An Interview with the Berkeley Improvisation Ensemble

The Berkeley Improvisation Ensemble
(L to R) Robert Strizich, Allan Pollack, Evalyn Stanley, Jim Aron, Jim Moran.

The Berkeley Improvisation Ensemble, active between 1968 and 1971, is among the many groups I first learned about via the archives at newspapers.com. No recordings were available, and information elsewhere on the internet was scarce. So I reached out to Robert (Bob) Strizich, who was gracious enough to answer some of my questions. He also forwarded my questions to Jim Aron and Evalyn Stanley, who gave their responses to several questions.

The BIE describe their music:

"The BIE is dedicated to the exploration of different techniques involving controlled improvisations. These techniques range anywhere from the performance of totally free pieces, where the control is provided by the individual improviser, to the performance of pieces where most of the sounds are precisely notated. Our main aim is to play music that is well-organized, coherent, and emotionally stimulating, yet still retaining the freedom and excitement that is inherent [in the music of improvisation]."

After striking up a correspondence, I learned that a 2-CD set of live recordings was released in 2019. It is available from Jim Aron, and can also be heard via YouTube.

How did the BIE first come together? Can you describe some of the first times you played together?

Bob: We came together by means of a rather complex network of interpersonal relationships!

Jim Aron and Jim Moran already knew each other from high school in South San Francisco;  Moran was attending San Francisco State College (SFSC; now San Francisco State University), and Aron was at the University of California Berkeley (UCB).  

South Bend Tribune, 5 March 1967 (p. 25)

Allan Pollack and I were also undergrads in music at UC Berkeley.  I had been playing in a UCB jazz quintet that included vibraphonist Lee Schipper and saxophonist Bob Claire.  Allan and Bob Claire had attended the same high school in Chicago and were friends, and so I ended up meeting Allan through Bob.  Allan and I became good friends, and we began thinking about starting a group that would explore non-jazz free improvisation.  

Allan knew Aron from a jazz band at UCB in which they both had played.  Allan subsequently invited Aron to join us, who in turn suggested his friend Moran as a fourth member.  Early on, Jim Aron was an engineering major at UCB, but soon switched his major to music.

The first several times we played together, the musical experiences were very powerful and really "blew our minds."  These early improv sessions convinced us to continue and to become a formal ensemble.

What drew you to improvisation? How did your views change during the life of the BIE, and have they changed since?

Bob:  I was originally drawn to improvisation as a result of my early interest in jazz and my veneration of the great jazz virtuosos whose playing I admired.  But when I first heard "free jazz" and then became engrossed in free improvisation myself, I began to realize that the term "improvisation" comprised a much larger musical terrain than just the jazz idiom.  As wonderful as jazz was, I saw that improvisation had much more to offer than just improvising in a steady tempo to fixed, cyclical chord changes.  In our work with the BIE, I felt that we were expanding the boundaries of what improvising itself was, and could be, and were evolving an extemporized musical idiom analogous to that of the composed "avant-garde" new music that was then emerging.  Although I don't follow the current improv scene very much, it seems to me that improvisation is very much alive and well nowadays.  And thanks to the emergence of the digital era, players now have an array of interactive technologies at their disposal to augment their instrumental improvisations (I'm thinking here of artists ­like composer/trombonist George Lewis, who performs improvised "duets" with interactive software of his own design).

Composer / trombonist George Lewis.

Jim Aron: Our involvement with improvisation certainly had its roots in our jazz backgrounds and although our very first rehearsals (which, by the way, included bassist Peter Marshall) incorporated jazz elements, we soon made a very conscious effort to avoid jazz techniques and jazz tonality entirely.  This direction away from jazz continued throughout the group’s existence.  That being said, I never lost my love of jazz.  

What were some of the influences on your musical style and background?

Bob: Many diverse musical influences influenced and informed our performances and style of playing.

Of course, jazz was an initial inspiration for all of us.  We were certainly influenced in some ways by the more "mainstream" post-bebop musicians of the era (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, etc.) and also the more radical free-jazz players (such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, etc.)

But the cultural context of the SF Bay Area in the late 60s and early 70s played a large role too. This was, of course, a tumultuous and troubled ­– yet exciting and inspirational – time to be of that young age, studying and performing music in Berkeley (already a notoriously infamous city!) and in the wider Bay Area.  Our music was most certainly informed not only just by our jazz background and university training, but also by the alternative, radical, anti-establishment ferment of those years –  combined with the changing winds of the new music blowing in from New York and Europe.

As music undergrads, we were all acquainted – through our university music history classes – with the "atonal" and dodecaphonic works of Schönberg and Webern.  But more important, and much more influential on us, was hearing live performances of post-WWII new music not only at UCB, but also at various San Francisco venues, Mills College, and UC Davis.  We were exposed to seminal new works by Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Xenakis, Penderecki, Cage, Feldman, Steve Reich and many more composers.  I also remember benefiting personally from visits and residencies of important composers such as Sessions, Dallapiccola and Messiaen (at UCB), Stockhausen (at Mills College) and Cage (at UC Davis).

All of the musical and cultural influences mentioned above were at work in our improvisational approach, characterized by a highly chromatic, freely 12-tone language at the service of an intense, dramatic – and often exuberant, even wild! –  musical expression.

On Discogs, I found a couple records of baroque music which you (Bob) recorded. Do you see your interests in improvisation and baroque music as related?

Bob: Yes.  Around the time that the BIE disbanded, I was becoming very involved with early music.  I eventually studied lute and baroque guitar at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, and subsequently spent a decade or more performing and recording renaissance and baroque music.  My experiences with jazz and the BIE definitely prepared me for the extemporaneous aspects of early music (such as ornamentation and the realization of basso continuo accompaniments).  And there was certainly a loose correspondence between our work in the BIE and the performance practice of early music:  like our BIE "scores," renaissance and baroque notation was not necessarily definitive, but was often a rough outline of melodic/harmonic content, the details of which would be filled in by the players at the moment of performance. 

Jim Aron: I was also involved in both renaissance and baroque performance technique, studying and performing on natural trumpet with harpsichordist Alan Curtis.  I also performed on soprano and alto sackbut, krummhorn and recorders with the Consortium Antiquum.

Who were some of the faculty members that you worked with, and did they encourage your pursuit of improvisation?

Bob: I studied with various composers at UCB, including Joaquin Nin-Culmell, Richard Felciano, Andrew Imbrie and Roger Sessions.  Another important influence for me was harpsichordist Alan Curtis, who was very supportive of my growing interest in early music.  These professors were generally encouraging of the work of the BIE, but only indirectly.  At that time, there was no support for jazz in the UCB music department, and the music that we were creating was considered to be some sort of jazz spinoff.  

In spite of our somewhat "alternative" status in the UCB Music Department, we were nevertheless quite active in the department and played frequent Noon Concerts (a weekly concert series on the campus sponsored by the music department).  From these performances, we became quite well-known (perhaps infamous?) in the department, so much so that we were dubbed by some of the more staid students "The Beatles of New Music!"

Other than Jim Moran, Allan Pollack, Jim Aron, and yourself (Bob), were there more members of the BIE? Did you have any other collaborators who played with you from time to time?

Bob and Evalyn: After the four of us had been playing for a while, we decided to do more theatrical work.  Evalyn Stanley had been a friend of Lee Schipper, and we got to know her through our jazz connections to Lee. After we saw her in a University production of Boris Vian’s “The Empire Builders," we invited her to join the group.  

Evalyn was an undergrad in Dramatic Arts at UCB and member of the Magic Theatre, a young theater group in the East Bay.  The Magic Theatre (MT) is now a well-known mainstay in the San Francisco theater scene, but at that time was in its infancy.  

The Magic Theater, San Francisco.

Our first collaboration with the Magic Theatre was “Ubu Roi” by Alfred Jarry, directed by John Lion.  Later on, in addition to Evalyn, we also collaborated with other actors from the Magic Theatre. When we began collaborating with the MT, the troupe had already mounted several controversial plays by San Francisco beat poet Michael McClure. We performed in McClure's play “The Cherub,” and also accompanied dramatic readings of selections from his “Meat Poems.”   

At some point, Jim Aron had suggested trombonist Johannes Mager as a possible collaborator.  Johannes was a very talented improviser at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) whom Jim knew through his brass players' connections, and we invited Johannes to share at least one concert with us.

One article mentions that the group explored "different techniques involving controlled improvisation". Another describes "rudimentary outlines, which the players then filled in". Did the Ensemble perform improvisations, scores, or a combination of both?

Bob: The only formal score that I recall was the score for my fairly long Improvisation for Electric Guitar, which contained specific timings, rhythms and pitches in addition to graphic notation. 

However, all of us contributed many verbal and/or graphic scores of various types, most of which were really rough "road maps" for controlled improvisation.  These scores were mainly used at the beginning of the three-year life of the ensemble, whereas towards the end of that period we tended to perform totally free improvs:   completely improvised, with no pre-planning at all.  Many of these were also quite long-lasting – often 30 minutes or more.   We considered these later lengthy improvisations to have been some our very best work.

Did the members of the Ensemble view improvisation and composition as different? How so?

Bob: I think that improvisation and composition were very much linked with one another for us.  Our main focus was chiefly improv itself, and for the most part, written "compositions" were just ways of guiding, or loosely controlling, the experience of improvisation.

The pieces we did with Evalyn were a possible exception.  Since these involved fixed texts and a member who was not a musician, the scores to these were more specific:  5 Poems by Stephan Crane, Potpourri, 4 Poems by e. e. cummings, and Cantata in a Forgotten Language.

Did the Ensemble rehearse? How often? What did you work on during rehearsals?

Bob: Yes, we did rehearse.  At one point, we actually lived together for a year in a large rented house in Oakland, and during this time we rehearsed with some regularity, especially when we were preparing for performances with the Magic Theatre.

After we moved out of the Oakland house, we probably rehearsed less, especially towards the end of the life of the ensemble, when we were mainly performing totally free improvisations.  

When we did rehearse pieces that were pre-planned or that used a "score," I think that rehearsals focused mainly on internalizing the overall formal shape, developing appropriate musical materials, and refining the proportions and timing of sections.

Some of the group's performances were accompaniments to dance, poetry, and theater. Did you view the BIE's activities as specifically musical, or interdisciplinary?

Jim Aron: The BIE was certainly formed specifically as a musical endeavor, but which early on utilized poetry as a component to several of our pieces.  This led naturally to our serendipitous involvement with the Magic Theatre. 

Bob:  I would say that we viewed our activities as chiefly musical, especially when performing as a quartet or a quartet-plus-actress.  But for specifically theatrical occasions (like our performances with the Magic Theatre), we wholeheartedly embraced our role as collaborators in a basically interdisciplinary enterprise.

I've been able to find documentation on about 13 performances, dating from Oct. 1968 until Nov. 1971.  Was there a particular moment at which the BIE disbanded?

Bob and Jim Aron: Actually, we played what seemed like innumerable concerts:  performances at venues all over the Bay Area, including museums, churches, and college and university campuses;  a tour of University of California campuses all over the state, etc.

All of us were developing other musical and personal interests towards the end of the three-year life of the BIE, and we disbanded – quite amicably I might add – in late December of 1971.

Are there any recordings of the Ensemble? Were any commercially released?

Jim Aron: Although we did not commercially release any recordings while the ensemble was active, we have recently produced a two-CD set of recordings spanning nearly the entire life of the ensemble, which we would be happy to provide to you. These recordings include pieces from all of our KPFA recordings as well as excerpts from our Magic Theatre performances and a performance on KGO-TV (ABC).  

Do you still improvise?

Jim Aron: When the group disbanded in 1971, I continued this type of free improvisation, for a short time, with Johannes Mager and The Ghost Opera, a group originally formed at the SFCM under the guidance of Robert Moran amongst others.  My musical life for the next twenty-five years moved in quite a different direction, which included theatrical and comedic improvisation but not the free improvisation associated with the BIE.

Bob:  Yes, I do, but now in the context of my composing work.  When I'm working on a new piece, I often improvise – on guitar, keyboard or computer (usually running Max/MSP) – to focus and develop musical ideas.  Improvisation – often computer-assisted – has now become a compositional tool for me! 

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Conversation with Mayo Thompson: Part Two

Continued from part one. Please do not distribute without first receiving permission from me

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Conversation with Mayo Thompson

Part Two

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What happened after Coconut Hotel was recorded?

We were invited to the Berkeley Folk Festival, on the power of it. A writer for some art catalog heard it and said “If I could get you all invited to Berkeley Folk Festival, would you play that?” “Well, yeah. Yeah we would,” thinking to ourselves, “No, but we'll do something.” Is it gonna be usual rock and roll? No, it won't be. This is rock and roll. And sure enough, we did. We played feedback. We opened … we played five minutes of feedback and drove everybody in the building out, practically. And then, Lost and Found, another band on IA came along and got everybody back inside, and got 'em all in a good mood by playing them some good time rock and roll.

A listing of artists at the 1967 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.
Image courtesy of Berkeley in the Sixties.

So when we got to California, we played. We set things up on the stage; the first thing I did was I walked out, leaned my guitar against [the amp], turned it on as loud as I could and walked off and left it there, then started doing some other stuff. That was in the 1960's, that was like “Woah! Look out!” That was our attitude. So when Hendrix freaked out at Monterey and set his guitar on fire with some Bunson cigarette lighter fluid [laughs]. We tried to get in there, we thought to ourselves, “Yeah, go ahead Jimi, set fire to your guitar. Now listen to this.” You're gonna hear apocalypse right now, the end of the whole fuckin' game. Ok? We're ready, and we got the soundtrack. Here it is.

We were feeling rather … I think the English call it “Bolshy”.

What does that mean?

You get into a crowd of hippies, it was easy to feel like “My goodness, come on. What's going on here?” It wasn't far from there to wanting to think in terms of being a revolutionary, politically. It belonged to that kind of attitude to the world. Eventually, you quote Marx: “Philosophy is meant to interpret the world, the point is to change it.”

Speaking of Marx, can you elaborate on the phrase you used earlier to describe Cage & Tudor's work, as working with the “means of production”?

If you wanna make music, you have to have a point of production. And there, you're liable to have struggle, if you want to put it in those kinds of terms. I met David Tudor and proposed various things to him; there was some piece where he was working on an island, and I suggested miking the island, and having some central headquarters. He looked at me like I had left something ugly on the table. So there's a politics of production, that inasmuch as there are ideas, and there is conflict among the ideas. And there's only so much money and interest to go around: production is a battle for inductive space; elbowing out inductive space: “This, here, now. Not that, this.” Or, “In lieu of that, this.” Or, “Against that, this.” “Instead of that, this.” Or, “To hell with that, let's kill that.” So there's a conflict of ideas.

So one is trying to get a hold of the means of production, which had been formed around the successful enterprises in that field, like Cage/Tudor, where you have programming prejudice: you come forward and your material's got to be relevant to the coin of the realm, and if it's not... “Next.” If we introduced anything successfully into it, it was a notion of extremism, as such. It is possible that you're gonna meet people who are playing the game exactly as it sits, but they're playing with different materials or or different attitudes to the same materials – that the other thing that one finds out: there is only one, there's no alternative material. You can turn a steam hammer into an instrument, sure enough. Luigi Russollo and George Antheil proved this: that this has all been done.

Musical Heritage Society's recording of George Antheil's
Ballet Mécanique (1924), recorded in 1927.

And that was the other thing for us. We looked at the world as a set of ideas, ideas which were exhausted. We weren't gonna work for them, we were gonna look for something else, that hadn't been done. That would have been another criteria: looking around, “Hmm, can't find anybody [who's done this], let's do it.” “I don't see anyone behaving like this. Hmm, maybe there's a reasonable way of going about it.” It's Machiavellian opposition politics, which is underwritten by a principle of commitment to truth: that something is the truth, and that it is reached in a mysterious way, perhaps. In a way that looks on the face of it contradictory. It may in fact not be; it may be contradictory through and through, because it represents some change in the way that this stuff is going to be dealt with. And those kinds of leaps are possible, and those are the kinds of things we were gearing ourselves for. Of course, maybe they don't even exist. They only exist in the eye of people who make them and those who hear them; you can get those people to appreciate the terms in which you made it. And that's, what I fear, is all there is.

When you think of these things in some detailed, analytical way, outside of “These are the conditions I'm operating my usual game in, and everything comes down to my usual game of survival”, it's awkward to find terms in which to operate where you're not just blowing smoke. And the quest is to find some. And this thing against blowing smoke also has to do with not wanting to be a part of the great celebration of human spirit, that music and art gets the job of: encouraging human beings, “Yes, we're special. We're the reasonable animal. Not mere animals, we're above the animals.” This feeds the illusory aspect.

Do you think this use of art as a celebration of humanity is naïve?

I don't think it's naïve, I think it's sinister. I think it's a form of manipulation used by people who want more than anything for music to be an instrument to their own ends. Lenin didn't like music. He'd hear Beethoven and say "Bah, that stuff makes me want to go out and pat people on the head. Get that away from me, that puts me in a good mood." The good mood that I need to be in right now is the one that goes along with doing the thing that I'm doing, not some generic equilibrium state which humans strive for in the evening when they put on their slippers and sit in front of the TV. Music is not a comfortable shoe, in my book. Music is a pain in the ass. I walk down the street, and I hear something somebody else [is playing]. It's got me by the shoulders and the bass is pounding on my chest and my pantsleg. I didn't ask for that. It's pervasive. Music pollution. Not that I care. I'm not going to go around trying to clean up the world; I'm not a reformer. I don't mind a little chaos, I've gotten used to it by now.

If you don't approach music in the way you described as “sinister”, how do you approach music in your life?

I do it professionally; she is a cruel mistress, but she's been good to me. We've had a lot of fun together, the ol' gal and I. I love her sometimes, hate her other times. I start sounding like an Italian movie: “She's my whore, priest, saint, goddess, blah blah blah...” I don't know how to talk about it in any sensible fashion that doesn't sound like cultural nonsense. All I can tell you is that it does play a role in my life, I like to hear a little bit. I don't put any on unless I have a reason. There was a time in my life when I processed music; I'd put it on and process the information, or because I enjoyed it, or because it had a strange working on me, and I wanted to feel that again and again. Why? Etc. etc. Music has had various roles; if I was throwing a barbeque, I'd know what to put on, to create a nice atmosphere. But unlike my artist friends who go into their studios, put on records and paint, it doesn't play that kind of role in my life. I'm fascinated by, interested in, overwhelmed by the amount of it that's being made; you can only hear a fraction of what's being made. And people ask me to make a top ten list; I will not. And don't ask me what record I'd have to have with me on a desert island, because I cannot make that list. There's no way.

This Frenchman wrote me wrote to me and he just had to know. So I wrote back to him, and said luckily I have a friend with some quantum sound accumulator, or something like that, and it is capable of capturing sound which has been transmitted as long as it hasn't been interrupted by a solid surface, or deflected or diffused in any way. This thing can catch 'em, so I can hear all the music that's ever been made. I like it all. All of it's relevant, or none of it's relevant. And that would be my philosophy, if you like. It's all okay, or forget it.

And that's a Cageian principle: you don't like something, so you listen to it twice, four times, eight times, and eventually you'll hear what's good about it. You can ruefully shake your head and say “I give up.” There must be something good about it. Point taken, professor, there's something good about everything. And it's certainly the case that if I'm drunk enough, “Mary Had A Little Lamb” may be just the right some for the night.

Was Coconut Hotel originally going to be released by International Artists?

The Red Krayola, Coconut Hotel. Drag City DC62, 1995

That's all vexed. My lawyer would tell me, “don't discuss anything about this stuff,” because it's still up in the air. In 2014 a lot of this stuff will fall out of contract. A lot of stuff that happened with IA is very dubious, meaning there's a considerable amount of doubt as to who owns rights to what, and why, and when, and where, and so on. That boxed set that you refer to, which was put out by Charly Records, or some arm of Charly Records, that's a bone of contention. But let's put it this way. When we made that record, Parable of Arable Land, Leland was sitting in the control booth. When we made Coconut Hotel, Leland sat out on the grass with Billy Joe Dillard, one of the owners of IA, and they picked grass like a couple of boys and talked about the business. There was nothing for them to do. And they didn't know what to do with [the recordings]. So it was just pushed to one side.

We fell out with them after the Berkeley Folk Festival because we recorded with John Fahey, and they were worried sick about us getting a management offer while we were in California. A record lawyer would have gotten us free in a New York minute. But we didn't know where we were, or what was happening, and we weren't paying any attention to the law part of it. All we were interested in was making that stuff. If somebody showed us a piece of paper and said “Sign this and we'll worry about everything; you're good to do what you want to do,” and down in the contract it said, like, “Your mother will have to work her fingers to the bone for us for the rest of her life,” we wouldn't have even thought about it. We would still have signed it and gone right ahead. Which is pretty much what happened.

So the thing was pushed to one side, and then we fell out with them. Nothing happened. They called me and asked me to make what they called a “second record”, which is where God Bless came from; the “climb-down”, shall we say, from the heights of extremism, by inching back along the limb toward the trunk. We'd gotten ourselves out on this limb and practically sawed it off. But there was no mention whatsoever of Coconut Hotel, it just sat there on the shelf. They didn't even know they had it; it never occurred to them. Then the company got into such disarray, that in the end, I had the tapes. Nobody knew about them, nobody cared about them. I was the only one who cared about what had happened. And all the other IA stuff, that was actually commercial product, was part of the package deal that Leland eventually finagled, he got control of it, and sold it around to this label and that label. But he did not have possession of that particular piece. I kept possession of that. As I now know, if we had been intelligent enough, we could have kept possession of all of our stuff. But it's alright; it never made a huge amount of money. It's not the money question. Not like the Elevators. Elevators made money. But even the Elevators didn't make money; you know what made money out of that catalogue, was the Maceo Parker track, where he's rehearsing the James Brown band. That's a stone groove; I'm down with that. That thing sounds like a loop. That band is so tight; that is as close as you can get to genuine repetition in music, as far as I'm concerned.

The One-Second Pieces present a formal problem. You can only play one of them, and then you have to dismiss the audience and the orchestra. Why is that? Because if you play two, they're related, immediately. And they're so related, if they're close enough together, they sound like they're part of the same piece. And if you play one, and you want to distinguish it in character from another piece, so you play a longer piece after, it still sounds like the introduction to that piece. If you play a longer piece in front of it, then play one afterwards, it sounds like a conclusion, or a joke. There's potential for that mishearing. So the only way reasonably to do it, is to play one of them, to give it a name, go through all the rigamaroll, set it all up, and on the downbeat... “Bop.” And then we all go home. And so on God Bless the Red Krayola, the only way to we could solve it was, “Listen to this.” Okay: the sound of the piano. And then the little ledger that comes between the tracks has a different acoustic quality to it than the rest of the “silence” on the record. Like, a silence within a tune has a different quality than a silence between two tracks. So you can create an acoustic space but even there, it's not really 100% satisfactory. It's really impossible.

So you can write a piece of music that's very difficult to realize, and it's the most compressed amount of music that there is.

Silence is the most compressed?

I think “silence plus one sound”. I think you have to animate the space somehow. I don't know how you could do that with just silence. [Pause] If you were in a situation where you could create two levels of absence, or two qualities of presence: one where there is nothing, and then one where an emptiness opens; a void opens, and you perceive a void. You gotta be able to wrap your brain around what you're hearing though.

God Bless The Red Krayola included some ideas from Coconut Hotel.

The Red Krayola, God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who
Sail With It, International Artists IALP7

Yeah, we tried to take some of those ideas forward. In God Bless it would be our embrace of song form, and also the genre; this is where our (by now) fairly “robust” sense of genre starts to come from; this is where it takes shape. We did not think of ourselves as playing this and that genre, but we made some genres there. That's the way I hear it. “Sherlock Holmes” – it's got a detective atmosphere, “Tina's Gone To Have a Baby”, each one of them is a little world. It was made as a record that you were to hear as a piece. You're not meant to be able to be pulling songs out, listening to this song, that song; you put it on and listen to the whole damn record, and part of the phenomenon is getting up in the middle and turning it over, and hearing the little girl at the end; there, you're in the recording studio, in the room with the little girl. The lights went off in there, trying to soothe the little child, making the little child feel comfortable, 'cause she was doing something so funny, “Gosh, turn on the tape recorder quick!” The urgency of human life is there, and it's got some community aspect to it too. There the Familiar Ugly play some formal roles, like we got some of them singing back-up.

And that record gets to be called a “minimal” record. It was not like a punk record, like “we're gonna get back to basics, good clean rock n' roll, we're gonna run the river Styx through here and start over again.” It wasn't that kind of thing at all. It was not driven by an impulse to basicness. It was just schematic because we were used to working with the stuff we had in our hands, instrument-wise. I had a Fender and Steve had a fretless bass, and Tommy Smith had a regular set of drums. Part of our game has always been to make unusual sounding stuff with conventional instruments; to make electronic music with not-electronic instruments in the purest sense of the word. The logic is informed by the possibility of what amount to category mistakes. That brings the Man into the music, which is not always so nice. You know what I mean by “the Man” right? You're up there in Michigan.

"The Man”?

Yeah, the Man. “You're workin for the Man.” The Man is implicit – the dead hand of capitalism is implicit to all rock n' roll. The Man is implicit to all music which is African-American … by definition. It defines itself that way.

Can you talk about improvisation, and Corky's Debt to His Father?

Mayo Thompson's first solo album, Corky's Debt
to his Father, released by Texas Revolution CFS 2270

Improvisation plays a role there. I would claim a palpable commitment to improvisation, which is characteristic of the whole thing. And it came out of the sessions, but it also has to do with … Corky for example, those are really heavy-duty players, and they're bitching at me 'cause I don't have an arrangement. And I don't tell them the secret: I know what I can do by myself. What I want to hear is what happens when I do it with somebody else. So, I say x and they do y. So, I make them play it, and I've got the machine running, and they want to take the music home and work on the arrangement, get their part together just so, and I won't let them do it. They've had to think, while listening, and that's what I want the sound of. So that's what you get on that record. And in the one case where there is an arrangement, Joe Dugan was allowed to think about the horns on “Dear Betty” and went home with them and came back with them the next day.

So that improvisational thing – I have worked with people like Rüdiger Carl and his COWWS Quintet. The piano player from there, what's her name... [Irene Schweizer], she learned a lot from Cecil Taylor. You wouldn't say she's a student, but she's certainly a follower; she has to be seen as someone who appreciated a great deal what Cecil Taylor does, and in fact hammers the piano and fights the Man. We played in front of Cecil Taylor one night with that band. I was doing some vocal stuff like that, and whenever I wasn't playing, I'd leave the stage. Then, after the show, Cecil said “Hey man, you're the guy who kept leaving the stage.” That's what he noticed. [laughs] Also, when we were in Berlin, somebody said to him, “Oh Cecil, it's so great that you've come to town.” And Cecil said, “Man, I'm just trying to play a gig. Take it easy.”

So, that's what I think of as improvisation: that's Cecil Taylor improvising against expectations. And that's what improvisation consists in: you've got a set of expectations and you're a realist about what it's possible to realize, and what you play manifests your awareness of the limit. As usual, at the limit, one is operating at an extreme; either extremely lot, or extremely little, or extremely middle, you know what I mean? One time Rüdiger Carl said to me, … I've talked to Keith Rowe from AMM, “What is improvisation?” “What isn't improvisation in life?” This is improvised, I don't care about the given forms, it's still an improvisation on themes. Sometimes it's a lot of stuff made up for relations that don't exist anywhere else. So, this is my personal quest against people congratulating themselves for doing the obvious. And I've got a one-man campaign to de-mystify these relations. That is a motivating force in my thinking. Whether they can be de-mystified or not, maybe I'm making it worse. [laughs] It's possible.

Thompson in 2010.

(interviewed by Matt Endahl on December 26th, 2011)

Read part one of the interview.