Across the table

Interviews that might have happened over a croissant and coffee, or perhaps the full English…

Tord Gustavsen – October 2009

The Tord Gustavsen Ensemble was in Birmingham near the start of their first tour to promote the new CD, Restored, Returned on the ECM label. He spoke to me in the foyer of the CBSO Centre while the rest of the band were busy with a meticulous soundcheck.

Q You have chosen very carefully the musicians you have worked with (certainly on recordings anyway) and there are not many of them. How did this band come about?

Picture: Russ Escritt

A In one way it’s a new ensemble but all the musical relationships in this band are long-standing. I’ve worked with [saxophonist] Tore Brunborg as a duo for a couple of years at least. And Mats [Eilertsen], the bass player, has been in all of my projects except the trio for eight to ten years, so he really is my bass player of choice, so when I wanted to expand the ensemble that was the natural thing to do to ask him. And also Kristin, the singer, we met 20 years ago while studying and working together during the conservatory years. We had a quartet during those days and also played as a duo. So these are long-standing relationships that I finally have the chance to collect into a project under my name and with my compositions.

Q You’ve played with singers all through your career, haven’t you?

A Yes, the first thing I ever released was a duo of piano and vocals [Aire and Angels with Siri Gjaere] and I had a few years of playing with Silje Nergaard. And two or three other of the really good Norwegian singers, I have been fortunate enough to work with in smaller or larger projects. It’s about interacting with strong melody makers. Also on bass and also on drums. Jarle [Vespestad] is playing the melodies on drums so that’s basically what it’s all about. Both Tore and Kristin on this new album really people who can make so much out of every little motif. If there is a good melodic line it will come out great when they perform it, and I love interacting with it, and I also love putting myself in a position where… you know it’s a challenge. When I play in the trio I get to do all the middle and upper register myself, and I can be inside my own melodic ear all the time. Now I naturally lay back a bit more and play less in those registers. But that’s the kind of restraint on my playing that opens up other fields of freedom, and fields of collectively improvised patterns. I really love doing that with these guys and I love having that happen on these compositions of mine, also.

Q Have you ever used a vocalist on the trio material?

A No, never. The trio was a very purified instrumental thing. We do however play some of the old trio material in this quartet which I love doing. I did some of the tunes also in duo with Tore Brunborg and that works really well I think.

Q Where and when do you compose?

A Sometimes I can sit down and compose something and it happens, but most of the time ideas come to me in odd situations, like in the tour bus or airport, or playing with children, or… and it’s a matter of trying to catch the idea and remember it so I can work on it and see where it might lead next time I have time at a piano by myself. The ideas arrive more often than not in non-concert or non-rehearsal situations, but then the process of getting to know the idea, and getting a feel of whether or not it’s a strong one and whether or not we can actually use it in this context, that’s more a long-term meditation of having it in the back of my head, singing it and humming it and sitting down at the piano with it, and repeating and repeating and repeating it. So contemplation certainly comes into it that way.

The kind of ideas that have gone into this new album, and this is for most of the tunes on the album, they come out of an improvised interlude, musical happening that kept happening during trio concerts. Between the actual tunes I would often improvise an interlude, and I felt there was something here. They often turn out to be an almost simplistic, almost naïve lullaby-like melody, carried out on a bi-tonal (music that has two tonal centres and therefore two sets of harmonies to choose from) musical background. So there was harmonic internal ambiguity with a very lullaby-like melody, and the kind of tension between the basic sensuality of a lullaby and the openness of ambiguous harmony – I wanted to take that kind of musical situation further and see if I could use that as a basis of putting together a set of compositions.

And then the challenge was given to me by the Vossa Jazz Festival in Norway to do a commission of work, and that was really the start of formalising it and putting these ideas together, first as a concert and then as an album.

Q How did the W H Auden poetry come to be included? Have you always read Auden?

A Not really. I was familiar with some of his work from Norwegian translations, but I had never sat down to read a full collection of poems until two years ago when we were on tour in the UK, and we had an off-day in Oxford, where I went strolling round the bookstores looking for inspiration and I found this particular collection of poems [Another Time], and felt an immediate connection to it. They are immediately gratifying on the surface as sensual sound and in the immediate associations evoked by them made me think that these can really be used as song lyrics. But at the same time they are complex poems that you can sit down and read, and re-read for weeks and weeks, and still discover new layers. And, also, the metre in them is not the standard symmetrical song-lyric metre, so writing music for them is not an obvious path to set out on and I like the challenge of that, too. There is something very immediate about them and at the same time something abstract so I really had to work on to get right.

Q What has recording for the ECM label meant to you?

A Well, for the last six or seven years it has meant good distribution – that’s the most fundamental thing. ECM has a network of distributors in most places in the world, which is difficult to get to on an independent scale. They combine the artistic vision of an independent with the distribution of a major label. Obviously in the days of the Internet that aspect might not be as important anymore because digital music is available everywhere, but still the network of dedicated distributors is important, and I am grateful for that. And also Manfred Eicher as a producer has played, especially on the two later albums, a very fruitful and good role in the studio. That has meant a lot also. We could have done it ourselves, but not in exactly the same way and he has some really good ideas, especially in sequence of tracks and of rethinking form in the studio. It’s not like some bands in jazz where when they are playing live they get into a standard way of thinking where you have a lot of overactive and most of the tunes are up-tempo, whether or not you really are into the compulsive up-temponess of jazz, whereas on recordings with Manfred they are able to back off and ease down, and get into the smaller nuances. With us it has been more the other way around. He has been instrumental in challenging us to work with dynamics because we are taking the stillness of things quite far, also in the concert setting and that has become a major pattern.

Q There are some people that expect of jazz that “up” and “exciting” in a conventional sense, mood in jazz and therefore might find it more difficult to get into your music. How would you help them to approach it in order to get the most out of it?

A Well, if you consider it a service, rather than a performance… A concert is a mediation in church, but it is also a matter of grooviness, a matter of artistic virtuosity, but first and foremost it is about trying to narrow in on the point where music really matters, that this is really saying something important, this is bringing me closer to the essence of life, to put it in a clichéd slogan, but you have to move with us in that direction, otherwise you won’t really like it because we are not there to fulfil any showbiz kind of thinking. That’s not what we want to do. With the quartet now, we tend to go a bit higher in dynamics than we did with the trio. We might even have more up-tempo tunes, but it’s always imperative that it evolves from a point of stillness, from a point of waiting until it’s called for, waiting until it feel essential to do it.

Jan Garbarek – September 2009

Actually we weren’t talking over breakfast… we weren’t even in the same city. Jan Garbarek spoke to me on the phone in the middle of a recent afternoon while in England for a spot of media interaction connected to the release of the Jan Garbarek Quartet’s new live album, Dresden.

Q Clearly Manu Katche has brought a different sound to the group, and now new bassist Yuri Daniel has changed its dynamics again. Can you expand on how the group has developed and what the different personnel bring to it?

A They were very unfortunate circumstances that forced Eberhard to leave us. He suffered a small stroke – it was actually during a soundcheck. He cannot play at the moment and it could be some time before he could be back.
This young Brazilian musician was recommended, who lives in Portugal, so he was not so difficult to bring along on the tour. He brings a very fundamental approach to the bass playing. Eberhard was contributing much in the sense of orchestration and atmosphere, but Yuri is a more basic player in that he knows a lot about rhythms, obviously, and about the place for the bass in the rhythms, so that is what we enjoy with his playing.
I have had the pleasure of playing with Manu off and on for the last 25 years and he has been on a few of my albums. This time he as able to do, off and on, touring for the whole year, so I just cherished the opportunity to be playing with him, because he is one of my favourites when it comes to drumming, and he has a wonderful sense of styling the pieces and contributing just the right thing, so it feels just right.
The other drummer that we have with the band is the Indian drummer Trilok Gurtu and he will be playing with us on our current tour and he offers very different things from Manu but also incredibly enjoyable things – so when it comes to drummers I have been in heaven the last few years.

Q And does that change in personnel affect your own playing?

A Somewhat – yes it does. And the important thing for me has been to realise that I have to listen to what they bring that is different and not to what I was used to hearing, and missing that, because that is counter-productive in a way, so I have to realise that something new is going on, and I have to find new ways to solve… come up with the right answers to what they offer. It’s been a good thing – it’s very inspiring.

Q A lot of us came across Milton Nascimento, and his piece Miracle of the Fishes, from Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer album. Is that how you came across it? Or did you know his music before that?

A I don’t recall – it’s rather a long time ago. I know some of his music rather well now so I can’t recall whether it was before or after… but I certainly know that album… Herbie Hancock is on it. And they played the same piece, in a very different way, obviously, but the piece is absolutely magnificent so, yes, they shouldn’t be allowed to keep it for themselves!

Q Just as those who don’t really listen closely to Leonard Cohen’s music might think him rather miserable, rather than often very funny, so the clichéd view of your music is one of Nordic cool, when, as Dresden shows so clearly, nothing could be further from the truth. Are you aware of this? Does it annoy you?

A I don’t understand it because, frankly, the music is quite vivid and quite intense. So I don’t always recognise myself in that “cool” characteristic. But I know of it, of course. It’s very obvious, isn’t it, that when you come from the cold north, that your music must be cold, and icy… it’s the easy way out. If you come from a warm country you play warm music; if you come from a cold country you play cold music…

Q I have heard that you developed your sound in the cruellest of acoustics. Is this true?

A There were a few years when I was living in a suburb, in a condominium, and I had to insulate one small room, and I covered everything – walls, ceiling, floor, doors, windows – with a thick and heavy foam, that was supposed to kill sound, not only in the apartment and for the neighbours, but also inside the room. There was no reflection so the sound was totally dead, and I think that helped me in shaping my sound and the way I attack a sound also. Because, there was nothing for free in there… Any other room I picked up my saxophone in would sound like heaven, really… so it was a great boost for me…. If you are in a big church with a huge reverb space, anything can go, really.

Q So Sonny Rollins’s Williamsburg Bridge and your foam room served the same purpose?

A I think they do, because the sound doesn’t come back to you at all, whether it’s a confined space with walls or a wide-open space… the sound is just what you hear directly from the instrument, without any resonance. So you have to work hard to make the sound come alive.

Don Cherry

Q You have written before about the influence of Don Cherry early in your career. What do think he would make of the jazz world today, and how it has developed as a “world music”?

A Oh he was the one that started it all – or at least he was part of it, that movement, that kernel that originated that idea. I remember well that transition from when Don was an avant-garde, free jazz player, and then became a sort of folk, cultural manifestation. His clothes were a mixture from all around the world; he was reading spiritual literature from all parts of the world; he went to Africa to collect instruments; he played with Turkish musicians, and in Scandinavia… he was just the embodiment of the beginning of that whole movement. And it had a tremendous impact on us, young Norwegian musicians. He was a hero.

Q It’s not easy finding a non-ECM recording in your discography. You have been there from the beginning. Do you remember how you first met Manfred Eicher?

A I remember it well. We, myself and some of my Norwegian colleagues, were playing in Northern Italy, in Bologna, and after the concert we were backstage and there were not a lot of people around. Actually we had made a recording before we went down because we heard there were some emerging new labels in central Europe that might be interested in the quite avant-garde stuff that we did.
And I asked one German musician if he knew any of those… and he pointed to a guy with a moustache, a quite striking moustache, who was sitting in a corner… and said talk to him because he is supposedly just about to start a company, and I introduced myself to Manfred Eicher, and he said he was not interested in our tape, but he might consider doing his own recording with us.
And I thought this was a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” situation, so I didn’t expect to hear from him.
Two months later I got a letter from Manfred inviting us to record an album. And he said: “choose a studio and find the technicians that you trust and get some music together and I will come on such and such a date and we will have three days – two for recording, one for mixing (which was the norm in those days) and he came, by train, from Munich – a long trip, 25 hours – and he went back with the master tapes on his lap – 25 hours – holding on to this tape like it was a treasure (and an investment for him of course). And that was our first ECM album and one of the very first ECM did.

Q Clearly your relationship with ECM is not like some musicians’ relationship with their record label. And clearly ECM is not like any other record company. Can you tell us something about what makes the label so different? And how you think Manfred changed the business to a certain extent.

A Well to me it’s all about individuals. It’s a company but it’s a one-man outfit really. It’s Manfred Eicher. He has a finger in everything – and intensely so. It’s his vision, his private, personal vision, that is the foundation of the whole label. It was from the beginning, it still is. He is even intensely preoccupied with the size, the placement and font of the text on the cover, the leaflet inside the cover. He is into every aspect of the album, the presentation of the album. It becomes such a strong business because of that. It’s not someone does this, someone does that, we get a sort of a wishy-washy presentation – no it’s one vision, and that is what also created the whole personality of the label.

Q Would you say it’s a label that does not recognize the labels that other people/the media put on music – jazz or classical or world – and becomes a label in itself.

A It’s true because of Manfred, because if something resonates with him, it resonates with the image of ECM and it could be Art Ensemble of Chicago and free jazz in a certain way or it could be Arvo Pärt, and anything in between and there are certain aspects of these composers, these performers that resonate in Manfred, and that is a basis for a collaboration. That creates the coherence also of the outfit. Even though it’s so spread out really, if you consider the various genres that ECM represents, somehow there is a common denominator, and of course it is Manfred’s own personality.

Q Did you ever think that 40 years on, you’d still be making records with him?

A No, I didn’t, but on the other hand if something works the way ECM has worked for me, there is no reason to think of any change. It was clear from the first moment that we work well together and have a very common history. So many of the jazz musicians of my generation, we have heard the same things, we have shared the same joys in listening, from Miles to Coltrane to Bill Evans, Mingus… and in the classical field we have the same composer heroes, so this common history and common ground was a very good starting point for us.

Q Is it true that ECM does not have lengthy multi-album contracts with its musicians? It is one album at a time?

A Yes and no. Of course there are contracts but there are also oral contracts, understandings, and they mean something in this case. It is not like any huge American corporation where you need a 150-page contract with lots of small writing underneath, and so on. What we say, stays. That is the basis and you expect all obligations to be fulfilled by both sides. And it is.
ECM is not a company that will pay up front $100,000 for one or two or five albums; you make the album, you see how it goes, and you are paid accordingly, and it’s absolutely certain that you get what you are supposed to get from them. It is always honest and clear.
I have heard so many rumours about bigger labels, bigger companies would make big offers of lots of money, but the artists would feel they have been cheated. I have never had this feeling with ECM. It is always dead accurate when it comes to sales figures. We get the money we should.
It is that integrity that is one of the reasons I feel so pleased to be part of that and do my albums for ECM. I feel that it is transparent in every way and that there is trust involved, and meticulous care from Manfred’s side and everybody that works for him expects the same.