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paul bley interviewpaul bley, the romantic revolutionary, by simon hopkins and dan hill
The legendary pianist Paul Bley performed as part of the ECM 30th birthday celebrations in Brighton last year. We were lucky enough to grab an interview, and given his historic role in modern music, he effortlessly spun out enlightening and often funny stories on the ECM label, the nature of improvisation and free music, jazz and the music business, grabbing one of the first Moog synthesizers, and forgoing the Miles Davis gig.
sh + dh: Tell us about your relationship with ECM Records
bley Well, Manfred Eicher was a bass player. He came to New York City and visited my studio there; he saw a roomful of master tapes, from floor to ceiling along the four walls. He said, 'Are you a record company?' And I said that no, I just believed in making a lot of tapes so that when it was time to make a record I could just pick one that was sitting there. He purchased one of my tapes and that became ECM 1003 - his third record. So we go back.
sh + dh: How many records have you made for ECM?
bley I don't really keep track but all in all I've released close to a hundred records in that time under my name on various labels.
sh + dh: How do feel looking back on that big a body of work?
bley Well, I don't feel it's that big. If I was going to have my own TV station running 24 hours a day for the rest of my life it would be too little rather than too much.
sh + dh: How do your studio recordings differ from your live performances?
bley Well, 'live' smacks of elitism because you're playing for 500-3000 people whereas when you're making a record people are buying it all over the world and getting married to it and procreating to it and so forth. Making records is a much more democratic activity. Life performance has always been an elitist activity. 'Chamber music' meant that someone had a chamber, and there was generally royalty nearby and so the instrument itself is a 'grand' piano, so it smacks of another time. Improvised music should encourage you to write books in real time with your tape recorder. People can write books in real time; poetry can be written in real time. There's absolutely no reason to labour for a long time over something; even a film can be made in real time. So that's what we're preaching- we're preaching real time.
sh + dh: Over the last thirty or forty years, the entire concept of improvisation has exploded. What distinguishes your work from a great deal of free improvisation is a certain late romantic lyricism. Or is this a misreading?
bley No, you're right on target, actually. My philosophical claim to fame was that once you free up the structure and don't necessarily use popular song form as the basis for improvisation (which was really ornamentation, apart from in a very few masters hands) you can use any structure and improvise on it, whether it's Indian music, tango music, jazz music, blues, ancient blues - to improvise is to improvise. Each piece can have a different premise. On one you can play without any structure at all, apart from the structure you bring to it. Another piece may be full of structure. An audience likes to hear a variety of things happening, so why limit yourself to one modus operandi? As a young artist you do have to limit yourself to what's new and most difficult so that you can master it, but after that point you play as wide a swathe as possible. But it's not what you play but how you play.
sh + dh: At what point in your musical development to 'lose all that stuff'?
bley It was as much a personal thing as it was a historical context that was going on. I've always tried to learn something from each performance. At New York at the time - and Los Angeles before it - in 1958, when I met up with Ornette Coleman (on my bandstand) many people were working on improvisation, free improvisation, because the AABA song format was getting to be a little bit repetitive. At first we thought it would be the composers that would lead us out of the popular song - Gil Evans, George Russell and so forth - but it turned out that once the composition was over for the small orchestra the soloists just got up and played Charlie Parker and ignored the philosophy of the compositions. So I went out to Los Angeles to try playing without any givens at all. It was quite successful but we weren't able to play with time. just really totally free, so the question was how to play with time in a free harmonic way. Even if it was with time, the time could be flexible, you could speed up a phrase, slow down a phase. One day, the guys in my band, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins and Dave Pike brought Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry to sit in. I realised immediately when they sat in that they had solved the problem of AABA by substituting A-Z with a final A at the end as the 'songform' so to speak. That simple piece of information eluded most jazz players throughout the 50s. Most jazz musicians in the 50s were looking to Stockhausen and the Europeans for some kind of analogy between atonalism and late Romantic Wagnerian harmonies. But unfortunately the rhythms that were offered by European music didn't relate to the North American continent. It didn't answer the question even though we could look back and see what happened in classical music and its progression harmonically. So we had to beat our heads against the wall to see how we could adopt this. When I heard A-Z I thought that the door was open and we could now play written music that improvises as a leaving of the music, then leads back to it. In AABA music you have three As and only one B in 32 bars! Times 20 chorus, you're playing A to death - you're stuck. So this new form was very helpful. That worked until 1964, at which point the drummer decided to do the same thing; he didn't want to play time at all. That was the point when the audience started to favour English folk music!
sh + dh: How did it feel back then - for those few years prior to audiences preferring English folk music!?
bleyAn artist only cares if the work itself is changing and if they're alive at the right decade the responsibility is shared, it's very exciting. The late 50s and early 60s were a phenomenal time because improvised music was changing from week to week. It changed one night on a bandstand. I worked with a drummer, Sunny Murray, who was a free drummer, and we brought in a bunch of written material that had time in it, but didn't have chords. So I counted off the time and Sunny [played freely] and I said, 'Sunny, we're playing time'. And he said, 'I love time' I went home and I told Carla, my wife of the time, Carla Bley, 'You're gonna have to rewrite the book because these guys can't play time'. So she wrote about a dozen pieces overnight. The next day we came into the rehearsal and Sunny played [odd time] perfectly. And Sunny says. 'See, I told you I could play time.' Changed right on the gig.
sh + dh: By the end of the 60s you were involved in not just playing music, but in the business as well...
bleyAnd also in the electronic side. I came back from a European tour and a Downbeat critic asked me what I thought of the synthesizer. I said 'What's a synthesizer?!' I figured I'd been in Europe too long as I was interviewing the critic. Turns out it was a 20,000 instrument that I had to acquire immediately. Being totally broke this presented a bit of a problem until I elected to write a film script in which the other actor was Robert Moog, the inventor of the synthesizer. I started the film script by phoning him up and saying 'Hello, Bob... ' and I rode him very tough. When I finally did call him and visited him in upstate New York, he's only made three synthesizers. He turned out to be a very friendly guy. The guy I had written in the film script was very difficult. He let me have an instrument, since he had made a miniaturisation of Karlheinz Stockhausen's music studio. I said that just because you had a keyboard didn't make it a live performance instrument and that he'd need my input, being a live performer. He said, 'OK, I'll send you one". He only had two! " I said, 'No need for that, Bob. My station wagon's just outside the factory. If you'll just take the other end...' And I drove off into the night. It was a very early synthesizer. And for two years - day and night - we were trying to get this thing to start! Not only was there no instruction book there was no off and on switch. To turn it on was only to light it up - it did not mean it was making a sound!
sh + dh: Have you still got that instrument?
bley Oh, I wish I did. Those instruments could go in auction galleries in New York now for a pretty penny.
sh + dh: You don't work with electronics at all now, do you?
bley No, I do. I just had an invitation two years ago from a record company called Postcards to do a solo synthesizer album, and this was 25 years after the one before. The instruments are so easy now, like a jukebox. You just push a few numbers and up pops what you asked for. It did present a little bit of a problem because in acoustic music now, if you need 45 or 50 minutes of music we just record the album. But electronics present quite a problem... after recording for two days I only had three minutes of music I liked. I only had one more day left, so I thought what it was about this piece of music... a little bit like the Hebraic prayer you offer at the bar mitzvah, 'What is there about this life that is different?'... What is there about this track that was different to the other two days' worth of recording. And what I liked was that using the synthesizer over the acoustic piano and using it so that when you touched something on the synthesizer it set of a whole set of motions which you then chase with the acoustic instrument. That presents quite a challenge because the electronic instrument has no limitations in terms of speed. Strangely enough one learns how to play by playing with a great musician who can play better than you. Just by standing next to you they sort of hand you the improvement. Playing next to a synthesizer you are also forced to play with more technique than you had imagined possible. That turned out a music session I was actually quite happy with, chasing the synthesizer for the final day of the recording.
sh + dh: So tell us about the business side of things...
bley A lot of us started our own labels. My first record was for Charlie Mingus's label called Debut Records, a trio record with Art Blakey. I realised that this was something I didn't know about, and as I'd just married my third wife I realised that the only way to keep a relationship going between two people is to go into business together. We're still married so it must have worked! Being my third relationship, I had get it right - you know what they say about three strikes! We started up this record company and we found out a whole bunch of things like who sells how many records and where do I fit in that scheme of things. It turns out there's this mysterious group of people called distributors and the distributors are really the record business, Even of your label loves you and wants to do all kind of things for you they can't go any further until the distributor will agree to purchase records in quantity. These rules are set in stone. So if they don't know anyone on the record they'll lie to you and buy some boxes of records and keep em under the desk and give them back to you after a couple of weeks saying they were returned. So you can't sell unknown people in the jazz world. In the pop world, if someone throws enough promotional energy at a group it is possible to create a groundswell, a word-of-mouth thing. But in the jazz world the music faces critics before it faces audiences and distributors have to find something to lean on.
So my first question was to a guy I found wearing a raincoat and a black hat standing on a corner - he was a distributor. Very mysterious, Humphrey Bogart type, film noir. He said, 'I know how many records everyone sells, including you.' I said, 'That's amazing, because I don't even know who you are and I've been in the business for fifteen years.' So I'd name a name, Art Blakey or Charlie Parker or whoever it was, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and he'd pop the numbers right back at me. So we learned about the distribution business and learned how much better off I was as an artist than as a record company, and how record company owners are like patrons of the arts, unlike the paranoia that most artists feel about the record companies. they're patrons of the arts and musicians should kiss the hem of their robe in gratitude, because they have to make phone calls for a year to get paid and we get paid before we get paid. So we had the best deal going but we were still paranoiac thinking that they were living off the fat of our artwork. So, having learned all of that, it wound up that my label wasn't handling the sort of quantities that my records could sell. It turns out it's not how many records an artist sells but how many a label sells. So when Herbie Hancock finally left Blue Note to go to CBS, they said (and Herbie's a friend of mine), 'Mr Hancock, we're not trying to get you to change your genre, you're perfectly welcome to make your Blue Note type albums for us and sell 20,000 copies, but our normal sales are 1.5 mill, and if you structure your product to sell those quantities, we can handle that for you as well. But we have a great deal of respect for you, so you decide.' Well, what is seduction but a naked lady? You might not even have thought of it until she took her clothes off. This was CBS stripping for the guy. So Headhunters was born, but Herbie was enough of a musician to make that an artistic as well as a business success.
He's a gentleman, you know. The only other story I have about him is the time in the early 60s when I became a sideman after Ornette (every time I learned something, I would put it on the market as a sideman - whoever hires you is validating this new information). So there are two bands looking for pianists in New York at the time - Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. The call went out for Herbie and I to show up at Birdland on a Monday night; Miles was headlining, Sonny the support act (they were playing on a Monday night because they weren't famous enough to play on any other night!) We met in the dressing room and Herbie says, 'Hi, how are you?' We knew each other; we'd met at the Five Spot. He said, 'Paul, which gig do you want?' I thought, 'What a gentleman; I don't think I would have made him that offer.' So Sonny was on the bandstand and I knew he had trouble playing standards with free players; he'd tried playing with Don Cherry and everything had fallen apart. He'd played standards in a straight way with Jim Hall. But I figured that as he could play freely on standards that was something I could do. So I jumped on the bandstand in the middle of the set. We played some tunes and I threw the kitchen sink at them. Sonny was very much like a boxer, and takes challenges so he threw the sink back at me. He hired me and we stayed together for a year. So I came off stage and said, 'Herbie, I'm going to go with Sonny and you'll just have to take what's left!'
sh + dh: What's coming up for you?
bley I'm going to play the Philharmonic Hall in February and do a Summer tour with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian. And I have a book coming out called 'Stopping Time'. The best way I can describe it is that a critic in The New York times called it a 'self-serving humorous book.' I read that and said, ' That's exactly my book!'
also by dan hill