This week, in conjunction with the release of the new duo record As if Anything Could Be The Same (Relative Pitch), we are featuring a week of all-things Jack Wright on the Search and Restore blog.
Jack Wright is a remarkably prolific practitioner of free-improvisation, and in the forty+ years of his playing career, he has scoured the United States and Europe looking for venues and collaborators, often finding them in obscure, overlooked towns, playing for whomever decided to show up.
It was my great pleasure to correspond with Wright, which produced the interview, below! I've also included a track from As if Anything Could Be The Same-- which is a duo record with his son, bassist Ben Wright--to stream, below!
This record is one of the few that you've recorded with Ben, maybe the only one aside from Tenterhooks. What was behind the decision to make a record with him?
We’ve been recording as a duo for almost twenty years without it being a project intended to be offered to others, so this was only an instance and nothing new. I’ve wanted to be satisfied in a way that I couldn’t hold it back, in a sense was already released and out of my hands, and not a calculation of “good enough.” This was what came out of our sessions in Jan. 2013. It resisted my efforts to think it could be better, which had been the case earlier, and has the only kind of perfection that is suitable for free playing. It is in the rare category of being both accessible to audiences I have never had and fully pleasurable to me after many listenings. This category balances the other one of mine, which is more challenging to listeners, including to myself, and satisfies the need for playing on thin ice. We recorded without an ultimate aim for it, then a producer of Relative Pitch Records asked for something and I sent him these tracks, which I felt were appropriate for the label.
Do you find that the relationship that you have with Ben, as a father, makes improvising with him different than others, aside from the natural differences that he has from other bass players?
When you approach playing as the job you do as a musician it’s with the goal of creating good music, a positive effect that results in audience and critical response, what’s thought of as artistic success. You don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize that, so there are restrictions, including the choice of partners. But when you play for the experience (ultimately of beauty) you operate and choose partners differently, then deal with the playing situation regardless of where it’s going. I am very selective who I spend my time playing with, on the basis of what I have experienced with them and my expectation of what might come. I am easily bored, intolerant, a junkie for new experience. When Ben and I play we treat each other strictly as “experiential” musicians, so if we had not been family-related the music itself would be the same. It’s more like brothers playing together, which I also feel with other close partners, like Andrew Drury, Ron Stabinsky, Evan Lipson, and Ben Bennett. Playing with this approach, especially over time, you develop a close bond apart from personal dynamics, a trust. This is an entrainment on an unconscious level, where there is an instinctual connection, an intimate knowledge of the other that is behavioral rather than literal.
Without selective musical judgment I wouldn’t have been playing with Ben all these years. Yet there’s also the fact that we have loved each other and wanted to get together, and playing became part of that long ago. Some aspects of our lives are unavoidably forced on us, or at least we are forced to choose for or against what is thrown across our path. I once asked Ben where he learned to improvise so well and he said, “Well, I grew up hearing you play all the time [in his teenage years].” He was free to be repulsed and run away from it; he chose instead to stay. The fact that I’ve not been, and have no prospects of being a successful musician has meant that his own love of music has not been muddied by a career goal, as mine has been at times.
(Ben Wright, bass; Ron Stabinsky, keyboard; John McClellan, drums)
How does that textural mentality apply to solo playing, a format you've performed extensively in?
First of all, texture, or unorthodox sound, is only one aspect. I see free playing as utilizing every possible direction, including conventional notes at times, indistinguishable from normal music except that they are used as one option among many, almost ironically, since they refer to musical conventions.
I don’t play solo on tour very often, mostly in circumstances where I find myself without a desired partner. In the avant music world the solo is supposed to establish the artistic level and uniqueness of the player, which I find meaningless for the actuality of playing. However, I’ve recently come to value the recording studio (my home) as a chance to discover what I would do deprived of pressure or encouragement to please others, and also free of influence from partners.
In this situation I often avoid the sound orientation, partly because I tend to move straight from practice to recording. If practice is exploratory self-teaching and not rehearsal or warm-up time then it’s already a kind of solo playing. It’s possible to experience every moment of practice as music at the same time as body movement. In practice I use multiphonics to push the embouchure out of normative alignment and expand beyond the convention of “one fingering, one sound.” But I still devote time to conventionally tuned pitches, although in an order where the interval is difficult to detect, big leaps and random pitches. This relates to my general approach. Instead of going “out,” which is how jazz improvisation operates, I see myself in practice rooted in the outside, and just treating that playing as music without trying to shape it as such. I take the position that anything I play is music, so I’m not striving to make it, or do the best I can. That’s the essence of what Friedrich Schiller called “the play drive” two centuries ago, that has continually undermined every official definition of music.
In this spirit I record, and find myself using more pitches, rarely conventionally tuned with each other, combined with subtle differentiations of sound, from the dull sound of “false fingerings” to the harsh multiphonics, contrasted with the normal ones. This kind of playing often goes unnoticed in the mix of a group, but here it can come to life. Also, most partners play continuously, without gaps or “dropouts,” or the predictable “solo space” in jazz, so precision timing (which I discovered in reductionism) is more effective when playing solo.
Although this particular record is on Relative Pitch records, can you talk about Spring Garden and what having your own label has allowed you to do for presenting your music?
Very few of those who perform and record their music get to have their work distributed to anonymous consumers. At least 99% of us are obscure and unknown to what could be called a public, anonymous peasants to the aristocrats. To make our music available at all requires the self-production of the post-sixties entrepreneurial musician. This has led today to the deluge of free offerings, challenging the music business and the hierarchy of players. For me DIY production began in 1982, with Spring Garden Music. I took the advice of my peers, who thought that just one record was enough to establish oneself as “serious” about pursuing music, which was all I needed. My LP cost me a quarter of my annual income, so I didn’t expect to do it more than every ten years. Like most of us I put out cassettes, mostly traded. With CDs, costs began to go down, and by the turn of the millenium I needed to do more to legitimate myself in order to get gigs. I also began to find new partners taking me in new directions, so I began to produce more. People started ordering from me online and I used each contact as an opportunity for a conversation, and to find out if they knew a place to play where they lived, anywhere in the US. So the label began to serve several purposes.
Spring Garden Music is non-commercial, meaning I don’t expect to cover costs, as almost all non-musician American labels hope to do. They are cautious, only dealing in musicians whose names have consistently brought some calculable return on the investment. This maintains the general conservatism of art music production in our time, the distinction between the few, encouraged to churn out repeats of what they or others have been doing for decades, and the many that no public would ever encounter. The many have no stake in self-replication, free to go any direction—whether they do so or not is another question.
I've read that your first foray into free improvisation was inspired by many of the political events going on around you. How has that changed? Has the current political climate somehow influenced your music in a different way, if at all?
This is not altogether false but misleading. For a brief period, ’69-74 or so, I was a political organizer on the community level in Philadelphia, also involved in keeping Movement organizations throughout North America in contact with each other. I dropped out of academic study and teaching to help build a non-party political movement, one that would take history in a revolutionary direction. I witnessed the decline of activism and went through a major personal transformation, for I no longer had any place in the world, no work I considered meaningful. To be able to play music was not inspired by revolutionary expectations so much as their collapse. Music was something valid to do in the world that the world could not stop me from doing. But to be self-sustaining it couldn’t hinge on the career, the American dream, or anything extraneous to the actual playing of music of my own aesthetic direction. The last half of the 70s was misery for me, but in it I seem to have forged an independent spirit, sloughing off the inessential, such that I have not fitted the operative models of artist musician available today.
Do you have any other projects and tours that are forthcoming that you'd like to speak of?
There is a CD with percussionist Ben Bennett, “Tangle,” coming out in May 2014 on Public Eyesore, a solo cd in the works (maybe called “thin ice”), and tours in various stages of preparation, which can be accessed on my schedule page: www.springgardenmusic.com/schedule.html. I spend far more time reading and writing than playing music, and have been at work on a book on free playing. This has required extensive historical research and writing, and I would not want to project when that will be completed, but it will. My occasional essays are here: http://jackiswright.wordpress.com/
Do you find yourself listening to music often? If so, what's some recorded music that you've been listening to lately?
I listen to everything for pleasure, which is often perverse, that is, unsatisfying and puzzling. I’m especially interested in musics that I’ve dismissed, recently 70s minimalism and disco, which I encountered in my studies for the book. I might walk past a club with live jazz and am enthralled for two minutes, almost tearful, then disgusted and feeling betrayed. I seem to need music that is worthless, on the low end of some scale, including my own. If music has made its way up the music world hierarchy to approval I have to find my own reason for liking it. A music I loved through the sixties, such as traditional classical, is now a struggle to listen to. I don’t have any favorites, just things that make me prick up my ears, usually temporary.
I’m an old-fashioned anti-consumer (a fifties motif) so I get music exclusively by copying, usually out of collections wherever I spend the night on tour, and what I come across on the internet. I haven’t wanted a piece of music so badly that I’d pay full price for it. In the early 80s I did a radio show of non-western music in order to be able to go through their library. I felt I knew the kind of thing the West was capable of and needed something to contrast with it, music from people who didn’t even think of music as a category, who didn’t “value” and evaluate music. Music is not “the background for my life,” as seems to be current. I gave my first record to a guy who rejected it by saying, “You can’t do anything else when you’re listening to it.” I took that as a compliment.
