aspect of the recording, the issue of joining musical cultures.

Since the focus of this blog is primarily my book about the Mwandishi band, what interests me now is what Herbie’s ongoing work has to teach me about that early 1970s work. In fact, every time I hear something new that he’s done, it does in fact help inform how I hear his earlier music. The reason is that Herbie Hancock is a highly eclectic, ever evolving musician, and it was in the Mwandishi band that many of the core pieces of his musical complexion simultaneously came into play. In my book, I trace what those elements were (in particular, his rhythmic sensibilities, his lyricism, and his use of abstraction), how they developed in his previous work, and then how they come together in the Mwandishi period. Looking through this lens, it is rare for me to hear anything that Herbie has done since that doesn’t integrate these elements, albeit maybe using different recipes and to different degrees. This is no less true of the Imagine Project. As is often, the lines blur between his soloing and accompanying; some of Hancock’s best playing is subtle and not out front. At times, what stands out are the grooves, the lyrical melodies, and then his signature use of harmonic abstraction suddenly manifests, adding depth and color. But the key Mwandishi-theme of this recording is its integration of many diverse elements and the lack of boundaries between genre and aesthetic, yet melding into a personal statement.

The diversity, or rather, the integration of diverse voices into a unified work, is in fact the main theme of The Imagine Project. In his liner notes, Herbie describes the overarching idea: “This album was recorded in various countries throughout the world, in multiple languages, and with various international artists in an effort to show the power and beauty of global collaboration as a golden path to peace.” The theme of all global collaboration and peace making has long been important to Hancock, as a Buddhist and as a human being. And indeed, several of the tracks include performers from a range of cultures, sometimes bringing musical cultures (such as the combination of the backing of singers Pink and Seal with Malian singer Oumou Sangare and the vocal group Konono No 1 from The Democratic Republic of the Congo, on John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’). At other times, Hancock concentrates on one culturally specific musical form. An unusual example is an Irish-influenced setting of Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times, They Are A’Changin’’, which includes members of the Chieftains and is sung in English and Gaelic.

The most striking example of cross-cultural fertilization is the closing track, ‘The Song Goes On,’ which joins a group of Indian musicians (including vocalist K.S. Chithra and sitarist Anoushka Shankar) with long-time Hancock associate saxophonist Wayne Shorter and singer Chaka Kahn. Whenever I see a cross-cultural blend coming my way, I tend to approach with caution. After several years of thinking about the issue, I published an article in 2008 that looked in detail at the borrowing and blending of culturally specific musical forms and materials. It was titled “Between, Within and Across Cultures,” and published in the journal Organized Sound (13.2). What was on my mind was some of my own recent work as a composer/performer, which I was beginning to reconsider with some skepticism.

I began by stating the obvious [these quotations leave out the scholarly references included in the original; also, since OS is published in the UK spelling follows British conventions]:

“A global perspective in which national boundaries become less important can potentially expand the pool of resources available to spark the musical imagination. Such a perspective is prefigured in the work of early Modern European composers. For some, new ideas, aesthetics, forms and materials from the East helped provide new strategies to organise and structure musical materials, as tonality became exhausted in the late nineteenth century. Claude Debussy drew upon ideas from Japan and Javanese gamelan in search of new conceptions of time, space, timbre, directionality or its lack, gestural shape and pitch organisation. Debussy discovered in the woodcuts of Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) a sensibility that influenced his use of sounds to convey sense impressions and symbols, analogies to reflections of light and shading, and shifting patterns … [A few decades later, Henry] Cowell studied the music of several Asian cultures as he developed his highly personal approach, one that collapsed national and stylistic boundaries, declaring: ‘I want to live in the whole world of music!’”

In the article, I then looked critically at a range of electroacoustic music, including my own in this vein, noting: “Although many composers have been influenced by or borrowed from other cultures, cultural artefacts do not exist in a vacuum and art forms are not separable from the wholeness of a group’s culture. The expressive arts are a core means by which members of a society articulate their sense of self, their history, struggles and strivings. Artistic traditions develop within contexts that are weighted with rich webs of historical and political meanings. Drawing upon other traditions raises issues about freedom of expression, cultural boundaries, ownership and understanding, ethics and propriety, and cultural, ethnic and national identity. What a composer may view as a natural aspect of the creative process may be interpreted, by others, as an act of cultural appropriation.” Appropriation has been a hot button issue within academia in recent decades, as scholars and political activists have questioned the free use by Westerner artists and musicians of materials that originate in formerly colonized cultures. The issue in part is the asymmetry of power relations between the composer and the cultural source.

I next referred back to what I had written more positively in a previous article, remembering that: “art making has always relied on borrowing and crosscultural exchange, from folk traditions to Bach’s reuse of his (and others’) own work, to Ives’ use of American hymns and patriotic tunes to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European use of Turkish melodies, to the evolution of the banjo, none of which prevented the original authors from representing their own culture.” Continuing in the 2008 article, “I concluded that borrowing is unavoidable and that crosscultural borrowing can be respectful and legitimate, if not invaluable. I noted, however, that three elements must be present to achieve respectful adaptation: an appreciation of the contents and value of the other culture on its own terms; a desire to speak from one’s own personal artistic voice without mimicking the other culture, and an awareness that can be articulated to an audience of the fine line between creative borrowing and disrespectful appropriation.” This isn’t as easy as it may sound: “because we all tend to see the world through our own lens, experience and values. Those in the West have been raised in societies that share the assumption that western culture reflects universal human norms.”

What I suggested is that artists and composers engage in a self-reflective process compositional process about their work, “carefully considering motivations, context and implications of compositional decisions, complementary to considerations of formal and aesthetic artistic criteria.”

Which brings me back to ‘The Song Goes On’, a collaboration between Western and Indian musicians. The composition opens with a flurry of notes by Wayne Shorter and then a lyrical section on sitar played by Anoushka Shankar’s, with Hancock subtly comping on piano. It is like an alap, the opening section of classical Indian music, where the modal/melodic materials are explored out of time. Next, a combination of Indiantabla and Western traps establish a groove that is at once neither Indian nor Western, but somehow both. Tony William’s steady state, dynamic-yet-static drumming on Miles Davis’ ‘It’s About That Time’ from ‘In a Silent Way’ came to mind. Shaka Kahn and K.S. Chitra sing the melody, alternating phrases, each in their native language. Shankar embellishes and responds by interspersing brief gestures. Chitra vocally improvises within her own Indian tradition, and then she and Shankar trade phrases.

The big surprise comes when Hancock and then Shorter add their own responses, each distinctly within their distinctive musical languages. The place of the piano is quite striking. I listened bearing in mind Ornette Coleman’s strategy of rarely including piano because of its tendency to introduce vertical harmony. Hancock’s playing is most often horizontal – melodic phrases – and thus avoids harmonic implications. When he hints at verticality, he plays the kinds of chordal fragments that date back to the abstractions of Miles’ Quintet, beginning in 1965. These were and remain harmonically ambiguous and existing somewhere in between clusters and chords, never allowing for a single fixed analysis. Hancock’s phrases are sometimes imitative of Shorter and at other times imitative of Shankar. They simultaneously engage in dialog and provide filigree.

Somehow everything fits together on this piece. A generous amount of space is left for each player’s phrases to breath. Everyone is listening closely. Nobody is giving up her or his distinct identity, and the music exists as an amalgam simultaneously within and between cultures. There is really no borrowing going on, but simply listening and responding, acknowledging commonalities and differences. I have listened to this five of six times now and keep discovering previously unheard, interesting moments.

The Mwandishi band was not substantially about cross-cultural meeting. However, it privileged improvisations that required flexible and close listening. It also drew upon a multiplicity of influences, integrating them all into a single fabric, rendering the distinctions invisible. It is this same integrative impulse that manifests in The Imagine Project. But here, since the differences involve cultural sensibilities that have been historically contested, the integration is not one in which everything becomes part of an undifferentiated whole in which differences are ignored. Rather, and particularly on ‘The Song Goes On’, we find a celebration of difference and shared humanity. Everyone speaks their own language, but does so together, finding what poet Adrienne Rich once referred to as “The Dream of a Common Language.”

Posted in Reflections on musical context

Something became clear to me nearly three years ago, as I discovered that some writing I was doing about the Mwandishi band was actually turning into a book. Here it is: thinking about this music was going to require not only listening to the recordings and to band member reminiscences, but also playing the music.

And so, I’ve played a fair bit of the Mwandishi band’s music with my various bands, mostly with my main trio (Michael Bisio or Christopher Dean Sullivan on bass and drummer Dean Sharp, and on two occasions, with drummer Jay Rosen subbing), and on a few gigs with a highly electronic configuration called ‘The Synapse Brothers’, with guitarist John Myers and, from a distance, Patrick Gleeson, who sent sound files for me to blend into the mix. The repertoire has included Sleeping Giant, Quasar, Water Torture, and Wandering Spirit Song (plus Dolphin Dance, an older tune that the Mwandishi band sometimes played). I already knew, from listening and drawing up graphic scores of how the band played the tunes, that some of the tunes were structured sectionally. A graphic score is a depiction of the music created by placing visual images or word descriptions on a time line noting the placement of the various sound events and how they are juxtaposed). Sleeping Giant, the subject of my last post, is a particularly good example. A sectional structure means that the band would have composed sections to work with; with group improvisation unfolding around and in between these sections. Sometimes, this composed material would serve as bookends for the freer improvisation, points where everyone comes together or brings a section to a conclusion.

During the past few months of book writing, I’ve also been engaged in creating my own two upcoming CDs, ‘Something Quiet’ (FMR, January 2011) and ‘Returning’ (FMR, April 2011). The first features a trio including soprano saxophonist Joe Giardullo and bass player Christopher Dean Sullivan; the latter is with the original configuration of my ongoing trio, bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Dean Sharp. Neither of these recordings include Mwandishi band material, although the first recording includes a very freely treated piano and bass duet of ‘Dolphin Dance’. As I listened to the completed studio masters, I realized that Herbie Hancock’s sectional way of composing for the Mwandishi band rubbed off on me. This isn’t completely new – in the late 1980s, I composed a piano piece for my dancer-wife that was structured in a similar manner. The idea is not unrelated to Stockhausen’s ‘Moment” form, where something would take place, then something else, then something else. The origins could also be traced to many forms of black music and story telling, where structures, characters, and basic plot lines remain relatively intact, with new side tales, embellishments about (in the case of stories) characters and plot reworkings take place with every retelling. Dave Holland’s ‘Q & A’ from the wonderful recording ‘Conference of the Birds’ (with Anthony Braxton, Barry Alschul – Circle minus Chick Corea, adding Sam Rivers) has an angular theme that everyone plays more or less together and then breaks apart into free improvisation in which phrases from the theme become available material, treated like Playdough, unfold.

One of my own newly recorded tunes, ‘October Song’, quite consciously follows this sectional model; the group improvises relatively freely, always keeping the core motifs or moods of the composed material in mind, treating it rather freely. But then, the players come together at composed markers. The score is to be treated however the band sees fit on a given occasion and not necessarily in sequence. Most of the tunes on that recording, ‘Something Quiet’ in some way shape or form owe a debt to ‘Crossings’ in the free way that the composed material is treated. Composing and performing tunes based upon structures followed by the Mwandishi band (and also by Ornette Coleman, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Circle, and others) has been helpful in clarifying what I’m hearing when listening to the various live Mwandishi performances.

There are many ways to gain insight about music, but few are as good as actually playing the music. My (or anyone else’s) “take” on the music and its forms are necessarily quite different from the originals, but personalizing them is a valuable route to understanding. It is a route, however, that is only useful when used as one means of knowing, in conjunction with listening closely enough to the originals to get inside the musical head of the original players. That requires repeated listening, comparing different versions, and talking to the musicians. All of this is great fun and I highly recommend it!

Posted in Reflections on musical context

This afternoon, I listened for the first time in about a year to ‘Sleeping Giant’, the suite that comprises the entire first side of the original ‘Crossings’ LP. Listening while driving in the car was the way I first came to know this piece and re-experiencing it in this same way, 36 years after my first time was, well, a trip. I’ve spent most of the year in between listenings writing about a range of topics about the Mwandishi band, in part expanding upon the musical descriptions that I wrote nearly two years ago, including about this suite.

Earlier this afternoon, I spent an hour listening again to the second two of the Norman Connors albums that include Herbie Hancock, Eddie Henderson, and at times, Buster Williams, all recorded between 1973 and 1974. And then I listened to the film soundtrack to “The Spook Who Sat By the Door.” I recently watched the film, having read the novel in high school. Noticing the similarities and differences between the score and, alternately, ‘Sextant’ and ‘Head Hunters’ is pretty fascinating. Maybe I’ll post something about this at some point down the road.

Back to hearing ‘Sleeping Giant’ – listening again, I’m struck by how new and fresh it sounds. The recording is playing in the background yet again as I write now (and this is a different text than what is included in the current version of my book). Each time I listen, even each time today, I notice new elements that I’ve somehow missed in the past. And I’ve listened to this over the years zillions of times. I’ve heard two or three live versions, as well. They are all quite different from one another and of course, due to the post-production and multi-tracking, different from the version released on record in 1972.

Two years ago, this was one of the Mwandishi tunes that I transcribed. At first, this was to have a visual representation to help me think about the music. But this soon turned to my creating my own arrangements of much of the repertoire. The way I came to learn more about this piece and others, then, was by playing it in various trio and solo settings. There’s a solo version for piano with tons of electronics (thus, hardly solo, although I’m the only one playing and its all real time) on my Youtube page:

http://www.youtube.com/bobgluck1

Its rather different from the original, but I think of it in a similar spirit, which is open to the moment and moving back and forth between abstraction and grooves and everything in between.

Listening again this afternoon, I found the original to be just a marvel. Although the whole piece is nearly a sprawling 25 minutes. But it is sectional and each part is quite different from what precedes and what follows, although they all mesh into a single unit. Herbie Hancock composed the suite with sectional markers, where the band comes together, playing music that he crafted in advance, and these provide both glue and common resting places. Some of the writing is lush and gorgeous, and in other places, inventive and catchy. Its Herbie at the top of his compositional game. As I hear it, there is but one tape splice, at a point where it probably wasn’t at all clear how a transition was going to happen between a deep funk groove and a pastoral lyrical section. In short, although its a bit abrupt, I think that it works.

What drives the piece is the rhythm section, comprised of Billy Hart’s surging, ebbing and flowing drumming, ever intense; Buster Williams searching bass lines, alternately leading and following. His electric bass, with and without fuzz are right on the money, right in the pocket and tight with Hart. And of course, Herbie Hancock is always soloing and always comping. He is the paragon of accompanists here, empathetic to everyone else, yet somehow also in the driver seat, whether formally soloing or not.

The opening multi-layered percussion is simultaneously locked in together all the while somehow simply juxtaposed. And when Billy Hart enters on traps, particularly his sizzling cymbals, the multi-dimensionality of his playing is just startling. The major post-production addition to this section is in the transition into Herbie Hancock’s opening electric piano solo. This is a reversed acoustic piano chord. Now you don’t see it, then you detect it in the rear view mirror and the next thing you know, its a surging train zooming us into the next section.

Hancock builds his solos gradually and steadily, taking side roads each of which holds our interest in of itself, but then also plays a part in creating the larger structures. I’ve listened to the various solos, particularly the opening solo and the one around the fifteen minute mark, many times and continue to consider how I can describe them in metaphorical terms as a journey through a forest. So far, what I have is drier language. First he does this, then he does that; here’s where he’s going… but maybe I’ll do the other at some point during my writing. I hope so.

This fabulous groove around 11 minutes, with its interlocking parts, both is and is not a funk jam. It lives somewhere between Hancock’s ‘Fat Albert Rotunda’ R&B grooves and the put-it-together-like-a-puzzle James Brown, Sly, Funkadelic kinds of grooves. Buster Williams’ fuzz bass lines have a sense of motion that never ceases to intrigue, yet sits right in between the beats that keeps my foot tapping and tapping and tapping. After a return to the lyrical horn choir, a passage that conveys to me a sense of stillness in a forest, Bennie Maupin’s soprano sax solo is just catalytic, buoyed by Herbie Hancock’s repeated chordal patterns. Just deeply funky, although harmonically meandering. If there’s a way to be simultaneously funky and abstract, this is it.

After a return to the lyrical horns, the tune splinters apart with the horns playing what easily could have been an electronic texture using extended instrumental techniques, breathy sounds and altisimo range sonics, at which trombonist Julian Priest particularly excels to this day, coupled with Bennie Maupin’s sit-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat multiphonics.

I will soon be listening again to live versions, with my many charts and graphs (from two years ago) in hand, searching to offer observations about the nature of their live performances. I look forward to that very much. Its my next task in writing this book, which is now quite well along its way.

Posted in Reflections on musical context

An aspect of the Mwandishi band that I find the most interesting is how when the group gelled, it’s playing became highly organic. A New York Times review of the album ‘Mwandishi’ considered the manner in which the band extended the intuitive means used by the Miles Davis Quintet to organize improvisation. James Lichtenberg observes of Miles Davis’s discovery: “musicians could play directly off the patterns of emotions…” rather than chord changes. Lichtenberg considers how this could unfold: “What, then, determines the patterns of emotions? The intricate and complex environment in which we are a.living and to which we are all contributing. For example, Hancock describes being alive abstractly as a multilevel web of tensions and reIeases whose source is the energy in the environment. The way his music works is as a carrier of these tensions and releases, in much the same way as an electric cable carries telephone conversations.”

What Herbie Hancock experiences and played an important role in guiding with Miles was a mode of collective improvisation that reached for what I describe in my book about the Mwandishi band as an “emotional core, a moment of psychic knowing, an intuition that transcends any simple description. It is a translation of somatic, emotional, and other human experience into music.”

There was something in the spirit of that period of time in the late 1960s and early 1970s when musical groups were engaged in various forms of open improvisation. Some were associated with the “free jazz” movement and others closer to idiomatic forms. The music was more process driven than chart driven, the music constantly evolving during a performance. Some of the foundational moments take place in the mid-1960s. You find it in the later work of John Coltrane and certainly in Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler, but also with Eric Dolphy (with whom Herbie Hancock played while in his early 20s), and in some of Charles Mingus’ more exploratory work. Collective improvisation became a fundamental value for the various groups emerging from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) in Chicago, founded in 1965. The Art Ensemble of Chicago is probably the best-known example.

Miles began to reach for a similar quality of engagement with his Quintet starting around 1965. And that strand continued in the bands that sprung forth from Miles’ playing on and following ‘Bitches Brew’ – in his 1969-70 band with Chick Corea, 1971 with Keith Jarrett, and those that immediately followed. It continues in early Weather Report and in Circle, a band that emerged from the direction that Chick Corea and Dave Holland were taking in Miles’ band, in this case in collaboration with saxophonist Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul. You can hear it in Wayne Shorter’s wonderfully exploratory ‘Super Nova’, in Miroslav Vitous’ ‘Mountain in the Clouds’ and Josef Zawinul’s ‘Zawinul’. Herbie Hancock plays on the latter two of these recordings. To find out more about the many expressions of open forms and free expression in the free jazz and “creative music” movements, look at Val Wilmer’s book “As Serious as your life: John Coltrane and beyond.” Not enough has been published on this topic.

In all these cases, even when an ensemble is playing a discernable tune, as was generally the case with the Mwandishi band and some of the others, the music unfolds in unpredictable, expansive ways, ebbing and flowing between solos and collective improvisation. Where that goes was unpredictable and at times revelatory. The title of Herbie Hancock’s tune (from which I take the title of my book), “You’ll Know When You Get There” captures nicely this sense of exploration. If you are really playing in the moment, you truly can’t know in advance where things will go. You can only reflect back upon where you went “when you got there,” if at all.

This is a topic that has been on my mind for a long time, but I’m thinking about it this morning because last night I played a trio gig with bassist Christopher Dean Sullivan and drummer Dean Sharp in which we stepped off the charts further than we have recently. The music became far more textural than it had during the past year of playing in club settings (although it had been that way for my trio in other settings in the past). But last night’s improvisations were far more collective than usual, more intuitive, more probing and based on subtle dynamics between the players. I constantly hear these kinds of dynamics while listening to the Mwandishi live recordings.

Posted in Reflections on musical context