LARRY OCHS INTERVIEW

Improv master Larry Ochs has played with everyone from John Zorn to Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, and Andrew Cyrille as well as being one of the driving forces behind the 30 year strong ROVA Sax Quartet. On Tuesday, October 13th at Roulette he presents the Larry Ochs  Sax and Drumming Core with a meditation on and a 21st-century distillation of the songs of American and eastern European blues-shouters, and of traditional chant-singers from Asia and Africa.  The result is strikingly modern.

ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
LO: I’ve been composing for improvisers since 1971, with the whole process jumping a few levels once I got involved with Rova Saxophone Quartet in 1977/78. I also prefer performing in ongoing bands, including bands that play 100% free-improvisation; improvisation that is based on mutual interests and results in the eventual creation of a world of sound that that band comes to inhabit whenever it reconvenes. The important thing though is: the working or ongoing band. I’m into “deeper is better,” and you can’t get deeper without repetition,  development of a group sound, and a willingness to take chances with partners you trust to know how to support you when you’re improvising out there without a net.
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The Sax & Drumming Core started as a trio of 2 drummers (same guys) and me on sax, and was intended as a one-off CD project only.  Touring with 2 drummers and just Ochs out front? No way. But then we performed live for a benefit locally (San Francisco), and then a few other gigs, then a tour, then a 2nd great CD ( Up From Under on Atavistic). Then I got lucky: a producer told me the only way she’d give me a date at her festival is if I agreed to employ Satoko Fujii. Well, that’s not exactly right. I proposed it to her myself, but then I started thinking I could never get enough work to have a quintet tour happen. Luckily the producer didn’t care about that… But, having played with Fujii and Tamura on a Rova project in 2003, and then hearing Satoko playing a synthesizer on Natsuki’s great quartet CD, I knew I wanted to use both of them,  to open the trio up for more possible colors, combinations, compositional strategies, etc. So the quintet happened first in 2007 for 3 festivals in Europe plus a recording and concert in Venice; the CD from that  Venice session is just out and will be available at the Roulette concert. Since 2007: a tour in western North America in 2008.

We work from compositions for improvisers; four basic forms: a graphic map that for the most part tells you when you’re in and out, but with a few set moments, frames an improvisation; form 2: an open improvisation with notation and visual cues, all available to be integrated into the open form when appropriate; form 3: a more standard form with heads and solos; form 4: a form that meditates on the blues shouters from around the world  …this last form was the first one used on the first CD, and the main reason I got this band together.

Are there working artists today with whose work you identify, or rather, who do you consider to be your peers?
LO: I love musicians working in the cross-hairs of composition and improvisation. I also love those working purely in free improvisation, but I need some kind of depth of musical understanding, combined with a sense that I’m hearing the inner soul of the player through their music, be that on saxophone or computer. If I get a sense that you’re just dabbling, I’m out of there. I do take younger less experienced musicians as seriously as my peers if I can see their soul in their music, or the potential emergence of the inner person. If you’re in it for life, I’ll be there checking you out.

The people I continually come back to are those that really combine composition and improvisation or are master improvisers: Barry Guy, Frith, Zorn, Crispell, (talking peers now, not spanning “the history of improvised music”), Lisle Ellis, Wadada Leo Smith, Roscoe Mitchell, Braxton, Evan Parker, Sharp, Z Parkins, Mori, Nels Cline, Fujii, and from the generation just below mine but still peers: Goldberg, Schott, Dunn, Amendola.

What was the last music you listened to?
LO: The last music I was listening to on the plane back from Moscow on Sept 28: Symmetric Orchestra, Jimi Hendrix, Morton Feldman, Goldberg-Schott-Dunn, Booker T’s most recent CD “Potato Hole,” Electric Masada, Charles Ives Second Symphony and his great short pieces for orchestra, Guy’s first trio CD with Crispell and Lytton.

Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?
LO: I consider myself an artist, involved in composing and performing music that I create or help to create. It’s too integrated to be separated out. Perhaps in that sense I am more a performer in the traditional sense than I am a composer in the traditional sense. I almost never compose for the sake of composing. I do perform a lot as a free improviser, but even in that context I am composing in real time, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t improvise like Derek Bailey, or as I imagine D Bailey improvised – only in the immediate moment.

Is there an event or experience that led you to start in experimental media?
LO: I started playing saxophone “late” at age 21; trumpet through high school, but not seriously, and I quit when I left for college. But throughout the listening stage of my college career, I was accumulating all kinds of information that led to my immediately being open to experimental music when I picked up music again at 21. I was inspired to choose a saxophone listening for (possibly for  the first time) to Albert Ayler’s recording called Love Cry; still great . But by then I was living in San Francisco; it was 1971, and the idea of experimentation was just in the air. I joined in.

Who do you see as instrumental in your development as an artist?
LO: Instrumental in my development: Coltrane, Ayler, Steve Lacy, Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Roscoe Mitchell, Xenakis, Varese, Scelsi, Feldman, Messiaen, Zorn, Douglas Hall, Lyn Hejinian, Monet, the language poets, D Bailey, the European improvised music scene in general, Glenn Spearman, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, the Who.

What is interesting to you about your own work?
LO: What is interesting to you about your own work? – Perhaps the most amazing thing is that I am still interested in it, and that it seems to be growing stronger even now. I also love to see how the compositional “concerns” seem to work across different groupings of musicians, with adaptations for the abilities and limits of musicians involved. Very interesting. I also love the conflict and ultimate resolution of problems between composition and preconception, and then on the other side improvisation and performer initiative. Given the abilities of the people I choose to work with, there is always this issue of whether composition is even necessary. But if you can use it in a way that focuses but doesn’t hold back the music, it is a very powerful tool. At the same time I love the bands I do play in that are essentially 100% improvised music such as Jones Jones, ODE, and Maybe Monday. More on those bands at www.ochs.c