You are quite a prolific artist. Not only in music but also in many other projects, you take on active roles. Could you talk about your work routine to inspire other artists? Are there techniques you have developed over the years that have proven effective?
The first thing, you know, it sounds kind of like a cliché or like I’m romanticizing it. But fundamentally, I really love what I do. I’m happiest, maybe of all, when I’m on stage playing music for an audience. And, you know, there are times when getting on stage, the work that goes into getting there and organizing things, although it can be very frustrating and discouraging at times, I’m lucky enough to work with amazing people who just keep inspiring me. And every time I get a chance to have a performance, it’s still exhilarating for me. It’s still super exciting. It’s not old for me.
All the work connected to the logistics is really tiresome, and usually not too enjoyable. But the passion for the music itself, and performing, is as strong, if not stronger actually, because I can see how much it means. Especially after COVID, you know? Not being able to play with people and not being able to tour. I was always very appreciative of the privilege to get to do all the things I get to do but having that, like everybody else, being forced to really be in one place… and so much of music is about collaboration. Not being able to collaborate for a year and a half, not being able to leave my neighborhood in Chicago, it really made me appreciate even further how significant it was.
And the social part of it, which I always enjoyed, I realized how much of a component that was for the music itself. Like, being in a room with other people, not just playing, and not just working on music and rehearsing. But, you know, having dinner together, talking about ideas, the social part of that engagement… the loss of that during the COVID period was tremendous, as it was for everybody, but it really made me understand how much it means to me to be able to go out on the road and play. So there’s a lot driving that.
And as far as a routine, there isn’t a specific one in terms of like day to day, because every day ends up being different, even if I’m at home. You know, the things that I got to do that day to, let’s say, organize a tour, meetings like this with you now, every day has, “Oh, this happens today,” or “There’s a concert,” or “I gotta get to an airport,” or whatever. There isn’t like a steady routine. So it’s adapting all the time and trying to get things done.
But every day I make sure I do something connected to music and the work I want to do. I mean, I’m 60. I turned 60 in September. And I’ve always struggled with the balance between administrative work and creative work. And you have to do the administrative work to get on stage. So I understood, you gotta do this. But sitting in front of a computer and doing emails and trying to book a tour, you know, is not fun. It’s not the enjoyable part for me at all. But, you know, to get on the stage, it’s part of the process that needs to happen.
But it’s gotten so complicated. And since COVID, to go back out and tour and play concerts, for a lot of different reasons, some of which I totally don’t understand, it’s become harder to organize tours. And it’s been harder to get communication with people, like better communication. So it takes more time than ever to coordinate a concert. You know, it takes more emails. You gotta contact more people, from the presenter to the musicians, and I found myself having to commit more and more time to this administrative work. And then that meant there was less time for the creative work.
And it really got to a point, like a few weeks ago, where I just was like, I can’t take this. I was very unhappy. Because if I’m not working on creative things, like, what’s the point, you know?
So I flipped it. And then what I would recommend, in terms of routine, as someone who’s done this for a long time, and I should have realized this a long time ago, the first half of my day is the creative work. And then the second half, I do as much of the administrative stuff as I can.
You mentioned that you love playing in front of an audience. I know there are some musicians who are the opposite, like they like to compose or record. How did you discover that about yourself? Because you compose a lot of music as well, how does that balance work for you?
You mean how did I discover that I like playing for audiences?
Yeah yeah.
I always did. I started playing music when I was, I think, 8, and I played trumpet until I was 16, and I was a terrible trumpet player. I, at that point, really was into the music of Sonny Rollins. I really wanted to play music, and the trumpet just did not work with my mouth. It just was terrible, and since the trumpet is like all upper lip, or mostly a lot of upper lip stuff, I thought of the saxophone, because it’s the lower lip. Maybe I’d have better luck with that. And thankfully, that was the case. That shift was really significant and important. But the school I went to in Massachusetts, near Boston, the public school, had a music program, so I was always playing in the school band, and I always loved it. And also from a very young age my parents took me to jazz concerts all the time, and I completely fell in love with seeing people like Art Blakey play, Johnny Griffin and these folks, and just the way they were on stage, their whole personality. I was like, this is the most amazing thing, this is what I want to do. I want to do whatever they were doing, even without really understanding what it was that they were doing. I mean, listening to the music and seeing it live, hearing it at home, I was immersed in jazz history from the time I was born up through now. I was super into the idea of performing for listeners. And then, as I started getting into improvising myself and being in a jazz band in high school, which is a starting place. I got to do that, but I always loved it. I just loved live music, hearing it, playing it.
And then the compositional part, like all the musicians I was super into, because initially it was more mainstream jazz, and then became more like outside of it, I was super into Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. All of those people were composers. So I was like, well, that’s what you do. When I was in high school, I started writing original music for the band, and I had my own band trying to work with tunes and improvising at a really early stage. But then in college I kept pursuing it, and I was studying film in Montreal but also playing music, and had my own band, and just got more and more and more interested in music, and less and less interested in university, and I finished my degree, but it was like just barely finished it because I promised my folks I’d finish the degree. But the last year was really tough, because I just wanted to play music all the time.
I assume growing up in jazz clubs played a significant part in it, because the engagement with the audience… You can’t get that in a stadium concert I assume.
You cannot get that in a stadium concert, absolutely. These were jazz clubs, often very small rooms, you know. For example, I got to see Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell play duo two nights in a row in Boston, in a room that could hold 40 people. And I was sitting five feet away from Ed Blackwell and Don Cherry. I could see every detail of what they did. So to your point, that’s what I grew up with, and the way that they interact with the audience. And because I was young, especially when I was a kid in high school, they were so cool to me. Man, my dad would take me backstage and Art Blakey would be like, “Oh, you play saxophone! Wow! It’s so great man.” And these people are like gods. I heard him on record and this person’s talking to me, I’m actually a valid human being. It was just mind boggling. It was so natural to just want to be part of that world and figure out how to do it myself.
And what I realized to kind of talk about discipline and routine… I knew that I wanted to do my own music. I wanted to play original music or work with other musicians who wrote their own music, and I didn’t want to work as a musician like play weddings, or earn money as a musician, because I just wanted to play the music I wanted to play. So when I graduated from college, I worked at a hardware store, and a grocery store during the day. And then, when I moved to Chicago, I worked at the Art Institute of Chicago in the accounting department of all things, and worked Monday through Friday, kind of 9 to 5. But every time I played it was my own music. Whether I was practicing, I was trying to learn something that I wanted to learn. I was studying with stuff that all filtered back into my own music, and so I made a living doing something I really was not interested in, but it made me free to always play what I wanted to. And I saw that with other musicians like “this is my own thing”. But I saw other musicians who would do weddings and parties, and also play creative music. They started to phase out gigs with creative music, because those gigs never paid very well.
It demands a lot from an artist though, motivation-wise, energy-wise.
That’s what I saw, too, because they were like, well, you know, I’m going to get paid $300 to play this wedding, and if I’m gonna get paid $25 to play this improvised music gig, I got to pay rent. So they start making those choices. And then when they come to do the more adventurous gig, they’re losing their sense of perspective on that. And it’s like they kind of half-assed it. You know. They weren’t passionate. They lost that sense of passion for being creative and exploring, you know. And so I realized that for me it was a better thing. I don’t know if you know John Cassavetes, the filmmaker.
Of course.
John Cassavetes would do popular movies and get paid as an actor. A Hollywood film. And then take that money and make super unique, inventive movies of his own. There are thousands of people who could never do that. They’d want the paycheck. It’s like a comfortable life. And then they’d start, you know, it’s a slippery slope, and the achievement of John Cassavetes’ is huge to have that discipline, to take the money and run, and then go and put it into your own thing, so I just knew I wasn’t going to be able to do that.
It’s a good link to my next question, like the myth created around the artists, how they live, what they achieve in life is enormous, whether they are like jazz music players, whether they’re rock stars, and so on and so forth. I’m sure there are people who love being famous and what comes with it. But also there are people like John Cassavetes who just wanted to realize their own selves as artists. So it brings me to my next question, especially the political climate around us. The narrative is, especially in the US, you need to be an entrepreneur. You need to be a millionaire. You need to have a very unique idea that will make you someone important very quickly. I think that’s isolating people instead of bringing them together, because it’s a narrative that makes you feel like you need to be by yourself. You need to be a success story with your name. In such an era what does collaboration and cooperation mean to you? Because it’s definitely against the zeitgeist. Why are you still trying to be incorporated, collaborate with other people like you could be a success story yourself?
I see what you’re saying, and I think that the zeitgeist is totally screwed up. Man, you know, late capitalism… I mean, the checklist of what’s gone wrong, politically, economically, culturally, in terms of climate. It’s just generated horrific outcomes that we’re living and dealing with now. And in my experience collaboration is an endless source of energy and inspiration.
I like to keep it to music, because I think whatever applies to music applies to everything else, too. But the music “industry” since day one has been designed to isolate musicians. Sorry, I have a dog that’s loud. One second.
That’s totally okay.
Since day one has been to isolate the musicians. The way record contracts were devised in the popular rock world or the pop music world of any kind, you get an advance to go into the studio and make the record. And the artists were like, “Wow, this is so great. We got all this money. We can make this record, and we can hang out in this expensive place,” and blah blah, not realizing, for some unknown reason, that that’s an advance against sales, and that’s not your money. And you spend all that money. And then the record fails and the corporation gets a tax write-off on that money that they “lost,” and the artists owe the label that money and lose the rights to their own music. That’s just one example, okay?
And that’s gone on and on. And now, in the current situation, it’s gotten even worse, because you’ve got all the streaming services like Spotify which frankly are criminal, because they don’t pay and compensate the artist fairly at all whatsoever, and make it worse and harder to get even elbow space in that algorithm, which is just another word for contemporary payola, because the big labels are paying Spotify money to jive the algorithm to favor their artists.
Exactly.
So it’s all bullshit, right? This pulls everybody apart. Now, if you work together, it’s kind of logical, because most music is made with a band. So people work together in bands. Now, in the pop music world, very often the powers want to break the band apart. For example, you’ve got the Talking Heads and suddenly there’s all this jibber jabber, and the band breaks apart, because, you know, David Byrne is going to be… and you know, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz are going to be that, you know, Tom Tom Club… and the thing that they have, their successes, their vision gets derailed. The creative compass of the ensemble gets pulled apart by money and fame, all these things that eat away at the spirit of the endeavor in the first place.
That’s the creative music history, which is what we’re fascinated by and what we want to explore. And the economic music history, which is basically 99 times out of 100, destructive for the creative part. It’s like that book by Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, fame and money, no matter what you do.
And especially in this zeitgeist, we have people who are completely non-contributing, who are influencers because they have fame. Nothing other than their own celebrity. Like the Kardashians. What have they done other than being famous, and milk that fame to make money and profit and not contribute? That’s oversimplifying, but not by much. And so people see that, musicians included. Someone on TikTok suddenly has a million followers. They’re making all this money through promoting whatever frigging products. That used to be disgusting. If you were an artist, you wouldn’t be frigging advertising watches. It’s disgusting. Right now it’s totally normalized. It’s hip. It’s cool.
And musicians, just to keep it to music, see this happening and think they can do it, right? And the systems around them say, “Yeah, yeah, if you’re on Spotify, someone’s gonna discover your music and you’ll sell more records or more digital files to more people. You will play concerts.” Which is absolutely not true. No one’s going to discover you on Spotify. Even if you pay whatever frigging money you now need to pay. It’s completely lies.
But it’s the fact that they see a symbol of someone on TikTok or YouTube, whatever it might be. Oh, it’s possible. But it’s a frigging lottery. It’s a lottery. And maybe you buy the ticket. But like the lottery, you’re not going to always win it. No one wins except that one individual, and that’s not an example for how to do things right.
So from my perspective, the zeitgeist that you’re talking about, and I completely agree with you, is all about pulling people apart. Because power comes not just from an individual, but it comes from collective activity. You know. A single voice is not as loud as many voices together. Like, that’s just a fact. So if you can work with a real community of people, and my community happens to be international, I have friends and colleagues that work in Europe, work in Japan, in Brazil, in the United States, you know, lots of places, right? That’s my community. My community is not just the people I know in Chicago. I’ve developed real relationships with people over time because they matter to me and the collaborations matter. And I’ve seen over time the significance of what gets accomplished when you share resources.
So, for example, just to put it to us, you know, this project that’s coming up with these musicians from Skopje, and reaching out to your collective to say, “Hey, maybe there’s a way, because I’ll be closer than normal to maybe get there,” and it didn’t work out, right? Because of the finances and stuff. I totally get that. But that’s how things get done. Because maybe next time it’s easier. And now those folks already know about you guys, right? And yeah, it doesn’t always lead to something every time but it happens often enough that being generous with resources is always the best idea. And what people are taught now is “It’s all mine. I don’t share the contact information, because if they do, then maybe they will get the gig, and I don’t because there’s only so many gigs out there.” The truth of the matter is we’ve got to share the wealth.
This is an ecosystem. The more you give, the more the ecosystem grows and you eventually benefit from it, because the benefit we’re talking about is not the big capital. We’re not going to get rich from it. We’re going to live a meaningful life together.
Exactly.
That’s why a lot of young artists are suffering from depression, in my opinion, because they think they should be the one, they are so precious, they’re so unique.
I was talking to a friend. I used to have a group called Marker, and one of the people in the band was in their late twenties, a very successful, excellent musician, Macy Stewart, phenomenal, and she was stressed out because she wasn’t 30 yet, but she thought she hadn’t done enough. And she’s phenomenal, and she’s had all kinds of success in the popular music world and the experimental music world. She’s fantastic. But I thought, what kind of pressure is that on people?
Again, she’s really good and successful from my point of view, you know, working as a musician, surviving as a musician, which is a tall order. That’s an accomplishment. Yet she was feeling this pressure she’s going to be running out of time. That’s insane, because this is a long game.
You mentioned Peter Brötzmann earlier. He was playing on literally until right before he passed, in his eighties. Joe McPhee is here at 85, still making music. It’s a long game. So if you’re stressed out and you’re 25 and not considering the fact you can do this for another 60 years and keep developing, then there’s something askew. There’s something amiss. There’s something wrong.
And I think that if the focus could be more on the idea of ecosystem and sustainability, just as with, like, the planet, that applies to what we’re talking about here. Because if you think about it as a system that’s connected, and you look at it and say, “Well, what’s not right here?” You can start breaking it down and analyzing it and saying, social media, along with the politics, is not super helpful. And it’s not going to solve all our problems as creative people, because it’s more and more maligned and manipulated. However, maybe there’s ways to use it as a functional tool to get information out, coupled with other means. It’s not the only way to do things. But you gotta start to break that down.
With Catalytic Sound, which is also a cooperative like you guys have, or similar in alignment with it, whatever, when I was looking at the streaming services, and how damaging they were… Because, the irony is that people who subscribe to them, I don’t think this is as true now, because there’s been more information out about Spotify, and how corrupt and terrible it is, and people are seeing that more, but the initial idea of subscribing and paying for a service, and then that money is supposed to go to the artists you like, that’s a system that makes sense. So I don’t blame listeners for subscribing to these services, because they believe the system is paying for their joy, which is just not true now.
So when I was looking at that, and being frustrated by it, rather than trying to convince Spotify, there’s a movement in the States by an organization to try to get Spotify to pay one penny per stream to the artists. They’re never going to frigging do that. And one penny isn’t anything, anyway. But they’re never going to do that. It’s a corporation. So just look at a history of corporations, like one billion dollar corporations, not like a little one, where a corporation with a big C, in the history of the universe, how many times has a corporation ever adjusted what they did for the betterment of other people?
That’s against the idea of corporations.
There you go. So you’re not going to convince a corporation to change its policies. What you can do is create an alternative. So it became very important for me to figure out a way to create a streaming service for experimental music that involved the musicians at Catalytic Sound, and we figured out how to do it.
So we created something in the ecosystem with the artists here that is going to expand out to other people and make it more. My goal is to make it a streaming service for experimental music for everybody, and figure out how to do that. So people who like this kind of music know where to go, and that the artists are getting paid for that work, those contributions. So it’s like looking at the system and working towards sustainability, which means that the ecosystem has to be healthy. And that means there’s got to be diversity, like biodiversity. If you only have one kind of tomato, that’s a bad thing, and scientifically, they know that. It’s the same thing with culture.
Exactly.
There can’t be just one face to the music, one genre of music. It’s got to have range and diversity, including all kinds of people, young and old, different parts of the world, different backgrounds. And then it’s rich. And the odds for sustainability are higher.
Exactly and I would like to say this because it’s, in my opinion, important. There was a Peter Brötzmann memorial concert in Istanbul. Istanbul has a relatively limited audience for his kind of music. If you think about it, there has never been an event for a dead corporation in the history of humankind. Artists are important. That’s why we should contribute to the culture. So what you’re doing is so inspiring and important for me.
Well, thank you. Thank you for feeling that way. And the motivation to continue comes out of feedback like that, and also seeing how cooperation, as opposed to corporation, but cooperation, how that leads to a better ecosystem, how it leads to enabling more things to happen instead of less things to happen. It’s awesome. It’s just a more interesting approach. It’s more interesting as things become harder and harder on people. It’s more interesting to push back on that and find ways to cooperate and build more bridges between activities that are happening because, despite the challenges we’re faced with, we’re also living in a time where information spreads fast in general.
There’s obviously problems with this idea in some ways, but you talking to me, when I started playing music, this would have been a very difficult thing to do. You knowing about me even, would have been challenged, you know. Difficult, you know.
Even impossible, maybe, right? I know you through the internet.
Right? Exactly. There are definite downsides to the internet, for sure. But there are benefits, and one of the benefits is the possibility for this kind of exchange. That’s what we should be doing with it. That’s how we should be using it. They’re just tools. A personal computer is more than a typewriter, and if you have one, you have access to all of this information. If you know how to use the systems. Because if you get the top pick, you know that’s been guided by something. So you have to be responsible and be critical about what you’re hearing. And then you can use it like a tool.
And I remember the first time I went to Brazil, and I was in São Paulo, and the place was packed and I’d never been there. And for the distribution for my records, there’s no way that this many people could have gotten any of the records I made, and I asked them how they knew my music and it was through YouTube. And this goes back, 2000s, like 20 years ago, or something.
Did you ever imagine being known in Brazil, to go there and have a ready audience?
No, absolutely not. It was phenomenal. I was like, “Oh, it’s a tool.” Because it was always this thing with people my age. When people could start using phones to record stuff and shoot videos, there were all these handheld cameras. It was very frustrating, because people would post that stuff without asking. So there was all this question: do we tell people it’s not cool to record? Or what do you do with this? But like, it’s Pandora’s box. Smartphones are everywhere now. It’s just gonna happen.
When I went to Brazil and saw that and had that experience, I realized, wait a minute, this is a tool. This is a means to a bigger end if we use it right. So let’s use that material and build the audience, right? For sure, and hopefully, it benefited them, because they encountered music that they were excited about, which led to me getting invited to play.
The spread of the internet and especially mobile devices initially created a wave of excitement for independent artists. It can be said that things went well at first, but soon the field was dominated by various platforms, restricting the space for independent artists. In this context, Catalytic Sound is a particularly important and unique example. We are curious about your thoughts on this issue. What are the ways for an independent artist to survive and create today?
I’m 60, man. I learned from people around me who are like half my age seeing these things as tools, and they’re highly problematic. The way like fucking Meta and all these social media platforms are manipulating what you see, what you get to is highly problematic. And resources for musicians, to keep it to music, but to artists of all kinds, to get information out about what they’re doing and generate an audience has become more and more complicated because, you know, newspapers in general are disappearing.
So there’s, doesn’t mean, media that people like. Like when I first moved to Chicago, and I’m sure it was true, a version of it was true, in Istanbul, any major city, you have like a weekly arts page in a newspaper. It’d have all the listings, have critics writing about concerts or films or whatever, and everyone would pick it up, and everyone would see what the critics were talking about. And it kind of created a sense of awareness about what the activity was. Well, that’s gone, basically.
And people are on their phone, scrolling through stuff. You can’t put a concert announcement in these places, like the former arts page that exists online. No one’s looking at those arts pages. They’re on their phone flipping through. So your concert announcement goes by like, zip, zip, zip! So how do you make a dent? How does someone become aware of what you’re doing?
And again, it’s like, use the tools. Figure out better ways. How do I put it… People make fun of me, which is cool, about writing long posts, because no one reads them. But it’s important to me to keep track of what the heck is going on.
I’m a huge fan of your Instagram and blog posts.
I think it’s important, because I think we’re on the ground, right? And so I don’t want someone who doesn’t really know about what I’m doing to decide how to get that information to people. So okay, the social media is there. I’m not into it. I write things. I try to direct people to the stuff I’m interested in. It’s a way to give voice to some perspectives.
And I think that one thing that’s happening now is things going back to old school stuff, like putting up flyers, just going to record stores and putting stuff on a counter, because people who go to a record store are already interested in music. So you’re reaching somebody. If you got a poster up about a concert, you’re more likely to have someone see that poster than anything on Instagram.
So you, and then you find out how the venue’s publicizing it, work with the venue. I think that there’s this idea, it’s just a lot of hard work, and you have to adapt because it keeps changing. So right now there’s Instagram and TikTok and Facebook, and God knows what else. And there’s gonna be a new thing, right? Something else. And then you have to figure out what you want to do with that, if you want to deal with it.
I don’t really want to deal with TikTok, because it doesn’t suit the way I want to express my ideas. I like photography. I like to write. I don’t want to sit there and shoot a 10-second video of me. I mean, I’m not interested. I get why other people use it. And if they can use it effectively, it’s a tool.
But I think it’s just like old school work, man. And that sounds like an old guy saying, “Well, just work hard,” but like, that’s what I do.
Life is all about hard work, in my opinion. I mean before social media, weren’t people working hard to get their art out there?
Now with social media, we have to deal with algorithms and corporations. It just changes. I mean, before social media in Chicago, I used to walk around and put up flyers, paste them onto walls and telephone poles, and I had a real mailing list, where I sent postcards out about all the concerts. I used to sit there for hours putting stamps on things.
And now it’s algorithms. It’s a different situation. You still gotta crack the code somehow and figure out how to work together on it. And I think that right now, and I’ve been talking about this a lot in the last few weeks with other artists and organizations, the best thing I think we can possibly do in terms of sharing resources and working together is partnerships with organizations that have similar kinds of goals and support each other.
It has a significance to it because you’re working with an audience that’s based in that country, audiences in Ankara and audiences in Istanbul and whatnot. However, it makes just as much sense to talk to you and work with you guys as it does to work with people here in Chicago, because the audience is everywhere, just like the art is everywhere. And informing people about that is important. And it’s amazing stuff, if you have a concert, and you’ve got a phone and you can stream it, people all over the world can see that concert in Ankara.
That’s amazing.
Yeah, it’s frigging amazing. And that’s one of the things that came out of COVID, people learned how to do that stuff. And a lot of venues created ways to stream stuff live. And in some ways the significance of that change, now that people can go to live concerts again, maybe diminished a bit. But if there’s a group based in Ankara that’s amazing, and I can’t be there but I want to know about them, and I want to hear them, and I want to see them, you can do that kind of stuff now.
I think organizations working together to publicize these events, and maybe ticket them for a small fee, so that some more money goes back into the system, working together like that means a lot more for the ecosystem than doing a show, and it’s just for the folks there, and people being frustrated because they’re not reaching enough.
Like, those people in Brazil knew who I was, and I didn’t even reach out to them.
You ask yourself a question very often: What would Duke Ellington do? And I would like to ask the question, what would Duke Ellington do, considering the possibilities you created with your limited resources?
Well, you know, he was a genius on many levels, but also in terms of business. He was criticized later in his career for doing these medleys of all his hit tunes. And then the critics were always like, “Why is he doing that? He’s done these tunes since the friggin’ twenties. Why is he still doing these tunes?” And I found out he did them because the royalties he got for doing a medley of like twelve tunes, that money kept the band afloat.
Right now you can’t do that, because the whole system is different, the way they pay musicians for whatever publishing situations exist in the world, like ASCAP or BMI. In the States the payouts are totally different and not the same.
I think what Duke Ellington would do is, he would figure it out. Because he kept a big band in an era where big bands basically did not exist anymore. Up through the 1970s, or whatever it was when he passed. That band was on tour all the time.
Sun Ra is another example. He figured out how to keep a big band together, doing really unusual music.
Sun Ra even played in İstanbul with that big band.
See? I think, like, Sun Ra figured out, and I don’t mean this as criticism in any way, he figured out the show. The dancing, the singing, the costumes, the idea of space and Saturn. And if you put a Sun Ra record on, it would be like, “What the fuck is this?” We were like, “Man, that was crazy. That was amazing.” You get people in the room, and people that went to see those shows would be like, “Next time Sun Ra comes through, you gotta go.” Because it was amazing. And in that show, there was incredible music.
He just put it in a very special costume. And that’s just very much simplified, because there was genius involved in all that. But I think Sun Ra and Duke Ellington solved the problem of how to keep a big band afloat in a time when it was basically impossible to do so.
So I think they both, looking at the situation now, would find a way to take these tools that we’ve got and make it work. Now, how they do it, I don’t know, because I’m trying to figure that out myself. But a large part of it is, for me to make money, it’s two things: for me to make money as a musician, and for me to survive from a creative standpoint, I have to be on the road.
I can’t stay in Chicago. I can play shows here. But they’re door gigs, basically. Sometimes a lot of people come, and sometimes it’s less, but it’s totally unreliable. And I can’t play enough shows here to even start to pay bills. So I gotta be on the road. And from a creative standpoint, I collaborate with a lot of people who live in different parts of the world. So I need to go to them, because it’s getting harder and harder and harder for them to come to the US.
And I don’t blame anybody for not wanting to come to the US right now, with all this immigration crap and whatever. So I have to figure out how to get out there. Which means that I’ve got to figure out how to book shows. And that changes all the time.
And I want it to be sustainable. I want to be paid fairly. And I want the musicians I work with to be paid fairly, but to not ask for some insane amount of money. If I do, then the presenters are broke and they can’t do any more concerts that month, because the whole budget got blown. I learned that many times over.
A little while ago I was in Poland, and we played a show to a hundred people. And it was like the equivalent of $5 to get in. And the band got paid around $500, let’s say, give or take. And at the same time, there was a big show at a big venue, it was in Warsaw. It was the radio concert hall, and there were 500 people there. And it cost $20 to get in. And the budget for this project was immense, like a hundred thousand euros or something.
And in the concert that we did, the budget of €100,000 versus €500, €1,000 to play music to 500 people, €500 to play music to a hundred people… how many shows and how many people could have been reached with a thousand dollars distributed over many shows?
That’s an immense effort.
Yes. And how many more musicians could have played, right? Thousands. So that’s where my head’s at. How do you spread the wealth? How do you share the materials? So more people can do work, and more people can hear the work.
And in the zeitgeist you’re talking about, people who want to be a star and want to play to 500 people, 1,000 people at once rather than 10 shows to 10 different audiences. Albert Ayler comes to mind. It’s not much changed since then, only the source of depression changed, in my opinion, because people want to be stars even more now because of the influencer and entrepreneurship culture.
I really don’t believe Albert Ayler wanted to be a star. He just wanted to be himself, and it was not an option back then. So I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful because of people like you. As you said, there was a Peter Brötzmann memorial concert in Istanbul. That’s an amazing thing.
You know, at the beginning you were asking me how do I continue to do what I’m doing, what motivates me? What routine do I have? I’m being very honest with you, like, the opportunity to have a conversation like this is a big part of why I do what I do.
I’m really glad to hear that.
Now I know somebody who I didn’t know. We were talking about ways to find solutions to keep things going that generate energy. I’m not by myself sitting at a desk hoping for change. We’re talking about doing things, where you are, where I am, bringing people together and finding sustainability and activity despite the odds.
Because all the people that you have mentioned, in the different time periods they worked, all had odds stacked against them. Did you talk about Black American musicians and the odds stacked against them over and over and over, and yet the magnificence they have created in music and art and writing and film. I mean, some of the most important artists to come out of the United States have been from the Black American community, and talk about odds stacked against them. And still you look at the news, the perpetual violence against that community. I can’t even process that.
So when we talk, I think of my friends and what they’ve done in whatever community they’re a part of, because there has been resilience and overcoming those odds again and again because of creativity. When kids in schools, in big cities, and especially kids going to Black public schools, and then they don’t have music programs anymore. They don’t have access to instruments anymore. What comes out of that is hip hop. They invented the turntables.
And then they started using samples.
And they generate a whole new way over again to invent new forms of music with new materials. And then what happens? They make it illegal. Not the creative community, but lawyers. So it makes it harder to use samples. And who is generating the most interesting work with samples? Black artists, right? And then they figure out how to do it differently.
So Hank Shocklee figures out a thing, and that gets derailed so you can’t do another record like 3 Feet High and Rising, or whatever. And because it’s just prohibitive because of the samples. And then J Dilla figures out another way to do it. And does the music that they do.
You talk about creative action overcoming the odds? I mean, we can do this. We have examples of people doing it in our history.
I mean, without odds, I don’t think art would be possible. Let’s go back to the Renaissance. Caravaggio wouldn’t exist. I’m not talking about his personal rebellion, his life standards wouldn’t let him to be an artist if he didn’t defy the odds. Art is all about odds in my opinion. I’m sure you know, apart from the content of it, there was a song in World War One era which was popular among soldiers: “We are here because we are here.” When I face the odds I remember that sentence. Okay, we’re here because we’re here. Now, what are we going to do instead of saying “Why am I here, or what the hell am I going to do to survive?” Okay, we are here because we are here. Let’s go forward.
Yeah. It’s interesting to find ways to articulate the meaning of what we do as artists. You know Michael Fassbender, I’m sorry, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, not the actor, the director. In one interview he said something along the lines of, like, none of it matters, right? None of it matters. But why not? Why not put something in there anyway?
Like, you know, the idea that art will create a revolution. You know, there’s this romantic ideal that it will happen. But it’s like what Steve Albini said, which I do believe, it’s a revolution, one person at a time. It adds up, right?
So instead of saying things like, “Why are we here? Why do it? What’s the point? No one’s gonna know.” There’s a million reasons not to do it.
The question instead should be, what can I put into the situation? What can I contribute to the situation? And the beauty of this? It’s the thing Mike Watt said in We Jam Econo, which is so great, “All you had to do to belong”, and I believe this firmly. Be part of the scene. Part of the community.
Let’s say you’re not a musician. You’re a fan. Then put up posters. Create posters. Get food for the band. Put somebody up in your house. There’s a million ways to contribute. And rather than look at the 1 million reasons saying, “What’s the point? Does anyone care? Understand?” Actually, yes. People do care. Yes, it does matter, despite all the odds.
Because I speak to the fact that some kid who grew up in the suburbs of Boston ended up playing with Getatchew Mekurya at the National Theatre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. That’s impossible. There’s no algorithm that creates that journey, that narrative. It’s a fact.
And the fact is, music changed me so thoroughly, and everything led me to another thing, and another thing, and another thing, and that’s how I met Terrie and The Ex. And every time I got to be around them I’d learn something, and it got to a point where I thought, “Wow, I could be part of that project.”
You gotta do something, right?
You’ve got to do something. You gotta, because it accumulates. It’s not always Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill. Sometimes it’s a snowball going down, gathering speed.
And there is no such thing as failure in this case, in my opinion.
Yeah, the failure is to not do anything. I’ll refer back to your original question, like, the routine and stuff. I think it’s very important: the idea of self-critique. Not self-criticism with the negativity attack. Not criticism, but critique. To look at what you do and analyze it, and see how I can do it better. Because you only know what your vision is, even if you don’t even know how to articulate the vision to yourself.
The inner self, the inner sense of “I’m reaching towards this thing, and I know I need to know more about this particular subject or this particular artist fascinates me, I need to study more of it.” Our intuition is so crucial. It’s not just our intellect. It’s the intuition that, as artists, is of equal importance.
And you just go with that intuition because it’s going to lead you to the right place, and you need to look at what you accomplish and what you don’t, because failure is not learning from those experiences. That’s the failure. To not do anything in the first place, and not learn. Because if something goes wrong, which it will, to ask why, and then how to do it better next time. That prevents failure. True failure.
And the only one who can really learn from those experiences is the individual immersed in it. You got to book a tour to figure out how to do it. You have to book a concert first before you can book a tour. You gotta rehearse and have music to play before you can do a concert, you know. There’s a whole, sorry, it’s not a mystery. It’s all really practical.
But I think a lot of times because of this whole star mentality you’re talking about, and success, blah blah, fame, celebrity, there’s so much driving people to want that rather than driving them to ask, why not contribute? Why not figure out a better way to do this and help each other?
You know, and I think that the people I’m around all think like that. They all think as collaborators. They all want the ecosystem to thrive. And they are looking to have that mentality to align with them to have more energy to go forward.
One meaningful conversation with someone who’s really in your frequency beats everything in my humble opinion.
It totally does, because then you know you’re not alone. This isolation thing you’re talking about, like the way social media breaks stuff down, corporations break stuff down, the whole politics trying to disrupt the social fabric of everybody. A conversation like this, or with your friend on the street, at a gig, in a museum, or whatever it might be, generates energy and breaks up that isolation.
Because you realize, actually, we’re not alone. But we have to actively pursue togetherness. Because the systems here are pushing us apart constantly. So we have to work towards collaboration. We have to work towards togetherness. Otherwise, the isolation is going to come. Because that’s what they want.
And it’s not like some kind of a conspiracy theory thing. It’s just… look at what’s going on.
Exactly. And that’s going to cost individuals a lot to be able to be individuals. That’s a huge cost.
And I think that’s a very crucial point you’re making here, because the beauty of the things I get to be involved in, improvised music, which is my focus, in a group, everybody is, not only gets to be an individual, is supposed to be an individual. They’re supposed to contribute their own ideas. That’s like the precept, that you’re an individual bringing your ideas to a group effort.
And it’s better than the sum of the parts. A good group is stronger than the individuals in it, because they create this energy that wouldn’t be possible if they were separated, or if they just were all playing the same thing the same way.
So that’s another factor, to be an individual in a collective. To work in collaborations where your individuality matters. And the truth of it is, it does matter. But you don’t want to be an individual in isolation, because then it doesn’t matter.
Your individuality doesn’t matter if you’re alone, sitting in a room, doom scrolling, and in despair, because things are so completely fucked up, which they are.
However, your individuality, if you contribute it to projects that you dream about, enables them to take place. That’s the best combination, because you can be who you are, contribute how you can, and get rid of all this zeitgeist, that you’re supposed to be a success and famous and make a lot of money and have a nice watch. All this crap.
You can decide what’s actually important to you, and figure out how you can do things to make those things occur, even if it is to start house concerts. You got a big living room? Okay, house concerts. “I can’t play, but I love this music. I can have a space for it once a month.”
That’s the kind of thing we need.
That’s the definition of being alive, in my opinion. Otherwise, we’re participating in the catastrophe.
Right, creating the catastrophe as opposed to the solutions.
We’ve talked about your Instagram and blog posts earlier. Since your father was a writer, I assume reading and writing were a natural part of your daily life while growing up. What do books and writing mean to you? We know that you have contributed to long-term book projects like John Zorn’s Arcana: Musicians on Music, as well as publications like Sound American and Catalytic Quarterly. Do you have a personal book project in mind?
No, I’ve been toying with the idea, and there’ve been a few folks who have come to me with the idea of trying to do a book. Because in addition to writing, I’m also very interested in interviews like this, where I interview people, and I did a lot of those for the Option series for Experimental Sound Studio. And I love talking to artists and musicians about what they do. It’s super fascinating to me.
So there’s been talk about maybe a book with interviews or a book about the work I’ve done. There is some talk about that. Right now, it’s nothing super concrete. And so much is already going on with just the music part itself. I’m just kind of keeping a journal of my thoughts about what I’m doing and how I’m working on things, to keep track of it.
So if there’s a point where a book opportunity comes down the line, and I could spend the time on a project like that, I’ve got the materials in place, you know.