Earconnector - jazz, new music and other urgent matters

I always remember when I first heard/saw Liam play: about 12 years ago, at the old Vortex, just walking into the club, up those old dangerous stairs, sounds from above sounding a bit like ‘Witchcraft’, actually it was ‘Witchcraft’! I just about managed to sit down somewhere and this piano solo was like nothing I’d ever heard before. It looked like some fucked-up block chord thing but I tell you it felt incredibly beautiful: a treasure trove of melodies. 

HK 

Well, all these records were separated by quite large intervals, I did the solo one in 1994 and “In the Meantime” in 2001, so I suppose the answer is that they follow on at quite a distance.  At the time of doing them, they don’t feel like they reflect anything in particular, it’s all a bit random really…I tend to brew ideas around in my head as a response to getting into something from somewhere else, then when the time comes where I absolutely HAVE to write or record something it’s a snapshot of wherever my head is at that time.  It’s quite weird that you have to live with these things for the rest of your life, but it seems easier if I think of it in this way…there’s never anything definitive as such, it seems that history invents that after the event.  There are certain things that crop up in all my stuff though, which I think relates to possibilities of  composition as counterpoint as opposed to a line plus chords (although sometimes these possibilities result in a chord sequence for the blowing).  There are a few composers who still work with sequences I really love, especially Steve Swallow, and he’s always been a bit of an influence…sometimes you just sit down and a tune comes out, other times I set out to try and achieve a particular structural or formal aim in a piece.  But a tension between orthodox “jazz language” and extended technique is always something I’ve enjoyed…rather than go “all out”, I like the idea of nudging something out of its orbit a bit by exploring tenuous connections…Ellington and Earl Hines sound “a bit” like Nancarrow to me, so it seems natural to borrow elements of both.

I suppose some of this was answered in the previous response, but one thing I enjoy in each recording is writing specifically for the musicians and instrumental combinations.  With the solo record, I guess it was practical in that I had no band and no money…I recorded it in four hours for eighty quid.  It was a bit of a sprawl musically and possibly unwise in terms of a business plan for a glittering career, but I still like it…how can you be a pianist and not do a solo record? It’s such a great instrument for that…you can start off playing changes and then abandon them when you want to, go in and out of time, tunes, whatever.  I suppose the idea of a solo record is quite “heroic” too, which is more like how I felt a few years out of college.

The quintet was more to do with my “growing up” and asking people to work with me where they weren’t just my “mates” (although I’d obviously known Stan a while) and the responsibility that brings with it – you can’t just sit around drinking tea.  I loved the idea of getting Stan and Chris (Sulzmann and Biscoe) together, they are so opposite…I’ve always had Ellington’s example of contrasting voices making up the ensemble – in a way, the music for that band was half finished as soon as I got the personnel together.  I was trying with that record to get an almost orchestral feel with just a small ensemble by voicing things in a particular way.

With this new record, I had the opposite idea; to use a quartet as a kind of “fatter” trio by keeping the instruments doubling each other a lot; I think there’s more of a sense of homogeneity as opposed to the contrasts in the previous record.  Often, the compositions are made up of two unison lines split between the four of us in various ways, so it’s like 2 part counterpoint but with the colour in the lines varying a bit.  Actually, most of the writing involves the other three doubling my piano part in various ways…I suppose it’s more of a “piano” record than “Meantime”.

It was interesting to play with musicians that you know from recordings rather than socially or through the scene you’re in (there is one, I’m certain of it).  They kind of come as a package, and there’s a couple of bits on the record where they specifically “do their thing”, which is a kind of accompaniment/soloing backdrop you can listen to in both ways…when you look below this solid groove thing there’s all this detail you could write out and analyse if you wanted to.  Tom I’ve admired for years on records by Tim Berne, Mark Helias and all manner of players.  His rhythmic concept was an important generative influence on the writing; the idea of shifting placements of rhythmic phrases.  He moves that shit all over the place and doesn’t ever do what you expect; even the “Tom Rainey” licks I anticipated weren’t really there.  When you think he’s going to let loose, he just leaves gaping holes, and vice versa, but it somehow is the right thing.  Drew I came across after Tom, he’s all over the instrument and has a similar eccentricity about his playing…sometimes it sounds like bottleneck guitar or something…having said that, his time and intonation are amazing and he can be really supportive.  What I noticed about both of them is the tenacity with which they can stick to an idea, it really strengthens the music, especially in a situation where the limitations are not formal or harmonic.  I think if you stick to something long enough, the next idea can “appear” to you rather than you have to generate all this new stuff all the time.  And Drew’s a really interesting composer, not afraid to write hard music because the soul never seems to get lost with those players.  His new record, “7 Black Butterflies”, has Tim Berne, Ralph Alessi, Craig Taborn, Drew and Tom and it’s killing.  It amazes me how these guys aren’t that well known over here, they are as good as anybody I’ve ever heard, if they’d been in Miles’ band at some point they’d probably be big stars by now.

Oh dear, I think I’ve sort of answered this one too, I’m getting ahead of myself.  So I’ll read the question after this one before I answer it.

Actually, my playing and writing sort of takes ages to catch up with what I’m listening to and influenced by compositionally.  And although I imagine I’m doing something different with each project, I always seem to work around similar ideas…in some respect, I’m still trying to write the perfect version of a tune I started before I even knew how to write at all.  To be brutally honest, none of the ideas I have about these things are mine; in this day and age, all you can hope for is a fresh mix of old ingredients.  All I can say is that there are some lines I can’t seem to cross.  I love Elliot Carter and Morton Feldman and in a way I would love to write something with that strong a sense of formal integrity, but I can’t seem to get away from writing “tunes”…on some level, that stuff isn’t part of my musical world and it’s too far away from where I started.  But the textures are useful for improvising, so I’d rather just nick bits and pieces, a bit like adding spices to a dish that aren’t in the recipe book…until the food becomes inedible (hopefully it hasn’t yet.)  But most of this just comes from observing the movement of musical trends…people like Henry Threadgill, John Hollenbeck, Bobby Previte and Wayne Horvitz seem to me to be doing most of the stuff that feels new to me, so they’re my role models in some ways.  Luckily, none of them quite do EXACTLY what I want to do - in a way, individualist musicians like these define themselves by what ISN’T in the music as much as what is.

A short answer to this one.  I only ever get bands together because nobody’s doing the music I can hear (intermittently and often vaguely) in my head.  So I won’t get a quartet with tenor sax together doing standards while I can do that with Bobby Wellins…basically, I’m a pretty reluctant bandleader.

A trio (with Dave Whitford and Dave Wickins) doing the music of Dave Brubeck.  He was an early influence on me as a teenager and it’s nice to go back to something you have genuine affection for rather than what’s fashionable.  His improvising is incredibly lucid and also very individual, and he’s a real independent thinker.  His solo version of “In Your Own Sweet Way” is one of the great pieces of jazz improvisation in my opinion, it sounds complete and self – contained, yet he moves away from the changes and is just “winging it” for the whole piece.  And I love his writing; “Jazz Impressions of New York” has some beautiful tunes on it, kind of coming out of a 19th century romanticism.  The “Two Daves” are a great rhythm section; Whitford can take the music anywhere he wants to, Wickins has a unique mix of Jo Jones and Tony Oxley which kind of points both towards and away from the “Golden Age of Jazz”.

Myself and Ingrid Laubrock are releasing a duo album on Babel records in March.  She’s got a great sense of space and sound which makes me play in quite a different way, it’s quite a conversational record and there’s loads of genuine improvising on it with a mixture of Monk, Mingus, Konitz and free pieces.  I think it’s a real challenge to do familiar material and make something happen on it; there is more potential both for stifling the music and setting it free than in any other context for me.  And it’s a delicate balance; but I don’t think I’ll ever completely abandon this kind of reportoire as I like the risk of failure!

Well, with two kids (three and a half and three months) sanity is out of the question, but when you embrace that idea I think it slowly returns in a new form.  My inspiration comes from listening to music; I know some people stop buying records as it detracts from their own thing, but I feel like my own thing is just a hotch potch of everyone else’s.  I just need to keep the mix as interesting as possible without becoming contrived.

Practice has suffered recently, but the last time I really got stuck in to it, I practised the “Goldberg Variations” by Bach.  The Glenn Gould recordings have been an obsession for some time, but to allow your fingers to walk in the footsteps of all that harmony and counterpoint is a great feeling.  Above all, it teaches you that there’s “Nothing New Under The Sun” and it’s made me look at harmony as a resultant of combined melodies, which has coloured both my improvising and composing. 

Most of this is personal psychology rather than music itself.  Having kids has brought a few things out in the open in that you need to start being assertive about things when you are responsible for other people.  That’s quite hard, but I feel like my business head might benefit from all this “growing – up”.  People like Christine Allen at Basho Records (who released my most recent two albums) and Tony Dudley – Evans at Birmingham Jazz (who initiated the gig with Drew, Tom and Phil) are very good at prodding me into action, but sometimes it’s good to do it yourself.  I suppose my main realisation is that being good is not enough, that you have to sell yourself pretty hard before anybody takes any notice, and that without people taking any notice you don’t work.  I used to regard all the networking thing as pretty shameless, but I’m slowly coming round to it as my problem not everybody else’s.  But I’m still pretty dismal at it.

Frustration and bafflement would sum up my reaction to the media’s lack of intelligence about this music (there are exceptions, we all have our private view of who these are!); I think reviews should educate and elucidate so that something you don’t understand may become less threatening.  On the other hand, one could ignore it all and get on with producing more stuff.  Cage said, after struggling for an adequate definition of music among such a plethora of styles, “Music is work”, but you need exposure in this music before it can exist at all.  And you have to pay your rent/mortgage/nappies somehow.  A solution to all this is out of my reach and keeps me awake at night, and also in the daytime.  

I’ve recently become drawn to pop music again after an epiphanal experience seeing P.J.Harvey on “Later…with Jools Holland” about 4 years ago.  It was basically the old guitar band thing, but the quality of performance, composition and sheer excitement got me really into her album “Stories from the city, Stories from the Sea”.  Loads of stuff like Laurie Anderson, Arto Lindsay and Aphex Twin where electronics seem to define a new kind of emotion; I’m no expert in these areas and am always on the lookout for other things like this.  I’ve been working for a few years on some kind of electronic set – up which so far is only on one keyboard; I did a gig the other night with Asaf Sirkis and Julian Siegel where we all just improvised and me and Julian used loops and stuff.  Improvising when you haven’t settled into a way of working and you don’t know how all the gear works is really interesting and unsettling.

I love Jim Black’s band “AlasnoAxis”, proper jazz-rock at last with thrashy guitars and simple chords but he somehow keeps it interesting.

Japanese music is one of the things I’ve been looking into, but how to recreate the unusual sense of breathing space and ritualistic use of materials is proving difficult and I need to think about it for another few years. 

Have any films or books, art exhibitions, travels, or any events and personal experiences helped your own ideas about music?

All of these things are great for titles I think, but they usually come after the music is already written or improvised.  Me and Ingrid are stuck on titles for the new record, maybe I should go read a book or take a year off in Goa and something will come to me!  I would like to just number all my pieces starting at 1, but that’s somehow even more pretentious than trying to give them a name…in the end, I like the way words sound more than what they mean…as to whether my ideas as such have been affected, they must have been on some level but I’m not aware of it enough to say how.  A lot seems to remain unchanged.

In terms of personal experiences, on the rare occasion that I have played to mark a poignant occasion, it feels different at the time, but I don’t know if that affects what the music actually is outside your own head.

As to whether my ideas as such have been affected, they must have been on some level but I’m not aware of it enough to say how.  A lot seems to remain unchanged.

In many ways, music seems to have been an escape from all these things so maybe in some kind of twisted way I want to protect it from them, to find something that remains constant on some level.  I need to start taking vitamins in the morning.

Liam Noble's CDs are available at www.jazzcds.co.uk  

More about Liam on his website www.liamnoble.co.uk