Bob Gluck's Blog

“Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words” reflection 4 – music writing, empathy and differentiation

•January 1, 2024 • Leave a Comment

Writing a book about a musician (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, Sept. 2024) always entails a two-to-three year period immersing myself in that person’s music, ways of thinking, experiences, and perspectives. As in the past, with Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Paul Winter, and others, this has once again been my experience with Pat Metheny, starting in January 2020. This kind of experience has always been a great source of learning on many levels – musical, conceptual, cultural, and other – as it has most certainly been once again this round.

Two things have made my experience writing about Pat Metheny different from the others:

First, my focus this time has been finely tuned to one musician rather than to a musician’s band (as with Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi Quintet/Sextet/Octet, the Miles Davis “Lost” Quintet, and to some degree the Paul Winter Consort), nor has it dealt heavily with a cluster of intersecting circles of musicians (as with the groups I write about in the Miles Davis book – Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea and Circle, Anthony Braxton, MEV, Revolutionary Ensemble, 19^th Street Loft, and others). I do write about Pat Metheny in the context of Gary Burton and Steve Swallow, the Pat Metheny Group, the quartet that recorded “From This Place,” the changing cluster of “Side Eye” musicians, and others. I also home in on the personal perspectives of two musicians who have worked with Metheny for years (Steve Rodby and Antonio Sanchez) and of Pat Metheny’s current guitar tech (Andre Cholmondeley).

Second, Pat Metheny is the first musician I’ve written about who is of my own generation (born six months apart), whose influences in some important ways overlap with my own, and whose musical perspectives, like mine, cross aesthetic, technological and other perceived boundaries. Each of us in our own ways pushes back against expectations that musicians should stay in their lane (“jazz” musicians shouldn’t play “pop” music, “acoustic” musicians shouldn’t play “electronic” music, “classical” musicians shouldn’t do anything else… and vice versa). This is in many ways generational because for an increasing number of younger musicians (Tyshawn Sorey and Esperanza Spalding come to mind), a far broader “playing field” is becoming normalized. For Pat Metheny, the Beatles weren’t more or less important than Wes Montgomery, while Gary Burton and Steve Swallow bridged the two. For me, Jefferson Airplane wasn’t more or less important than Cecil Taylor, while Frank Zappa bridged the two.

Being a musician is so embedded within my sense of self (I do not claim to be unique in this respect) that prose writing bridging empathetic understanding and scholarly distance is at the core of my scholarly skillset. Crucial to my ability to write about musicians is noticing where my subject’s perspectives align with my own and discerning with clarity where they do not. Yet this is not a static binary distinction since I can find commonality in purpose or conception with another musician while recognizing that we may each arrive in that place from very different trajectories and aim for different artistic ends. Alternately, the trajectory may be similar while the musical outcome is different. Achieving clarity of understanding thus involves repeatedly shifting from identification to differentiation, toggling back and forth between the two. At times this can be confusing, while ultimately the result brings forth deeper understanding.

This alternation of identification and differentiation is really what allows me to understand another musician. I learn about other musicians by playing their music – and – listening to them play their music, and dialoging with them. The sum of all these experiences, and others, serves as a bouncing board (and mirror) that helps me understand how I personally understand the music as if it were my own – and with that I am able to perceive the musician’s work with scholarly distance.

While finding points of musical commonality with Pat Metheny has been crucial to my ability to write about his work, equally important has been identifying the ways we differ. Here’s one example. Pat Metheny – a guitarist – composes primarily at a keyboard instrument rather than on guitar. I on the other hand – a keyboardist – compose almost exclusively at the keyboard no matter what instrument I’m writing for. Pat has commented that the design of the guitar and the physicality of navigating a guitar doesn’t substantially influence his composing. For me, the process is quite different.

A blog post I published on August 18, 2020 collected several of my previous reflections about the relationship between physicality and embodiment, and musical expression. You can read these here:

thinking about unconscious aspects of musical improvisation… the new book

In a post dated August 4, 2015 I wrote: “We improvisers prefer to consider what we do as intentional translations of thoughts into sounds. And there is something to that…”

What I’ve learned about Pat Metheny is that this description more or less defines how he composes. I then add in the blog- and this is as true of Metheny as it is of me – “Honestly, I think that much of what we improvisers do is unconscious.” Pat Metheny conceptualizes music mentally and emotionally, conscious of harmonic and pitch relations, melodic shape, long arcs of phrasing and melody… And of course while improvising, this cognition helps shape how he plays, more than muscle memory, favorite turns of phrase, habits… (note that others disagree with me on this point) even while maintaining an often identifiable sound and aesthetic. I am of course over simplify to make a point.

For me, the physicality of my relationship with the piano dates back to my earliest experiences and it hasn’t notably changed. I am sufficiently knowledgeable about harmonic and pitch relations, repertoire and a range of musical approaches, so while I may not be actively thinking about them, these are always present somewhere in my mind (this is of course true of many experienced improvisers, including Pat Metheny). But for me, the conceptual or cognitive side of composition isn’t always at the core of inspiration or initiation for my composing. The feel of the keyboard and my engagement with it is in many ways my North Star for musical “thinking,” whether the task is composing or improvising (and what Pat Metheny observes about himself is true of me too – I paraphrase here – “composing and improvising are similar endeavors at very different temperatures”) The processes that drive how each of these unfold for Metheny and I differ.

My 2015 blog post continues: “… Among the modes of improvisatory cognition is muscle memory. Some may define this as ‘habit,’ and sometimes it is. But there’s an element to playing, at least for me, that is substantially physical. It arises in the ways we shape or move our fingers, our lips, mouths, feet, doing so in ways that our body knows are right. This isn’t necessarily the same thing as habit; it is simply another way of intuiting and knowing. I find that what I play is more often what my body wants to do than is usually acknowledged by musicians (including me)… Placing trust in my fingers and arms does not come easily since I was rigorously trained to trust only in sheet music. So much so, that it was hard for me to even trust my memorization of sheet music. Only in mid-adulthood did I rediscover my early childhood free abandon at the keyboard, before ever starting lessons… One of the gifts I discover when trusting my body’s judgment is that I allow great latitude to making mistakes.”

I’ll add that the directions my compositional process heads – following the initial phase of inspiration and gathering of materials – can be far more cognitive than I’m stating. Such is the nature of musical form, however open, and how one can employ it to give shape to musical ideas as these unfold in time. It is also true that certain compositional influences, particularly Wayne Shorter and Johann Sebastian Bach form a kind of musical backdrop that influences what my hands “like” to do and how I mediate between the physical and cognitive aspects of my musicianship. And of course, when I’m playing with others, close listening, response, and guiding are important drivers of what I play.

As the production of my new book heads to its conclusion, culminating in a September 2024 publication date, so does my own musical productivity continue to evolve. The process of composing and recording this past year (in fact I recently released a new album) cannot but be in some form of dialog with my thinking about Pat Metheny. This doesn’t mean that I’ve been composing music that sounds like his music, but maybe it subtly responds to aspects of his musical thinking that have been impacted by the process of writing. I’ve certainly learned a lot from the experience. I’ve certainly emerged musically changed in subtle ways as a consequence of each sustained writing project I’ve undertaken. I look forward to consolidating what I’ve learned musically from this one, just as I anticipate the arrival of the published book and its journey in the hands of readers.

Posted in Crafting the text, great musical thinkers, music and the body, musical content, musical perception, Pat Metheny, Personal notes
Tags: Andre cholmondeley, Antonio sanchez, bob gluck, cecil taylor, composition, embodied performance, esperanza spalding, frank zappa, gary burton, guitar, herbie hancock, herbie hancock mwandishi, improvisation, jazz, jefferson airplane, mev, miles davis, Miles davis lost quintet, mwandishi, ornette coleman, Pat Metheny, patmetheny, piano, revolutionary ensemble, Steve rodby, Steve Swallow, the beatles, tyshawn sorey

Letting go of roads not taken

•December 7, 2023 • Leave a Comment

What is one thing you would change about yourself?

I would love to feel less regret about alternatives I decided against, particularly when my choices actually worked out quite well.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: dailyprompt, dailyprompt-2141

A wonderful juggle: completing a recording while writing a book …

•December 6, 2023 • Leave a Comment

Many musicians juggle composing/performing careers with academic positions. For many years, until my recent retirement from teaching, I’ve been one of these people. I’ve also been among the subset of musicians whose work includes large scale writing projects within what I’ll term (pun intended) a “three-channel mix.” I refer to the trifecta of making music/teaching/writing. This balance act has been a good thing for me. Playing informs how I understand the music I write about, teaching sharpens how I articulate and explain my ideas, and writing (and the musical listening involved) influences my playing and composing. I enjoy this mix while very much appreciating the period following the conclusion of any of these projects, and with that, having the opportunity to regroup and consider where it all has brought me as a musician. The opportunity to relocate my own voice as a composer/player after submerging in other peoples’ work is really important. These points of calmer, more narrowed focus are also always great learning experiences, since everything has changed in some way, shape, or form.

I’ve now completed the first release of my new recording And Every Fleck of Russet. The recording became available exclusively on BandCamp on December 1. A second release will occur when the recording becomes available on multiple streaming platforms including Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal… on January 5, 2024. The “official” release date is January 15, 2024. At the same time, I await page proofs for the new book Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words. My task will become proofreading the manuscript and paginating the index. I’ve already chosen the musician names, terms, and key words that will be listed. While this aspect of a writing project may be a bit tedious, it is important to me. The index offers a way to present alternate paths by which readers can navigate the book; thus I carefully choose what terms are included and which subtopics are prioritized.

Here is the way the album, titled And every fleck of russet (Electricsongs Music, 2024) is described in the advance publicity:

“…a playful, musical boundary-crossing collection of Bob Gluck’s recent compositions. After a decade and a half of work that centers interaction between fellow musicians, And every fleck of russet, composed and recorded 2020-2023, is an introspective solo album. The music ranges across a broad canvas of emotions and textures, from evocative ballads to whimsical and fantastical regalia. The album concept has roots in Gluck’s long fascination with Bill Evans’ multitracked solo piano album “Conversations With Myself” in its interplay between melodic directness and layered complexity. And every fleck of russet expands this sonic pallet beyond the piano to electronic sounds rooted in Gluck’s early recording career, and his fascination with precursors of keyboard instruments including the dulcimer.”

The album title, incidentally, is inspired by a line from the Robert Frost poem “After Apple Picking.” I was looking for a line from a poem that fulfilled one single purpose, a reference to the color field captured in the front and rear photographs I took of the brown, orange, and yellow autumn leaves just as Summer shifted into Fall. Russet seemed about right and Robert Frost being a favorite poet of mine… it all fell into place.

The liner notes, addressing each individual track, can be found on my Bandcamp page (https://bobgluck.bandcamp.com/album/and-every-fleck-of-russet). One aspect I do not address there are the ways that writing about Pat Metheny influenced this musical work. These are not obvious when you listen to And every fleck of russet. Listening closely to Metheny’s work pointed my attention to certain ideas about musical form, as well as some elements of his sonic vocabulary, each of which found their way into my musical work. For example, a few tracks include layers of plucked string sounds; among these are the ballad that opens the album, “Something Happening,” which sets up a timbral contrast between plucked string sounds and several layers of pianos, and the intentionally humorous third track, “Abundantly,” which takes an unexpected turn when masses of plucked string instruments suddenly jump to the fore within the mix.

The plucked string instruments aren’t guitars but rather a variety of hammered dulcimers. To some degree, the “stringiness” of some of the textures have a loose connection in my mind to aspects of Pat Metheny’s sound palate (particularly his Pikasso 42-string instrument and, from “Imaginary Day” and later, an unfretted acoustic guitar). Even so, the specific sonic choices more deeply speak to my interest in precursors of the modern piano, specifically harpsichord and clavichord. I’ve come to think of the hammered dulcimer as a clavichord without the wooden enclosure or its mechanical striking mechanism initiated by depressing a key. While I’ve been playing hammered dulcimer this past year (often processed with various kinds of electronics), the dulcimer sounds on this recording are sampled, the goal being to access a broader range of dulcimer sounds than my own can produce.

The other Metheny-influenced idea that seeps into And every fleck of russet is multi-section musical forms that gradually and steadily unfold as if walking through a railroad flat apartment, at times featuring bass lines that move stepwise, sometimes clouding how one might mentally and emotionally process the ambiguous harmonies that result. As multi-sectional works with unusual harmonic movement, tracks five, “Lost World,” and seven, “24 of December,” most directly fit this description. Other, unrelated influences inform additional tracks, for instance track six, “Enmeshed,” which is a playful homage to the spinning motion of the Bach’s C-minor Prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier. Also here, dulcimer sounds make a surprise appearance towards the conclusion of this track, returning us to the theme of “stringy” sounds.

And every fleck of russet was created over a two-year period. I have been recovering from an auto accident that made it impossible for me to sit at a keyboard. For this reason, I spent my musical time composing, playing, and recording while standing up during 20-30-minute intervals. It came as a surprise to me to discover that I had created solid versions of forty minutes of material. This realization suggested the possibility that I had a nearly completed album. I did some re-recording, added a new fifteen-minute piece with a new modular analog synthesizer with an extended keyboard synthesizer solo, and voila, the album was complete.

The timbre I use for this solo instrument (performed on a Roli Seaboard, an unusual keyboard that looks like a long strip of black foam imprinted with key-like shapes) was influenced in equal measure by Pat Metheny’s Roland guitar synthesizer playing and Robert Fripp’s long-sustained fuzz Gibson Les Paul guitar sound. The timbre is one part cello, one part trumpet, and one part fuzz guitar, and I play it in a manner akin to a cross between a synthesizer ribbon controller and unfretted guitar.

The book project emerged in large part from my experience playing some of Metheny’s repertoire during performances in 2019 and 2020, concluding nine months prior to the auto accident. My set-up for each of these dates was a piano or digital keyboard plus the Roli Seaboard, and I often drew upon the cello-trumpet-fuzz guitar timbre. Thus, my return to this sound on the final track of And every fleck of russet is a reprise of the instrumentation on those gigs (with the addition of the “stringy dulcimer choir,” as I affectionately call it). A few of those Metheny-centered trio sets took place in a wonderful remote studio that easily accommodated pandemic era trio sessions (separate rooms, great ventilation, and wonderful musicians); two were live broadcasts and all were well recorded. One of these will become available during this coming year; it is being mixed right now and I am thrilled with it. You’ll hear more about the recordings and the musicians at a later date!

Posted in Crafting the text, great musical thinkers, musical content, Pat Metheny, Personal notes
Tags: acoustic music, contemporary-classical-music, electronic music, jazz, jazz trio, music, music writing, musical performance, new-music, Pat Metheny, piano, Roland guitar synthesizer, roli, seaboard

“Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words,” reflection 3 – wordless vocals

•October 22, 2023 • Leave a Comment

Preparing the manuscript for publication, phase two, and thinking about – and – listening to Metheny’s music orchestrated with wordless vocals

Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words, my forthcoming book (University of Chicago Press, Fall, 2023), is in production mode. The first half of this is a pretty work-intensive period for the author (me). I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have been assigned to my “team” the in-house manuscript production manager at the Press to copyedit my book. There are well over 2,000 copy edits to review, something I did this past week.

During the coming week, I’ll do maybe two read-throughs, this time not looking at the many corrections, additions and changes I’ve reviewed and made this past week. I’ve now turned off the “track changes” mode so I can see a text cleared of corrections and questions. I look forward to this first time reading unimpeded through my book, close to how it will read once further corrections are made. It will soon go to the layout and designer. This will also provide an opportunity for me to read while looking at the musical notation examples and listening to the music that I discuss. It’s been a while since I worked on these in tandem. I’m reminded, as I have been at this point in writing and editing each of my books that writing a work such as this is a substantial enterprise!

One section of the book particularly caught my attention. It is half a chapter towards the end, and I am really looking forward to re-reading it while listening and viewing the musical notation. It is a segment about Pat Metheny’s music recorded and performed by the Pat Metheny Group over a two decade period that included wordless vocals, featuring the singing of Naná Vasconcelos, Pedro Aznar, David Blamires and Mark Ledford, and Richard Bona.

I’ve always found this portion of Metheny’s work to be particularly revealing because of the way it not only centers well-crafted melody in the compositions but unusually strongly in the performances due to the human voices in the orchestration. Pat Metheny grew up in a family of trumpeters and bucked the tradition he was expected to carry on (he was in fact playing French horn) when he was a young adolescent. But the vocal qualities and the importance of breath and trumpet-like articulations continued when he developed as a guitarist. One hears this easily in his playing the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer, but it carries through much of conception as composer and improviser of guitar phrases. One way we can hear the centrality of composing in his identity as a musician (despite the maybe stronger attention his guitar playing receives in the press, and for good reason) is in the melodies he composes.

During the era of the classic formation of the Pat Metheny Group, when Metheny added wordless vocals to the ensemble, the listener can experience the expressiveness of these melodies in a heightened way. Each singer has brought unique qualities to the music, from the wispiness of Naná’s voice, to the incredibly deep expressive range of Aznar (who Metheny told me can sing essentially anything), the unique vowel formations of Bona, and the soaring sounds of Blamires and Ledford. These are but a hint of what each singer brings to the music, each of whom is called upon to perform with enormous emotional depth – and stamina.

I divided this section of the book into three parts: up-tempo works (“The First Circle,” “Tell It All,” “Third Wind,” “Have You Heard”); medium tempo pieces (“Every Summer Night,” “Afternoon,” “On Her Way,” “Something to Remind You”), and ballads (“Goodbye,” “You”). In each case, the singing is one part of the overall (and often quite complex) composition and orchestration. Each work brings unique qualities of the human voice to bear. As I write in the book, “Metheny draws upon his knowledge that differences in tone quality between low and high portions of a singer’s range, and between chest voice and falsetto, produce differences in timbre, vocal strength, and tonal clarity.”

Listening to this music closely provides a deeply rewarding experience. I hope you are planning to become a reader of my book when it is released. Assuming so, consider preparing for this section of the book by listening to each of musical examples. You can find them notated in one or both of Pat Metheny’s published song books (Pat Metheny Song Book, and the more recent Pat Metheny Real Book) to follow along listening or playing. Even better consider singing them yourself – or sing along. Enjoy them! You time will be well spent.

Posted in Crafting the text, great musical thinkers, musical content, musical perception, Pat Metheny
Tags: bob gluck, composition, David Blamires, jazz, Mark Ledford, Naná Vasconcelos, Pat Metheny, pat Metheny group, Pedro Aznar, Richard Bona, University of Chicago Press

“Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words,” reflection 2 – Neither This ‘Nor That

•September 5, 2023 • Leave a Comment

A favorite concern of writers who have contributed to the discourse about Pat Metheny is “what kind of music is it?” Metheny is certainly not alone among those whose work emerged during the 1970s and doesn’t fit within a neat genre box. There are many ways this perceived tension is articulated. Here is a brief list of my favorites:

“Is it jazz?” – “if it isn’t jazz, why is a jazz musician playing it?” – “it sure sounds like jazz so why doesn’t it follow therules?” – “if its jazz, why are we hearing electric/electronic instruments?” – “it might sound like jazz if it only swung more” – “it sounds like a pop song so why are the musicians improvising” – “why is this tune so loud if the previous one was so quiet?” – “why are the dynamics changing so often in this one tune?” I’ll stop there, but as you can see, I could easily fill the rest of this page with 31 additional flavors of similar ideas.

There are those who express a desire for their music to sound “just the way it used to.” Similarly, there are those who yearn for “that old time religion.” As if there has ever been an “Ur“ moment that defines everything that historically follows a precursor. Alas, music like religion changes, absorbing all kinds of influences and perspectives as it encounters new times and places. Often the very things people yearn for seem “golden” in retrospect, while in their own time were considered out of fashion. Big bands of the 1930s didn’t want to sound like the “old fashioned” musicians out of New Orleans/Chicago. While Bach’s own children were considered novel, their father’s work was viewed as a relic of the past.

The yearning for a time “before everything changed” represents resistance to new ideas. A kind of purism greets new conceptions that seem to cross categories that are considered to lose their integrity if breached. When Tony Williams, Gary Burton, Larry Coryell and Bob Moses, Miles Davis, and others became influenced by the sounds of rock and other streams of music, it was inevitable that jazz purists were going to respond negatively. In reality, there has never been a time when the music was an amalgam of sometimes contrasting contemporaneous influences. Many “jazz” musicians have been the same people recording the instrumentals on rhythm and blues songs, playing bar mitzvah and wedding music, studying with orchestral musicians… Musicians are often truly people of their world. Creative musicians have ears that listen deep and wide.

There is often resistance to “this” sounding like “that.” This is really but one example of the manner in which the world is often conceptualized as a collection of mutually exclusive bins. One is a jazz musician or an orchestral musician, a rock musician or a jazz musician, white or Black, woman or man, a writer of pop songs or a composer of “serious” music, human or an animal (of course humans are an animal specie). I find it encouraging that some young musicians today increasingly pay little heed to the categories into which they are expected to be situated. There needn’t be a conflict between a deep skill set within a historical musical stream (or two or three) while in practice blurring these distinctions.

During the 1970s, when Pat Metheny began his mature professional career, musicians who weren’t easily categorized were termed jazz-rock, rock-jazz, or “fusion.” Personally, I’ve never understood these terms since they imply bridging categories whose distinctions I often fail to often find very useful. Musical history doesn’t really know such distinctions, although they are the stuff of music textbooks and marketing. In a sense, it is understandable that some would label music built on vamps and riffs – but played by improvising jazz musicians – by a new category or sub-category name. But how useful is this really?

Maybe writers have been confused by Pat Metheny because his music, often electric, has resisted riffs and vamps as organizing principles, while his melodies can reflect the sensibilities of popular musicians, be they rock musicians like The Beatles or Brazilian songwriters like Milton Nascimento.

Much can be written about the Beatles and Nascimento influences on Pat Metheny (and you’ll have to read my forthcoming book to learn more!), but tracing these can provide insight into his music. I say this at the risk of overgeneralizing – Metheny is so prolific as to deflect global statements. His melodies can be tuneful and unfolding like a narrative, his harmonies and bassline constructions can at times draw upon the Beatles, the surface simplicity masking an underlying complexity. One of the most useful insights that Pat Metheny Group bassist Steve Rodby suggested to me was that it is useful to listen to the music’s pop qualities while remaining attuned to the ways the musicians think like jazz musicians – ever flexible, responsive, and in the moment. Music can be simple and complex at the same time, tuneful and intricate, resting in neither this category nor that one.

Posted in Crafting the text, great musical thinkers, musical content, musical perception, Pat Metheny, Reflections on musical context, religion and music
Tags: bob moses, gary burton, improvisation, jazz, larry boryell, miles davis, milton nascimento, Steve rodby, the beatles, tony williams

“Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words,” reflection 1 – my forthcoming book is on its way

•August 22, 2023 • 5 Comments

It may seem as if I’ve been quiet for a while. But I’ve actually been busily working on two long-term projects. One of these is a set of new musical compositions, tba. The other is a book project that I began in January 2021, and has now entered its production phase.

I’m happy to let you know about my new book, “Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words,” to be published by University of Chicago Press in Fall 2024. This will be a successor to my two previous Chicago books, “You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band” (2012, Italian edition forthcoming), and “The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles” (2016; Italian edition, 2020). The latter book treats Miles’ first electric band in the context of Circle, MEV, Anthony Braxton, the 19^thStreet loft, and the Revolutionary Ensemble. My conversations with Pat Metheny by chance emerged upon my discovery that he, too, was as positively impacted by the Mwandishi band as a teenager as was I.

Like many of my writing projects, the Pat Metheny book emerged from my experience playing the (in this case his) musical repertoire. When I was working on my 2020 recording “Early Morning Star” (FMR), I began to play Pat Metheny tunes just for fun. I worked my way through much of his most recent “Pat Metheny Songbook,” selected 25 compositions and then narrowed them down to 15. These became the core repertoire for duets with bassist Christopher Dean Sullivan, and subsequently trios with Chris and drummer Karl Latham. The trio gigs took place in the first year of the pandemic, at first in an outdoors venue, and then via live stream.

In the process, I realized that a number of core musical features – representing aspects of the “DNA” of Metheny’s music – touched on musical issues I had been wanting to write about. I asked Pat whether he was open to my writing a book about his work, and he agreed. Thus began two years of dialog with him and others about his music and the concepts behind it. Portions of these conversations, supplemented by interviews with Steve Rodby (Pat Metheny Group bassist and ongoing co-producer of Metheny’s work), Antonio Sanchez (drummer on several Metheny projects), and Andre Cholmondeley (Metheny’s guitar tech) added breadth and depth to the extensive writing I was doing highlighting musical examples that I felt exemplified these features.

In a sense, “Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words” is a listener’s guide that explores the music using several different narrative lenses. One is descriptive, another more technical, but of greatest interest to me, a third that engages with Metheny’s metaphor of “telling a story.” I believe that every reader will find a path through the book that will suit them, leading to a fuller and deeper engagement as a listener. I also sought, while writing this book, to select examples that represent a range of Metheny’s diverse repertoire that may appeal to an equally wide range of listeners.

You’ll be hearing more about the book as it moves through the production cycle this year. To keep informed and gain a better sense of the various topics I address, periodically check back in on this book blog. If you are not yet a subscriber (it is free), consider subscribing and you’ll receive a reminder when I publish a new entry. … ‘til then!

Posted in Crafting the text, great musical thinkers, musical content, Pat Metheny, Reflections on musical context
Tags: andre chomondeley, Antonio sanchez, bob gluck, electric guitar, guitar, jazz, music, music books, musical stories, Pat Metheny, pat Metheny group, Roland guitar synthesizer, Steve rodby

Interview with Karl Berger

•April 10, 2023 • 1 Comment

Posted on April 10, 2023, in Karl’s memory (March 30, 1935 – April 10, 2023)

Woodstock, New York, September 25, 2011

Bob Gluck: I’m most interested in talking about 1970, 71 and 72. I’d like to get to the beginnings of CMS. But first, when did you come to the States? Did you go right to New York?

Karl Berger: I came with Don Cherry’s band in ’66, the first time. Gato Barbieri, Aldo Romano, and Jean-François Jenny-Clark. We had this quintet [Don Cherry Quintet] going in Europe for a couple of years. Before we came here we had been playing every day but Mondays. Literally. At the time you’d play a club for four weeks, not one day. In Paris we had our own club, so to speak: The “Chat Qui Peche”. We played there for five months, six months, something like that. It was that kind of scene. Or Montmartre in Copenhagen for four weeks. The Golden Circle in Stockholm for two weeks. It went on non-stop like that, except for Mondays.

Cherry had a contract with Blue Note Records; he had done an album with Gato in quartet. I couldn’t go at the time because we expected a baby. The first album he did with a quartet was, I think, Blackwell and Henry Grimes, and Gato. This is in New York. Then we all came over in September ’66 for a Blue Note recording called “Symphony For Improvisers”, adding

Pharoah Sanders, Ed Blackwell, Henry Grimes. We played a Town Hall concert, initiated by Ornette Coleman, again adding more players: Rashied Ali, Charlie Haden, Lee Konitz. We played at the Five Spot Club for a while, on St. Marks Place.

Then Don decided to stay here. And I said I’d stay here too. But he started to travel all across the country, with many different musicians and groups. It wasn’t the band anymore. He was more on his own. Doing separate projects. It was the end of 1966. I started my own group then. Carlos Ward, Blackwell, and Henry Grimes. That was the group we recorded for ESP in December ’66. The group was together for a while, except that Grimes disappeared in ’67 and Dave Holland came into the band. Dave played with Miles at that time. While Dave was with Miles he was also in our group. In ’68 we recorded for Milestone, “Tune In.” It was also Carlos, Dave, and Blackwell. Grimes was replaced with Dave. Then Ingrid Sertso joined us again in ’69. We had worked together before the Don Cherry period and also during that time off and on, including a month with Steve Lacy in Paris.

BG: You scheduled around Miles’s touring schedule?

KB: Yes. We weren’t playing that much. We were basically a recording group, playing a few gigs here and there. I was working with another group led by a drummer Horace Arnold. With Reggie Workman, Sam Rivers. We played in a program called Young Audiences for the New York and tri-state schools. That was it at the time the only real steady gig in New York. Playing for the kids. So we’d go out twice, three times a week, play two, three concerts a day, one hour long educational concerts. We’d ask “what’s improvisation.” They’d come up with some melodies. That kind of thing.

BG: We’re coming full circle. It’s coming again.

KB: That’s right, it’s coming again.

Around that time, we (Ingrid and I) played with many New York musicians, Marion Brown, Roswell Rudd, Clifford Thorton, Rashied Ali, Jimmy Garrison, Robin Kenyatta, Sonny Sharrock, J.C. Moses, David Izenzon, and many others. But there weren’t really a lot of gigs. You played Slugs a little, some things with Jackie McLean. And we hung out with Ornette a lot, at Artists House.

BG: Can you talk a bit about what you remember about Artist House?

KB: The most vivid memory of Artist House is really when CMS had already started. Because Artist House only started in the early 70s. The first festival we did, we did at Artist House.

BG: That was when?

KB: I think it was ’74. There was a festival where I played there with the group with Dave Holland, and also with David Izenson’s group. David Izenson, Ingrid and myself, we had a trio called “Mind’s Eye”. That’s when I had started to work with David Izenson. Basically, he was the leader. He was looking at it more like a collective. J.C. Moses was the drummer. But we also had this trio. On the first compilation from CMS there are three cuts from that trio, opening the whole CMS Archive Compilation series..

BG: At that point the structures at that time were completely open or structured in any particular way?

KB: The structures were harmolodic, originally Ornette Coleman’s approach, which I learned from Don Cherry We had a real school sort of thing, playing each night four, five hours. And we had a rehearsal every day. Before I got here, it was almost like going to school, playing all the time. There was no vocal communication because Gato Barbieri spoke Spanish, Jenny Clarke spoke French and English, and Aldo spoke French and Italian. And I spoke German and English, so there was no common verbal language. So Don would come into the rehearsal, sit down at the piano and hammer out something. Ornette called him, he told me later, “the man with the elephant memory.” Don could hear a line and completely remember it immediately. If you listen to the early Ornette quartet records, Don is often leading because he remembers the tunes. Ornette wrote new lines every week, but he didn’t write. It was all in his head and Don remembered it. Ornette would get the cue from Don often. Cherry could remember every note. He would walk around with short wave radio earphones all day long. He’d hear stuff from Indian, from Africa. This is how the world music started happening. He would come to the rehearsal and hammer out a melody he’d heard an hour earlier from India, from Egypt.

BG: He hadn’t been to those places yet?

KB: He did later, but not at the time. Of course, he expected us to have the same memory, you know. Don would always say, if you said: “what’s that?” he’d say “you heard me.” That’s what he said. That was his answer. What I learned there is what I’m now describing in my concept that I call “Music Mind”. You had to be on your toes, completely at all times. Completely. If you missed a beat, that was your problem, so to speak. There was no slack.

BG: How was what he was doing different from what Ornette was doing?

KB: What was different was the material, the themes that were utilized. Don would pick up any material. He’d play bebop tunes. He would play tunes from popular artists, Beatles songs. African melodies. Egypt, Turkish. He was the first one to take any material from any part of the world and just use it without any stylistic considerations at all. Just improvising with that material. So that was the main difference. Ornette was really playing original music only, with the exception of one song, two songs, standards that he might have used. But Don wrote not nearly as much. There are about thirty songs that I have. Some of them I’m using with my Improvisers Orchestra in New York Stone. It is music that is largely forgotten. People don’t know it. It’s wonderful material to improvise from, because it’s very open. The way this original music of Don’s is written, you can go in many direction from it. I also use it some of these lines in workshops. Other than that, Don was really a disciple of Ornette.

BG: What about the dynamics of improvisation? Obviously if the band couldn’t talk, you wouldn’t talk about it. But how much of what you were doing was following in Ornette’s footsteps?

KB: Oh, very different. It was a lot more collective playing. It was less solo playing and actually Cherry didn’t like long extended soli. If Gato started playing, getting into what would have been a half-hour Coltrane solo, Cherry would start another tune right in the middle. He’d just start the new tune and Gato would fall into the new tune. We’d play suites, uninterrupted suites of like six, seven tunes per set. Don would often, just in the middle of anybody’s improvisations, start a new tune.

BG: Did he do any conducting, or just direct through his playing?

KB: No. No conducting. He really expected you to really be on your toes, every note.

BG: On your toes meant melodically, textually? What was most important?

KB: It was about that you were right with him. Totally present. He didn’t expect you to imitate what he did. He wanted you to play your own stuff. He wanted you to make sense from your point of view just as much as he did. There was no preconception of what the end result is.

BG: But were there certain trends?

KB: Of course. But I couldn’t describe that.

BG: I guess that’s my job as a listener.

KB: How could I describe that? I came from a more classical background. I was a classical pianist. I picked up the vibraphone because I could get up and move around. The vibraphone wasn’t an instrument that I learned. I never had even one lesson on the vibraphone. That’s why I won six Down Beat polls, because I played different from people. I have my own idea about it, so to speak. So in a way, I’m a piano player. I’m thoroughly trained as a piano player. I’ve no training as a vibes player. The vibes is sort of what I’d call my toy. I use it as children would treat a found object; almost anyway.

BG: You find ways your imagination can go without constraints?

KB: That’s right. I have no classical technical ability on the vibes.

BG: That seems like a little of an overstatement. I’ve heard you play.

KB: People say Monk couldn’t play the piano properly. That’s the same thing. He developed the piano for his own purposes. He played what he heard. So he wouldn’t be able to interpret someone else’s music. It would become his music. That’s what happens for me on the vibraphone.

BG: That’s the good news, isn’t it?

KB: That’s the good news. Actually, I’d recommend everybody have such a second instrument. One reason I started playing the vibes is that I played a club in Europe that had a bad piano. I could always have something in tune if I played the vibes. A second reason, I mentioned, is that I could get up and move around a little bit, which I like. I don’t like the sitting position so much. And the third thing, of course, is that I really could see the rhythm aspect better. From playing the vibes I learned that the piano is really a percussion instrument for the most part. It really affected my piano playing. For two years, after the first cherry thing, I stopped playing the piano, to get rid of these classical licks. When I got back to the piano, I found that I could translate what I learned on the vibes to the piano. For that period, I only played vibes. There’s no piano track on the ESP album and none on the Milestone ( “Tune In” ’68 ) album either.

BG: Back to the history. Do you remember your first time being at Artist House?

KB: I think it was when we played that festival. Ornette lived upstairs at Prince Street. We went a lot there, in the late ‘60s. He had people coming over all the time. That’s the first time I met Leroy [Jenkins] and a lot of other people who’d come there. And we were playing pool. He had a pool table. Always on the weekends there was a bunch of people there. Ornette even recorded some of his records there.

BG: Friends and Neighbors.

KB: Friends and Neighbors, right. And That Friends and Neighbors feeling was exactly what happened in that period. Basically, we were there every weekend, and also some weekdays. I really sort of studied with Ornette. Not officially. He has a way of talking that is like harmolodic talk. He does exactly what he does in music. He’ll say a sentence, then he’ll use a word in the middle of the sentence to start another sentence, and do that two or three times in one sentence. So nobody understands at first what’s going on. He says everything he wants to say, but it’s sort of shortened. And that’s how he plays. He plays the same way. I remember once he asked me to bring back from Europe on of these Uher tape recorders. They were 5 inch reel recorders, made in Germany. He wanted me to bring one back. In order to remind me, he sent me a telegram the day before I left Germany. The telegram said all the words, except in no order whatsoever. So it was like a puzzle. You put the words together and it would say: “I would appreciate if you would bring back with you Uher Recorder,” but the words would be all over the place. As soon as I had figured that out, another telegram arrived. It was the same words, but in a different order. The purpose of that was possibly that you don’t forget. There’s no way you forget. There’s no way you forget that, right?

Artist House, in addition to that festival, had a concert series where Dollar Brand was playing, Jimmy Garrison, and others . But I really don’t know much more about Artist House. It was not really very long. Ornette got pushed out of that building.

BG: I never quite understood what happened.

KB: It was mostly racial. They didn’t want him in the building. Ornette was one of the first ones in Soho, converting lofts. He was one the first ones living there. Then other people began moving in. And it became fashionable. Four or five years later they pushed him out. They found a reason. They found a way. It was warfare in this building. People wanted him out of there. It was racial, but it was probably also sound related.

BG: I had heard stories of people harassing him by dripping water down from the ceiling.

KB: He was really harassed. From there he went to Rivington Street and he rented a schoolhouse. And there he got really robbed and beaten up. It was terrible.

BG: He must have been the first black person to move into that neighborhood as well?

KB: No, but it was an empty schoolhouse.

BG: At that point that whole neighborhood was pretty poor.

KB: Yes. There were wholesale stores.

BG: During the day. And at night it was dangerous.

KB: It was a drug scene. He was alone on the last floor of an empty schoolhouse.

BG: I find it interesting that like some, he comes out not bitter. Maybe being successful helps? How did people like Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor come out of all of the hardship they went through?

KB: I wouldn’t be able to answer that. These are three very different characters.

About Anthony, he is one of those guys who remembers everything and follows through on everything. There are two situations I had with him recently. We played on the same festival in Switzerland. He came to the concert. We had a sextet (with Ingrid, Steven Bernstein, and others ). He came up and said to Ingrid and me, “I’d like to record with you. We could do that in the summer.” That was two years ago. Then he called recently. Two weeks later he was here. We recorded all day. He left the same evening. He was like the easiest, outgoing guy you could think of.

As he left, I said: “Anthony, this trio is nice. Would you consider playing at a benefit for CMS at Symphony Space.” He said: “yes, sure.” And I asked: “Would you like to play some of the themes we recorded here?” He said: “No, let’s play new stuff because you need more material.” As if to tell me to take this music and put it out. I said “fine, let’s do something else.” When the day came, he drove from Middletown to the City to do this concert. We played 35-40 minutes. He got back in his car and drove back to Middletown. But he was there. Like no further communication necessary. He’s very methodical. He’s a very methodical guy.

BG: It seems like he organizes a lot around his students.

KB: In Switzerland he was with a nine-piece band of his students.

BG: They are incredibly lucky to have him. Where else could students have this kind of experience?

KB: Anthony lived here in Woodstock when we started CMS. That’s why he got so involved. He was one of the first and involved teachers here.

BG: How did CMS come about? At the beginning of CMS, it was you and Ornette?

KB: When I came here, I started this “Young Audiences” program, playing for twelve year olds. At the time, in the 60s, they were completely open to sound, no matter what sound; totally open. I knew, and experienced right there again, that stylistic entrenchment in the music wasn’t necessary to follow in terms of building your own idea of what you want to do.

BG: Your vocabulary.

KB: I heard that John Cage was leaving the New School. I wrote them to see if they were looking for another course in improvisation. He didn’t call it improvisation, of course.

BG: Right. Indeterminacy.

KB: He wanted to avoid that. He never wanted to get ID’d with jazz.

BG: Did you ever talk to him about that?

KB: Yes, of course.

I was surprised that the New School said yes, so I started teaching that class there. On the way there—I had no clue what I was going to do—I said “that’s good. It’s about improvisation.“ And as I was driving there I started to make plans. I said: “No plans! Go into that class and improvise.”

BG: How did you find college age students? I know it was the New School.

KB: The New School at that time wasn’t like college now. It was a collective of people who were playing music from different points of views. One guy was classical who wanted to improvise. Another guy was a guitar player who played in a rock band who wanted to come. Everybody came for a different reason. So when I had everybody play to see what levels they were and ask everybody why they came and so forth, it turned out that everybody had timing problems. It was very obvious that nobody could keep time. And I had played with Don Cherry a piece called Gamala Taki. These were syllables that came from the Mideast; they were part of the North Indian tabla language also. And I devised a system right then and there. Let’s divide rhythms in odd and even syllables and play them that way. Accenting syllables in that way. This was 1967. From there came the idea that maybe we should have workshops. I thought, let’s have workshops where there is no talk about style at all. You don’t use any words that relate to style. You just work with what is the common basis of what is any kind of music. That was my main question.

BG: Who coined the term creative music?

KB: That was Leo Smith. He had a creative music orchestra. We started without knowing that. I came up with it I guess. We had an office at Carla Bley’s and Mike Mantler’s Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Association on Broadway in New York, so that’s where we started. And I met Leo and he said yeah, I’m using that phrase. I asked whether it was ok to use it.

BG: He coined that for the AACM.

KB: The AACM was using creative musicians.

BG: In my own music department, I proposed using the term creative music. People took enormous offense at the notion that everything else was not creative. I said that this is not the point; or that it’s a little bit of the point about rote vs. non-bounded music.

KB: it can’t be used as a category of music. That would be wrong. We’re talking about the creativity in music and the process of music, no matter which music.

BG: There’s a six-year gap between 1967 at the New School and CMS.

KB: In 1968 my second daughter was born. We went back to Germany. I took a band back to Europe. I took Alan Blairman, Albert Ayler’s drummer. I really liked his playing. It was the closest I could hear from Blackwell’s playing. Between ’68 and ’71 we played mostly in Europe. Bassist Peter Kowald complemented the group.

BG: Did you still have an apartment in New York?

KB: Yeah. We kept the apartment. In Weehawken, New Jersey, right across from Manhattan Manhattan. Lee Konitz lived downstairs there.

BG: So in 1971 you came back.

KB: I came back and talked to Ornette about forming a not-for-profit, because I had learned from Carla Bley and Michael Mantler about the whole grant system and how it worked. And it was pretty good back then. They had this orchestra going and it was supported. And they had the Watt record label. And all of it was built on this not profit idea. And I said to Ornette: “That’s what we should do.” I like to teach in the spirit of this music. At the time he had this quote where he said: “Rock, Jazz, Classical, these are all yesterday’s titles. It’s really all about personal expression”. So I said: “Ornette, would you consider getting it going with me?” He said: “Yes, but I want to stay in the profit work. You do the non-profit, I do the profit.”

BG: What was James Jordan’s role in this?

KB: He (Ornette’s cousin) had just come from California at that time. I just met him there. He played a big role later because he became director of the New York State Council on the Arts. He’s a wonderful guy.

BG: You were in New York City?

KB: In New York State.

BG: You had at least a paper organization at that point. When did you start doing things? Was it 1972?

KB: Yes. Before we had left for Europe in 1968, Marion Brown had brought us up here (to Woodstock) and introduced us to several artists who lived up here. When we came back in ’72, we said: “let’s drive up there.” We weren’t going to live in the City with two kids. So we drove up here and rented a little place. I was getting ready to teach at the New School, commuting from up here. But the New School didn’t have enough people enrolled. So I started a workshop up here at somebody’s house here. That was the first unofficial start. The real official start was in 1973.

BG: The workshops were during the year? In the Fall?

KB: That was the Fall.

BG: When did the summer ones start?

KB: Summer started later. Our problem with the summers was that the facilities that we rented… first we worked out of our house. We rented a barn. There was things going the year round; there weren’t any concerts yet. Then in ’74 we rented what is now called the Zen Mountain Monastery. That was at the time the Lutheran Youth Camp and they used it in the summer so we could only have it in the Fall and Spring. So we only had Fall and Spring sessions in ’74 and ’75. Then in ’75 we went to Boulder Colorado and did a session there at the Naropa Institute. It came about because we had recorded some of Trungpa’s texts. Ingrid had used some of his texts at the Peace Church in the Village. We did a series of 15 or 20 concerts at the Church. Everybody played: Dave Holland, Bobby Moses, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Garret List… everybody who was teaching there.

BG: Did you do something at WBAI?

KB: WBAI, yes.

BG: The Kitchen?

KB: The Kitchen, yes. That was the John Cage story we started talking about.

BG: When Garrett List was programming?

KB: We did that when Garrett was there, but we did something earlier when Rhys Chatham was there.

[Getting back to how the workshops started in Woodstock…] So, in ’72, we rented a house in Woodstock from Eileen Marder.

What happened was… it’s like the funniest story. She rented an apartment in Woodstock that formerly belonged to Bernard Stollman, who started ESP. She sublet. She found all these ESP records. She saw my picture; they were like black and white portraits. She said to me the other day: “I saw this LP with his face and said ‘he’s cute.’” And she went into town to shop and she a paper I had put up; we wanted to do some workshops. She thought: “didn’t I just see this name on the record?” She called me and said: “I’m going to rent this house starting this month; you could do the workshop there.” And I said: “ok.” Then she organized the workshop and then the following year when we rented the barn she moved in with us. She became our first administrator.

BG: I spoke with Rhys in Paris, about three years ago. One thing he said was that there was a strong feeling in the founding days of The Kitchen, on the part of some of the musicians who became connected with it, that black musicians have jazz clubs to play, and their small circle wasn’t liked or invited to play at Columbia, so they had their own place that was going to be for their own music. The outcome of that earlier on, as it was in the Electric Ear series and Automation House–except for one show involving Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton in 1970, there was a sense of very bounded kinds of lines down there. It wasn’t explicitly racial. It was more about genre, although it had racial implications.

KB: Sure.

BG: It was like: “ok, you can play Slugs or later, you have Studio Rivbea.” And then Garrett List comes along and started inviting a wider circle that included black musicians.

KB: We already worked with Rhys. But that had to do not with really having this jazz orientation. It was probably something with Frederic Rzewski or Music Elettronica Viva, because I played with them too.

BG: In their New York incarnation.

KB: The Italian one. We recorded in Rome. Steve Lacy was part of it as well.

BG: We’re talking late 60s at this point.

KB: That’s ‘70s. In Rome, probably even later, like’74 or ’75. I think Garrett didn’t start there until ’76 or ’78. When Garrett was there, we did a bunch of things there. He was CMS trained. He was there (CMS) from the beginning. He even became one of the CMS program directors for a while. I had different people program different things. One of them was Roscoe (Mitchell). I liked different people programming.

BG: And they would program around their own interests?

KB: For example, starting in ’76 we would have two Summer sessions, early and late. So the early session would be run by an artistic director. Roscoe would be one of them, or Leo. The second would be more world music oriented, run by Steve Gorn or by somebody. So we had different artistic sub-directors. We also had a program director, Jim Quinlan. I didn’t want to be in the middle of that kind of work. I’d give a bunch of names to him and he’d come back to me and say: “there are these other guys that I want to bring in.” I’d say: “sure.” So it was pretty nice like that. I didn’t have to do the actual programming work. I could just really focus on what we called Basic Practice.

The basic layout of CMS programs unfolded early on into three stages:

One was Basic Practice, the fundamental question what’s common to all the music. So we talked about rhythmic training, about overtones, about tuning. Things like that. The Gamala Taki Rhythmic Training developed there and was a central practice each morning, led by myself and Ingrid Sertso.

Second, the afternoons, would be ensemble work, guided by the artists who would alternate from week to week.

Third, the evenings would be about the participants making their own music. They divided up into sessions of their own choice, their own ideas, compositions, songs etc.

All of this would result in two concerts weekly: Participants’ concerts on Friday and Guiding Artists concerts on Saturday. We would record both of those, and listen to them Monday. Then on Tuesday the next Guiding Artist would come in.

BG: The ensemble work would be conducted improvisation?

KB: The ensemble work would be whatever the Guiding Artist wanted to do. Let’s say Jimmy Guifre came in it would be more traditional. When Anthony would come in it would be big white and blue schematics. So everybody would do something else. There was no rule to that. As a matter of fact there was a lot of contradictory information from week to week.

BG: That’s the good news.

KB: Some students would come to me after a couple of weeks and say: “I can’t handle it.” I said: “Well, you might have to come back a year or two later.” It was not for everybody. Some people said it’s not structured enough. I replied that they missed the point. We were not a school, per se. That’s why we called it a studio. It was an experimental place, where people would study as well as experiment. Basically it was about experimentation. That’s what it was about. And it was about basic information about music, period. No genre. The Gamala Taki practices, or the tuning practices dealing with harmonics; the eminent role of dynamics; the definition of consonance and dissonance. I continue to deal with these fundamental issues in every workshop, and with my Improvisers Orchestra In New York, which is actually an orchestra of young (and young at heart) professionals, not students. We are fine-tuning the concept of collectively playing from the heart, from the ear, not the head.

BG: When did you first start doing conducted improvisation?

KB: 1973.

BG: Had you been in settings where you were a performer being conducted?

KB: No. We invented all of that. Leo Smith, Oliver Lake, Anthony Braxton. Each of them developed their own thing. There was no special method developed or anything like that. Spontaneous conducting developed at CMS to my mind. If you ask Frederic Rzewski, he’d say Cornelius Cardew started it. I wouldn’t know.

BG: Frank Zappa did some. My teacher up at SUNY Potsdam, Donald Funes…

KB: We’re not claiming any…

BG: There are particular flavors of how you shape gestures, how you direct groups…

KB: Yes. I’ve developed a kind of conducting that I’m still using now. Basically, it deals with range, with lengths of notes—short and long—but it deals mostly with dynamics. And with the personal input of the participating players. The shapes of their ideas. Primarily, it is about dynamics, timbre, touch, the sensibilities that harmonizes the sound. Any sounds. You don’t have to worry about having to change notes, in order to harmonize the sound. That is really what I am into: infinite dynamics that one can feel and blend.

BG: That one sounds very Ornette.

KB: I’ve never heard him say it like that, but Ornette, to my mind, was the first to realize what he now calls the Sound Grammar. My experience is two-fold. One is if you hold a note and you change the chords to that note, you have to change that note ever so slightly. There’s no such thing as an “A”. It’s all context. You have to hear it. You have to get sensitive to that. That’s a lifelong practice. You can go from there. You can say that any sound can get tuned. You just have to get really focused, really sensitive.

BG: I’d like to go back to Cage.

KB: One thing that Ornette said when we got started. I suggested that the first thing we needed to do was form an advisory board that showed the breadth of what we wanted to do. So he asked me to contact Buckminster Fuller, Willem DeKooning, John Cage, Gil Evans, George Russell I think. A very diversified group of people, all over the map. He wanted to show through that that it wasn’t about jazz, it was not about a certain kind of music. So, I talked to all these people. Buckminster Fuller was fine. DeKooning I never reached. Gil Evans was fine, George Russell, even Cage.

BG: Did you go over to his apartment?

KB: Yes, I went to his apartment. On Bank Street, West Village. I went to John; it was sort of a basement apartment.

BG: Did he feed you a macrobiotic lunch?

KB: No. It was an interesting conversation. He said to me: “Well, you know, I really don’t like jazz. But I like Ornette.” That’s what he said. So I said: “ok, that’s fine with me. We don’t use the word jazz. We don’t need it.” So he signed up.

BG: What about the word “Jazz?”

KB: We didn’t go that far in the discussion. I know he had this famous discussion that’s written up in George Lewis’s book. I know about all that stuff. It’s a political thing because I think in Europe Stockhausen and those people were protecting their turf. That’s a million dollar turf, a big turf.

So Cage came up and he taught at CMS. Did a colloquium. We have texts from him. Then he came to one of my Kitchen concerts. After the concert it was too conversational for him. The style I play is conversational oriented. I talk the way I play. He said to me: “If I want to talk, I’d rather use language. I’d rather speak, with semantics.” I said: “it’s the opposite with me. If I want to talk, I’d rather play!” That was the end of our conversation.

He said something very interesting that I just read a couple weeks ago, in one of our papers, which will show up in the oral history project we are doing. He said: “When music is really getting into a difficult time, there’ll be such an abundance of musicians turning up.” And that’s exactly what’s happening now. Music is in a difficult situation. And there are not hundreds but thousands of musicians turning up. Every week I’m getting an emails from young professionals, who want to join my Improvisers Orchestra. When I ask the orchestra members, they sometimes haven’t heard of them. There are so many new players in New York, improvising players of all instruments, who don’t even know each other.

BG: People turning up are ones who are familiar with the vocabulary or the traditions or not at all? People I’ve met through the “free improvisation” scene in Boston, for instance, have never heard of the AACM or CMS.

KB: Yes, but they are always eager to know when they do hear about them!

BG: So, are you getting people who would know Ornette’s music and know Braxton’s music ?

KB: Yes, most of the people I talk to do. But there are a lot of kids on the student level (next generation) who’ve never heard a thing and just do it. Its in the air. Expanding improvisation in many forms and styles is what is called for now and in the future.

Posted in great musical thinkers, memories, Memories of shows, Reflections on musical context, sources
Tags: bob gluck, cms, creative music studios, don cherry, karl berger, ornette coleman, woodstock

Thoughts about Keith Jarrett and his “American” Quartet

•March 6, 2023 • Leave a Comment

As I’ve been reflecting on the passing of Wayne Shorter I found myself searching for friends’ commentaries on the internet about his life and music. This led me, unexpectedly to discover a very recent video interview with Keith Jarrett, which led to memories and reflections about the importance to me of Jarrett’s 1970s band, his “American” Quartet. And within the interview, I discovered that Pat Metheny had parallel thoughts.

Piano trios are particularly important to me as a listener and as a player. For me, this love really begins with the Keith Jarrett American Trio and then Quartet. In college I heard the album Death and the Flower (1975), and two years later, I had the immense fortune to see the band at the Village Vanguard, playing Survivor’s Suite (released on record in 1977). I think I walked around in a daze for the next month.

Death and the Flower was the first small acoustic ensemble album I ever purchased, even before Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and the Bill Evans trio recordings with Scott LaFaro. I was completely hooked, and I came to think of this band, with Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, and Paul Motian as the go-to, the ur-text of modern piano trios and quartets. Maybe all quartets, whether they were playing improvised music, or Beethoven, or rock music.

I’ve had Keith Jarrett on my mind this weekend because I watched Rick Beato’s December 2022 interview with the pianist. This provided the first images I’ve seen of him talking and, in fact, playing piano, with the one hand unaffected by his strokes. For me, the most telling moments were sequences when Beato and Jarrett listened together to performances from years ago, one an eye-popping solo rendition of Miles Davis’ “Solar,” and the other, an unreleased work composed for and performed with the Eastman Conservatory band. The camera focuses on Jarrett’s facial expressions as he listens, witnessing him experiencing those moments with intense fascination, and at times it is as if he is inhabiting the unfolding of the musical lines. You can find the interview on Rick Beato’s YouTube channel, uploaded in late February and linked below.

Early in the Jarrett video interview, Rick Beato inserted a segment of another video interview, one he did with Pat Metheny in August 2021. It led me to search out the full interview from which it was excerpted, also located within Beato’s YouTube channel (again, the link can be found below).

I was fascinated to discover, that Metheny holds the Keith Jarrett American Quartet and its music in similar esteem. I rarely hear anyone expressing the level of appreciation that I feel for this Quartet and its music, and I think that’s a shame. Here are some excerpts of what Pat Metheny told Beato:

“That band, the “American Quartet,” to me that was the last great acoustic jazz quartet. Nobody plays that music because it’s too hard… But that book of tunes he wrote between the American Quartet and the Scandinavian Quartet, to me that book of tunes has tunes… [even aside] from him as a player, just as songs it is the last great song book… And also, that band was such an unlikely band in a lot of ways. Dewey, you know, Dewey is such an enigma… [Jarrett] could have gotten somebody who could play inside changes in the most detailed of way. Dewey was this other kind of player, and that’s a lesson too. Don’t cast a band in your image if you have another way to do it; get people who are going to think different.” (from the 1:19:00-1:20:00 point in the video).

The band didn’t “only” provide a terrific, empathetic bouncing board for Jarrett’s pianistic excursions, but it paired him with the tremendously intuitive, responsive rhythm section of Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, and it renewed the pairing of Ornette Coleman bandmates Haden and Dewey Redman.

The compositions, as Metheny points out, are wonderful, often unfolding gradually as they move through subsequent, sometimes contrasting sections. The melodies are beautiful and Jarrett’s harmonic language, a blend of folksy diatonism with the ii-V-I harmonies of the bebop songbook, is quite distinct. Even while I was on a several year “pause” from playing the piano, I periodically sat at the keyboard and played the tune “Death and the Flower.” In the late 2000s and early 2010s, this tune, plus “My Song,” and a reshaping of the extensive first half of “Survivor’s Suite” were regularly on the set lists of two of my trio and other bands. The stepwise moving perfect fifths in the bass periodically shows up as part of my musical vocabulary, and I hopefully approached the music from my own angle. What a pleasure it has been to know this music, as a player and as a listener. I’ve placed links to two of my “Death and the Flower” performances.

You can find a version of “Death and the Flower” I played in 2017, an outtake from a duo session with drummer Tani Tabbal, recorded at Karl Berger’s Studio in Woodstock:

And here is another from a concert in 2014, a memorial to a great college friend, performed here with bassist Christopher Dean Sullivan, drummer Tani Tabbal, and me) – it is the fourth tune in this playlist:

Here is the link to Rick Beato’s Keith Jarrett Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgL30jDhoQU

And here is the link to Rick Beato’s Pat Metheny Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEgalcH_-b4

[note: both SoundCloud and YouTube often have brief advertisements for x, y, or z prior to the start of the track]

Posted in great musical thinkers, memories, Memories of shows, musical content, Personal notes
Tags: deathandtheflower, keithjarrett, patmetheny, survivorsuite

Remembering Joel Chadabe

•May 5, 2021 • 3 Comments

December 12, 1938 – May 2, 2021

When I reflect about my memories of Joel Chadabe, I find myself flooded with images, sounds, and experiences. These include memories of enormous variety: memories of events, moments chatting, projects undertaken, ideas discussed and discarded, plans made, places visited, detailed editing, meals eaten, stories shared, performances produced … The list goes on and on as befitting decades of association.

I first met Joel in the classroom when I was his student at SUNY Albany in 1976-77. When I transferred to the University, I knew almost nothing about the campus or about its music program. I knew that it had an electronic music program, and the name of its head was familiar to me from SUNY-wide arts events I had attended as a student at SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music.

I was one of Joel’s composition students (my concentration as a Music major was in Electronic Music; I may have been the only one during this period to choose this path), yet I learned the most from him in lecture/seminar settings. That’s where he was in his natural element, leaning against a desk, looking at you directly in the eye. In the studio, Joel took a more laissez faire approach to student work.

Joel was a natural teacher who loved to open doors of knowledge to whomever who would listen. What seemed to grab him the most during that period at the University were big conceptual ideas, scientific revolutions, and stories to tell. His gifts as a raconteur were nonpareil. Joel told lively stories that included noted musical personalities, often to dramatic effect (for instance about Igor Stravinsky and John Cage). The anecdotes were often funny, surprising, revealing, and just entertaining. But they always conveyed information about ideas he wanted to convey.

Here are some of the key ideas I learned as a student of Joel’s, some of them in the 1970s, some in the 1990s:

Musical ideas reflect and are deeply interconnected with the large philosophical ideas of an era
Sound is all around us; we simply need to notice
Among the most breakthrough musical ideas of the early 20^th century were new approaches to the vertical juxtaposition of musical events (rather than related in terms of harmony), were pioneered within Debussy’s “Jeux” and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” [I would add that equally reflects Ornette Coleman’s innovations]
The paradigm of the era beginning with Picasso/Braque collages and then Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrete was “items and arrangements,” which means collecting materials/objects/”items” (for instance, sounds), and organizing them into compositions
The subsequent paradigm is the idea that one can compose an instrument/system; succeeding the idea that s/he composes specific musical contents, within or crafting new musical templates/forms
Music can be made and experienced within the context of interactive system: interactivity is defined as a mutually influential relationship between a human and a machine
New musical instruments are ever emerging and unfolding, just as new musical ideas emerge and unfold

The classroom setting was particularly memorable for me because Joel and I constantly argued during class. It was usually about systems theory and its musical applications. I was strongly opposed to the idea that music should reflect algorithmic decision making, which was of course, his main focus during those years. My recollection of class was that it was just Joel and me; he’d talk for a while, I’d argue back, he’d smile, and continue on. I barely remember anyone else there. Years later, Joel had no recollection of this dynamic. Personally, it was a fantastic example of a professor giving space to a student’s ideas; ok, maybe too much space. Not putting that student down because you disagree, but acting as a patient agent of learning and growth. When I began working with Joel at EMF, years later, some of these arguments resumed, but around this time I began to notice the wisdom of his thinking, and before you knew it, as I’ll soon mention, I was composing with algorithmic elements, thinking philosophically about systems, and designing interactive systems for musical performance.

Systems and algorithms, baked into hardware and transitioning into hardware-software hybrids were Joel’s core interests in the studio setting at the University back in the 1970s. His focus at the moment wasn’t student work tied to the “items and arrangements” paradigm (that remained my focus), but the new ideas and instruments he was engaged with in his own work. This made sense given that SUNY Albany was and remains a research university and Joel was always pushing the frontier. Joel was efficient at delegating responsibility when it came to technical details, but generous with his time when it came to thinking broadly about his students’ compositional work. The latter took place in the analog Moog CEMS (the Coordinated Electronic Music Studio System) studio that Joel developed between the studio’s opening in 1966 and 1969, when it was installed in the newly opened Performing Arts Center (PAC). This system was an early systematized modular instrument, one of his vehicles conceived to explore ideas about musical systems, the role of weighted randomness, and interactivity. It was realized on equipment designed and built by Robert Moog to Joel’s specifications. Shortly before my arrival, Joel had completed his compositional interests in the CEMS system, and transitioned to the digital PDP 11/10, an early mini mainframe. During my final semester at the University, he purchased the first Synclavier ever sold, and he was just beginning his work with it.

I arrived in Albany during a period of programmatic quiescence following era of tremendous activity in the University’s Performing Arts Center, in full bloom with the opening of the PAC in 1969. Substantially due to Joel’s imagination, his friendships with musical colleagues, and funding initiatives, the early 1970s programming Joel produced featured artist residencies by a raft of the most important, cutting edge composers, performers, and multi-media artists. Under the banner of Free Music Store (a name borrowed or maybe shared with programming at Pacifica Radio’s WBAI in New York City), illustrious musicians performed, among them John Cage, David Tudor, Eberhard Blum, Alvin Lucier, Lejaren Hiller, David Gibson, Salvatore Martirano, Frederick Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, Kenneth Gaburo, Bulent Arel, David Behrman, Larry Austin, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Johnson, Charles Dodge, Morton Subotnick. Among the visiting composers were Lukas Foss, John Cage, Bernard Rands, Vivan Fine. A highwater mark was the performance and recording of John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s multimedia work, HPSCHD. Joel’s achievement was a model display of cutting-edge musical ideas, albeit dependent upon his personal initiative and willingness to raise funds, sometimes from within the SUNY system.

I lost touch with Joel during the 1980s, a period when I went on extended vacation from music. In the early 90s, I began to explore music software on my first Amiga computer, mostly early sequencers, and found them uninteresting. Soon after my family moved to the Berkshires, I dropped Joel a letter, asking his advice about what was new in electronic music. In other words, I was asking about what had happened in the 15 years I kept my distance from what I soon learned were incredible advances that had taken place in electronic music.

Joel invited me to visit him at his Electronic Music Foundation (EMF) office in downtown Albany, to chat and have lunch. Joel, ever excited by new ideas and an inveterate entrepreneur, was eager to demonstrate the software application Max (soon to become Max/MSP). Max seemed to me at first to be a clever way to design and run algorithms that could generate musical materials, but after making my purchase, discovered that Max opened all sorts of doors to new approaches to making music. Joel had explained to me an idea we had discussed years before, how semi-randomized processes could result in musical outcomes that varied in their predictability. This could be an avenue to further collaborations between humans and machines. I became enthralled, composed my first new compositions in years, and soon began to design new software, and soon hardware-software hybrid instruments. I essentially went from musically indifferent to musically super engaged. It was only a matter of time before I rethought my life direction and was headed back to graduate school for electronic music.

Joel and I periodically met between that 1994 visit and my arrival in 1998 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s iEar Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer master’s degree program. I immediately began to work for Joel at EMF. One of the more entertaining aspects of working at EMF, at times closely with Joel’s son Benjamin, was Joel’s fascination with the fact that I was a rabbi. Sometimes when visitors came to EMF, Joel enthused about the organization having its own rabbi in-house! What began for me as work writing descriptions of recordings gradually morphed into co-editing a historical website to document the history of the field of Electronic Music.

Thus began many years of meaningful collaborations and of discussions with Joel about the history and about historiography, how history is told. We debated a wide range of topics, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing. Joel was open to being challenged on historical issues about which I felt strongly, for instance my sense of an over-emphasis on European and Euro-American origins of electronic music, and about the importance of considering music through a lens of the environment. In turn, Joel pressed me to deepen my exploration of interactivity, and the importance of oral history, something modeled in his 1997 book Electric Sound. Most important, Joel taught me that facts become most significant when organized into patterns representing a meaningful whole. Why something mattered was more important than the fact that it took place. It was in this period that I substantially honed my ability to write professionally. I credit Joel’s mentorship with my developing career as a writer of musical histories.

During the ensuing years, the 2000s-2020s, my relationship with Joel matured in one of peers. In 1999, I began to teach at SUNY Albany, recently renamed the University at Albany. I moved into the office Joel had occupied until his retirement in 1997. By 2003, I had become Assistant Professor, and served as director of the studio Joel founded. During this period, Joel’s company EMF Media released my first three recordings and his produced some of my early public concerts. Once I became associate and then full professor, Joel and I often commiserated about our experiences in academia. My family became regulars at Chadabe family parties, hosted by Joel’s spouse, Francoise, herself a gifted teacher and talented cook.

During many of Joel’s years at UAlbany and following, he also taught at Bennington College, and for a time, at the Manhattan School of Music. During his final decade, he joined the adjunct faculty at New York University (NYU)’s Steinhardt School. These late career teaching experiences fed and excited him, renewing the energy that fed his initial teaching career. Joel’s enthusiasm translated into his desire to write new books and initiate a publication enterprise. For me, the door opened to new opportunities to discuss and debate with Joel about a widening range of issues, from musical to organizational, artistic, and personal.

What I always appreciated the most about Joel was his optimism. There was a constant twinkle in his eye. Something was always percolating in his mind and he’d sometimes become lost in his thoughts. He’d squint a little and suddenly say, “… have you ever thought about… maybe you should try….”

Joel had an eye for beauty and novelty. He’d point out fascinating and beautiful looking things that grabbed his eye, from people to objects. He was excited by good food and brilliant colors. He loved to photograph everyone and everything. He was eager to ask people to tell their stories.

Joel was the most forward-looking person I’ve known. For Joel, there were always new concepts to consider, new sounds to hear, new angles to approach anything and everything. There were always ideas coalescing in his mind, each of them pointing to concepts for new music to compose, new enterprises to consider, and new books to write.

Joel was a good friend, a great teacher, and a mentor to many. Joel was a person for whom every day offered the potential to discover a new horizon. The world is a better place because of Joel’s presence.

Posted in great musical thinkers, memories, Memories of shows, Personal notes, Reflections on musical context
Tags: electroacoustic, electronicmusic, interactivity, JoelChadabe

Preface to the 2020 Italian edition of “The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles”

•February 28, 2020 • Leave a Comment

Miles Davis, il Quintetto Perduto e altre rivoluzioni by Bob Gluck, Quodlibet/Chorus (Spring) 2020

Italian edition of The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles by Bob Gluck (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Preface by Claudio Sessa (editor), Quodlibet/Chorus

This is not a book on Miles Davis.

There are several books on the great trumpet player, also in Italian, and satisfy almost all the needs of his many admirers. But this is not a book on Miles Davis. This is a book that tells how a specific, magnificent, revolutionary musical season of Miles Davis has been inextricably connected with the historical period in which it was immersed.

At the end of the sixties, while his group (the historical one with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams) was slowly reconfiguring, Davis for some time wanted to document on disk truly “special projects” that they would transform in a sensational way the idea of jazz album itself: in particular the studio works In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. In this way he never had the opportunity to bring the new stable group into the recording studio, with Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette with the leader and Wayne Shorter. Years later, this formation would be remembered as the Lost Quintet (which in fact, as told in this book, over time became a Sextet and finally a Lost Septet, thanks to the inclusion of Airto Moreira and Keith Jarrett).

What profoundly distinguishes this group from the previous one, as documented by several live recordings, is not only the personality of the individual members, but the radical experiments that the ensemble made with electronic instruments applied to increasingly free forms. Here is what has previously been missed: according to the standard narrative, Davis, in the late sixties and early seventies, relentlessly moved from very adventurous jazz to the so-called “jazz-rock”, or rather to a music very influenced by funk. But this is not an accurate interpretation. For a long time the trumpeter developed a multi-layered aesthetic strategy, not at all linear, simultaneously exploring very different territories. And of this research the Lost Quintet is one of the most fascinating chapters.

Bob Gluck, noted scholar and musician, who had already explored in his previous book (You’ll Know When You’ll Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band) another sector of this adventurous universe, helps us comprehend this anomaly. In Chapter 5 he describes the introduction, played live by Corea on an Fender Rhodes electric piano, to the song “Directions” by Joe Zawinul, which at the time was Davis’ opening theme song. We are in March 1970. The public is hit by something that “concerns pure sound experience. And it is wild and otherworldly (…). At first, the Fender Rhodes sounds like a bus honk, sharply articulated and insistently repeated. It is more an electronic than an electric sound, calling to mind more of the electronic music avant- garde than rock, pop, or funk. Its level of distortion is different in kind from fuzz guitar. Fuzz emphasizes a sustained albeit ‘dirty’ sound; these articulations are brief and sharp edged.”

Miles Davis and his musicians were pushing the limits of consensus gained by a large audience. But the constant attention that the group received is not only due to the charisma of the great trumpeter; it also has to do with the aesthetic resonance, we could say ideologically connoted, of an entire generation.

Gluck is not satisfied with reconstructing the profound meaning of the Lost Quintet within the development of Davis’ poetics. He senses the link with everything that happened in the boiling cauldron of that historical period, and shows that there is a network of relationships between seemingly very different groups. Starting, of course, with the most spontaneous and at the same time most unexpected fruit of the Lost Quintet. That is, with the exit of Corea and Holland from the group, the formation of their own trio which later became the Circle quartet. The new band seems, on the face of it, to be the exact opposite of what most listeners assumed to be true of Miles Davis’s music.

Corea and Holland came in contact with Barry Altschul, a drummer centered in the world of free jazz and in particular the pianist Paul Bley; shortly after, the three enter into a relationship with saxophonist Anthony Braxton, a member of the avant-garde association of Chicago AACM. As it happens, the association also includes the drummer of the Lost Quintet, Jack DeJohnette. And by pulling the threads of this intricate ball of yarn, Gluck cannot help but get to another group that emerged from Chicago, the almost unknown (and extraordinary) Revolutionary Ensemble formed by Leroy Jenkins, Sirone and Jerome Cooper, respectively violinist, double bass player and drummer , but all capable of alternating with various instruments.

Following the actors of his lively scenario, Gluck builds a dizzying and fascinating path. On the one hand, Davis’ music emerges from the most glorious past of jazz, from Charlie Parker to John Coltrane, who in turn in his complex itinerary represents a point of reference also for all the others; on the other hand we see the icons of new youth music arising, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone. After all, Davis ‘pupils’ were now creating a school of a distinct flavor. We think of Hancock, Shorter and Zawinul’s Weather Report, John McLaughlin: English like Holland and Jack Bruce of Cream, who will enter Tony Williams’ Lifetime. Williams’s “discovery” was greatly assisted by Sam Rivers, another musician who in these pages continues to re-emerge in ever-changing roles. But this is not all; the impression, up to this point, is to have gone through various areas of popular music, but in fact Braxton’s experiences bring us to the heart of the post-academic avant-garde, from John Cage to Gordon Mumma to the group Musica Elettronica Viva (Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum), onward to Stockhausen and Schoenberg. From here, if we observe the roads traveled by electronics (at the center of the experiments of the Lost Quintet), we can even meet Keith Emerson, Wendy (or Walter) Carlos, again Paul Bley; if we explore the research that goes beyond academe, we find the AACM with Wadada Leo Smith, and then Frank Zappa, Evan Parker (also British), and great older men like Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Bill Dixon. Not to mention the African American Diaspora in Europe (Art Ensemble of Chicago, Marion Brown) or various forms of independence from the music business, about which Gluck allows us to observe interesting cases such as those of Dave Liebman and Karl Berger, in addition of course to the three members of the Revolutionary Ensemble.

In the background, almost to represent a sort of “anti-Miles” that marks the beginning and the end of the book with his personality, the great heretic Ornette Coleman is always present, of which Gluck says that ultimately all the musicians of whom he spoke are “children.” There is therefore a sense of cosmic circularity in this essay, which is configured as a map to cross the great experimental season between the sixties and seventies: a season that had as a luminous and fickle referee Miles Davis.

So this is a book on Miles Davis.

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