Alexander von Schlippenbach

Chapter Eight One from the West, One from the East Excerpt from 2000 PhD dissertation, Wesleyan University Alexander von Schlippenbach My influences actually begin with Oscar Peterson, widening through Bud Powell to Thelonious Monk. These influences were timely to certain stages in my playing, except for Monk's, which still plays a role. Then, of course, later Cecil Taylor played a deciding role, influencing my work as a whole. I have also always been involved with composition, have myself, over time, written many pieces. Ultimately my goal is to integrate what I learned of the classical discipline as a student with my work as a jazz musician… (von Schlippenbach, in Noglik 1981: 100, my emphasis) Resonant with Gunter Hampel's accounts of both himself and von Schlippenbach, these words capture much about the relationship between the jazz and twentieth-century compositional traditions in von Schlippenbach's work, and much about the experience of (African-) Americanization undergone by the postwar generation of Germans, especially musicians: jazz came in first, in the formative years, to inform and, in large part, become the primary musical identity; the need to integrate the European composer's tradition came rather with the mature needs to both individuate and integrate roots, to take a place within both local and global societies. We learned something of von Schlippenbach's beginnings in Chapter Six. He was born in Berlin, but moved with his family to Budapest, where he lived until the age of five. The war triggered a move back to Germany, where he grew up in a mountain village in Bavaria (something like Germany's version of a conservative American South that never quite got over the Civil War) until age 16. He then went to Cologne to take up his music education, then back to Berlin in 1970, where he sees himself remaining. Unlike the Wuppertalers and the Easterners with whom he would later work, his cultural identity started out more broadly European, less personally rooted in die Heimat. Also in Chapter Six, I posed some questions in response to American critic Carl Bauer's comparison of von Schlippenbach with Cecil Taylor, favoring the latter. To paraphrase: what exactly was the nature of Taylor's influence on von Schlippenbach, and is Brauer imposing undue expectations of music-as-narrative ("telling a story," with a beginning, middle, and end) that betray an American bias, and ignore a European value (of music as moment rather than flow unfolding, story-like)? The following references to Taylor (in Thiem [1982]), along with everything else, I think, paint a picture of a pianist who does his storytelling more as a composer (even of many of his own pianisms), and gives his improvising over to the thrust of the free-jazz moment that is more like a painting or a sculpture in sound than a story in time; he mines the bop (especially post-Monk) tradition for both and as both (composer and player). His comments point out the organic connection between jazz and composition traditions in his early development. They also point out the similar link between his thinking and personality and that of the more radically free-improvisational currents coming out of Wuppertal: At 14, I was playing boogie-woogie and blues, and then I went on to bebop and lingered there for quite some time. When I became involved with new music, I was also influenced by these concepts of sound. At the time, jazz was developing towards ever more complicated harmonies and a conglomeration of dissonances and tensions. I tried to transpose bebop to an atonal level, preserving its characteristic feeling. I think that this can be heard in my first recording with the Schoof Quintet…I listened a lot to Ornette Coleman. Only later did I discover Cecil Taylor. Today I know that the first bars of Ornette's album Free Jazz anticipated all that was to come with free jazz, even in its most extreme forms. As far as my own development is concerned, I always have to refer to Ornette Coleman…On the other hand, the Globe Unity Orchestra is the result of an independent development, of the experience I had gathered with other musicians. Looking back, you could even say that Globe Unity resulted from a combination of the Schoof Quintet and the Brötzmann trio of that time. In those days they were the most interesting groups playing exactly the kind of music I had in mind. So following my own concept, I put together this lineup in 1966 and wrote a composition to fit this frame. (45, my emphases) Note that unlike Gebers, Mangelsdorff, and Hampel (and like Kühn and, as we'll see, Petrovsky), von Schlippenbach mines much from Ornette Coleman's contribution to the development of the European Emanzipation. Many who play somewhat freer over bebop changes today, and over harmonic frameworks, also play modally, improvising scales…the Berklee school's system is programming a whole school of musicians to a very rigid stylistic orientation. By contrast, our music in the 1960s, coming right out of our own hard bop backgrounds, was certainly more open; our use of systems and scales, the same ones in use today, was clearly in great measure in the service of our development of new expressive possibilities. When we were still boppers we had more in common with today's free jazz than with bop. The crucial part, that did make up our strongest link to bop, was the ongoing tempo, which from the first we got from Ornette Coleman. The rhythmic conception in our playing as a whole was strongly influenced by Coleman… (Noglik 1981: 101, my emphases) And, the forementioned "composition to fit this frame" was "Globe Unity," filling one side of the LP by the same name. The other side was full of "Sun," which is the one examined in detail in Part III, for its use of twelve-tone and other approaches (similar to its more famous companion piece, but closer to the points of this study, as we'll see). His playing is dark and flashing, his ideas urgent and ambitious. Von Schlippenbach has never seemed like an experimenter, even when European free jazz was inelegantly feeling its way towards a proper identity. His organization and sense of structure and balance has always seemed unimpeachable. (Cook [1986: 10]) Alexander von Schlippenbach's "Globe Unity Orchestra" comprises a veritable Who's Who of new European jazz...In spite of all the problems it's had, GUO is one of the most productive and longest standing forums for the development of the state of the art collectively improvising musicians are capable of in a large ensemble, and that not only by European standards…(Noglik [1981: 97]) It's to a considerable extent due to the work of pianist-composer Alexander von Schlippenbach that people nowadays talk of independent European styles of jazz, and even of "European jazz." The West German's composition Globe Unity, written for the orchestra of the same name in 1966, has gone down in the annals of jazz history as a seminal work combining new music techniques and free improvisation. At the time there was nothing similar—even in the homeland of jazz, the United States—which could have opened up such radical paths…(Thiem [1982: 44]) Maybe it's too soon to speak of this being a tradition. I feel myself strongly based in a jazz tradition. I still call it free jazz, and this is important. I don't call it improvised music. (von Schlippenbach, in Cook, 48) When Thiem suggested to him that "jazz critics often maintain that too much of the jazz feeling is lost in twelve-tone improvisation," von Schlippenbach responded, That all depends on how much command the musician has of the twelve-tone scale with which he intends to improvise and how far he is capable of improvising. It's also possible to think of a jazz improvisation with a very slow measure and very few tones. This does not necessarily mean that it is of poorer quality than a fast one. So, this whole assertion cannot be maintained…I'm an admirer of Arnold Schönberg and I've dealt with his theory of harmony…It was all quite a logical development. (45) On the other hand, also a logical development was that of his composer's vision from (in the grand tradition of Ellington, Basie and others) his hands-on work as a pianist, and (also in that tradition) from the work of his fellow instrumentalists, more than from abstract theoretical training. And, more broadly, from his body as a whole, and theirs as a collective, in the playing. Of course, I practise certain techniques, things I have worked out, 12-tone chords and scales. But I don't have a prefixed way to use them. It's in the fingers. Every improviser has it, in a way. Sometimes I use fragments from composed stuff. I'm still busy as a composer for radio big bands, and there might be some fragments from that. I don't really know if you could call it thinking, when I play. It's more a feeling of balance, not thinking at all. When I get the feeling it's not working, then I think about what I could do to make it better. I'm not such a scientist that I could give you a fundamental explanation. Technique is what you need to transport what you want. If you know what you want to play, then you have the right technique. Piano is maybe the most technical of all instruments. The tradition of the instrument, not just the jazz piano tradition—it's a very big literature of technique and exercises. It might be hard to get out of it…but it's the same with most instruments. There were many things to discover on trombone, say, which you can't do with a piano. Apart from prepared piano, but I've stopped that now. . He's resumed it since then, as I saw at least twice in the 1997 live performances I caught. I think there are still big possibilities to play things that have never been played. (Cook 10, 48, my emphases) His mention of the horn calls to mind his long relationship with saxophonist Evan Parker and percussionist Paul Lovens in their trio. I digress from pianist-as-composer a bit to explore how that pianist-with-others aspect might have shaped the pianist-thus-composer. Berlin 9.8.97—"How," I ask, starting my second cold-gold stein that afternoon at that rough wooden table in his apartment in the posh Charlottenburg district, beating the heat, "would you describe the evolution of this trio since its beginnings, musically?" "It's very important to understand the basic working conditions of this group, which is just to play the concert," he says. "We don't have any rehearsals ever; we just start it. Around 1970 the situation was that we formed a trio to play free-jazz gigs in small clubs, and in regular yearly workshops in Wuppertal. So we more or less worked continuously over a period of years; sometimes we added a bass player—Kowald, Alan Silva, sometimes on FMP records—but the core was the trio, and increasingly by preference, though we do have guests from time to time. "The trio's identity is not only strong in itself, but even as a kind of nucleus of the Globe Unity Orchestra, especially of the band's totally free period. We had a time when we only played free, with no charts at all. I think the trio was always a kind of central organ for this period, setting the tempo, the phrasing, the gesture and everything. This was something we really developed together; it's hard to say who had the most influence. I think it is really an example of very strong teamwork and interaction." . Lovens told me: "I'm one of the believers in true love, and working marriages, stable situations and relationships with people. So we've been lucky to have this combination of Evan Parker, Alex Schlippenbach, and me, and it's turned out to be a lasting thing. I mean, ask any woman who wants to marry her man whether she knows before what's going to happen." Evan Parker told me, on the subject of this trio and other longstanding musical relationships: "…it's a big community, family kind of thing; that sounds a bit sentimental, but the whole thing is driven by love, I suppose, in the end, the same kind of love you do get in a family when the family's really working well, you know, people tolerate one another's idiosyncracies, even what you might call weaknesses, character defects…" "Paul Lovens told me he was fascinated with playing with pianists in general, and, of course, that he was closest to you. I'm wondering whether you have any special affinity for playing with a percussionist in a duo, and what the nature of it is if so." "I can certainly say that I have a stronger relationship with drummers than bass players, generically, and I play much more often with drummers, although I have played with some bassists. But since free improvising really took off, the traditional function of the bass has vanished—the ground harmony, the root tones, timed to provide harmonic structure and ground—so I don't really need the bass for the way I play my improvisations. But I can work very well with the drummer, because much of my own touch and style is percussive, too, so it's just easy for me to work very well very quickly with a good drummer. And I have worked with many—I played a duo with Baby Sommer, one with Sunny Murray." "Do you find your playing to be noticeably different then than in other situations?" I ask. "Not really. Of course, when I play with Lovens, it's a very close relationship, and that can be a challenge. When you play with someone new, it is usually easier to be much freer and more creative." "And yet the closeness is obviously something you've chosen to cultivate, in a group that's been together so long." Unlike Vinko Globokar's decision with his similarly constituted group, I think. "Yes, I think we all think like that," he states. "We take enough time to recover from our adventures, then go on again." "Do you have an equally important relationship with horn players as horn players," I ask, "as you do with percussionists? Something you developed with Evan perhaps, that supplies you with something you particularly like, something different?" "Yes, especially the way Evan plays, we often get into things together that are very close to each other, as opposed to contrasting. Things, naturally, more on the melodic side." "But he also plays rather percussively, doesn't he?" "Yeah, he does, but he can also play very melodically. Not in the way you'd normally think of; he can split up the melody somehow, in different motives, and go on with them in ways reminiscent of minimal music, the way he repeats phrases and uses circular breathing. It took me awhile to find things to do with that, but as I've developed my sort of twelve-tone system of improvising, which comes out of the structure of the piano—six notes for one hand and six notes for the other, each a tone-row—we can work together on certain tempos and pitch overlays in a very interesting, interactive way. What happens in my hands relates, in other words, to his circular breathing structures." "Tell me more about that system of six notes in each hand," I coax. "I know that in the beginning you were influenced by twelve-tone music, as a composer-arranger, but I never really thought about how it might work as a pianist. You're consciously working something out as a playing method?" "Yes, I've worked out certain chords that are very conveniently played on the keyboard. I just found them from experimenting, and have tried many different combinations, for more than twenty years now," he says. "Very systematic and slow, takes a lot of time. Also, it's very interesting, because it keeps opening up new things to work on. It's something I'm very serious about." I sense it would be crossing a line for me to ask him to write them out, or say any more about them. I recall Gunter Hampel's words about the African-American pianists in New Orleans, their own meetings with chromatic mechanics there throughout the last century, especially (re: jazz) right around the time of Schönberg's work. I muse over Cecil Taylor as a major endpoint of that first encounter, and the looming presence he's been behind FMP's European roster, and the way that presence has kept cropping up in my own study despite my decision to focus on a handful of German "first-hour" players. Indeed, as I've mused over the trombone—along with the fretless string instruments, the least chromatically designed of the typical jazz-free/jazz instruments—I muse over the piano's greater integration and diversity in the European than in the American early free-jazz scene. In other words, this music has perhaps stretched farther, or in different ways, down the extremes of the spectrum of instrumental concept design, those at the most Dionysian/wind/unpitched-noise end and that at the most Apollonian-Pythagorean/scientific/mathematical/pitched-noise end. These all beckon as promising lines of formal research in their own right, for other studies, other students… Noglik's words, however, thrill me with their resonance to my own pursuit here. To von Schlippenbach, he offers: [It would seem then also that the body itself has not an unessential role to play. One can understand that in the direct sense of the breathing cycle, the heartbeat, the pulse, the overall life processes, as well as in a more general sense. You discover this yourself in a group dependent on deep communication such as the GUO, which must put you in a very interesting position. The ongoing involvement with advanced musical material will no doubt feed the emotional life, so that one can almost speak of and discover an art of physical reaction. Do you also find this so in your playing?] I find this aspect very strong. Anyone who knows me and my music knows that this phsyical aspect is always part of it. It is so with most musicians I know. Certainly there are also players who approach their playing differently—be it with an intellectual concept or a meditative practice. So there are different ways, which I don't want to judge between, but with me there is certainly a strong physical component. (1981: 116) Noglik continues down fruitful lines, connecting body to instrument in solo. I recall the expansion of free music into the solo gesture, pioneered by Braxton, as a statement proper to any instrument—which is to say, as much to the wind instruments, designed to express flow of unharmonized sound in horizontal time, with their history of extension of the voice expressing its passions…as to the conventional solo stringed instruments (including piano), with their history of extension of the mind ordering its mathematical, scientific thoughts and explorations, designed to state harmony in vertical moment too—and as a statement signaling the mind of a composer as much as, if not more than, that of a virtuoso interpretive instrumentalist. Von Schlippenbach's words to Noglik about the piano as a percussive and/or non-harmonic instrument place him within that expansion. [You wrote of the experience of your first solo piano concert in Brügge of the focus and concentration on the instrument and you alone with it that was required. Do you find the mindset you described still to be the case? If one has this physical or psychophysical approach going on, is it something like the loneliness of the long-distance runner?] Yes, I would still put it so. The comparison with the long-distance runner is perhaps a little too athletic. But a certain aspect of that analogy works very well. I mostly try to play a piece all the way through without drifting from the tension I establish, even if I move through very different tempos [my emphasis recalls Kowald's words about his "inner stream"—M.H.] In the sense that I can't depend on anyone else for musical ideas and closure in this process, and that I am exclusively confronting myself in it, can we draw the comparison with the long-distance runner…(116-17) The words emphasized above are corroborated by both Cook and me. Cook: Von Schlippenbach isn't very involved in the vast structural heights that obsess [Cecil] Taylor. He paces himself quite thoughtfully through a piece of playing: in duet with [Sven-Åke] Johansson on records like Kung Bore, the interplay is definite and emotionally direct. His piano voicings are sometimes stripped away to [Carla] Bley-like essentials, as in their vicious rumination of 'Over the Rainbow;' mostly they're a skilful balance of curt, stabbing patterns, hectoring speedball rushes and sober, schematic interludes. Some performances, like the fascinating Drive, create a tangible long form out of the collision. (10) I found just such a "tangible long form" and "collisions" in the duet with drummer Sunny Murray, Smoke. This balance between the vertical moment and horizontal flow (analyzed in Part III) I attribute to von Schlippenbach's fast hold on and embrace of the jazz-traditional premise of tension sustained between palpable pulse and departures from it, and between pitch and rhythm—contradistinct from many of his European colleagues' radical embrace of only the vertical dimension of sound in stasis. . See Kramer 1978 for a pithy discussion of the development of "moment form" in twentieth-century European art music—closest to home here, in Stockhausen. The move from form as tonality's unfolding of pitch relationships to sound's demarcations of duration was a move from time's horizon as flow to a theoretically infinite succession of vertical eternal Nows. We've looked at metered time as a nut worth cracking—but, once cracked as a universe, it still has a place as one paint on the palette, in the work of von Schlippenbach, Kowald, and others. However, his answer to Noglik's question, following, seems to contradict that contradistinction: [Do you conceive of your solo concerts in a large arc (recall Brötzmann's description of his playing process as "one big sound"—M.H.) or do they follow the principle more of successive gestures that you develop each in their turn, independently?] (Recall Günter Sommer's and Peter Kowald's closer affinity with this approach.) The latter is more often the case…(117) To Thiem: I've been approaching all my solo concerts in a totally free way for a couple of years now. Of course, fragments of earlier compositions might crop up here and there, but this is never predictable. Also the trio (with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens) improvises freely just as the duo with Sven-Åke Johansson, except the things that happen there are very different, like Sven's singing, for example. But it's all spontaneous improvisation… (47) This also digresses us naturally, from the self-contained pianistic processes of one player to those similarly organic ones between the players in their collective. I would say that the impulse and gesture of the jazz tradition is what distinguishes our music. From that our music is improvised, though the GUO players have no explicit predetermined givens to interpret. They can all both improvise and interpret well, but it makes no sense to me to try and solidify a style from this freedom. We improvise spontaneously from feeling, from the impetus of our involvement with jazz. There are in GUO musicians who are very different from each other—Evan Parker and Günter Christmann for example. But they all share a common ground in jazz, however strange many jazz fans might find that, based on how they sound. (Noglik [1981: 113]) Aside from sheerly musical processes, the point most significant in this and many similarly adamant avowals of his music as part of the jazz tradition is clearly von Schlippenbach's perception of an international jazz genre and audience—those with which he naturally belongs—that is essentially more broadly popular/populistic than narrowly esoteric; more practically, it signals the strategies he's sincerely employed to secure his and his groups' own widest common ground in jazz history and reception. " I played jazz in the beginning—I'm a jazz musician, I'm not only a free improviser, and for me that is very important," he tells me. "There are some who will only play in the free idiom, and do so very well, but will never cross the border back to mainstream jazz. I play with my trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens what you would call free jazz—not mere improvised music, but the hardcore free jazz we as jazz musicians forged for ourselves. "I have never seen that activity's flow decrease; in fact, it seems that we're playing more now than ever before. We have a tour in Brazil coming up organized by the Goethe Institute; we play some ten concerts in Japan; then we come back here for a two-week tour through Germany and Austria and Switzerland. Then we make a record for FMP. I have been very lucky to play with this trio for so long; it could have been just a flash in the pan. "That's why you must understand that it would be a false understanding to see it as a thing of the past, and that the involvement with Monk music"—we will get to this shortly—"is some sort of new development beyond that. Our music and Monk's have coexisted the entire time, from my point of view, within the same tradition." Noglik remarked that this [jazz] impetus is itself rooted in the world of composition. A jazz musician modifies at the most a predetermined structure in large part as a classical musician simply plays it. (1981: 113) This carries us back to that "grand tradition of Basie and Ellington," above. Von Schlippenbach: If I for example compose something, I always consider first who will be playing it and what the entire ensemble can do with it collectively. This is one sense in which I remain a conventional jazz composer, as my final statement always comes from this starting point. Inspiration often comes from music we have orchestrated or played already as well as from the playing process itself. I've also derived a series of inspirations from nature—natural sounds, noise and so on [shades of the tumbling strain…M.H.]. They lead me to fresh imitations or incorporations of authentic acoustic material. The different sound results all come from strongly musical processes… Not all improvisations are bound to the jazz praxis. Jazz players have a certain emotional component in playing, an intensity, which also comes from the idiom and results in specific rhythmic elements in our music. I actually don't need to call it just the jazz tradition—it has more precisely to do with the school or style of playing, and then with the individual temperaments within that. This leads us into the history of collaborations with E-Musik composers, one which has been more problematic for practical reasons in the West than in the East. Von Schlippenbach expressed frustration over this in earlier interviews; by the time I spoke to him, he summed up such collaborations as too sporadic over the long course to have been a significant contribution to the evolution of his body of work. His work both in small groups and his large Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra had taken a turn decidedly in the direction of the jazz tradition, with healthy incorporations of the hardcore free jazz aesthetic as a subset within it. (By contrast, Petrovsky, the penultimate jazzman for most of his adult life, was most enthusiastic about his own work with contemporary composers for their promise to the future of the music.) In 1981, von Schlippenbach told Noglik: The tension [between composition and improvisation] has certainly played a role in our history. If we had the possibility to rehearse more, to really work our new ideas, I think we would resolve it better. In the GUO is a wide variety of players. There are some who can write very melodically, such as Kenny Wheeler or Enrico Rava, who work with us regularly. Also Steve Lacy, a bit more sporadically; he has a very individual and interesting way of making pieces. There is by contrast a quite different mentality among others. I want to realize the potential of the whole diverse ensemble. Occasionally there emerges, for example, an expression that foregrounds a certain musical philosophy more strongly than another, only to give way to its opposite later in some other voice. Both sides ("composition" and "improvisation") actually have a place in our programs; one piece may be almost pure improvisation, another an expression of musicians who want to realize some structural concept over the course of the playing. [And both will be extended?] Yes, because I believe they feed each other. A good idea for a composition can come out of free playing, and good arrangements lead to new improvisatory impulses. Thus a music emerges that is certainly more than what would result from "total" improvisation, which is for me in the end very narrow. With some 15 musicians making spontaneous music, which also for the audience is very demanding, I reserve the option of contrasting musical statements I myself want to make and hear them explore… [It seems important that with GUO the process of crafting sound is transparent. One hears the direct line from player through instrument to music.] Yes. Eleven to fifteen players meet each other openly in the musical interaction. The dominant voices in the group are the horns; behind them are several percussion instruments, bass, cello. Actually one can say that the GUO is basically a wind orchestra. (105-07; recall the longstanding favoring of winds—traditionally the Dionysian voice, against the Apollonian strings, from the Greek roots—in German music, flowering both there and in America through the Prussian military bands) Noglik's insight following (especially the part emphasized)will cue our own analysis in Part III: [You have said that improvisation for you increasingly tends toward a 'free atonality.' That suggests that your music might reasonably be categorized as bred through twelve-tone and serial music to an orientation to functional harmony. It is interesting to me that at this point your music often structures the emergence of sound surfaces (Klangflächen) in such a way that there is throughout a "linear" development they follow.] The more familiar one becomes with an initially strange music, the more links with the music one already knows well are seen. Our music is not so far from conventional aesthetics and criteria; where it does differ can be best discerned also through such familiarity. Anyone involved with new music—pieces by Ligeti, Penderecki, Kagel, with Schönberg and his school—will not find our music so alien. From sound vocabulary to ways of structuring it, there are many parallels between both areas. There are also many who have no such exposure to this musical culture who themselves spontaneously click with our music. Often listeners find themselves confronting the borders of their musical universe and seeing in our music new possibilities. (1981: 108-09) As we've seen from Brötzmann's musical tastes, and the experience of Butch Morris with Kowald's Ort workshop players, and the problem Jost Gebers expressed with Anthony Braxton's and Steve Lacy's approaches, the more radically improvisatory voices in FMP—clear reactions against the European legacy of composers dictating their visions down the food chain to interpreters—make for their own difficulties. Noglik addressed this: [How do you deal with the tensions in leading a musical democracy of a band full of leaders?] I've experienced no negative dynamics in this regard. If everyone has a strong idea or strong impulses to share, then all I wish to do is let them manage it themselves. Our collaboration is based on mutual respect and trust. That includes allowing everyone a way to find their own places as both individuals and team players. [You're saying, then, that the consensus is strong enough that this process won't end up repressing someone?] Good musicians don't let themselves be held down so. Even if the personalities are very different, they know to arrange those differences in terms of the music's potential for balance between the voices. Take for example two very different players of the same instrument, Gerd Dudek and Evan Parker. Both bring contrasting but complementary presences to the collaboration. Naturally this makes for musical variation from case to case. To one event Albert Mangelsdorff will bring more than Günter Christmann; in another Christmann or Paul Rutherford will move naturally to the foreground. One can never foresee this, it depends on many factors. However, I am convinced that these differences work out to a balance and equilibrium between voices more than a hierarchy of leaders and followers, in the end…(107-08) [Have you found in collaborations with strictly reading musicians the problem that the specific skills of jazz musicians are only marginally active?] If such a collaboration has any potential at all, one must have at least one long and intensive rehearsal. Penderecki was one who understood this well. I respected him throughought our collaboration. We met and spoke for long about how we could best collaborate. At one point there was talk of an elaborate television production, which would unfold in different phases—an ambitious project, for which we had absolutely no funding. The bottom line: such a collaboration can make perfect sense; it is not that different from a jazz group with a leader, such as GUO and me, who composes for players who do total improvisation. If there is interest and respect on both sides, I already know something worthwhile will emerge from the collaboration. With Bernd Alois Zimmerman, for instance, I developed a very good collaboration. He incorporated into his later work jazz, free jazz, as he understood it. With the Schoof quintet I helped Zimmerman work on a performance of his opera "The Soldiers," as well as some instrumental music. He was a really great composer. We learned much from him, and apparently he also from us. In 1974 there was the collaboration of GUO with the Hamburg Radio Choir. Schoof and I wrote for this event. The choral parts were in part spontaneous, and to some degree reflective of the improvisatory processes of the GUO players. (114-15) Again, cutting to the present, my curiosity about such collaborations circa 1997 evokes interest—but also a shrug. "Such connections do seem to continue in various ways," he says. "We were incorporated as a part of the orchestra in Baden-Baden, for [Bernd Alois] Zimmerman's Requiem for a Young Poet, which is a big composition for symphony orchestra with a little jazz part in it. I was in touch with the conductor and the producer for this project, and they conceived a project between the Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, but it has yet to happen. So such things are always in the air. . See Keller [1999] for an American first look at this composer, in an account of this work's recent American premiere. "We've always had contact with Ernst-Musik composers, since the beginning, but it's always been a very occasional thing, too, nothing so important." The record suggests, again, for all his adamantly held identity as a jazz musician, von Schlippenbach's disappointment and frustration in this failure to integrate it more extensively with that of the composer. He wrote under his own byline in 1975, If we in the GUO had the opportunity to work with art music composers, to have enough money to rehearse with orchestras for a week, I think you would see the art of free improvisation go much farther and wider than it has so far into the common cultural discourse, and into composed art music. The improvisational tradition from jazz has the musical potential to go where art music goes in terms of pitch relationships, technique and so on, with the added emotional components in the sound and feeling we bring to it, both from the jazz tradition and from our individual personal voices… It is between the achievement of a real unity [between free jazz and art music] yet it seems there are so few occasions—collaborations—affording the chance to realize it. In other words, the work is just beginning. So delightful is the potential of collaborating with art music ensembles—be they choirs, orchestras, singers, or chamber music groups—that I wish for ever more workshops, in which we could schedule more rehearsals and work. The difficulty in actualizing the musical potential that is there lies simply in not being able to afford enough rehearsal time. (12-13) After a time of inactivity due to such difficulties, the 1975-6 recording Jahrmarkt, produced by Kowald as a document of a festival-like event in Wuppertal, and released on Paul Lovens' PoTorch Records, marked something of a resurrection of the GUO at the time, and something of a turn from von Schlippenbach's toward Kowald's vision as a composer; von Schlippenbach shifted his own concept too, with orchestrations of traditional jazz material. He expressed collegial respect for Kowald's ideas and (at the time of Thiem's interview) more mixed feelings about his own, seeing the traditional statements as exceptions to the free-jazz rule of the GUO. Again, from what I saw and heard in Berlin 1997, that rule was alive and well in the trio, albeit marshalled as a subset within the more mainstream context in the big band and the Monk-specialty band, as also within his solo work (interpreting Dolphy) and duo work with wife Aki Takase. He told Noglik: I have developed techniques which one can use to make free-jazz arrangements (I use the word in a very loose and broad sense) since 1970. They have not been so much thematically conceived—and notated, partly conventionally, partly with graphic notation—but, much more, structured through different combinations of instruments, which naturally primarily simply improvise. Later I went through a phase in which I arranged songs and themes in the conventional sense for GUO to play, a relatively short phase, in 1973, for Peter Kowald's first Wuppertal Workshop…(103-04) What he told Noglik in 1978 suggests a reach in both Kowald's and his own gestures then to strategies of survival and greater accessibility (of the music) as much as of aesthetic growth. Along these lines, it would help to have radio broadcasters whose mission was to expose more people to free jazz. Sadly, jazz most usually reaches only a few people, usually those who are seeking it out. There have also been real attempts by musicians to break through this ghettoization. I'm thinking, for example, of performances of free music based especially on Peter Kowald's ideas. Saturday afternoon the GUO played in the Wuppertaler marketplace. And people out shopping and so on couldn't help but hear us. They were partly alienated, but also partly spontaneously interested in such an outdoor free-jazz concert. Of course, the first ones it drew were the kids. [So it was Kowald's initiative that brought the music community and the general community together.] Yes, it was a combination of GUO with local music groups, familiar, safe music with this apparently "dangerous" bunch of horn players. The Wupperspatzen, an accordion orchestra, played their own well-determined music in contrast to our improvisations. Later there was also an organ grinder and a Greek folk music group. Kowald orchestrated the entire event. Many people came and heard the music. The project was a success. I think much can be done in this direction. (111-12) About his own contribution then, a move toward conventional orchestration and structure that served to revalidate its free-improvisational opposite: At that time [of the first Wuppertal Workshop, in 1973] I began to make pieces different from the partly graphically-scored, partly serially organized pieces I'd been doing, using instead simple themes and song forms. That was when I wrote a piece based on Jelly Roll Morton's "Wolverine Blues." I had written so many such short heads for small groups before that I wanted to try something similar for the large group. At the same time, we began to play entirely improvised sets, to contrast with the through-composed pieces. This was a very important development, because it was actually our way of organizing possibilities for improvisation. It was more or less totally drained, this whole idea of mastering a definite form. We recognized then that our development undoubtedly leaned in the direction of total improvisation. That was the result of continual group activity in which individual players worked their own styles unto ever greater realizations of their own musical potential and energy. This energy was that of the players themselves. Today we play essentially full free sets for an hour or an hour-and-a-half, in which nothing at all is prescribed. We also have a few pieces which we sometimes—when, for example, we've played a long piece or set—play for contrast: they include both of Willem Breuker's arrangements "Out of Burton's Songbook" and "Goodbye" by Gordon Jenkins, and my "Bavarian Calypso" or the already-mentioned "Wolverine Blues." The difference between us and other similar groups, in my opinion, is that we are thoroughly trained and experienced in playing free, totally improvised sets for an hour or longer without losing the urgency and drive, with a total enthusiasm. (von Schlippenbach 1975: 11-12) Like the words about the body bypassing mental maps in music generation, von Schlippenbach's next statement corroborates those uttered by, or evinced in, the work of Globokar, Taylor, Lacy, Braxton, Gumpert, Lang, Hildegard, Bach, and Schönberg: music and poetry as the Janus loa from ancient Greece, riding their German horses strong. (We will continue collecting these glimpses, here and in the musical examples, to inform our theoretical Part III.) When I at this time wanted to write a text for the GUO recording, I tried not to write music so much as a textual expression on music to supply, more as an author than a composer. I have drawn much from literature for musical purposes. There was also less expression of a concept than the attempt to convey something of thought from a text, in lyric form, with which I had no more to do. (Von Schlippenbach 1975: 12) The composer speaks to the fundamental problem the free improviser encountered in the wake of the "first hour"—as the vertical speaks to the horizontal—in the following words: From wild collective catharsis of all desires comes an inflation of too much sheer musical strain—in any case, the refined specialties possible by a group like ours have no chance to blossom. The mix of different musical styles—as in the work of Charles Ives, based on the principle of the collage—can naturally be very stimulating. Music can simulate—as Kowald himself formulated—the soundscape of a real marketplace. The different sources merge in one musical event—the organ grinder, the mechanical music of the carousels, the cries of the people selling things and such sound events can be programmed, without their spontanteity being compromised, which was the premise for the project with the GUO in Wuppertal. (Noglik 1981: 112-13) To summarize, before ending with a few updating points from my own interview: fixed musical material and conventional technique is learned by the young music student from both native European and imported American art music and jazz traditions; the fixed material and concepts (of Schönberg, Ives, Cage) from concert tradition stand as the end results of the composer's process, those from jazz (same in kind—metered diatonic-chromatic harmonic-melodic forms/formulae) more as entry points for the improviser's process, which is very much an inclusion of the instrumentalist into the composer's decision-making about how to vary and present themes and motifs, but not into the making of them itself. The student's vision for himself is to integrate the formal European training and improvisatory jazz activity (and he has been frustrated in that goal by the lack of regular, ongoing support , such as a resident city symphony enjoys, for example, of the GUO and its collaborations with such European-traditional ensembles). The extensions by Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor of the jazz improviser even farther into the classical composer's realm lead eventually into the concept of spontaneous, unprescribed improvisation as "instant composition." When von Schlippenbach merges what he organically, idiosyncratically develops in the context of a small group (the Schoof Quintet) with those body-based gestures similarly cultivated by the Brötzmann trio, the GUO comes about: a collective driven by a nucleus of (orally/aurally) autodidactic, radical free improvisers and (literately) schooled, trained musicians. (Von Schlippenbach would protest against the charge of any self-appointed "jazz police" that his work goes beyond the pale of the "authentic" jazz tradition.) Historically, the GUO stands thus as one of a long line of reflections of the meeting of the tumbling strain and the one-step melody, the barbarian and the civilized, the (perennial) informal child and the (individuated) formal adult; intrasocially, it stands as a microcosm of the complementary, often conflicting impulses of the Dionysian and Apollonian, in both the individual and the collective dimensions of Western history. . It is striking to me in this regard the degree to which Brötzmann's music is shaped and likened to the process and effect of painting—the shock of the vertical moment—and Schlippenbach's by syntactical language, the mitigation of that shock via a gradual-rather-than-sudden accretion of meaning in the horizontal flow from one step to another through time. Aesthetically, then, the Globe Unity Orchestra (and its descendant, the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra), true to its name, models the way the forces (classes) that have clashed in Western history, from the decline of Rome to the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, can rather work together as equals in a cooperative, respectful, and fruitful way, and that, again, not as marginal eclectics but as torchbearers of jazz-as-Western-music. This is a summary of our look at processes; in conclusion, we'll look at how those processes have established themselves in von Schlippenbach's current activities with younger peers and non-Western musicians and audiences—situations shared, in some version, by most of my interviewees. (An interesting glimpse ahead to Chapter Ten, about those youngers: we will see there how the music's general currents both from American jazz and from the European experimentalism most distant from jazz have deepened and extended from what started in the "first hour" years—often in the same artist.) The New My lifestyle is not very different from traditional musicians. I work for myself, as much as possible, I write, I give lessons at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Above all I write for the GUO, and I use those compositions in my lessons at the Hochschule, and in Workshops occasionally financed by the city. We work very hard to keep the GUO playing. The largest part of the work I do consists of developing a model to create from, to guide my treatment of arrangements of pieces or songs. All to provide us with concrete material... —Von Schlippenbach (1975: 12) This citation carries another one of those mixes of key elements of our story: the development of compositional from improvisational aesthetics and processes, and the transmission of both to the next generation—with an updated twist (like the one on the history of free-jazz/E-Musik collaborations). The twist: von Schlippenbach's role as a formal teacher has faded, but his work as a player has led him into relationships with younger players that are influencing the nature of his voice in his local scene. "I've gotten to know a lot of younger musicians from the Berlin scene," he tells me, "and some of them have come to work with me in my Berlin Contemporary Orchestra. I get out to play in jazz clubs here fairly regularly, so I have contact with many musicians through that. I go to the A-Train, or the Junction Bar, or the Bb-Club, and I see suddenly some activity happening around a given player—more people, something new coming out in the sessions. It is really a very lively scene in the bars here in Berlin, for musicians and people of all ages." As he speaks, I realize he was already speaking like the elder statesman twenty years ago about his "new" jazz, and that Noglik (to whom he spoke) was also grousing back then in the same way many of us grouse today about the generation of players coming up behind us: In recent times I have been surprised to see many young people at our concerts. As Peter Brötzmann, Sven-Åke Johansson and I were on tour in Scandinavia, we played in Stockholm's "Fasching"—actually an old-school jazz club, in which the matadors out of the bebop era were resident musicians—and encountered there a totally and surprisingly new young audience. This public with an entirely different musical history spontaneously found the groove of our music. [I find it heartening that many young people come to jazz. On the other hand I think it would also be good for them to change it even more radically from what it is with the elders and professionals. In this regard, the bottom line is one of organizing and presenting one's originality.] (1981: 111) And in that regard, we have here no cause for complaint. Axel Dörner and Wolfgang Fuchs—two we will meet in Chapter Ten—are paragons of the meaning of that bottom line. Dörner's involvement with Thelonious Monk and Fuchs' with Eric Dolphy led to several of the von Schlippenbach performances I taped. I remark to him that his recent gigs (two, in two different venues, during my stay) celebrating the music of Monk are a first, in their straightforward presentation of a bop or post-bop repertoire as a packaged program. His responses show concern that I not distort the import of this. "I have actually included such material in my earlier recordings, because I've always been very strongly rooted in the jazz tradition," he reminds me. "For example, I recorded a piece by Jelly Roll Morton that I arranged for big band, on FMP. In the '70s, I also arranged Monk's 'Ruby, My Dear,' with Anthony Braxton as a featured soloist. We also did a version of Monk's 'Evidence' on an FMP Globe Unity Special recording, with Steve Lacy. So there are these things threading through my recordings as single pieces on them, if not the theme of one in entirety." "That's true, I do know those pieces," I say. "And they are more showcases for your arranging than your piano playing, and also not parts of an entire tribute program. So is it more of a strategy now, to showcase entire programs of traditional, or let's say special material, more than before? An evening of Monk, a program of Dolphy?" "That has to do with my recent acquaintances with younger Berlin players, especially bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall and trumpeter Axel Dörner," he replies. "They also specialize in Monk's music. They had collected all sixty-four or so of Monk's tunes and arranged them for the different voices in their band. I had a meeting with them and was also very interested to do something with this material. We got the idea of taking all of the pieces and putting them together into one program." (Some are very short.) "It was very interesting; we had a week at the jazz club in Treptow and played only for the door. We were astounded, it was a huge success, from the first night and every night the club was packed, and on the weekend we had to turn people away. We had no idea this would happen; we were pleasantly surprised to make good money. "It was so surprising because it was a success from the grassroots up, rather than something imposed powerfully from above. That told us that we had something that was good with the audience. We had an invitation from Podewil, which is a major Berlin venue, to do one of their popular courtyard concerts. I wasn't going to turn that down, of course, but this success with the Treptow week reminded me one can make anything work with the public if one works with the right people. Because Monk has never been in the broad mainstream of the classic jazz tradition, rather more of a cult, inner-circle kind of following. Of course, I have always involved myself with his music; I've always believed in trying to cultivate an aesthetic that includes all the disparate areas of musical interest." "Is the Dolphy project similar?" (Von Schlippenbach opened this concert, at Berlin's radio studio concert hall, with solo improvisations on Dolphy tunes; then Fuchs' trio Holz für Europa) with fellow reedsmen Peter Van Bergen and Hans Koch, played von Schlippenbach's trio arrangement of more Dolphy tunes. "It is similar in some respects," he says. "Wolfgang Fuchs was more the leading force in this, and he asked me to work up some of Dolphy's music for his concert. I hadn't been nearly as involved with Dolphy's music as with Monk's, because it is of more interest to a woodwinds player than a pianist. On the other hand, I always loved what he did, and had bought everything he'd recorded, so I felt a great passion toward the project." "It interests me that it's the younger players who are so interested in and involved with Monk. Was the audience in Treptow also mostly young?" "It was very varied; one could not characterize it as only youth. They were part of it, of course, but the Berlin jazz audience has been a thriving community since after the war, because of all the jazz clubs that sprang up here then, so there is an older generation of fans. This new generation's interest in the older music I find a positive thing. Because the jazz scene has always been very fragmented between factions here. There is the FMP scene and all its usual clubs, and they have been markedly different from the straight jazz club scene; the lines have always been very strong between the scenes, but that's changing, for the better, I think." "Does the success at the Parkhaus Treptow have anything to do with the fact that it's in the East rather than the West? Is Monk more popular in the East than the West?" "No, I don't think so. If anything, he's less well known there. Parkhaus Treptow is a very 'Eastern' institution, in a way; it's the oldest jazz club from the Eastern part of Berlin, it has history and a certain atmosphere. But the manager there, Assi Glöde, has opened it up to a variety of things; I played there with my trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens, what one would call hardcore free jazz, and that has also been very well received." . My videotape of a trio gig by Gumpert, Johannes Bauer, and Willi Kellers will take us to this place soon. Abroad The trend toward FMP connections with musicians and audiences outside their original European circle resonates with a larger historical-cultural thrust from Frederick the Great's intellectual interest in things Asian, Alexander Humboldt's similar passions, and the Berlin musicologists who began comparative musicology. It has its way with von Schlippenbach's work, too. As with Albert Mangelsdorff's 1963 Asian tour and many since, the Goethe Institute . See http://www.goethe.de/eindex.htm for a sense of this organization's mission and activities. It has been a very important facilitator of the spread of all German music, language, and culture outside Germany. sponsored an Asian tour by the GUO in 1980, facilitating important connections with the Japanese jazz scene. The other side of this outreach coin has been an off-again (in earlier interviews) on-again (in my interview) relationship with his own country for appreciation and support. (Ironic: the Americans have had to go east to Europe to find forums for their music, while their European peers have often had to go farther east—more often than west to the Americas—including East Germany, and across Eurasia toward the Pacific.) As mentioned, a Goethe-sponsored tour of the trio to Brazil was in the works when I was there, and took place after I left. Von Schlippenbach told Thiem: Japan was fantastic…our Tokyo concert was the climax of the whole tour…it was a little more difficult in Malaysia and Indonesia, but…we scored a big success in Bandung, of all places, which was amazing because it's just a small provincial town in the jungle of Java. If we play well and the audience reacts spontaneously, understanding is possible even in places like that. In India things also varied from place to place. In Calcutta it went very well, but it was more difficult in Bombay…There was a very unfair and biased article about our Bombay concert in the Suddeutsche Zeitung which not only attacked our whole Asian tour but also the Goethe Institute as the sponsor and organizer…I just want to say here that we played two concerts in Bombay. In between them we gave a "lecture demonstration" explaining aspects of the art of free improvisation with different groups of musicians from the orchestra playing and then discussing what they did with the audience. Strangely enough, that second concert in which we played a completely improvised piece got a more favorable response than the first in which we chose the same set we played in Tokyo. Maybe the instructive demonstration which took place the day before at the Rang Bhavan had a useful effect. Anyway, the whole thing was of more value than the constant suavity with which Jazz Yatra audiences especially are soaped down. (46-47) In response to a question about beneficial results from receiving West Berlin's Art Prize (1980), von Schlippenbach answered It didn't cause any changes for me. I've still got the feeling that in West Germany especially my work is viewed with disapproval or even hostility. The only radio recordings I've made over the past few years were for NDR in cooperation with Michael Naura. But there are quite a number of radio stations in this country which have the possibility as well as the money to do something for the new jazz music. So, some of my West German colleagues as well as myself work almost exclusively abroad…I guess there's some truth to the old saying about a prophet having no honor in his own country. Maybe I should migrate to Italy. In Rome, I've been able to make a couple of radio recordings with the RAI orchestra and Globe Unity under the direction of Luigi Nono. Thank God, there is interesting work elsewhere…(47) To Cook, six years later, he said It's hard to put the [Globe Unity] orchestra together because it's so expensive, and there's not that much interest in it in Germany. We won the Down Beat poll for new bands twice and it was never mentioned in Germany! They don't want this music. There's even a movement against it. (48) By contrast, when I asked, "Do you play mostly in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe?" he said, "There was a time I played a lot in Italy. That too fluctuates. Right now it's mostly Germany, even a lot in Berlin. Berlin is actually now a very good place for a musician to live; many good players come through here, and move here, and the quality of the local scene goes up. It's really very interesting at the moment. "In the beginning, there were so many things going on, and everybody was trying to improvise and do something new; now the audiences have a more developed critical faculty, and discernment. Audiences are never stupid; basically they react the right way, unless they are misled by some bad information or something. And even that they get over. I've always believed in the intelligence of the audience. Maybe people want them to be sometimes—producers who say 'you can't do that, the audience doesn't want it'—but if you have a way to make them listen, and if you have something worth listening to, they come through." "I noticed in your program at Peter Edel," I say, "that you started with a Kenny Wheeler chart, kind of a regular mainstream modal kind of arrangement, structured; then you went to your piece, then Aki's, and it was kind of a mix of traditional and new." "Yes, because the program of this band is to play and produce compositions of contemporary jazz composers, all of whom can be very different. And I think that Kenny Wheeler is a fantastic, interesting composer, and I like this piece very much." See vid ?, track "But coming back to Peter Edel—that's a very good example for seeing how important the circumstances are for a Berlin audience. The effort we made was immense, enormous; we had eighteen musicians, fantastic people from far away, who cost a lot of money to bring in—and we had maybe thirty people in the audience, which was ridiculous. Partly it was because of unexpected problems. I had another venue lined up, but it fell through when a bank pulled out at the last moment as funders, so I was really in a bad situation. I was happy enough to find Peter Edel. But there was no money left to make a publicity outreach to the people, so not many came. Some important to us came, it was okay, but it was a waste. Also, that place is a bit out of the way." "I know you're a musician who's basically involved with his own music," I say, "but I wonder if you have any thoughts about the role this music has played in the culture or society you live in here?" "I think music always has enormous power to influence, or to inspire people along the lines of given ideas. It just depends on how it is presented, and what the possibilities are for listening to it. Nowadays, of course, music is ubiquitous—in the airports, elevators, etc.—which is of course a real drag for me to hear; I feel real hate for it, I try to avoid it as much as possible, although it's sometimes difficult to escape. This is an example of music's power as a negative force; all the stupid stuff people are doing in the world today has this constant, unrelenting input from this shit. You have to make an effort to go find musicians who are really working to make good music. "I don't like to go out to the 'official' clubs either, where I have to pay 30 Marks and stand with all these tourists to listen to American musicians play commercial gigs; it's horrible, I never do that." 810