Listen up
The unique pleasures
of the creative music scene demand to be heard. Derk Richardson
I lurked for several years on ba-newmus, the e-mail list devoted
to the Bay Area creative music scene – a handle that fails
to describe an impossibly diverse, awesomely opinionated, and often
inspired community of improvisers, inventors, sonic techies, and
born eccentrics. But no longer, not after realizing
how often I was reminded of the mid-'90s electro-acoustic improvising
group Circular Firing Squad, which was what the contentious ba-newmus
was feeling like to me.
Besides, with war against Iraq seeming increasingly inevitable,
I wanted to spend more time surfing antiwar Web sites and reading
the incoming missives from activist organizations like Move On,
Indymedia, and the Human Rights Campaign.
Still, although I continue to receive the ba-newmus e-mail event
notices, compulsively log on to the Bay Area Improvisers Network
(www.bayimproviser.com), and eagerly await the snail mail arrival
of the monthly Transbay Creative Music Calendar (also available
online at www.transbaycalendar.org), I miss the alternately heated,
amusing, exasperating, and intelligent exchanges between ba-newmus
regulars like Matt Ingalls, Damon Smith, Tildy Bayar, Rent Romus,
and Lance Grabmiller. Couched in the frequent pontifications and
diatribes is a tremendous amount of insight into the whys and wherefores
of the local avant-garde, er, new music, ah, creative music, um,
improv scene. That these musicians so actively engage in dialogue
about what motivates, inspires, irks, oppresses, and elevates them
says a lot about the vitality of both the music (really, we all
ought to get out more and actually hear what these often
amazing performers are doing) and the community that fosters and
embraces it.
To the crowds jamming into Shoreline, the Fillmore, and even Yoshi's,
the scene that has given rise to Positive Knowledge, Forward Energy,
Marco Eneidi, Karen Stackpole, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, and many others
is essentially invisible. But over the course of the 25 years that
I've enjoyed, and too infrequently written about, the creative music
community, it has grown and diversified to a staggering degree.
In the fall of 1980, nine avant-garde musicians gathered at 1750
Arch in Berkeley (now the home the Center for New Music and Audio
Technologies – CNMAT) to perform at the Metalanguage Festival
of Improvised Music. Participants from the Bay Area included pianist
Greg Goodman, guitarist Henry Kaiser, and the founding members of
Rova Saxophone Quartet: Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Andrew Voigt, and
Bruce Ackley. They were joined in various configurations by three
international visitors: Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo and,
from England, guitarist Derek Bailey and saxophonist Evan Parker.
In retrospect, that assemblage (which was recorded on two LPs, The
Social Set and The Science Set, and recently reissued
on CD by the Beak Doctor as The Social/Science Set) looks
like a historic summit meeting – of first-generation nonidiomatic
(truly free) improvisers and their northern California progeny.
But it's only a slight exaggeration to say that, minus a few notables
from the period, including Henry Kuntz, George Gruntfest, and Ron
Heglin, it also came close to representing the sum total of what
was happening locally in improvised music at the time.
Rova, Kaiser, and Goodman still figure prominently hereabouts.
And Parker, especially, remains a godhead for improvisers. But now
they are stitches in a much larger fabric. That was evident just
a few weeks ago when bassist George Cremaschi put together a concert
at the Community Music Center in which he and Goodman opened for
a trio with Parker, drummer Paul Lytton, and pianist Alexander von
Schlippenbach. This was a major event for fans of this decidedly
outside music. But it also took place during, and independently
from, the nine-day San Francisco Alternative Music Festival (SFAlt),
which in turn boasted an embarrassment of riches from the Bay Area
talent pool, plus guests from around the United States.
SFAlt, which premiered last year, underscores two of the most critical
and laudable traits of the Bay Area's creative music scene: its
ability to organize itself and its inextricable bonds with like-minded,
if not always like-sounding, musicians hither and yon. Both aspects
can be traced back beyond the days of Metalanguage (the record label
founded by Goodman, Kaiser, and Ochs in 1978) to the historic San
Francisco Tape Music Center and the experiments of Pauline Oliveros
and Terry Riley, among others. And as we follow the threads running
forward to the present, we encounter a host of self-help milestones,
including the birth of Bay Area Loft Jazz (leading to today's Jazz
in Flight) and Woody Woodman's Finger Palace in the 1970s; the gradual
rise of the Asian American jazz scene and the establishment of Asian
Improv aRts; the heyday of Oakland's Koncepts Cultural Gallery in
the late '80s and early '90s; Rova's nonprofit incorporation and
its staging of ambitious annual events; and the golden age of Gino
Robair's Dark Circle Lounge in San Francisco's Hotel Utah and the
sorely missed Beanbender's in downtown Berkeley (among other avant-venues)
in the late '90s.
The web of global connections grew too. Members of the international
improvising community, such as England's AMM and Hann Bennink, Misha
Mengelberg, and Willem Breuker of the Netherlands-based Instant
Composers Pool, made significant visits. Chicago's Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians became more than an abstract
inspiration when trombonist-theorist George Lewis and saxophonist
Anthony Braxton served as faculty members at Mills College (where
guitarist Fred Frith is presently a visiting professor). Although
based in New York, and sometimes Japan, saxophonist John Zorn became
a towering role model for many Bay Area improvisers and composers
through radically varied performances and such seminal projects
as his "game" piece Cobra.
The penchant for international networking and guildlike cooperation
(in such annual events as Other Minds, the San Francisco Electronic
Music Festival, the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, and the
Transparent Tape Music Festival, as well as a profusion of artist-run
independent record labels) arises both as a survival mechanism for
those working on the margins of a basically hostile mainstream culture
and as a natural outgrowth of an intrinsic collaborative sensibility:
the improviser's impulse to improvise with someone else. Inevitably,
just when you think the community is about to atomize into the worst
kind of hyperindividualism, it pulls together in ways you'll rarely
encounter in other music scenes.
"Don't try to make the rock big and clean. It is not. It is
small and dirty. This is its value." So writes Jacob Lindsay
in "Jacob's Musical Manifesto," which can be found on
the Views page of www.bayimproviser.com. Indeed, the more you let
go of conventional prescriptions of what music should sound like,
and the more you surrender to the "here and now" of the
creative moment, the more the natural habitat of the improviser
feels like a welcoming place to take refuge. Lurking has its rewards,
but none that compare to taking the plunge.
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