A conversation.
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Tim Perkis: Well, to start, can you talk about how you ended up in the San Francisco Bay area? Dan Plonsey: I come from Cleveland, born in Cleveland Heights, went away to college to Yale as an undergraduate and majored in math and music, and got married right out of college. My wife was also studying composition, and we went to the University of Toronto for a year and it was really awful there. We loved Toronto, loved Canada but we hated the university, hated the professors. It was my first introduction to the dangers of state-sponsored music. In Canada there are laws that orchestras and ensembles receiving a certain amount of funding have to program something like 7% Canadian music, which is great in a way. But the downside is that a number of students say, look, don't rock the boat, if you can get through this you'll get commissions. Just tell the teachers what they want to hear. So we left Toronto and went back to Connecticut, and after a couple of years my wife decided she wanted to study religion and music. She wanted to go to Harvard or the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and I really wanted to come here because I'd heard a few records. I'd heard ROVA [saxophone quartet], I'd heard Henry Kuntz, I'd heard Henry Kaiser, I forget who else I'd heard. There was this Henry Kaiser record "Ice Death" that had all these Bay Area people on it. I think it was his very first record. The sounds were really strange and interesting, I hadn't heard anything like it, in terms of the kind of instrumental techniques used. So I just though the Bay Area must be the happening place -- everyone knew that! -- so in 1984 we moved out here. I hit a dead spot the first few years. At that time there was a real lull in the improvisational music scene, there weren't places to play, there wasn't much going on, and it took me several years to find out what little there was. I saw ROVA once, but nothing else seemed to be happening. Then in the late 80's things started picking up , with venues like Olive Oyl's and the Heinz Afterworld lounge, and after then things started to flow. You might be able to tell me what was happening 84 thru 86. There were some things going on at Mills College, I think... Yes, I was more in the Mills orbit at that time, I hadn't started getting into doing improv gigs. It was an exciting time there. The Mills thing -- which somehow never was able to come up with a better name than "New Music" -- came from Cage and Tudor, David Behrman and Robert Ashley. We all built electronics gear, messy tables-full of it in the David Tudor style, but with the new microcomputer boards added into the tangle. I wanted to get involved in the improv scene that was developing at that time, so I concentrated on building a setup I could take around and easily setup and just sit in with improv musicians. Well, I started studying at Mills from 86 thru 88. Pauline Oliveros was there part of the time, and Anthony Braxton was there part of the time. That was very important to me, because I had met him earlier. In 1979 when I was a junior in college I took a five-week summer session at the Creative Music Center. Karl Berger and Roscoe Mitchell were there the whole time, and Braxton came in and Leo Smith and George Lewis and a couple of others. At that time I wasn't quite ready for it. I was 20, still in this very intellectual mode of composition and even though I loved their music, a lot of what they would say struck me as naïve or mystical. I didn't get the sense of it, it took me years to process it, to realize they had a lot of important things to say. If you take things literally all the time nothing makes sense, every system falls apart. But if you take things a little bit more metaphorically - and if you take into account all the pot those guys were smoking!! -- You know, it seems from my point of view now, whatever it takes to get you into a zone in which you do things which are really creative, liberated and free from the constraints of what makes sense - go for it.
Anything you can do to get yourself out of that sensible mode - go for it.
If it means inventing wild systems like the way Braxton or Leo Smith have, or however Roscoe Mitchell does it -- now I really appreciate the value of that.
In college I was learning a more systematic approach to music that's still taught at most of the universities: you know, an historical approach, thinking things through and outlining and knowing the instruments and having scores as your reference.
It's not that I don't do that, but there has to be something else, and that something else has to be a little crazy, as far as I'm concerned.
I like the idea that a system you create is really a temporary scaffolding...
Right, exactly, it's like a scaffolding, because when you're done, the scaffolding comes down, and no one even has to know what you went through to get the piece done -- if it involves holding your breath while you write music, or whatever.
I was reading about Jonathan Franzen the writer, who wrote The Corrections. His method was to wear earmuffs, and work in a pitch black room. But the point is that different people have their own way.
I've been reading that Captain Beefheart's band is getting together and doing stuff and they're going to do it exactly the way Beefheart did it except without all the crazy things that he did. There's a story that he locked one of the musicians in a room for 8 hours and said don't come out until you're a fly. That's pretty cruel, but it seems to me that after 8 hours of that, he might have come out of the room a much better guitarist than if he had just spent that time playing scales.
I had the experience in doing computer music composition of finding out that my fascinating complex algorithms didn't really amount to anything, musically. It turned out that it really didn't matter that much what algorithm was underlying a piece: whether it worked musically all depended more upon paying attention to how it mapped into sound, what it actually sounded like, and one's state of attention while performing the realization of the piece. In essence, I learned that complex algorithms don't make music, they may have some kind of temporary usefulness, but that's all.
I think my background is really similar to yours in a way: we do this computer stuff for a living, I was a math major, I have a mind that's pretty good at computer programming. But it's been hard for me at times to figure out how to use that strength; in fact I've found it doesn't help really, it usually gets in the way more. So I've learned how to exploit my weaknesses instead of my strengths!
I mean a lot of music doesn't come so easily to me - there are people who can pick up an instrument and they have some sort of natural dexterity, maybe just for music, or maybe it's a general kind of thing, I don't know. but I don't have that. My mind tends to trip me up when I have to play written music, I get to thinking too much. So I've had to exploit my awkwardness and second guessing and make that a part of the music.
And make it my means for doing something that doesn't make sense.
I notice that in my own playing and the playing of other people who are doing more systematic things, or computer things, that it can be a way to hide. You don't seem like you're hiding to me.
No, I'm trying not to, I don't want to hide. I think that for men in our culture, there's a tendency to hide: hide behind your profession, your clothes, your suit, your authority. And in music, in serial music hide behind that method, and then John Cage comes along and you can hide behind chance! But the common theme is to remove your personality from what you're doing and deny that.
As much as I love John Cage , and of course we've all been tremendously influenced by him...
Just recently I got in a conversation comparing John Cage and Ornette Coleman
and contrasting the idea of Cage -- every sound is musical -- versus Ornette -- every person is musical.
I'd rather be the person that's musical. I'm trying to get out of method, and out of anything that interferes with where the music is really most interesting.
Like the musicality of kids, just the way that they hit the keys on the piano. When I play with my sons they just hit the keys in a way that's so strong and so genuine that it's such a contrast to how I play. I want to get that -- I want to get that kind of sound and that kind of feeling, but with who I am. I don't want to be a three year old, I want to be a 44 year old who has that sort of energy of a three yr old, or six yr old now.
Yes, and one big problem in life -- aside from just getting tired and running out of gas! -- is how do you keep what you learn from obliterating that simple power? I mean, it does make sense that the more you learn the more you might tend to focus on what you've learned, instead of keeping your connection with that initial energy.
Well, it's clearly a trap, an attractive trap.
For some musicians it's not a problem at all, they don't even really see things in those terms. They might say, well, I'm at one level, and now I want to get to another level, and I'm going to get from here to here by just getting better at what I do.
But I don't want to get in the trap of what I know, so I'm always on the lookout for ideas that seem just too impractical or not right for me. Those are the ideas I try to develop.
I mean with Toychestra,there are these 5 or 6 women on stage, their personalities come through so strongly, you know who they are. They project certain characters: it's not necessarily who they really are or maybe we could say it's one aspect of each of their personalities that comes out on stage, or several aspects.
I'm not saying that music has to be autobiographical, but I feel that it has to have character, and the character it has to have has to be a sort of life character.
This is something very characteristic about your music, that I think confuses many people. It's very unusual for someone who is as serious and dedicated to music as yourself to also be interested in working with players of all kinds and levels of ability.
I guess I've been interested ever since I first began composing in working with whats there instead of working with some kind of ideal state. But yeah I've always liked to work with people who are around, and use that as a constraint. If you've got a really good oboist, use them, plus someone who's just a beginning clarinetist.
So right now there are these people around, these great toy-playing girls, so it just seems so clear that theyre the best ensemble to work with. They're right on the edge of their abilities all the time which is something that a lot of better, or so-called better musicians aren't. A lot of musicians work where they're comfortable, but Toychestra is really pushing themselves, their arrangements are almost too complex, the vocal lines are almost too hard.
So you like that sort of sense of danger... is that the way you think of it? People on the edge of their abilities?
Yeah, I like when I can actually see how dangerous it is -- or not dangerous really, because nothing really bad is going to happen. We all talk about risk and danger and stuff like that, but in music nothing is going to happen, really, and with Toychestra when they screw up they just laugh, and they're very upfront about it and they make it part of it and just go on.
I just like the edginess of the sound, it comes down to the sound. And there's also the visual aspect of watching people who are just barely in control, like when you watch a juggler who has this real fantastic finish: you can tell that they practiced it a lot, but there is the possibility that they are dropping things and you can really see all their concentration and that they're operating at more than 100 percent. I guess that's what I like about the musicians that I like the best is that you can really tell when you're in their presence that they're a little bit out of control and that they're well past 100%.
I've always admired the community building aspect of your work: your music itself is concerned with community, and you've also worked hard to organize places for people to play. Could you talk a bit about that?
Back in the early nineties various friends and I would fantasize about having a club: we'd make food and it would be this place where musicians hang out and you could get dinner and then there would be music and it would just be a utopian kind of place. I was ready to do this although I had done nothing whatsoever to make it happen. It kind of fell into my lap when it did happen.
We called it Beanbenders after a Daniel Pinkwater story in which some kids stumble upon a nightclub in the middle of nowhere that's called Beanbenders, and there's just the strangest kind of entertainment and the strangest crowd. By strange I mean all kind of people, in the story there's a guy that comes and talks about baseball, theres a painter who starts talking about how he's painted his whole room white and then the star of the show is a guy with a singing and tap-dancing chicken, accompanied by an accordion player.
That whole image of community just was exactly what I wanted. I wanted there to be a place where all the weird artists and writers and poets and musicians and theater people and intellectuals -- or just pseudo-intellectuals, preferably! -- would congregate, and hang out and talk, and then there would be music and then they would drink some coffee and go outside and talk.
And that's kind of what happened! We had hoped initially to have a diverse kind of musical thing going on, and it did really happen over time. It wasn't just improv by any means: there were classical musicians, electronic musicians, improvisers, pretty straight ahead jazz. Two gamelans played, Toychestra played a couple times and in addition to that people like Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith and the Sun Ra Arkestra.
What inspired me to start doing my film Noisy People was an attempt to get a handle on something indefineable about the music that seemed to interest me. There seems to exist some music that resists having a name, but which lives on the edges of other more established musics and art forms. Some people think of themselves as on the edge of jazz, others on the edge of rock, others on the edge of 'contemporary classical' or academic composition, others on the edge of electronic dance music, and some on the edges of the visual arts, as 'sound artists'. But it often seems to me that all these 'edge musics' really are one thing.
How would you characterize the music that interests you?
I guess the closest I've come to defining it is that it's something like one of the greatest college radio stations -- like WFMU, for instance, or KALX, which is pretty good right now. How do they define what they do? I guess they call it freeform, but that doesn't really do justice to it.
The term "freeform" doesn't tell you much about what it is, more what it isn't...
It's music for the hell of it, really. Sometimes I'll go to a concert of what I think is my music and then I realize, no, these people are approaching it from an alien perspective; these people are perfectionists; these people want to get grants and their aiming in this direction; these people take things extremely seriously, whatever it is; these people think they're carrying on a tradition and there's this whole burden of tradition on their shoulders. And this can happen just as easily at a free jazz concert as at a folk concert.
I identify with all the people that are playing with their format, that are able to both be in a style and love it and at the same time make fun of it. Like the way that Eugene Chadbourne approaches all the songs he sings.
For me it's just taking all the examples that I have and all the music that I love and just going with it all at once and not really worrying about whether it makes sense, or whether it furthers the tradition.
I mean I'm really serious about it in that I feel that it's a really high calling to be a musician. But to be creative demands something more than just learning the music. I think we can allow ourselves to be serious about one thing, which is that we trying to be creative and well use anything at our disposal to do it.
We were talking last night to an artist I always had thought of as a photographer, and she said, "Well, I'm not really a photographer, I just use whatever materials I need to do whatever it is that needs to be done."
And that's how I feel, I don't feel like I'm wedded to free improv, I don't owe anyone anything in that regard.
Just because I'm playing a saxophone doesn't mean I have to be a jazz musician, but also it doesn't mean I'm not a jazz musician: I can be a jazz musician for five seconds and then not be a jazz musician for the next five seconds.
I don't feel like I've really answered your question about what it is that we all are, what it is that unites us, but we seem to know each other when we find each other.
You've avoided the question in the right way though, in an illuminating way! Because to me the ephemeral nature of this music is actually what's fascinating about it. Debussy supposedly said "music isn't in the notes, it's between the notes." So what could be more musical that music than doesn't even have a name?
Right, that's a very good idea, nameless music. Yeah, that does have to be the most musical, I buy that!
So I was going to ask you how you thought your work related to the jazz tradition, but maybe you answered that already, in saying that you could be a jazz musician for five seconds at a time...
Well I'd just say that one of the things that appeals to me about jazz is that it has been a pretty inclusive genre. I mean when you think of all the things that are accepted, even by pretty straight-ahead musicians as being jazz, that really includes a lot. And in the case of all jazz musicians I admire the most, they're not constrained at all by the label.
I just don't consider myself a jazz musician if it means I have to learn all the standards and I'm expected to be able to play a certain kind of way. There are certain things about jazz, or I guess I should say about the way that jazz is usually played, that drive me crazy.
The rule seems to have been for a lot of people: don't do what other people have done. By this definition, if you're doing what someone else has already done then you're not doing jazz. So
if you are playing jazz then you're not playing jazz and if you're not playing jazz then you are playing jazz!
Well, I really do hate the domestication of jazz into a fixed body of knowledge: "okay class, today we're learning the bebop scale." It seems somehow the essence of it is not stylistic and technical details of the way it was played at certain points in its history, but rather that openness you were speaking of -- which lives on in the works of people like Leo Smith and Anthony Braxton.
Right.
About that kind of over-reverent museum-piece jazz, I like that quote from Frank Zappa: "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny."
Right (laughs) You know that jazz radio station that has a bumper sticker that says " KCSM -- KEEP JAZZ ALIVE"? So John Schott made his own bumper sticker that said "KCSM, LET JAZZ DIE."
I think of your work as so oriented towards live performance that I wonder how you think about recording your music. I know you've made a good number of recordings: do you plan pieces specifically for recording, or do you think of recordings as records of live events?
I guess I do think some of my music is not meant for recording, ever. But then other music of mine has been very specifically made in the studio. I did two CD's of sax music, all overdubbed, with me playing all the parts, and some of the pieces I didn't even attempt to record with other people because I knew they wouldn't work. They depended too much on being played by me, with my particular intonation, with my particular rhythmic problems,
and the ways that I'm particularly off.
It's like if you had a stutter and you were writing pieces based on your stutter. You can't bring other people in to perform it unless they have the same stutter, not a different stutter. So I have written music for sax quartets and for multiple sax ensembles, but I think of that as different than what I would do by myself.
Tell me about your band Daniel Popsicle.
It really comes out of a fantasy, or vision. I've had several fantasies -- or fullblown fantasy worlds! -- about where I would go with music. One, the earliest, was the idea that probably most of us have had: you form a band and you tour the world, and all your friends are in the band and it's a pretty big band, and you have a great time touring all over the world doing your own original music. And for me it was important in that fantasy that it would be a cooperative and everybody is writing music for everyone else.
That kind of happened a little bit, without much of the touring aspect. When I first came to the bay area my ex-wife and I formed a group called the Composers Cafeteria, where we did concerts and everyone wrote for everyone else. That worked pretty well for a while until the group got top-heavy with composers who couldn't play very well, and those people should just be wiped out!
Composers who can't play are worse than the capitalist bloodsuckers!!
Well, maybe they're not, they're not worse, no one could be worse than an Enron executive, but they're kind of the Enron executives of the music scene, composers who can't play, or who won't play.
And then there's the Beanbenders fantasy, the fantasy of the place where people would congregate... and then the third fantasy, which comes from reading science fiction books for way too long. Imagine a kind of post-apocalyptic Philip Dick-ean world in which people are coming out of the ashes and they form a band (of course!) with whatever instruments that have happened to have survived. And the best music is somehow half destroyed, and we have ten clarinets and only two trumpets...
So I just called everyone who I knew who could read music and who seemed like they had some time on their hands -- or who I though should have time on their hands! -- and got some people who can't play that well and some people who can, to do this post apocalyptic band. Initially it was going to be a marching band, but it turned out I knew too many guitarist and bass players so it just became a band.
So I started writing this sort of simple music for the band, with the idea that it would be like on of those asian bands, like a Thai band or an Indian band where everybody basically has the same part, and the people who can play a little better get to elaborate a little bit. It's sort of heterophonic, and the tuba player has to take a few breaths and doesn't play all the time. So the pieces I was writing were based on listening to some of this asian band music, and also incorporated different elements of rock music, and just little fragments of things that got lodged in my brain... wiith the notion of a post-apocalyptic world in which even musical memories have been damaged.
So that was the impetus, and it's happening, and we've recorded a lot with that and it will be released. It sounds really good on recordings, but maybe not as good as it would sound in a sort of dusty plaza in front of the presidential palace....
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