Do
you get a lot of hassle from audiences? (Tim)
They don't say a word. If they did, I'd get down and kick ass. No...I poured water
over a guy once. Carter was taking a solo at the Troubador and this guy and his
brother and his wife came in, sat down right in front and started talking. You
know, you get down sort of quiet sometimes and Carter was saying, "That white
facist sob-singing Presbyterian son-of-a etc. etc." I
said, "I'll take care of them Carter, you keep on playing." He's so typical, I
can't believe it. The guy keeps on on talking so I go...lay down my guitar...go
around and say, "Hey white trash. You either shut up or get the fuck out of here."
He said, "You can't talk to me like that." "Yes I can." Then I threw water on
the guy and ran back to my chair. Nobody
saw it. Carter blew his whole solo, laughed, and damn near fell off his chair.
It was great! They got up five minutes later and split. That was the only time.
Mainly they're indifferent or they're stoned, or they want to hear old stuff,
which is natural. If you like something, you want to hear it. Is
there any set way that you compose your material now? (Tim)
I say, here's a line, and I hear it. Or I say, here's a line of lyric. It may
come out different every time. The lyric changes; it becomes more prolific as
it goes on. I'm not going to tell grown men, thirty-eight, forty years old what
to play. It's stupid. If they can't hear it, they they won't play, or they'll
do something else. There's
nothing you can do that's wrong. No...that's a lie. There's a lot of things you
can do wrong. It's hard to play. If you do something that you think is wrong,
you can cover it to the point of beyond covering. Then you've made a difference
within the music and it makes sense. So
you don't rely at all on the basics, like chords? (Tim)
Well listen, that's in school. That's the way they teach you from the word go.
What they lodge in eveybody's mind is that it's supposed to be on a certain line
of triads or something, which doesn't mean anything really. (Maury)
What it comes down to is that the music started out being lines and rhythms. Like
Hindemith [Paul Hindemith, German-born composer and music theorist] says that
every chord has been discovered - they've all been played. But not every rhythm....
(Tim)
When you play a chord you're dating yourself actually. That's how devastating
a chord is. You play a certain chord and a Studebaker comes to mind, or an Edsel.
If you play a certain chord progression, you can get a 1930 feeling! The fewer
chords you play, the less likely you are to get conditioned and the more you can
reveal of what you are...unless you're putting across somebody else's definition
of what has already been done. The
less that influence has anything to say about how you're going to respond personally,
the more completely you respond to your own feelings or the people you are playing
with, or the people out there. "Why
do you have to put a label on it? Are you shipping it someplace? Just listen to
it and say, "That's what that cat does..." |
(Maury)
Music schools always teach that Bach is the great one because he was able
to do two things: horizontal and vertical sound. They teach you tricks to get
by one. "Now, if you learn this number of tricks, you can get by at all the best
places." (Tim)
They teach you little tricks of the trade so you can make a living. It's like
a trade school. They tell you, "If you play it like this, the way Bach did, you
can go to any concert hall in the US and they'll love ya. This has been tried
and true - A-1! They'll love ya. Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland will just drool". That's
the way it is. That's what schools do. But, if you've got any mind of your own,
you can get around it. The only way of getting around it though, is to pick out
just what you need. You've got to learn your technique. I mean, you gotta know
how to read and write and stuff like that. You can't get away from it. But, while
they're teaching you how to read and write and do composition, they're trying
to change you to their way of thinking rather than let you go your merry way.
(Maury)
I was just thinking of this piece by Charles Ives called The Unanswered Question.
This is very weird. You see, this cat was an insurance salesman. He did that right
until he dies and he never took music lessons; didn't study very much at all.
And his work just springs all over the place. The
whole beginning is a string quartet, and they're real slow and just in there tight...right
through the whole background like the wind or something. Then the trumpets start
the "unanswered question" and the woodwinds are the sneering crowd, putting them
down for asking the question. The
whole point of this is that there's no answer, but the whole thing is in the preface.
Ives did this a lot---described the whole thing in works.... "The trumpet will
be the unanswered question and the strings will be the flow of humanity going
thru it and the woodwinds will be the sneering crowd." He apparently knew what
he was doing, but he didn't trust the thing himself.
He had complete conviction, but the point is that whatever you're doing, new or
old, you don't have to overemphasize it. You don't have to label it. (Tim)
Why do you have to put a label on it? Are you shipping it someplace? Just listen
to it and say, "That's what that cat does." (Maury)
There's a guy that does that same kind of thing. He calls it partially improvised
music. He writes out a theme and all of them sit around in a circle and play their
thing along a general format. As much as I think that what we're doing is really
new, it's been going on for a long time. When I was in Conservatory, you had to
go up to the third floor of this place and hide in a little thing to play jazz.
This one piano teacher used to come in and say, "Oh, you're playing that awful
music with the beat again." They
said in music school, and it's true for any kind of music, that for music to be
really exciting, it takes three elements - the music itself, the players, and
the audience. When you're listening to something new you're doing a lot of composing
in your head. You put yourself in the place of whatever's going on. That way,
if it doesn't make sense to you, you're justified in not liking it, but you've
got to open yourself to the point that you're doing a lot of the composing yourself.
People
have lost the little bit of genius that everybody had - .everybody's got it or
they wouldn't fall in love. There are a lot of people walking around and there
aren't that many people who are in love. That really takes a genius! A lot of
people have forgotten that it even exists - that small part of them, the genius
part. | 
