Transcript:
Hi, this is Brandon Ross and I’ll be presenting some of my music on May 9th 2013 at Rilet in Brooklyn, part of the Interpretations Music Series.
I’ll be presenting my duo for living lovers with bassist Stonemu Takeshi and expanding the group into my quartet that I call Blazing Beauty, which will include J.T. Lewis on drums and Stephanie Richards playing brass.
The focus of the concert, part of the focus of the concert will be this interaction between brass, drums and strings, percussion. I’m going to be playing acoustic guitar, banjo and electric guitar. So there will be a range in dynamics as well. And this progression of technologies, which will always inform the music in ways that takes a minute to get used to for many people sometimes. But technology continues to push things forward for yea or nay. For Living Lovers, which is my acoustic duo, Stomu Takeishi, developed through our playing together with Henry Threadgill. It was in 1995 in the fall. I heard Stomu performing at a place in the city.
At the time I was in Henry’s band Make a Move and Henry was looking for a bass player. Henry was in India. I heard Stonemu and I thought that Stonemu would be the guy for the project.
And largely because he was doing something that was very unusual. He was playing electric bass in an ensemble with violin and cello, which were acoustic and just miked.
And the blend was completely natural. His sensitivity to the environment really impressed me, as well as his patience and his choices, his musical choices.
Stomu and I have a musical chemistry that is remarkable. That’s all I can say about it. And I say that because it’s the feedback that we get from the environment that it’s like one large instrument when we’re playing.
We also share instruments designed by Luthier Steve Klein, which have informed the way I’ve written for us.
Sonically the instruments interact and behave in a way that slows things down.
So the expansion into a larger ensemble from the duo was actually a larger, part of a larger idea that developed also back in 1995. Basically I’d gone to India with Henry Threadgill and Henry wanted to start a new band. When I got back to New York, Henry said, “Look, keep your eyes open. I’m looking for a drummer and a bass player.” So I came upon Stomu and then J.T. Lewis, whom I’d met working with Kip Hammer, called me one day just to check in and say hi and asked what I’d been doing. I told him, “I just got back from India and blah, blah, blah, blah.”
And I told him what I was doing. Next day he called me up and he said, “You know what? I need to be in that band with Henry. I need to be in that band. I had a dream about it.”
So I kind of thought it was a good idea. I wrote to Henry about it and we set up a situation where we could hear everybody and audition. So basically what I realized is that Stomu and J.T. were really my choices for Henry’s band. In the course of that time, J.T. and I started a project together called Harriet Tubman, which is an electric power trio.
And Stomu and I started working together as a duo.
And I secured my Japanese recording deal and called J.T. and Stomu together along with Ron Miles and Graham Haynes, a few other key people, to record the CDs I did for the Intoxicate label.
Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the idea of natural music making.
For me, natural music making is gestural.
It has a lot to do with just understanding sound and impulse and inclination.
And I had a conversation back in January, a brief conversation with Wandada Leo Smith. I was talking to him about the idea of velocity and communicating velocity in a way that didn’t involve a metric delineation for velocity.
And I’d been thinking about that and I just happened to ask him what he thought about that. And he showed an idea that was very interesting and had to do with, rather than thinking about velocity in a metric context, but more the idea of concentration of activity.
And that thought has really helped me think about what I want to do in this concert.
Stomu and I have talked about our music making together as breathing.
Because we don’t particularly count things off. I remember seeing an interview, a conversation with Ornette Coleman.
They were remarking about Ornette’s band and how they observed it. He never seemed to count things off, but the band was always together. And asked, kind of wondered how he was doing that. And Ornette made a simple comment of insight
So I’ve been very interested in these kinds of ideas for a long time. Natural music making, insight, an organic flow, breathing kind of process. And all of that to me leads into the expression of who someone is as a music maker, as an instrument, as an individual, and what their music is. And whether I have a place to orchestrate that in the context of what I’m doing.
This concert in May, I’m going to be looking at those issues and try and find a way to convey the idea of this thing just happening.
If I’m looking at the western system of 12 tones,
and I’m dealing with laying these things out on a page in a particular way, that automatically sets up a way of relating to what music is, or at least the representation of music. That’s all the representation naturally.
So I’ve been dealing with a different kind of chart mechanism, charting mechanism, or directive mechanism, visually on the page. That is diagrammatic, involves concentric circles, and cross axis, central axis. So that the lines of activity can move in either direction along a horizontal plane and a vertical plane. And then there are quadrants of information that have tonal direction and harmonic direction within it. And intervallic direction for behavior within a certain period of duration.
So I’m going to be looking at exploiting that system and that direction in the context of some of the other music I’ve done,which will come from some of my Japanese recordings, the costume and puppet,and some newer things over the last couple years or so.
But the idea of free playing, from my point of view, wants to have a direct direction, be directionally driven towards something.
And yet many pathways, allows many pathways to get to that thing.
Because the vocabulary and the language, it must have been Horne Coleman probably, I was talking to him once, and he was speaking about how many people play the instrument rather than the idea.
And that their playing ends up being dominated by the instrument that they’re playing, rather than using the instrument to serve the idea that’s a part of their intention. Now that is, some people understand that immediately, some people think, what does that mean? But to learn to play an instrument, we’re set up with whatever pedagogy we’re looking at, whatever system of development we’re looking at, most of which involves repetition and a certain kind of organization… All of that is going to lead to the outcome of what you tend to do and how we look at something.
I’m just referencing things that people that I’ve admired or worked with or talked to have said to me over the years. I remember having a conversation with Henry Threadgill once, and we were talking about music and different things, and he said, “No, Brandon, technique is the result of music, not the other way around.”
To give just a moment of thought to that, it’s very logical, it makes perfect sense.
And as I have guitar students these days, and some come to me who are beginning and learning things, and they say, “Oh, I have this habit and I put the thumb here, I know that’s wrong.” I said, “No, look, there’s no wrong thing that you can do, because if you ask me to play something like that, I don’t play that way, so I’ll get something different out of it.” But that technique is valid if you’re playing something that calls for it. And even that would be the result of what kind of music are you trying to get out there? What statement are you trying to make? So use that means, and then a technique evolves out of that.
