Wish You Were Here

Douglas Henderson's Music for 100 Carpenters at The BOILER. Photo by David Henderson (from atop the boiler!)

The installation version of the piece (which includes video shot from above with wide angle lens capturing the performance AND a five channel surround mix of the piece) is up at The BOILER until December 20th. BOILER hours are Wed. - Sun., noon - 6pm, 191 N. 14th St. Williamsburg, Brooklyn (bet. Berry and Wythe)

Parlour Games at The Tank, December 4 and 5

I will be writing more about this piece soon. Parlour Games is a collaboration between myself and choreographer Tze Chun. The choreography is inspired in part by Victorian era parlour games as well the architecture and environment of late 19th century / early 20th century New York City.

The music I am composing for Parlour Games is mainly for piano with the harmonic, rhythmic (definitely rhythmic), and melodic language coming from some of my favorite composers - Debussy, Satie, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Scott Joplin...even a little bit of Mahler. I'm also utilizing a lot of Foley-like sounds (my own recordings) including the creaking stairs and slamming doors of a six unit turn of the century building as a part of the mix.

There will definitely be some effects processing of the piano performances (all done by pianist Daniel Kelly - please check out his music), but I don't want to give too much away here...

December 4 and 5, 2009
Parlour Games
Choreography by Tze Chun
Original Score by Chris Becker
@The Tank
354 West 45th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues)
December 4 and 5, 2009
9:30 pm
Admission: $12

Interview with Douglas Henderson

Interview by Chris Becker
Right Photo: Composer Douglas Henderson

To complete my triptych of interviews that began back in September with author Ned Sublette followed by saxophonist, composer Matana Roberts, I bring you an interview with my friend composer Douglas Henderson. I am participating in a performance of Doug’s Music For 100 Carpenters next month (November 7th and 8th, 8pm, at Peirogi Gallery's BOILER space in Williamsburg, NY) and I thought an interview about the piece would interest and provide a "way in" for those unfamiliar his work.

Douglas Henderson's work straddles a line in between the categories of music, sculpture, and dance and theater. He has presented works at the Whitney Museum at Altria, Dance Theater Workshop, and PS122 in New York and at Inventionen and daadgalerie in Berlin, among many others. Doug describes Music For 100 Carpenters as “a theatrical surround-sound music performance, enlisting 100 skilled and unskilled tradespeople. Prying at Stockhausen’s convolution of rhythm and timbre, 100 hammers, 100 blocks of wood and some 10,000 nails of varying sizes are brought to bear in a real-time, real-world articulation of complex computer synthesis. Under the guidance of job supervisors, thousands of hammer blows become waves of tonal murmur, threaded with rustlings of nails and occasional snarls of righteous indignation. The performers are organized into work crews with lists of tasks and closely timed schedules, and arranged in a circle around the audience. Toolbelts, sweat and lunchboxes are part of the score.”

If you are interested in participating in one or both performances of Music For 100 Carpenters, you can email me, leave a comment, and/or visit the 100 Carpenters website.

Chris Becker: In performance, Music for 100 Carpenters generates an incredible dynamic range of sound. What you yourself describe as a “limited sonic palate” (i.e. hammering nails, shaking bags of nails, opening and closing lunchboxes, etc) actually generates sounds that transcend their humble origins. As a composer, do you yourself hear the potential for all manner of expression from the “non musical” sounds of tools, household objects, and/or the natural world (rain, wind through leaves, etc)?

Douglas Henderson: I generally work with base source material; partly because it is much more susceptible to surprising transformations (especially in this technique of multiplication, which I'm much taken with), and partly because it inevitably has a heavier psychological wallop. Working with the stuff we all grew up with, from birth, affords a lot of suggestion, which, manipulated, becomes a strong part of the subject matter of the composition. Psychology, or more phenomenology, is something that can be played with on the level of musical composition, and that fascinates me.

CB: There’s a spatial component to Music for 100 Carpenters that is hard to explain on paper. In your description of the piece, you write “… (it) unfolds as a moving sculpture, using sound to tilt the architecture of the venue.” The audience is more or less surrounded by the carpenters and the sounds they’re producing over the course of the piece. Other works of yours that I’m familiar with – multichannel compositions using prerecorded sounds – are played to listening audiences seated in concentric circles faces out with several speakers placed around perimeter of the venue. Is your use of space (spaces?) – i.e. where the individual sounds occur and where the listeners are located –a means for sensitizing your listeners’ ears to sound?

DH: I would say that tuning the listener is a central part of the work, both in terms of space and sound. Maybe this is one of the things that distinguishes the identity of the thing, and perhaps defines it outside the realm of music (but maybe not...).

In this piece the carpenters are arranged around the audience, in 10 groups, so I have in some way a 10 channel surround system (with considerable slop, as I don't expect any sort of precision of execution from the mass of carpenters). I would love to put the audience in concentric circles, as this maximizes the dimensional imaging, but we don't have space in the gallery, and the audience will be in 2 sets of rows facing opposite walls, the best compromise I can manage. In this piece, space, location, direction and sonic architecture are nearly the totality of the composition. Each performer can make only a few sounds, and while the multiplication of those sounds is a large part of the magic trick, the main is about location, mass, volume and so on. "Where is it? How thick is it?", these are the things I'm trying to get the people to perceive as variables for composition, and to experience the organization of time in those terms.

CB: Music for 100 Carpenters began as a prerecorded work overlaying several tracks of the sound of one person hammering nails. Since then, the piece developed into a live performance using as many as 50 people. And November 7 and 8 at Peirogi Gallery, you have 100 people (carpenters) on hand to perform the piece. What are some of the qualities to the live performance of Music for 100 Carpenters that you could never realize in its original prerecorded single carpenter version?

DH: The recorded version was actually only an accidental discovery, when a “solo” button was inadvertently released and something strange came out of the speakers. From hearing one person pounding some nails into a board I suddenly heard 40, and the sound was completely transformed, I could no longer recognize the source. The piece was born at that instant. I then used the canned version as way to compose the 50 carpenter piece, which was never intended as anything other than a proof-of-concept, i.e. that the same magic trick could take place in the real world. I was always shooting for the 100 carpenter version, but never had the venue or the money to make it happen until now.

The piece is designed as a set of orders, or scheduled tasks, in the same way that a large construction site is organized. No one has the complete picture, everybody just puts their heads down and does their bit of the work; somehow a building emerges out of all that unknowing, and all that lack of communication between the trades, the architect, the general contractor. I thought this was an interesting set of boundaries for a score. The live iteration, fraught with error, unpredictable following times and so on, completes the thing, or corrects its inherent clumsiness, because the commands possible in the score are very clumsy. If everybody performed exactly what is on the paper it would be kind of blocky (as is the recorded sketch), like a low bit-depth digital converter; the human element is a kind of “dither”: noise introduced to make the signal clearer.


CB: There’s a quote from the painter Piet Mondrian at the beginning of composer Morton Feldman’s essay “Crippled Symmetry”: “I enjoyed painting flowers, not bouquets, but a single flower at a time, in order that I might better express it’s plastic structure.” I immediately thought of your multi-channel piece (pages of illustrations) which uses thousands of recordings you made of brushing two leaves together to realize a multi-tracked, complete and leafy “tree” comprised of the recordings. What did this recording process – similar to Mondrian painting a single flower at a time to create a bouquet – reveal to you in terms of structuring an imagined tree?

DH: A slightly lateral reply: I’m doing some sort of granular process in these pieces. But where the definition of granular synthesis assumes (or perhaps mandates) that the grains have no particular identity, I am interested in putting an individual face on every grain. So for example, in (pages of illustrations) I made hundreds and hundreds of individual recordings of brushing the leaves together - in some way I was getting to know the tree one leaf at a time.

I see the algorithms used to manipulate grains streams and clouds as some form of government - you make a law and many people will follow it, to some extent. It can be something rather minor, like, “don’t spit on the sidewalk”. Some people will disobey, but you will see a citywide trend of less slime on the walkways. This is my metaphor for granular synthesis; and it then becomes interesting to zoom in on individual grains, to give them some meaning in their legal structure. Music for 100 Carpenters is very much involved in this metaphor, with a simple set of rules and hierarchies guiding the performance, and the individual sounds and micro-rhythms being very recognizable, until they form a cloud mass and take off.

CB: You describe Music for 100 Carpenters as “Prying at Stockhausen’s line between rhythm and timbre…” You lived and created work in New York City for a long time before relocating to Berlin, Germany. I realize I’m generalizing here, but what sort of reaction are you getting from Berliners when they hear and/or see your work? Is anything lost in the translation? Or are there elements that they respond to more immediately than New Yorkers?

DH: Europe, as has been observed by many more eloquent observers that I, is different. Morton Feldman said, “..in Europe, if you have a job, you’re an amateur.” This is very true, and makes it hard to perform Music for 100 Carpenters over there, because the piece is so much about this very American flexibility in the labor market. Almost every artist or musician I know in New York has at one time or another been a carpenter to make some extra dough; the piece is largely a tribute to those “tool bag days” which are familiar, not just to artists. In Germany, every profession requires a training period of 2 - 3 years before one is permitted to practice; paperwork, licenses, insurance and so on. So people don’t do a lot of different jobs, and if you declare yourself a composer or artist it is somewhat shameful to admit that you have another source of income (though most people do...). The effect on people’s perceptions is substantial, and I bump into some incredulity when I tell people that I actually make my own sculptures, do my own audio engineering, compose music and tie my own shoelaces. One curator said to me, “it is not possible that you can be really good at such different tasks. You must choose one, and only one, field.” (He has since lost his job and is frantically struggling to find a way to pay his rent, with his one, and only one, skill).

So there is a lot of skepticism of Americans for that reason, and also a lot of interest, because Americans are apt to approach problems very differently. Discussing (pages of illustrations) with a group of mainly German electroacoustic composers at the Technischen Universitaet, someone asked me, “What is the structure of the piece?” (I think he was worried that there wasn’t any - a cardinal sin of course). I hadn’t really approached the work from that angle. I was more concerned with the conceptual/perceptual problems. But the answer was very simple, and I said, “The structure is the wind.” The man was clearly hoping for something less poetic, and I had to explain that I studied a particular 14 minute stretch of wind gusts I had recorded, analyzing them for speed, acceleration, pitch alteration in my ear canals, how leaves react at the windward and leeward edges of a tree, etc. That map became the score for the piece. He was shocked - it wasn’t in his way of thinking at all. He wanted something rigorous, or he wanted me to fail - it never occurred to him that a structure could be both rigorous and completely outside his analytical framework. I had to repeat my magic formula three times before anyone would believe me. Then we all had a good laugh.

Mind you, I don’t see these differences as negative in any way, they are just differences. And I think my success in Germany is partly down to the alienness of my background. The corollary to Feldman’s observation is that in America, artists are regarded as dangerous slackers who refuse to get a real job; while Europeans view the calling as a noble one and they have great respect for the sacrifice and effort required. A cop at the German passport control asked me what I was doing in Germany, and I replied that I am a sound artist (Klangkunstler). He said, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Are you doing more in the way of installations or concerts? Berlin is a great place for sound art, I wish you all success in your work.” I wager this will never, ever happen to me at U.S. Customs.

Music For 100 Carpenters

Photo by Douglas Henderson.

Thank you everyone who took time to read my interview with saxophonist, composer Matana Roberts. And if you haven’t already, you might find my interview with author Ned Sublette interesting as well.

Soon, to complete the triptych, I will post an interview with my friend composer Douglas Henderson. I am participating in a performance of Doug’s Music For 100 Carpenters next month (November 7th and 8th, 8pm, at Peirogi Gallery's BOILER space in Williamsburg, NY) and I thought an interview about the piece would be of interest and provide a "way in" for those unfamiliar his work.

Doug’s work straddles some weird line in between the categories of music, sculpture, and dance and theater. He has presented works at the Whitney Museum at Altria, Dance Theater Workshop, and PS122 in New York and at Inventionen and daadgalerie in Berlin, among many others. Doug describes Music For 100 Carpenters as “a theatrical surround-sound music performance, enlisting 100 skilled and unskilled tradespeople. Prying at Stockhausen’s convolution of rhythm and timbre, 100 hammers, 100 blocks of wood and some 10,000 nails of varying sizes are brought to bear in a real-time, real-world articulation of complex computer synthesis. Under the guidance of job supervisors, thousands of hammer blows become waves of tonal murmur, threaded with rustlings of nails and occasional snarls of righteous indignation. The performers are organized into work crews with lists of tasks and closely timed schedules, and arranged in a circle around the audience. Toolbelts, sweat and lunchboxes are part of the score.”

If you’re interested in participating in one or both performances of Music For 100 Carpenters, feel free to email me, leave a comment, and/or visit http://www.douglashenderson.org/100Cdesc.html.

Mo later.

Interview With Matana Roberts

Interview by Chris Becker
Photos by Owen Richards (top) and Brett Walker (b&w w/saxophone)

Saxophonist, composer, fanzine writer, and blogger Matana Roberts is the current artist in residence at Issue Project Room (NYC) where she is developing and presenting in a series of concerts material for her “large scale…sound narrative” COIN COIN. COIN COIN might be described as a multi-movement composition utilizing composed, improvised, and pre-recorded music along with elements of theater (projections, candles, chains) to give voice to a complex family history that extends from Louisiana to at least three other continents. Matana – a Chicago native – combines her Midwestern roots (including the influence of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which she is a member) with a very Southern-styled “collage” compositional technique to realize performances that (in Matana’s words) “…create an atmosphere where the people witnessing it feel enveloped into the experience.” Those words certainly describe the two COIN COIN performances I myself have witnessed, the most recent being last week (September 30) where Matana, on alto saxophone, clarinet, and vocals, was accompanied by drummer and percussionist Mike Pride.

Her recent CD The Chicago Project (2008) is a wonderfully varied collection of original compositions featuring Chicago musicians guitarist Jeff Parker (Chicago Underground Trio, Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble), bassist Josh Abrams (Josh Abrams Quartet), drummer Frank Rosaly (Ken Vandermark) and special guest tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson. We talk a little bit about this recording in the interview that follows.

I first became aware of Matana’s work via her blog (Shadows of a People now called In The Midst of Memory) What I like about her writing is its immediacy and honesty whether she is providing details about her family ancestry or reacting to this country’s current confusions regarding race, gender, and class. Matana’s will to give voice to her experience as a creative artist in the 21st century, as well as to the history of her Southern, African, and European ancestors is one of the things that inspired me to reach out to her for this interview.

Please note: This interview was conducted and edited just before the untimely and tragic passing of Issue Project Room founder Suzanne Fiol. Matana is certainly not the only artist to speak highly of Suzanne, and I would like to express my sincere condolences to everyone who knew and loved her.

Chris Becker: As a composer and bandleader, can you talk about how you select musicians for a recording date or a Coin Coin performance? Do you compose with specific musicians in mind or do you go about the search and selection after the fact?

Matana Roberts: I like to compose with specific people in mind when I have the luxury to do so. Since I have been working on COIN COIN now for about 5 years as I re edit the work, I can pick and choose amongst sound makers that mean a lot to me not only as musicians but also as friends and almost honorary family. I put together The Chicago Project with every musician that is on that record in mind. I wanted it to be a very specific document about my Chicago roots and development and all of the people involved are people who made it possible for me to play at the level I am playing now.

The only exception on that record would be Frank Rosaly- Frank showed up in Chicago right after I left, but I wanted him on the record because I felt he represented the positive new influx of creative direction Chicago has been getting in the last 10 years or so, and I also just liked him as a person. I'm more interested in musicians as people first, sound makers second. If they are not compassionate and open and considerate as people, that means that their sound output will (to me) be just as cold as their probable personality in my opinion.

CB: Not to take anything away from the other musicians you play with, but one of the many exciting things about your CD The Chicago Project is the sound of Jeff Parker’s guitar playing alongside the sound of your alto saxophone. You each have a very distinctive sound that blends as well as contrasts with the other throughout the tracks. What do you anticipate musically from Jeff when he is playing with you?

MR: For whatever reason I have yet to figure out why Jeff and I have a very special musical connection that has always been apparent even in the little time we have played together. Maybe it’s because he has such big ears. He listens to some of everything and deals with the process of sound in so many different capacities - in collaborative groups, groups he leads, as a deejay. He's one of the busiest sidemen in creative music and so I just feel like he internalizes so much that allows him to connect with someone weird like me in a really empathetic and eerily intuitive sense. He's also just has an incredible big heart, the best laugh ever (Nicole Mitchell is a runner up to this though-her laugh comes from such an amazing wellspring of sound!) and speaks with such kindness about so many things, and knows how to speak on them with a tasteful brevity that I wish I could access more often.

He also has an incredible work ethic when it comes to dealing with the guitar and improvisation that I'm not sure many people are aware of. I personally think he's a bit too hard on himself creatively, but so am I, so maybe that's why we get along so well musically? He’s wonderful, I love him so much.

CB: Another treat on The Chicago Project are your three Birdhouse duets with Fred Anderson (tenor saxophone). I hear something new each time I listen to these tracks. Was there any discussion in advance between you two before recording the performances? Or was that even necessary?

MR: No discussion necessary beforehand, I just wanted to document myself getting "schooled" by a master in real time! Originally I wanted it to be a saxophone trio with myself, Fred and Von Freeman, as those two men represent so much for me as far as saxophone, Chicago and my development there but Von wasn't able to do it at the last minute and actually now in retrospect I was am so glad. Fred, 80 plus years old, was killing me in there! If it had been the double trouble of Von and Fred? Sheesh, I shudder to think on that...One time when I was playing at his Sunday night jam session Fred asked me to come by early the next week. As he was standing behind the bar getting things ready for the nights upcoming fun he turned on the stereo and blasted some classic Bird (Charlie Parker) recordings, talking to me about my sound and what he heard and what he didn’t hear in my sound that he heard in Bird’s sound that I needed to work on. There was a certain strength in the core of my sound that was hiding then. We did this ritual for a long time, really trying to put into words what the core of Bird’s sound was. It was hands down some of the best teaching I ever got about dealing with the saxophone. So when we were playing I was thinking a lot about those times-and named the tracks Birdhouse not only for that but also as homage to one of Fred's first clubs in Chicago that went by the same name. He has provided so many opportunities for inner city Chicago youth musicians who just needed somewhere safe to go that they'd stay off the streets and deal with music. Von too with his regular Tuesday night jam at the new apartment lounge. I owe of them a great deal....I hope to one day be able to provide the same kind of space for developing musicians.

CB: In a recent interview, you described your experience with elder musicians in Chicago: “…I felt like I was learning from artists who really lived their lives – like the way they learned how to play was by truly living life and very organically turning this into music.” This reminded me of something a friend of mine – a friend who teaches jazz guitar and composition in a University – said. He said once jazz loses its connection to “the street” it’s no longer jazz. Is there any way to teach a student, other than by example, how to live a life and turn it into music?

MR: Stay out of traditional music schools, would be my initial answer. I am a graduate of two by the way, and so I’m not trying to be a hypocrite here, I just have yet to see a music program that teaches people to be critical thinkers outside of trying to master their instruments. It might not be possible as there is so much that has to be focused on just dealing with the building blocks of music that there's just not the right time frame. The mastering of an instrument takes a lifetime. You will not learn a life time of mastery in a 4 to 6 year educational period. But you can learn in that 4 to 6 year period core intellectual ideas and values about the possibilities of the human experience that will last u a lifetime and will push your artistry forward if you have the wherewithal and freedom to blend the two (and it might be cheaper - music school is big business....)

On the flip side - I have had a lot of compassionate, energetic, passionate teachers within the box of "music education" and I would hate to say music school is a completely bad thing as its also allows real music masters who are also master educators (sometimes that’s not always one in the same) to have another way to support themselves and in the end support art and music (it’s all a cycle really). But I have also had my fair share of negative experiences within this framework partly because they could not classify my creativity. I think this is dangerous. I also find the diversity within a lot of these programs lacking and now see the residuals of this in the 21st century jazz framework looking kind of scary. But I mean whose fault is that really? For instance almost the entire jazz blogosphere reminds me of music school in that I rarely see any women trying to be a part of the discussion and rarely any folks of color. And I'm not quite sure if I should care in this post-Obama world we live in, but I don't know how I can contribute without just being naturally reactionary and this troubles me. I know there are folks out there blogging who are very aware of this, but few touch on it. Why is that?

At the same time, the idea of what it means to be a person of color in America is changing – it already was before Obama because of the complexities of 9/11. Now more than ever its time for a reexamination and redefinition of the idea of race as well as the idea of gender as it relates to the classification of the African American identified woman and lastly how this all relates to creativity. It can't be summed up to sound bites or the classic (in my opinion, tired) intellectual arts reactionism and generalizations of the last 30 years. My COIN COIN project has been helping me personally redefine some of these things...

Also, I don't know if it’s so much about Jazz's connection to the street per say as its connection to the struggle of the African American question? Again I am having to think of this along those lines because this has been my experience. I feel like the elders I mentioned, both African American, all came up playing during a time where there was so much struggle and strife going in relationship to the color line that a lot of the questions that this brought up came out in their expression. Miles Davis was from a middle class family; there was nothing "street" about his upbringing, but the music he made had a lot to do with these questions. Another elder musician I admired greatly and came into some contact with when I was growing up in Chicago was the white tenor man Lin Halliday - an amazing player - and his experience spoke of a cultural camaraderie with African American musicians. There’s not this same camaraderie anymore, because there doesn’t have to be, which is great in many respects. I mean at one time in America the only thing that Black folks were allowed to do was entertain. Jazz music, no matter how intellectual it might have become, was initially attached to this sphere. If Count Basie hadn't of been a band leader he would have been a janitor (he even said so himself). So now that being African American means more choice in terms of expression combined with the fact that you can receive a degree in a music that was once seen as a slumming type of discourse the whole the idea of jazz's "connection" has changed and demands a re-definition instead of a re-romanticization that answers nothing concrete. It just can't be summed up so simply anymore based on the sociopolitical-economic history of our country's past.

CB: Have you performed the Coin Coin project in Louisiana or elsewhere in the Southern U.S.?

MR: Not yet. Would love too. Right now my focus is just on getting to these places to do more in depth research. There is only so much you can do via the internet, phone calls. I need to touch the soil of these places I speak of, hug the people who have been so kind as to share tidbits of really beautiful memories with me. I also need a patron to really make this happen on the level I want it too. In the meantime I’m trying to play the grant game so that I can get support for the work but so far its been a no go. But little things keep helping it to chug along - the residency that I was just given at the wonderful Issue Project room in Brooklyn is helping me so much in just keeping the project from dying.... I can only do so much in creating the music and if it were not for people like Suzanne Fiol, proprietor of Issue, who definitely has had a vision for supporting creative and experimental sounds my own artistic visions might never be heard. I am so grateful to her and her superhero staff and also to the tireless Jim Staley of Roulette who was the first to commission this piece when I started it 2006. It was because of him that this project and the ideas I have been able to put together with it even exists in the realm it does now.

CB:: In December 2009 you’ll be presenting chapter one from your Coin Coin narrative Gens de Couleur Libre (Free People of Color) at Issue Project room. You said you’ve discovered ancestors who lived in the Cane River area (in Northwestern Louisiana) who weren’t Cajun or Creole. And that these are the people who appear in Gens de Couleur Libre. Can you elaborate a bit more on the background of your Cane River ancestors and describe how they’ll be represented musically in this upcoming performance?

MR: I guess I would direct everyone to read three books - A Forgotten People by Gary Mills, Cane River by Lalita Tademy, and Cane River and its Creole Stories - self-published by Kathleen Balthazaar Heitzmann, a cousin I found in doing this research. Mills’ book (he is a genealogist) is an important document. It’s out print but you can still find used copies on amazon.com. That book cites a lot of my people. I am a direct descendant of Carroll Jones, a very powerful businessman from that area. It examines, though maybe too briefly, the question of Creole versus African versus Cajun etc. Tademy's book is more historical fiction based on family research she has done and though I am not related to her line everything that she speaks of in that book is very much relative to my people's experience on that river. Hietzmanns book is really important because it’s a collection of documented historical narrative by people in their own words who actually lived there and it gives a really good taste of what that community was like. All of this combined with stories I have been told by my own family that still remembers certain important things in regards to race on that river I have used as jumping board to create the first chapter of the narrative Gens de Couleur Libre. The Creole thing is confusing. I have uncovered a myriad of things and am not sure how to make sense of it. Just the other day a relative told me my Great Great Great Grandmother spoke French Creole, but not Louisiana Creole. Not sure what to make of that! Again it means its time for a visit. Creole is a dying language and I am hoping, I am trying, to include more and more of it in my piece about these amazing people.

My relatives are represented in different ways in the piece - some of which is seen and some is not. It focuses a little, but not exclusively on the life of Marie Thérèse (COIN COIN) Metoyer - a woman I am not related to by blood in any way I can decipher yet but am related to her distantly by marriage. (The pianist Jason Moran is actually related to COIN COIN - something I found out after I started this project - by direct blood lineage. He has also been doing work on the Cane River story with the Imani Winds - you might want to contact him about his work on the area. He turned me onto another interesting book - The Known World by Edward P Jones which doesn’t talk about Louisiana but discusses the mysteries surrounding slaves owning slaves in the South - something that is a part of my family's Cane River history as well). COIN COIN’s story was a big part of my upbringing in that it was one of the first historical legends I was told about constantly in terms of my peoples' connections to Louisiana. And she was the first strong female, woman of color archetype outside of the women in my immediate family that I was exposed to exclusively by family story telling. For me that translates well in terms of my own struggles trying to be a woman of color dealing with an art form that sometimes refuses to include me in the discussion of it's progression among other things. But also in this chapter I touch on some New Orleans stories that were passed onto me (some of which you saw the other night) and stories of other family members within that part of my lineage. But again some of that is more ingrained in the conception of the composition and its score in ways the people witnessing and even the musicians performing it might not even realize unless I explain. I use a lot of numerology in my scores for COIN COIN, and a lot of the musical ideas are based on dates, geographic coordinate numbers, addresses, etcetera, that are directly connected to specific stories and sometimes specific people within the narrative.

Please visit the Issue Project Room website for the latest news on Matana Roberts upcoming performances. The Chicago Project is available via amazon.com, iTunes, as well as Downtown Music Gallery. Matana Roberts contributed an essay for Arcana IV available via Tzadik.com and Downtown Music Gallery. Visit the Matana Roberts website.

Feed The Loas

Hello after a bit of a break from any updates. I wanted my interview with Ned Sublette (see below) to sit for awhile as the first thing people see when they visit this blog as I put a lot of work into the questions, Ned put a lot of thought into his answers, and the whole subject of New Orleans had weighed so heavily on my soul throughout August.

The whole experience of reading, researching, and brooding in order to prepare questions for Ned’s interview felt like an extension of the process of composing music. Actually, I can’t really tell you if there is any difference between one process as compared to the other. I’m not a gifted writer, but I do enjoy learning, studying, and sharing what I feel is important information with the world. So with all of that in mind, I decided to reach out to a couple more creative people I admire to see if they’d be agreeable to answering some questions for this blog. I’m happy to say that next up I will be posting an interview with saxophonist, composer, and writer Matana Roberts. Matana’s work – particularly her sound narrative Coin Coin (more on this soon) – takes a lot of inspiration from her family’s history as it unfolded in the Southern U.S. So her interview and Ned’s will more than likely compliment each other in significant ways.

In other news...I am working on a new piece for four guitars (electric or classical) and bass (electric or acoustic). After several weeks of getting a grip on the instrumentation and analyzing and refining a chord progression I had come up with without much thought at the piano, the piece seems to be writing itself. That doesn’t mean its writing itself QUICKLY. Just steadily.

As always, thank you for reading, commenting, and for just being cool and supportive.

An interview with Ned Sublette author of The Year Before The Flood

Interview by Chris Becker
Photo of Ned Sublette by Jennifer Kotter

Writer, historian, and musician Ned Sublette is the author of two incredible books that IMHO every musician should have on their bookshelf: Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo and The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. The World That Made New Orleans is a meticulously researched history of the Crescent City beginning with its Spanish and French colonization, continuing on through revolutions both near and abroad (most significantly the Haitian revolution), and concluding in the early 19th century when - in what was now one of this country's wealthiest port cities - African American music was coming into existence. There is final chapter - a coda titled We Won't Bow Down - describing the return of Mardi Gras Indian tribes to New Orleans less than a year after hurricane Katrina. It’s an unexpected and sobering postscript pointing the way to his next book The Year Before The Flood: A Story Of New Orleans.

The Year Before The Flood describes the year Ned Sublette spent in New Orleans researching The World That Made New Orleans. During that time, Ned and his wife Constance (also and author) lived in the historically tough working class neighborhood known as the Irish Channel. After ten months and a brief return visit to take in Satchmo Summerfest, Ned returned to his home in New York just ahead of hurricane Katrina which hit Louisiana on August 29th and - thanks to decimated wetlands and an inadequate levee system - destroyed so much of a city he had come to know and love.

The Year Before The Flood resonates with me on a number of levels. I lived in New Orleans for five years (1994-1998) meeting and collaborating with many incredible visual artists, dancers, and musicians. I met my wife in New Orleans and we were married there in a ceremony that brought family and friends together from as far away as Texas, Minnesota, Florida, and Atlanta. My CD project Saints & Devils – a five year recording project inspired by stories and icons of the deep South with performances by musicians from New Orleans – was mastered just two weeks before hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast. As artists, we sometimes find that the purpose of our work is to bear witness to a history we do not control.

This month (August 2009) I chose to spend a lot of time meditating on the history of New Orleans, the experience I gained as a result of living there (1993 to 1998), and the possibilities for its still uncertain future. Ned graciously took time to answer some questions for me:

Chris Becker: Your book describes several inspiring musical performances you attended including second lines, a show at the Funky Butt by the Wild Magnolias, and a Halloween house party with Big Sam’s Funky Nation throwing down in the living room. What are some the qualities of New Orleans’ indigenous music that separates it from music heard elsewhere in the U.S.?

Ned Sublette: The music you hear in New Orleans has all the depth of the city’s unique 291-year history. As far as I can tell, New Orleans had its own peculiar personality from the earliest days of the colony.

The indigenous music of the region would be the music of the Choctaw, the Houma, etc. I don’t think that’s what you were asking but even so, I’ll take your question as an opening to underline the importance to Louisiana culture of the indigenous people, who first showed European and African alike the secrets of survival in the peculiar environment of the cypress swamp – even if we hear little direct influence of them in the sound of modern-day black New Orleans music. (If you don’t believe me, ask the groups of African American men known as Mardi Gras Indians.)

I don't know what differences might have existed between the indigenous music of south Louisiana and indigenous music elsewhere on the continent, but I think it’s safe to assume that at the time when Native Americans were a political power in the region, their music was along the generally known lines of Native American music up and down the hemisphere – drums, shakers, voices, pulse, spirit.

There's a description of a celebration with the Houma Indians in the March 20, 1699 journal entry of the French-speaking Canadian founder of the Louisiana colony, Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, which I reproduce in The World That Made New Orleans:

“To the middle of the assembly were brought some drums and chychycoucy, which are gourds containing dry seeds, with sticks for handles. They make a little noise and help to mark the beat. A number of singers made their way there. Shortly afterwards came twenty young men, between twenty and thirty years old, and fifteen of the prettiest young girls, splendidly adorned in their style, all of them naked, wearing nothing except their braguets, over which they wore a kind of sash a foot wide, which was made of feathers or fur or hair, painted red, yellow, and white, their faces and bodies tattooed or painted various colors, and they carried in their hands feathers that they used as fans or to mark the time, some tufts of feathers being neatly braided into their hair.

The young men went naked, wearing only a girdle like the girls, which partly concealed them. They were prominently tattooed and their hair was well arranged with tufts of feathers. Several had kettles shaped like flattened plates, two or three together, tied to their girdles and hanging down to their knees, which made noise and helped to mark the beat. They danced in this way for three hours, appearing very merry and frolicksome.”

Does this not sound a little like a description of the party esthetic of New Orleans, already in effect when the colonists arrived?

But when we talk about the music of New Orleans we’re talking about a powerhouse of black culture -- the layering of Afro-Orleans: Senegambians, Kongos, English-speaking African Americans, Saint-Domingans, arriving in successive waves to a series of different colonial environments and an urban space compressed by water and muck on all sides. The decades-long importance of Congo Square, a place of memory and a laboratory where a new African American music was created, every Sunday. The divide between Catholic and Protestant forms imposed on African spiritual practices. All that’s in the music, if you can hear it.

If you visited New Orleans and heard a random sampling of bands in the clubs, parties, and streets, you might conclude that what they have in common is that whatever style of music they’re playing, it’s what we recognize as funky. The way I heard it the year before the flood, funk – one of the great American musics, IMHO -- was the lingua franca of the city.

More: lurking in back of New Orleans music is the parade, most importantly including the funeral parade. And then there’s the observance of a wide range of annual festivals, saint’s days, holidays, anniversaries, et cetera. One thing that sets New Orleans apart is the intensity of its devotion to a calendar rhythm of celebrations.

CB: You describe New Orleans as a town “…where you need a different verb tense to describe a past that hasn’t ended.” I knew immediately what you were talking about. And I personally feel that this is one of the most endearing as well as frustrating things about the city. With this in mind, who in New Orleans (be it an individual or organization) is currently taking the lead to create better future?

NS: I don’t know if it’s for me to evaluate that, since I don’t live there. But I will say that I went on the Tamborine and Fan Super Sunday this year, and it was a mighty event [Editor’s note: Inspired equally by the civil rights movement as well as New Orleans street traditions, Tamborine and Fan is an organization hosts an annual pan-tribal parade.]. Which is not to say that everything’s fine. The working-class black population was devastated by the flood of 2005 (and the concomitant forced evacuation) and many have not been able to return. Nonetheless, the community that is there knows what the stakes are for the survival of the culture. Social and Pleasure Clubs are going strong – Black Men of Labor, Young Men Olympians, Prince of Wales, too many to name. A second line these days in New Orleans is a powerful experience. And then there are the Mardi Gras Indian groups.

CB: New Orleans has a long history with the island of Cuba. You write about this history in great detail in your previous book The World That Made New Orleans. Would lifting the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba have positive repercussions for New Orleans’ economy?

NS: It would be a great game-changer, in Cuba as well as in New Orleans and all along the Gulf coast. I say this every time I have a platform: the embargo of Cuba is also an embargo of New Orleans. For more than 190 years, definitively ending with the imposition of the embargo of Cuba by President Kennedy in 1962, Havana was New Orleans’s great trading partner. With restored relations with Cuba, Houston might ultimately wind up with the major airlink because it has the connecting flights, but beans from North Dakota are gonna come down the Mississippi. There’s a reason Kathleen Blanco went on a trade mission to Cuba when she was governor in 2005: Cuba imports something like 80% of its food. They can get US agricultural products way cheaper than they can from anywhere else, and a lot of that would pass through the Port of New Orleans.

Meanwhile, we need to get the Havana-New Orleans cultural link reactivated right now. New Orleans should jump out in front on this. I’m a firm believer that cultural engagement between Cuba and the US should not wait for full commercial engagement, but should light the way. There’s a marvelous organization in New Orleans, the CubaNOLA Arts Collective, that’s been doing great work. My last trip to Cuba, in 2003, was a CubaNOLA trip with a big group of New Orleanians. A lot of progress had been made before the Bush administration slammed the window shut on cultural exchange and travel at the end of 2003. It looks like that window may be about to start opening up again, though it’s hard to say how fast.

CB: Many of the homes and families who bore the worst of the levee breeches after hurricane Katrina were part of a community dating back at least to the late 1940’s if not before. A home in the Ninth Ward might have been built from the ground up in the mid 50’s with ownership being passed from one family’s generation to the next. I bring this up because I know many New Yorkers do not understand why people chose to live in New Orleans in spite of the threat of flooding, as well as other fundamental problems with that city’s infrastructure and politics.

As a non-New Orleanean, do you yourself understand why someone who isn’t Allen Toussaint or Fats Domino would want to remain in New Orleans?

NS: I don’t live there, but I hope I can keep returning there and that it can always feel like home when I do. Which, I guess, is to say that I hope New Orleans will remain.

It’s like Cuba, in that it’s not hard to see why someone would want to leave, and it’s not hard to see why someone would want to stay. It’s a hard town to live in, and it can be a wonderful town to live in. But it’s not for everyone. It’s a tough place for older people, because of the scarcity of medical resources and the ordeal that the annual hurricane-evacuation madness represents for the aged. A lot of older folks have simply died under the stress. It’s a younger town now. There’s been a move to the city in the post-flood period of single adults, some of whom are activists, trying in good faith to contribute to the community. Meanwhile, there are still many families who formerly lived in New Orleans that can’t get back, and the more time passes, the less likely it is that they will. Nor is it at all clear that the city has adequate protection from the water.

CB: You spent a year in New Orleans doing research for The World That Made New Orleans. Literature, poetry, and drama are vital components to New Orleans’ cultural life. Did you and your wife find New Orleans to be particularly conducive to the process of writing?

NS: Not exactly. It was the most remarkable year, which was why I had to write a book about it. I started writing what became The Year Before the Flood before the flood, during the Thanksgiving weekend of 2004, because I had this sense that our mundane activities felt like they were somehow part of history. And they were: the last year the city was whole. Amazon’s category for the book, which I like, is “21st Century History.”

But I found New Orleans less conducive to writing than to researching, at least since what I was researching was the city itself. I had a great working situation, with my own office in the Howard-Tilton library at Tulane. Constance was not as fortunate, because she was working at home, in a house we’d rented, subject to all kinds of interruptions, including a crew of – well, it’s in the book.

Upcoming 2009 Ned Sublette book readings and concerts:
Reading: September 2, 7 p.m., Barnes and Noble, 82 & B'way, NYC
Reading: September 23, 5:30 pm., Garden District Book Shop, 2727 Prytania Street, New Orleans
Party: September 24, 6:30 p.m., Mother-in-Law Lounge, 1500 N. Claiborne Ave., New Orleans
In concert: November 20, Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, NYC