Out of Chaos J.P Jenkins gives the 411 on free improvised music, it’s relationship to Bach and where in town you can watch it unfold. by A. Symmetrical It is a strange thing that which is called “free improvised music”. Strange in that it is a style of music that claims to have no style. I have often found that labeling music, while handy in giving someone a quick overview of what they are about to listen to, often falls short of the vast sphere of influence that is the makeup of a band. The final product that will be the song is never what is brought to the table because each individual musician has a take on what he or she wants it to sound like. Unless you are reading a chart, and even then each note or chord is open to interpretation. Does it swing? Is it loud? Will I play a fifth on the bottom or will it be the flatted seventh? So, free improvised music is a lonely beast in that there is no structure, no set of rules. Every song is different and, the thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriter rule notwithstanding, you just simply can’t play the same song twice. It is a genre that defies genre but is the ultimate genre at the same time. Tell me about the 411 Collective and how many people are involved in it? Well, there’s about eight of us. It was started kind of as an outcropping of a bunch of us playing together regularly. Essentially, it started as a Monday night thing and we got together and random people would show up and improvise together, we’d make dinner and it was just this thing. And we all have been booking shows in town, or a variety of us have for a few years now. Booking your own shows? Uh huh, booking our own shows in different places. We did a series at It’s a Beautiful Pizza; we did a series at Itizness, a variety of different places, wherever it turned up. Finally we wanted to have our own space that’s set up our own way. We can have a piano in, we can have dance performances there, we can have this community of free improvisers coagulate in this specific spot that’s pretty much dedicated to that. It arose from a frustration from playing in bars and playing in situations that weren’t the best situations for seeing this type of music.
What do you offer in your space? Primarily it’s for free improvised music. It depends. Mostly that is our focus because it is underrepresented in other places but at the same time other things have happened and will happen here but that’s most of what happens. It’s a nice space. It’s a 2000 sq ft open studio, half of it has twenty-foot ceilings, the other half has nine-foot ceilings. It’s pretty informal. It’s not like a club; it’s like a practice space that also puts on shows. Tell me about what free improvised music is. I don’t know. Each person has a different idea because each person has a different past and a different path. What is it to you? For me it is an amalgamation of all the things that I have learned in music and am free to play in any given context at the same time as other people. You’re not saying, “this is the genre we’re playing”, even though to some extent you are, you are just saying any genre goes and that’s a way of playing. Any Idea goes. Genres are just collections of ideas that people just put into a box. What I feel like it is you break apart all those boxes so the second I play a country type of lick that may go into something that is more jazz oriented. It’s all genres and no genres at all. It is your experience of music. Does a band like Jackie O. Motherfucker fall into that category? Yeah, to some extent. They do have a lot of specific songs that they (do). A lot of times it was very free but they were playing, in certain respects, idiomatically, in terms of referencing, as a group, sections of a specific kinds of music. Either everyone playing a key and doing a drone thing. It depends on the song. I’ve heard them do a modal thing where the horns are playing over the top of a modal drone that’s being held by the bass or guitar. I would consider them free improvisation. But that’s what I mean. Each person has a different definition of it based on what your musical knowledge is and what your musical interest is, really. What is every possible thing that I can do right now. Let me choose the path that seems most interesting to me this second. It’s being in the present continuously without having to think about what you just played or what you are going to play. Not an attempt to build a specific structure, per se, unless you’re feeling that structure. It almost sounds like quantum mechanics. You can look it that way. It’s definitely a paradox. As a person, I am a composition. No matter what I play it’s going to be a structure based on what I know. Why do I have to write a song? That song is already me. That song is already this building. That song is already the world. That structure is there already. I can only make a guitar sound like a guitar. I can only make it do the things that it does. I can’t make it vibrate like a reed. Exploring that particular song in all its complexity is what I try to do every time I play freely. Obviously, you are making a compromise because you can’t play every possible thing a guitar can do. You can focus on certain areas and certain times that seem interesting to you. What drew you to it? I played music in rock bands for a long time and I started to listen to jazz. I listened to a lot of Jimi Hendrix and I really liked the parts of the songs where he improvised a lot. What brought me to free improvisation What are the origins of it? It started the first time any of us picked up an instrument. Bach, when he was writing his music, had to think improvisationally, he had to start by improvising. He made up some stuff, wrote it down, made up some more stuff, wrote it down. The difference between this and that is that this doesn’t get written down, and when he wrote it down eventually, it became more structured. True, but he also used his music as sources for improvisation. He would literally play for six hours straight on one sheet of music. When he was an organist at church, that’s how he did things. There are a lot of different ideas as to why it arose, when it arose. People that I have been influenced by, in terms of my personal path in thinking of music this way are people like Derek Bailey or Jimi Hendrix or Woody Guthrie and none of that music really has any ties to each other except that their all musicians and they all played in a way that had that certain sense of freedom to it. If you want (you can) think of free improvisational music as a genre that has more of a traceable history to it but I’m not certain if I believe in the idea of history that way, so it’s hard for me to say what are the origins of something like that. I think everything has existed always. You start to go back like that and you start to find paradoxes, for instance, John Coltrane represented a certain lineage of saxophone playing, to some extent that’s true but to some extent he is one point on a much broader grid where each of us are equally valuable points. That to me is how I choose to learn music. I’d rather be more influenced by Brian Eubanks than by Coltrane because I know him. I know his reality. I know his world. I know who he is and it’s human. That seems much more important to me in terms of being influenced by things and that’s what I want to get out of doing this kind of music is to make things much more personal and immediate. 411 Collective |
was pretty practical, I was playing in bands a lot and I couldn’t stay interested enough in remembering what was supposed to happen next. I just stopped and improvised over everything. Then I realized that I wanted people to respond to my improvisation but the other members of the group were locked into a specific thing. I wanted to play with people where we are all improvising, where we were all lead instruments and where we can respond to each other and go places more fluidly. (It’s difficult) if the drummer is always playing a set rhythm, if everyone wants to flow into a different feeling of rhythm or breath, as rhythm goes up your breath speed goes up, your heart rate goes up. Everything becomes more excited. Your biorhythms can shift around over one piece of music. It’s like biking across town. There’s some hills where you go faster and faster and faster and some hills on the other side where you go slower and slower. It just flows, like life. It seems more akin to life, just the experience of doing it.