What’s Going On: Conduction, Improvisation and the Culture of Structure begins and ends with Butch Morris. The festival, which spans over 7 nights in October and November of this year, focuses on 3 iconic musical conceptualists of the mid to late 20th century. And in fact the final night does indeed end with the music of Butch Morris. The spark that created the overall conception also begins with Butch.
The “culture of structure” might sound a tad pretentious, or possibly obscure, but bear with me. In a very short time in my youth, I went from West Side Story to the Rolling Stones to the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, sidelined by Howlin Wolf and Magic Sam, and slid easily into Electric Miles Davis and Weather Report on to Cecil Taylor and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. All these musics were predominantly influenced by the aesthetics and philosophies of traditions from Africa. Most people think of this in terms of rhythm first and foremost, and then often in terms of melody and harmony, and also tunings, or what is called intonation. There is so much to speak to here but let me just move quickly into contemporary music, some of the debate involved, and why it matters – at least to me!
I had the good fortune to hear Cecil Taylor give a pre-show lecture on a snowy evening in Washington D.C. when I was 17. It was an odd event, but I was riveted, and for the most part lost. I did some reading to follow up, and I was so naïve, and so outside of European music traditions and jazz traditions, that it was a revelation to me that there was any controversy at all. From Cecil Taylor’s perspective, the European mind set had an uninformed and at times condescending attitude towards “new music’ from an Afro-centric mind set. And for good reason. Not only did the academy typically view jazz with some disdain, but even mavericks as far out as John Cage voiced fairly negative opinions about improvisation.
Cecil Taylor was himself an intellectual and cultural consumer of almost boundless dimensions.
He believed fiercely in the avant garde he was forging out of a primarlily jazz tradition, but he was an avid fan of ballet, opera, film, all the arts, and traditions throughout the world. One would be hard pressed to find a cultural intellectual who was better informed about artistic traditions around the globe.
Cecil’s basic premise, at least as I understood it, was that an Afro-centric aesthetic had faith in the logic of the body. Many of the attempts to codify music systems in a post-tonal post-steady pulse world were highly mathematical and/or conceptual. Cecil made a case for the structural integrity that evolved out of discipline in practice. It is so important to stress that this wasn’t in any way adopting a sort of primitivism. Looking back, I think Cecil was letting us know that the body may the most sophisticated mechanism, and certainly neurologists would concur. I can’t remember the exact quote, but he famously said that “if an artist practices enough links, sequences and patterns a structure will emerge.” It’s intuitive. To me, if a composer says if I use this mathematical system, or this symmetrical division of an asymmetrical scale, or any similar techniques, ipso facto there will be structural integrity. Cecil basically said “the same holds true of the disciplined improviser, in the moment”
Butch Morris was fascinated with jazz, improvised music, electronic music, the far edges of popular music, contemporary European music and all its intersections. He was in a unique position as part of the scene in New York in the 70s and 80s. Moving to NY from LA after his time in Vietnam, Butch was initially associated with the up-and-coming free jazz saxophonist David Murray. Butch was a brilliant cornetist, but he began to conduct David’s band, and introduce some hand signals that not only indicated ideas about content (pitch and rhythm) but also arranging (go back to a section, repeat a phrase, superimpose motifs). The players were improvising content, but the conductor was improvising the structure. There is a hilarious moment in a video of a lecture Butch gives on conduction where he says that as a student he asked his conducting teacher, “what if I wanted the orchestra to go back to measure 82?” and she said, “why would you want to do that”. Butch went on to use both composed music, arranged music, and entirely improvised music as material for his “conductions”.
Of course, Butch wasn’t alone. As he points out in the same video some of this went back hundreds of years, and he mentions artists as disparate as Lukas Foss, Alan Silva, Charles Moffett, and Leonard Bernstein as musicians who were like minded. Many of the musicians who were involved in Butch’s early conductions were also involved in John Zorn’s Game pieces. From these experiences we learned similar lessons. There is so much potential in improvised music beyond free improvised music, or improvised music structured with traditional forms.
Butch spent the last 2 decades of his life dedicated to this process. He was on a mission, and today numerous artists have adopted some form of his system. It’s important to note that it is a system that is performer dependent. We often observe that Duke Ellington wrote music with a specific performer in mind. Mahler not so much. Sure you can play a Duke Ellington chart, but the one played by Johnny Hodges is ultimately the final one, or at least it is how Ellington conceived of it. Same with conduction. The only Butch Morris conductions we have for prosperity on the ones on recordings. Conduction is not “the score”.
I absolutely loved being part of a Butch conduction, but it was decades before I adopted the approach in my own music, and in the beginning it was almost by accident. For me, and I suspect many others, it has become part of our artistic and compositional method, not exclusively but a method among many others. Pencil and paper? Recording studio? The computer? Conceptual approaches. All these methodologies reap different results, and conduction holds a unique and compelling place in a world of artistic exploration.
Soon to come. Sun Ra, and Marty Erhlich speaks to the legacy of Julius Hemphill.