Dave Liebman

[Ayler]

Voici un entretien particulièrement intéressant de Dave Liebman :

Am I mistaken that you’ve been emphasizing tenor saxophone more in the last few years than you had in years previous?

DL: Yes. It’s back in the arsenal since 1996, after a fifteen-year hiatus.

What was the reason for that hiatus?

DL: To get really good on one instrument rather than be ok on a few. The soprano was the choice for a few reasons. One was that I felt a little bit closer to it as far as individuality. Also in 1980, as far as the water-under-the-bridge aspect of how many people had left a voice on the instrument, there weren’t that many at the time—now it’s a little more crowded. Those two reasons made me think that it was time to put down the flute and the tenor, and concentrate on the soprano, and get it to a higher level. It took me 10-15 years to get it up to wherever it is now. It’s a hard one. But just when I was approaching 50, I decided it was time to bring back the father horn and own up to it, and to try to find a way to play it that made sense to me. I felt that I didn’t want to go so much into the Coltrane thing, all my roots that I had played so much, and to find another way of playing it.

Someone remarked that your approach to tenor saxophone is almost like an electric guitar, to which you responded that if you hadn’t heard Coltrane at 15, you might indeed have played electric guitar.

DL: I might have, yes, because of the expressive possibilities. Of course, I loved Jimi Hendrix. Those were all around the same time. But sometimes I hear... Especially on soprano, sometimes I think like that, even moreso than the tenor, because of its lightness and speed. But the way I play both instruments is marked with a certain kind of intensity, and there’s an immediacy that may be reminiscent of the way electric guitar is played.

Hearing Coltrane when you were 15 would place you in 1961, when he signed with Impulse and was starting to elaborate and extend his concept. Can you describe that first hearing?

DL: That first hearing was Birdland, and it was the second or third time I’d gone there. I’d gone with some of the older people in my school. I went to Lafayette High School in Brooklyn.

Sandy Koufax’s alma mater.

DL: Yes, and Larry King.

Joe Torre and John Franco. Bensonhurst.

DL: Well, first of all, six thousand people in the school, and my class, being 1946, was 2500 people. It was quite a large school. Anyway, I went to Birdland, and I didn’t know really who Coltrane was. It was the Bill Evans Trio opposite. Coltrane was with Eric Dolphy, as it ended up, and they played “My Favorite Things,” which I couldn’t believe. I said, “How can they play a song from ‘The Sound of Music’? This is not possible.” In any case, I was compelled to go back every time I could, dozens of times until his death. That’s the main experience of my life, really. Outside of anything personal or family oriented that has happened to me, to see that group live was the big event. It was beyond words, the way they communicated, the way they played, their attitude, the atmosphere, the way it sounded. I was a teenager just starting to fool around a little bit, but I had no idea of the depth of this music, or what it could be—or what MUSIC could be, let’s put it that way. Nothing had ever gotten to me like that at that point. It made me see that there’s something in this music that I didn’t know.

You were playing saxophone by that point?

DL: Yeah, I was playing piano and clarinet.

So you had the music bug.

DL: I liked music, and I was trying to play jazz and pop and so forth. The first music I loved was rock-and-roll, ‘50s rock. I was an Elvis Presley freak. I loved the tenor in rock-and-roll, which is how I got to the tenor. I took music lessons like a high school student does—you’re in the dance band, you do shows, it’s an activity. I enjoyed it. But when I saw Coltrane, and then subsequently Miles... all the different people... I would go see jazz every weekend, and they made me see this as a very serious thing. Of course, in my case, getting a chance to play with Elvin and Miles eventually opened the door, and then, of course, it went to another level. But I had no idea of that in my teenage years—just that it was very, very strong music.

When did you start to get involved in the New York scene? There was a group of people about your age, a little older, a little younger, who started a loft movement before loft jazz, in ‘67, ‘68. How did those attachments start to form?

DL: [Drummer] Bob Moses was my very close friend when I was 16. In fact, we went to the Catskills and played a hotel there. I actually ambushed him for a gig. We played merengues and such. I was in the lofts already at 16 years old, trying to play. That part of whatever the scene was... The amount of musicians in New York was very small. There were dozens, maybe, as compared to hundreds. So you kind of knew everybody. Say, you could see Hank Mobley, and he might know you because he knew your face, because you’d been around and you were hanging. It was a small community. It was easy to go into a club, you had a beer, you sat at the bar, and you could go night after night. By the time I got to college age, and was on my own at NYU in Greenwich Village, I was there a lot. We had quite a scene, a loft scene back in ‘69-‘70...

You moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

DL: Yeah. When I was done from high school.

In those days, that was a big move.

DL: You were going to another country. But of course, I had been familiar with Manhattan, and I had been playing already—club dates, but also trying to play jazz as much as a young person could in those days. Looking for jazz on Bleecker Street with my horn. Seriously going out in the street and thinking there were sessions in the middle of the street! This was what I thought. But we actually organized in the late ‘60s. We put together an organization called Free Life Communication, which I was the head of, and Moses and Chick Corea and Holland, Mike and Randy Brecker, Lenny White, a lot of guys. We put on about 300 or 400 concerts in the first year. We saw that this was a thing we had to do on our own, because jazz actually was pretty low-down in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s as far as places to play and opportunities. So we decided to take matters into our own hands, and got funding from the New York State Council of the Arts, and so forth. So there was some organization and some activity, but we were basically playing free jazz. The avant-garde movement was very strong in New York in the late ‘60s, and that was all that young cats like me wanted to play. Our model was Ascension. We never even played a tune or a blues or anything straight-ahead.

So were you also involved in listening to Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp...

DL: This was our favorite stuff. That’s what you saw. You’d be on the Lower East Side, and that’s what was happening. It was the current thing, and it seemed to be exciting, and it seemed to be something that you could do—get up and just start playing, basically. There were no schools then. Remember, there was no formal schooling. Some guys went to Berklee, but I didn’t, and we didn’t learn in any kind of formal way. We all learned from each other, from watching and listening and hearing and asking questions, and just hanging out.

Was it 1970 that you joined Elvin Jones?

DL: I was with Elvin in ‘71-‘72, and then ‘73-‘74 with Miles.

Seminal relationships, obviously, and very exciting. How did it happen?

DL: Gene Perla was the bassist with Elvin, and he got the gig in late ‘70 or early ‘71. He was part of our community. That was a big thing for us, because we saw one of our own, so to speak, getting with a heavyweight—a real heavyweight. He said, “I’m going to get you in the band and then I’m going to get Steve Grossman in the band—I’m telling you now.” Sure enough, slowly, Joe Farrell, who’d been with Elvin for those years, the late ‘60s, eventually was leaving, and I took his place, and then within 4-5 months Steve was in the band. That was the unit that recorded Live at the Lighthouse and so forth. It went on for that two-year period. We had a wonderful time. First it was the quartet, and Don Alias was with us for about a year with the congas.

How had Elvin Jones’ playing evolved from the time he stopped playing with Coltrane until then?

DL: I’ll be honest with you. Of course, having seen it so many times and knowing Elvin’s playing intimately, I was hoping and expecting and thinking that it would be like Coltrane. Of course, the one big thing that was missing is that I’m not Coltrane! That took a minute to realize. But in essence, Elvin was much more controlled. His timing was much different. He played soft for many, many choruses. He played a lot of brushes. He basically orchestrated the energy, which wasn’t true in Coltrane’s case, where it was Elvin and Coltrane and McCoy, all at the same time. But in this case, it was Elvin’s band, he had young guys with him, and he basically orchestrated the whole thing—without saying anything. When he went up, you went up. When he went down, you had to go down. I spent the first few months with my neck bulging, playing intensity, and he’s playing brushes and saying, “Where are you going? What are you doing there?” The vibe was I’m pushing. He knew that. I was a young guy, I was excited, and that’s what I wanted to try to do. But he matured me slowly, and he was in great control of his drums.

The other thing was that he took a major solo every set, and a long solo. You got to hear a long, expansive drum solo, which you didn’t hear so much with Coltrane.

During those years, how interested were you in changes playing? You were incredibly into Coltrane. Were you as into Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson...

DL: Oh, definitely. The two were always Sonny and Trane. For our generation, they always coexisted, always the half-and-half. Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson were on the second line. Those four were the main influences. Then Pharaoh and Archie Shepp, and the people kind of on the fringe who had a particular thing that you liked. We always had these debates. You’d go up to guys on the street and say, “Trane or Sonny?”—this ongoing joke. It meant, “Who’s your strongest influence? Where’s the real deal?” In a way, I was caught between both, because if I played a certain kind of tune, I’d be in Trane’s bag; if I played a certain Sonny kind of tune, I’d be in Sonny’s bag.” That ended up to be a little bit of a challenge to get over.

But with Elvin, we played a combination of chord change tunes, regular standards, and, of course, modal type tunes. There was no piano, so it was very open—just trio, really, with the other horn. I was able to explore both things at the same time, sort of. When I got to Miles, Miles was completely one chord. It was just rock-and-roll, one pedal, E-flat for 45 minutes, let’s say. There it was completely modal. So between those two leaders during those four years, I was able to go harmonically and non-harmonically—or, let’s say, chord changes and also modal and pedal point. Which of course, ended up being what I do. That set the stage for me.

Under what circumstances did you join Miles Davis?

DL: Well, I did On The Corner, and Miles asked me to join, and I said no, because I wanted to be with Elvin.

You were contracted to do On The Corner? You weren’t part of the band.

DL: My mother found me at a doctor’s office in Brooklyn and said, “Teo Macero, whoever he is, said ‘Come NOW’ to 52nd Street and Madison”—I knew exactly where it was. I got in and played on “Black Satin,” the first track, and I did another overdub maybe. Then Miles said, “Join my band,” something like that, kind of offhand. I don’t know if he meant it or what. I said, “I’m with Elvin, and Elvin’s Daddy,” that was my vibe. He didn’t say anything. Then six months later, in January of ‘73, we were playing the Vanguard, and he came down Tuesday night and Wednesday, and by Thursday he was on my case big-time to join. I told him, “You’ve got to talk to Elvin.” And he did. He called me in the middle of the night and he said, “Elvin said you’re fine, and tomorrow night you play with me at the Fillmore, then you go back and finish the week with him and go to the Workshop next week, and then you’re with me.” That was one night where I played with both, actually. January 12, 1973. It was amazing. I played at the re-opening of the Fillmore, which had been closed for a year, and only was open that one night for Miles and Paul Winter, and then closed and never opened again! That was 8 o’clock, and by 10 o’clock I was back playing “Three Card Molly” with Elvin and Steve at the Vanguard. I will never forget that night musically. Of course, it also felt good. But the music was from the 21st century to...well, I walked into the Vanguard, got down the steps, and they were playing a blues, something with that feel, the complete opposite from Miles’ thing, which was all-electric. I couldn’t hear a note I played. That morning I had just had holes put in my horn to put a pickup in. I had no idea what he was playing. Anyway, this was the beginning of that stage, and that went on for about 18 months with Miles.

[Ayler]

What was new for you in that?

DL: It wasn’t the rock-and-roll, which I was familiar with—or whatever you want to call it...funk. It was the volume and intensity. It was a loud band. Miles, of course, was playing electric trumpet and wah-wah pedal, and there were no real heads. There were no chord changes. You had to watch him for everything. He pointed to you, he cut you out, he cut the band down—you’ve seen the tapes from there. It was his band all the way. He didn’t want anybody else’s tunes. You didn’t bring anything to the plate. You just were there. The main thing with Miles was the chance to be next to him and hear him play every night. Regardless of the style, the way he played was classic Miles. To be able to hear it from five feet away is different than being on the other side, listening from the audience or listening on a recording. You can’t really get it until you stand next to somebody. That was a big lesson in phrasing. Of course, the way he led the band. The way he nuanced everything, the way he brought the energies to him, and the way he controlled the rhythm section in a music that wasn’t necessarily a give-and-take rhythm section like the jazz era. This was a background. They played more or less the same thing. But the way he controlled things was, of course, a major lesson.

So it was a spontaneous orchestration every night.

DL: Very much so. I mean, it got into patterns, because we did night after night, but it was really on him, what he wanted to do. Of course, he was playing keyboard then. At first there were keyboard players, but he fired them eventually, and then it was just him on the keyboard. He’d play weird voicings with his elbow, and I’d play the alto flute, not knowing what key we’re in! We had some good fun. I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed him. He was a complex person. In a lot of ways he was a Jekyll-Hyde personality, it’s true, and he had a lot of drug problems at that time, and a lot of physical problems. But in his heart of hearts, music was everything. It was all music.

Your subsequent career seems marked by an interesting approach to eclecticism. You’re pragmatic, you keep working, and you also put yourself in creatively stimulating situations.

DL: I enjoy a lot of kinds of music. I certainly enjoy my band most, but we play about five different kinds of music in the band. I like the challenge. You are who you are, and the idea is you within a context—you being whatever your style is and how you hear. I hear harmonically a certain way, rhythmically a certain way, etcetera, and that will permeate, whether it’s Puccini or Coltrane or my own tunes. To me, that’s an obvious thing. Of course, I come from this era, the ‘60s, which was the beginning of widespread eclecticism. Now, there were certainly eclectics before, but by the ‘60s you could hear a lot of musics much more readily. It was not unlikely that a listening session could be Bartok, Ravi Shankar, the Bulgarian Girls’ Choir, and then Coltrane or Cecil Taylor or something like that. There could be four or five hours of listening and hanging. All those things affected me—rock-and-roll, world music, classical, especially 20th century classical. I enjoy all of it. On the pragmatic side, I don’t have a contract, so I don’t do one thing a year for a record label. I’ve done a little travel, so you find a label that enjoys one thing, another that enjoys another thing, and so on. I like that.

Lee Konitz has been doing that for about forty years now.

DL: Paul Bley. David Murray. Steve Lacy. It’s not unheard of. From the business side, there’s always the difficulty of selling, because you have too much product competing against your other product, and the labels hate it when you do that. On the other hand, more is always better in the sense that at least people hear more music that you like, that you’re a part of. I’m really thinking about people who are listeners. Selling is not going to happen anyway, in this day and age. So to me, if I can find a way to express myself and somebody is interested, I’m going to do it, and if it’s crowding the other thing, what can I do about it?

You were saying that you’ve concentrated more on the tenor saxophone over the last decade, since you hit 50.

DL: It has come back in, yes.

What other things have you been working on?

DL: Outside of a little envelope when I had a band with John Scofield for four-five years in the late ‘70s, much of my work after Miles was with Richie Beirach in Quest and Lookout Farm and Duo. My relationship with Richie was based on heavily on harmony, and the tradition coming out of Miles and Coltrane. He took care of the rhythm section and I was the soloist. That was our thing. By 1990, I’d had enough of that, and I really wanted to explore rhythm, to get myself more sophisticated rhythmically. Of course, rhythm is the main thing that’s on everybody’s plate in the last 10-15 years. I’m about to go to Manhattan School of Music and start my course, which is based on my book, A Thematic Approach to Harmony and Melody. But of course, it’s so arcane. It means nothing now, because nobody really uses harmony any more. What we have is a world of rhythm; everything’s not in four any more. In 1991, I felt there was a need for me to get familiar with it. Hence, I hired Jamey Haddad as my drummer, who is an expert on hand drums and an expert on rhythm. That was the band’s focus. Also synthesizer—Phil Markowitz played a lot of synthesizer. And I had Vic Juris there. I wanted more color and more written material than I had with Quest. Quest was really an improvising band. It was four master guys who could play. Not that these guys can’t. But in Quest, we were all from the same generation.

But now, in the last five years or so, I’ve been getting back to harmony, playing with Marc Copland or playing duo with Markowitz. Also, Quest was been reawakened, for our first tour in fifteen years. What happens as you get older, in a certain way, you really don’t care about what anybody thinks (if you ever did), you don’t care about categories, and it really doesn’t matter, because you do what you have to do. Also, time is limited. I’m not being morbid, but 60 is not 40. I’m just going to keep going until I can’t.

You were describing your sense at the top of the ‘90s that nobody plays in four any more...

DL: I’m exaggerating.

But the beginning of the ‘90s is when that approach started to become more mainstream instead of an exotic thing.

DL: Yes.

You’ve been an educator over those years. Could you give us a bird’s eye view of what’s transpired over this period?

DL: Well, it’s the computer. It’s world music. The influence of odd rhythm has permeated the West. That’s what it comes down to. Which it should have. It’s been there for thousands of years. Playing odd rhythms puts you in a situation where you’re not playing the same thing. You can’t phrase the same way. The generation that came up in the ‘80s, or certainly in the ‘90s, heard everything from the past played so well from the past. How could they find something fresh? We’re graduating so many students from these places who are so well-equipped, are such good musicians, that doing things in odd meter is one way to make things different—at least at the surface. At least you start with a different premise than if you’re playing 4/4 and playing rhythm changes. I think the odd meters have become endemic. It’s everywhere. My students don’t write anything in 4/4! Which is fine. It’s very interesting. The dust is already beginning to settle a little bit, and things will get to where the distinctions are not so... It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

As far as education, the last ten or fifteen years are an amazing period, with hundreds of students who make my generation look like we couldn’t play at all at that age. I certainly can’t compare myself at 21 or 22 years old to these guys. They’re unbelievable. I mean, they’re not mature men and women yet, but they know everything. They know tunes. Their tools are just ridiculous. What we teach them at Manhattan School of Music and what they have to do is so high-level—I tell you, I can’t believe what they turn into. I’m very impressed. What they’re going to do with it, how they’re going to make out, that’s another story. In some ways, the music is as healthy as it’s ever been because of this influx from all over the world. Business-wise, it’s the worst it’s ever been. It’s a complete dichotomy.

I guess there’s a mix between fresh new repertoire and playing... Well, it’s hard to say that playing “Peace on Earth” and “Meditations Suite” is dealing with older forms, but this is music that’s forty years old.

DL: Yes. That’s a very fair comment. First of all, there’s such a wealth of material. Just in general, because something was played once doesn’t mean it can’t be touched again and redone. Everybody knows that, and that’s why they go back and do it, and do it in ways that aren’t recognizable—“deranging” tunes, as it’s called now. An iota of “My Funny Valentine,” they call it “My Funny Valentine,” but it has nothing to do with it. It’s very interesting in a lot of ways. The students don’t really know past-present. They have so much material. With the iPod, they have hundreds of years of music right in their hands. History doesn’t mean the same to them as it does to us. So the little that we can do, somebody of my generation...

It’s all information. Decontextualized information.

DL: Yes. And it’s hard to find a way into it. As somebody who has a link to this, through my roots in Trane and Elvin and Miles, which was my school of learning, I feel a responsibility to play the older material. Not only, not exclusively, but to play it and reinterpret it and make it present. It’s part of what we’re supposed to do. This is the tradition. I believe in it. I don’t have Lincoln Center as a soapbox, but I believe exactly the way Wynton Marsalis does in that respect. We have a strong tradition. I’m very proud to be part of it. I feel like we have to continue it. I think it’s a good thing for somebody to see somebody in my position playing it—mixed with my own material, of course.

You mentioned recording for many different labels in recent years. Organizing all that activity and keeping the contexts separate must also be a bit of a challenge.

DL: I’m also an educator, and writing books. I can only say I’m very happy that some people enjoy and respect what I do. There’s no real money in it. In fact, in some cases, recording you ends up costing people. To me, records always have been basically a calling card. It’s a means for you to classify your material, and then once you do it, and it’s on the shelf, you can move on. From an artistic standpoint, it’s a necessity, if you can, to close the door on a certain music, or a certain tune, or a certain idiom, or whatever. Also, it’s a way for people to know you’re around. To me, it’s a way for those people who enjoy my music, for fans (I have a couple here and there, not thousands) to know I’m still active, still going. I’m always inspired by older musicians who continue to evolve. When you have 30-40-50 years under the bridge, it’s not easy to find new ways of doing things. For the first ten or twenty, you’re supposed to find new stuff. But when you get past 20-25 years, you’ve done a lot, heard a lot, been inspired a lot, you’ve written those amazing tunes based on your experiences and all that stuff. You’ve had your political awakening, your love awakening, your social awakening. Not that it ends, but you can’t repeat what you’ve done. Being creative... It’s one thing to die early, but it’s another thing to keep going! I got to tell you, it’s not easy, man, to keep going and be creative and have self-respect. It’s a matter of having respect for yourself. If other people see it that way, that’s their business. But I know I need to feel good about what I do. So I need to not repeat, if I can help it, and try to move on—and it’s not easy.

You made a classical music duo recording not long ago, called Vienna Dialogues [Zoho]. Has that been more of a preoccupation over the last decade?

DL: Not really. I’ve always been interested in 20th century classical music because of the harmonic content, for obvious reasons, but I’ve been less interested in pre-20th century. I was doing something in Vienna, where the tradition is very strong, and I was inspired by the songs—just piano and voice (or in this case, soprano). I found a young pianist, Bobby Avey, who was willing to put in the time to help me find the tunes and arrange them. This is a very straightforward, lyrical recording of songs by Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Mahler, celebrating the great European tradition. I didn’t take the songs apart, or change too much—we just played on the songs. That music is what forms the basis of the harmonic music of our time. These are the guys who laid it down.

In the program notes you wrote: “There are several unique challenges. Accuracy of pitch, of course, is crucial, but more important from the aesthetic side, the challenge is to convey an emotional attitude culled from the written music while infusing it with one’s own personal set of inflections, guided above all by good taste. The balance between too little and too much is very precarious.”

DL: Yes. It’s one thing to take a Duke Ellington tune, as on a gig I did at Yoshi’s in 2006 with Delfeayo and Jason Marsalis and Nicholas Payton, where we played “It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” every set, and then phrase it and work with it the way you want At least to me, that’s what you’re supposed to do. But with Chopin and Schubert and Schumann, you have to watch yourself that you don’t go overboard—and I definitely can easily go overboard. One thing I’ve been guilty of has been in excess. I know that. That’s part of my M.O. But when you play a delicate, lyrical song with piano and soprano, it’s important to have good judgment and good taste—to try to be underneath rather than over. That objective-subjective line is an interesting thing. How much of me is in it? How much of It is it? When do you detach yourself from the art? When is the art strong enough that it conveys itself by you being the messenger? All these questions are posed when you are interpreting classic...not just classical, but the classic material. How much is you? How much do you let the music take itself? Etcetera. Of course, every man and woman has a different view on those questions, from a listening standpoint, But from a performance standpoint, you do have to take an interpretive stance. That’s what that paragraph is about.

What do you want to be doing in ten years?

DL: Keep doing it, man. Getting on that plane is getting tough. I’ve got to figure out what to do, because it’s getting harder and harder to get to where you’ve got to get. I’m not even taking the horns. I bring my mouthpiece. But I’m afraid I’m going to get to an airport and they’ll say, “Put the soprano underneath.” That’s the end of that. Things like that are happening. But I hope to continue doing what I’m doing and continue with the music.

Source : http://www.jazz.com/features-and-interviews/2009/1/3/in-conversation-with-dave-liebman

[Ayler]

Un entretien en français :

http://jazz.blogs.liberation.fr/pfeiffer/2009/03/david-liebman-a.html

[Ornette]

Au Sunside le 6 décembre à 21h00 (entrée 30€), Dave LIEBMAN Quartet plays Ornette COLEMAN (pour les 10 ans de la salle).

Le groupe sera ainsi composé : Dave Liebman (saxophones) ; Vic Juris (guitare) ; Tony Marino (c.basse) ; Marco Marcinko (batterie).

Plus d'informations ici.

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