Greetings from STEIM in blustery Amsterdam. Been breathing solder fumes all day - time to get out the thinking cap.
There’s a legend among American improvisers; a legend shared by Americans engaged in other areas of new music, media arts, contemporary dance, and any creative activity considered avant garde. It’s the legend of the European arts career: Through all the disrespected lobbed at arts in general in America, for every gig that pays a few dollars at the door or nothing at all, for every adventurous record label revealed to be a money-losing living room labor of love, American underground artists take comfort in the belief that at least their counterparts overseas are able to make a living doing what they love, what they were born to do. And some even dream of taking up the expatriate life to realize their dream of making non-mainstream creative work full-time without reliance on unrelated employment or the mixed blessing of pursuing a teaching career.
It’s been programmed into a lot of American artists, myself included, that if your work is not of a mainstream variety - or, as with classically trained performers, even if it is but you are not one of the tiny percentage who can make a full-time playing career happen - your only recourse for an art-oriented life is through academia. In fact, I and others have been so immersed in this kind of thinking that we equate a life in art with a life in academia.
How do American, and especially New England, improvisers create careers that at the very least permit themselves a minimum level of participation in their improvisation scene? What are the experiences of American improvisers who have managed to make a full-time career out of music making? What about New England musicians who have moved, or are moving, towards academic careers to realize their dreams as fully as possible within American economic realities? (People like me)
Seriously, drop me some comments, I’d love to hear what you think.
In Berlin, I’m going to meet several people this weekend whom I have never met before, but with whom I’ve emailed quite a bit. is it this kind of pre-personal socializing that Facebook and MySpace were keying into when they appropriated the word “friend” and made a verb out of it? 10+ years ago, email revolutionized improvised music by connecting hundreds, then thousands, of improvisers in a communications economy they could afford: namely, a free one. (as long as they could get to a computer, their own or one at school or the library.) now as I’m starting to write about it, it’s gone well beyond email.
MySpace never caught on much with me, mostly because it felt unsafe, labrynthine, and fugly. other improvised&noise musicians dove into it, but I always felt that myspace couldn’t make up it’s mind: was it for chilling with friends, or was it for professionally networking bands?
Facebook has never made you choose if you are a band trying to get promoted or just a person. and that I’d where I feel it’s a better mesh with improv/noise people. it’s a community, or anyway a collection of scenes, with a very personal, sometimes even self- effacing, view of itself. it makes sense that if would be at home with the more affable, less hype-oriented feel of Facebook.
but that’s just my view; maybe I don’t look at myspace enough. I’m still glad I have it. Let me know what you think about MySpace, Facebook, et cetera in the context of improvised, noise, phonography, and everything that intersects with it. now I just need to get everybody on the scene(s) into Twitter (hit me up at fielderblank).
On friday I am traveling by train from Netzaberg to Berlin. On saturday I will be performing in Berlin, at Staalplaat (the retail location of the Amsterdam-based record distributor of the same name; staalplaat is dutch for record). I will be performing on an American (Korean-made) 5-string banjo, which I will play on its back with two e-bows, loose pieces of metal, plastic and metal clips, a loose guitar string, and two contact microphones.
I am a bass player. When people ask me what I play, I say “bass.” By this I mean specifically the acoustic contrabass and also, less frequently but originally, the electric bass guitar. Every time I say “I’m a bass player” I want to say more, because there’s a lot more. When I perform, I still consider myself a bassist first and foremost, when in reality I play more than have of my performances with some other instrument or apparatus: laptop, banjo and electronics, electronics alone, some combination. Why is it I still think of bass first? There could be several reasons: 1.) Depending on who’s asking, I want to keep the answer short and simple. I often avoid getting into longer explanations of what I do, just so I don’t lose my interlocutor. If she or he is someone who plays “this music,” I probably won’t shorten my answer, but I may still start the same way. 2.) My own history of bass paying is tied into my general musical thinking on every level. Every time I learned a new way of making music, one that was further outside of western canon and further into a personal, self-made domain, it was with the bass: I composed notated music at the bass rather than at the piano; I learned to play Hindustani ragas on the bass guitar; I learned how to make my contrabass sound like a klezmer clarinet or like Sarah Vaughn; I learned how to make my bass sound like a bitten sax reed or like Sainkho Namchylak. Or maybe it’s just that 3.) “bass” sounds cool.
I could not do this so easily if I were trying to bring a bass. A major part of self-idiomatic musicianship, for many people, is the practicality of developing your own instrumental resources depending on your immediate needs, whether those needs be to fill a room with speakers or to be able to hop on a train and play at a record store or under a tree or in the Palais de Tokyo (maybe in the same trip). Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley of nmperign once said to me about their soprano sax/trumpet instrumentation in an age of electronic gizmos sprawled across folding tables that they wanted to be ready for the apocalypse; when all the power is gone, they still would be ready to play. I guess that’s why I’ve got a banjo, with its resonant skin: Even though I can plug in the contact mics, if the grid goes down, you can still hear me.
