Photo courtesy of Bill Smith
|
Saxophonist / composer Ken Vandermark is a driving force in
creative music worldwide. Juggling
several active projects, releasing several recordings a year, and constantly
touring, he is not just an overactive participant, but also one of the
music’s primary instigators. Over the
last ten years, he has spawned a new level of activity in improvised music in
his hometown of Ken’s recent projects include a duet recording with bassist
Peter Kowald; a double disc of live recordings of his DKV Trio, featuring
bassist Kent Kessler and drummer Hamid Drake; a new trio called FME with
bassist Nate McBride and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love; and new recordings this
year [2002] from his ensembles School Days, the Territory Band, and Spaceways
Incorporated. He plans on touring this
year [2002] with the AALY Trio (featuring Mats Gustafsson, Kjell Nordeson,
and Peter Janson, and inspired by Albert Ayler), Paul Lytton and Paul Lovens,
and the Brotzmann Chicago Tentet. Brian Carpenter spoke with Ken in this interview about his rise
to prominence, the MacArthur award, and his latest project with the
Vandermark Five. ------------------------------------------------------------------ BC: Let’s get started
from the beginning. I know that your
father Stu is a big supporter of the improvised music scene here [in KV: Well, I started off
playing trumpet in fourth grade and I was a markedly terrible trumpet
player. But I wanted to be a musician
and in high school when I was a junior, I switched to tenor saxophone. From that point on, I’ve basically been
self-taught. I took some fundamental
lessons when I just first picked up the horn, and then I took some summer
lessons with George Garzone, actually.
That was important to me, especially for the music he played with The
Fringe. I went and saw that band a lot
when I was in high school. That was
very instrumental in opening up my mind to a lot of different things, musically. For the most part, I’m not really schooled in a conventional
way. I didn’t go to a conservatory, I
didn’t study composition with anybody, and for me personally…that’s been the
most useful way to go about what I’m trying to do. I think that in some ways it’s slower, but
you end up solving problems your own way, which gives you a kind of –
hopefully – more personal and unique stamp on what it is you’re trying to
do. So it wasn’t like a conscious thing; I mean I didn’t
consciously decide to not go to music school.
When I initially went to college, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a
musician. I was studying film in BC: What triggered your
move to KV: Well, it was a lot
of different factors coalescing at the same time. I had a sense of what I actually almost moved back to BC: After being awarded
the MacArthur Grant in 1999, you’ve done a lot with that in the last few
years, with recordings made on OkkaDisk and the Brotzmann Tentet tours,
etc. Groups like this and Vandermark
Five are such a challenge to tour with, financially speaking…this type of a
grant sort of enables these tours, does it not? KV: Well, before I got
the MacArthur, the quintet had been touring already. I had been doing tours with AALY in the I’ve been trying to figure out how to make things work in the I feel like I’m really lucky because economically that money –
knock on wood – is a surplus. I’ve
been able to live and survive as a musician in my relationship with my wife
-- who’s a pediatrician – and the combination of that has enabled me to be a
musician full-time. Most of the people
who I work with…unfortunately…have to have various forms of day jobs: Jeb
Bishop is a translator, Dave Rempis is a bartender sometimes, Tim Mulvenna is
a full-time musician, but a lot of the guys I work with are doing music
part-time, which I think is unfortunate.
And I think that a lot of people don’t realize that. BC: Right, it’s kind of
behind-the-scenes… KV: Exactly. It takes a lot out of people
physically…energy-wise…to do something different other than music and put all of their creative and
physical energy into this music. I
feel like I am fortunate to be in a
position where I am a musician full-time.
It gives me the time and leeway to try to book tours and organize
things and put concerts on and work with other people and try to hopefully
get more exposure for the people I work with and hopefully get them more
work. For me that’s extremely
important, because I do feel like I’m fortunate to be in the position I’m
in. And all the money that’s come in
from the MacArthur I’ve been trying to use on music projects. Right now I’ve been trying to sock a bunch
of it away over the next few years.
I’m not going to be using as much of it. I’m going to be doing this Brotzmann tour
in June, but other than that I’m going to try to save it all and invest as
much of it as possible, and use what I make off of the investments to help
subsidize projects and whatnot. So
there will be a large chunk of money there…ongoing…to help keep the music
happening when times get more difficult. BC: How did the
Vandermark Five group come together, and what’s the vision for it? KV: Well, when the
Vandermark Quartet disintegrated, I wanted to continue to work with So that was kind of the objective – to work on aesthetics and
compositional ideas, and that was totally focused on those issues. And I was lucky enough to find people that
were willing to do that, and that’s difficult, because you’re asking a lot
from people. The music can be very
difficult and challenging at times to play.
They have to put a lot of time into rehearsal and touring and doing
music that – from an outsider’s view – isn’t there. People think of it as being my music, which makes sense in a way
because I wrote the compositions and the structural ideas behind them, but
everybody in the band contributes an infinite amount to the realization of
the music. And that’s not just playing
the parts right, but that’s bringing creative energy and ideas to the
arrangements and obviously the improvising.
So for me, I kind of think of it as sort of my version of the Mingus
group, with Dolphy. Mingus brought in
arrangements of tunes that he liked by other people, like Ellington, and then
he wrote music for the band and no one else wrote compositions or
arrangements for the band. But they
obviously all – like Dolphy or Jaki Byard – added an immense amount to what
the band sounded like, and what the band did, and how it played. So I kind of think of the Vandermark Five
like that. I obviously wanted to use BC: Vandermark Five is
one of the more composition-based groups you play in, as opposed to DKV,
which is more of a free form group.
How do you approach composition for groups like the quintet, groups
with collective improvisation? I hear
compositions with a head followed by general sections with different
forms. Are they mapped out a
priori? What do you do structurally to
inspire the improvisor? And what’s the
process of writing these pieces -- are
you getting ideas from a piano, or are you getting melodic ideas from just
what’s in your head? Or are you
writing down your improvisations -- are those
the compositions? Maybe speak to that
a little bit. KV: Well, there’s a
bunch of different things in there, and they’re all really good
questions. In terms of the actual
writing process, I’m a reed player, so I write off a horn. I can’t really play piano…I can sort of
peck at it. But in terms of
arrangements, the piano is really helpful for voicings, horn parts, and that
kind of thing. In terms of the actual
melodic content, I figure most of the time I’m playing the instruments I work
with, and writing off of those makes the most sense to me because you’re the
most connected to those. The distance
between my idea and its expression is shortest between instruments I’m
working with. With the piano, I mess
around with it occasionally, but I’m not writing off of it, because it’s not
where I’m well-versed. In terms of the compositional approach, it really depends a lot
on each band. With the quintet, it’s
as open-ended as possible; anything that’s interesting to me personally that
I think may motivate someone to improvise in a way that would be new to them
or takes them someplace else I’m going to utilize. If you look at the different records,
there’s a lot of range, as far as source materials that have inspired the
writing – everything from funk and rock stuff to new music, classical, free
jazz to West Coast jazz -- it’s all over the place. And I think that it all holds together because
the people I’m playing with understand that there’s a unifying quality to why
these things may be interesting, why they may work. And the job is to try to pull that off, and
make it not sound like a pastiche, or a postmodern cut-and-paste. So with the quintet it’s one approach to the writing, but with
Spaceways, that is a radically different kind of thing. Part of it is the musicians involved, part
of it is the size of the group, part of it is the aesthetic that we are
interested in working with – funk, reggae, and kind of free jazz head tune
oriented type of thing. The Vandermark
Five compositions, on the other hand, tend to be extrapolated narrative forms
that start in one place and end in another place. It’s not like a head tune, like an Ornette
Coleman tune, which is a very functional and strong way to work, and there
have been a lot of people who have done that and done that extremely
well. But I’m trying to find other
ways to write music for improvisors. BC: Right, so the
transitions stem from the improvisations.
The compositions on the latest Vandermark Five album, Acoustic Machine, are each dedicated
to pioneers of the music. Do each of
your compositions stem from the composers’ styles or their writing…? KV: Generally speaking,
the fact that the pieces are dedications is not so much that they’re tied
compositionally to the artists, but that this is an acknowledgment that these
people have made an impact on me. In
some cases, like “License Complete” dedicated to Julius Hemphill, Dogon A.D is one of my ten favorite
records of all time, and I was thinking about that particular piece of
music. His use of really heavy groove,
bringing something totally different to an improvised jazz context was really
important and central to the way I think about things. So that one [“License Complete”] actually
has some of that…for lack of a better term…blues/funk head to it. “Coast to Coast” I wrote, worked it up, and then later
dedicated it to Stan Getz, because with the approach that was taken on that
piece, it sort of made sense to dedicate it to him. I think Getz is sorely misunderstood as an
instrumentalist…he was just an amazing and fiery improviser… BC: Oh, right, I agree
completely…he has that West Coast reputation of sort of laid-back
improvisations… KV: Right. So those tunes do have some themes that
were written with those artists in mind.
But sometimes I don’t understand people’s dedications at all…they have
no reference at all. For me, knowledge
of their work really has changed my life for the better. Sometimes it’s a musician, sometimes it’s a
teacher, sometimes it’s a good friend, but these people have enabled me to do
what I’m trying to do as a creative person and give me the strength in any
context. Sometimes – for anybody – it’s
a hard living. Period. No matter what you do. And the artists that keep us going, I
think, sometimes get overlooked.
They’re not acknowledged, and they should be. So it’s an attempt to do that, in a small
way. Also, I’ve had some people get in touch with me and say “I didn’t
know who so-and-so was”, and I want to check out his stuff after you
dedicated a piece to him. And that’s
amazing to me. So that’s part of it
too. I’m totally fascinated by what
musicians and artists do and study, and what they’re influenced by. And
that’s actually how I discovered Warne Marsh, was through Braxton. I kept hearing him talk about this guy
Warne Marsh, and I was like, who’s Warne Marsh? I had never heard of him. Then through Warne Marsh, I ended up
getting to hear Tristano’s work. BC: So it’s a thread… KV: Right, it’s an
extremely fluid process, and it ties together all of these artists in a
cross-pollinating way. So doing the
dedication thing is an attempt to say, “These are the things that are
affecting me. Check them out if you
want.” And that’s kind of what I’ve
been doing…I listen to artists I look up to and listen to what they’re
influenced by. And then they impact
me. So it’s this really great,
wonderful way to take this creative energy and passing it on to other people,
hopefully… BC: There’s a wide
spectrum of form on Acoustic Machine. Is that something you look to when you
write pieces for a record -- trying to present the breadth of the group, in
effect saying “This is what this group is capable of”… KV: Yes, I think that’s
a pretty accurate statement. One of
the things that I attach to the approach of the Vandermark Five is that it’s
all possible; the musical spectrum that exists is potentially all material. And hopefully we get to some things that
are our own, and that are original and personal and haven’t been done
before…and history will decide that.
But it’s all potential material.
For me, with the quintet, I’m searching to find new things for the
band to do that may push us in new places to play and new ways to improvise
with the material. So it is a
conscious thing. It would feel very
strange to me to make a Vandermark Five record that was all like…swinging
jazz. It wouldn’t be the nature of the
band, whereas with another group it might make complete sense. So it’s really an attempt to say in some
ways, “There’s a world of music out there, and it’s all potentially source
material for where we may go next.”
And that includes, in the case of the latest record, everything from a
short piece dedicated to Feldman that is very quiet and introspective, to an
extended aggressive pieces like “Auto Topography”, and the sort of funky
pieces like “License Complete”. The thing is to try to put a coherent set together when we play
live, and put a coherent album together from all of the potential
pieces. And I think that it’s really
interesting because the way these tunes play off each other in the course of
a night or in the course of a record really changes the way the improvisors
will play. That’s a big part of
it. Like tonight, “Wind Out” was the
last tune of the evening and then we did an encore with “License
Complete”. The way that we played
those tunes was different than if we opened the night up with “Wind Out” and
then did “License Complete” at the end of the second set an hour and a half
later. Those things play off each
other, and the musicians play differently based on how the sets and the
albums are constructed. And it’s interesting the way you end up hearing the music. One of
things that are great about CDs is that you can re-sequence things. So this piece “Hbf”, which is cut apart on
the record into 5 pieces, is tied together by extended improvising when we
play it live. But when we did the
record, it seemed to make for interesting segues between the other
material. With a CD, you can lay all
of those themes out consecutively and actually hear how the piece works
thematically, and that would change the way you’d hear the piece. When we were in Rochester, someone wrote about that piece, “Hbf”,
and said it was completely unlike Feldman because, for one thing, it’s very
short. And the truth of the matter is
that when we actually play it, it’s an extended piece of improvisations. I can see where that writer felt that way
because it works that way on the album, but that’s the thing that’s so
beautiful about improvised music – the album is just one version of that
reality. And from night to night it
changes radically, so I think the combination of being able to play with the
band live, keep up with the material, and so forth, makes it an ongoing
developmental process of music. And
that’s why I love it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ © Free Association 2001 |
