Downbeast - music blog

THE BEAST: So you haven’t done a record as a leader since The Constant Flame – and this includes Cloud Plate, which was released in 2005 but recorded just a week after Flame. Why the long downtime and what happened to you in the interim?
ALEX CLINE: First of all, I’m not the kind of person who has an absolute boatload of diverse musical ideas that I want to manifest at any given time. It takes me a long time to come up with and refine the ideas that I do have. I’m fairly selective about what I want to say musically. Part of that is the fact that I work mostly as a sideman, so I can get a lot of experience with a lot of diverse music. I get certain aspects of my musical needs met that way, but when it comes to doing my own stuff I tend to limit myself…That also makes me not particularly prolific, and the fact that I’m not trained in the normal musical sense means there's a bit more of a process for me to actually get the music written down. But more than anything, my life completely changed during that time. The Constant Flame was done before I became a parent, at what was known to be at the time of the recording the end of what existed at that time as the Alex Cline Ensemble, we knew going into it that was going to be it for that band.

In what way?
The first two Cryptogramophone CDs I did, Sparks Fly Upward and The Constant Flame, were always conceived to be complimentary recordings. I guess they could be considered one big project in a way, even though they were done few years apart. At the time that Sparks Fly Upward was done, the group was still able to play concerts, although hardly ever because scheduling is always difficult, the fact that the vocalist Aina Kemanis lived in Berkeley was not a huge hurdle but it was a hurdle still. This is also the kind of ensemble that had great difficulty in finding the proper and appropriate venue: Too big and too dynamically diverse for some spaces and too small and essentially unpopular for others...It’s a group I feel never really got to develop sufficiently as a concert unit…Between Sparks and Flame, while everybody knew there was going to be a second project with related material, but in the interim a couple of things happened that were particularly significant: Aina decided that she didn’t want to be a member of the group because her experience of singing the music was becoming too nerve-racking. I really went out of my way to feature her and that was causing her a lot of stress. But even more than that she was planning on retiring from singing altogether, so I basically cajoled her into doing The Constant Flame anyway.

The other development was that the bassist Michael Elizondo had become a an in-demand co-writer and ultimately co-producer in the hip-hop and pop-music world and at the time that The Constant Flame session was being planned, he was under contract to Dr. Dre and was therefore had to be available to him at any time...On top of that both CDs were produced by Peter Erskine who quite possibly at that time had the most difficult schedule to work with…so it just turned into a big hassle and made the whole endeavor not just impractical but somewhat unpleasant for me to be wrestling with, particularly losing Aina’s voice and not wanting to find a replacement for her. I really didn’t know I wanted to do next at all and I decided until when I figured that out I wasn’t going to do anything. I had some old musical ideas lying around that never got finished or performed, but I just left them on the far back burner and did other things for awhile until I had an idea of what I wanted to do next, which went through some changes. But it was awhile before it became “the light-bulb moment.”

What was the light-bulb moment?
I was at Crypto world headquarters designing a CD cover with Jeff, and while we worked he was playing me the unsequenced, unmastered mixes of Myra Melford’s Be Bread CD The Image of Your Body, which he was preparing to release. Two things happened: I was enjoying it a lot…and I started to hear possibilities, particularly in what Myra was doing with the piano and the harmonium. I thought, ‘Wow it sure would be cool do to something with her some time!’ [Laughs]

I was thinking of this somewhat obsessively, and I realized that I could put a group together consisting of Myra, Peggy on cello – whom I’d been trying to do a project with for over ten years at that point – Jeff, and a bassist named Scott Walton, because I’d been working with him a fair amount at that point, particularly in this trio that I had called the Rain Trio with Eric Barber, and we had developed a real rapport as a rhythm section, plus he’s has a really great energy to have around in any project. Scott is not very well known; I think that largely has to do with him being in San Diego although he’s moving up to Northern California…He’s moved around a lot, and he was living in San Diego when I first met and played with him which was actually with Vinny Golia, when Vinny looking for a good bass player to fill in the void for Ken Filiano when Ken moved back East. He invited Scott to come up and play a trio gig with us at what was once the Inner Ear Concert series – at what is now the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, by the way. It was one of those things where we were doing for lack of a better term a ‘sound check’ in this very cavernous dance space and we just started playing and Scott and I just instantly connected. I consider myself really blessed to be able to play regularly with bassists where hooking up is not just easy but fun, and Scott was one of them. Especially when we were getting into the ‘free time’ end of things. The sort of foundation and momentum that he was able to generate -- it’s something that years of experience taught me was uncommon and when it came time to play metric time it was the same thing. A bond was forged immediately, and we’ve had the pleasure of touring with Vinny in a quintet and then playing together in The Rain Trio whenever that was possible, which was never enough.

So anyway, this is the long way of explaining that the musical ideas I had put on the back burner and the things I was starting to think about that were newer ideas could be achieved by this group and probably realized in a way that was going to be exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to do. So I e-mailed Jeff and told him: ‘I have yet another ridiculous pipe dream of an idea’ and his response was: ‘Great! Sounds good to me! Let’s do it!’ I mean, what a complete maniac!

Jeff Gauthier

Thank God for Jeff!
Yes. So that process took two years. Jeff had been encouraging me to do another project and I kept telling him, ‘I don’t have any idea what I want to do. All I know is that I don’t want to have voice on it. I’m not going there. I’m done with that for awhile because I don’t want to create any comparisons. I want to do something different.' So when I thought about this, a couple of interesting facts emerged from the idea: no electric instruments involved. Actually, it wasn’t that much of a conscious decision, it just turned out to be a feature of that choice. I was happy with that because I realized it would have a somewhat subtle but still significant orchestral difference for the last two CDs, but also it as the exact same instrumentation that I had originally intended to be used on The Lamp and The Star...because I was already developing music for that before I learned about the surprising geographical proximity of Aina in Berkeley, who was somebody I always dreamed of working with and assumed lived in Europe. So I retooled the music to include her, throwing stuff out and writing new stuff. Before she entered the picture my original concept for the group on Lamp and Star was the same: violin, cello, bass, keyboards and percussion.

That was a weird thing I realized later, that I had returned to this original idea, and the thing that made that possible – because I frequently get musical ideas that include long sustaining keyboards – was the fact that Myra plays harmonium, which I’ve always loved. So that was an exciting prospect. When the time came, I sounded everybody out about doing it, and thankfully everybody agreed. Another one of the intervening factors was that I did some concerts up on Northern California playing Myra's music with her band, which was helpful, because I had played with all of these people by the time we recorded but not all of them had played with one another.

Scott Walton

Was it a bit of a high-wire act mingling people you’ve played with for years versus the newcomers?
Yeah, I wondered about certain elements and how successful they would be, because one of the other things that happened not too long before the recording session was that I had played a concert in town with the dancers Oguri and his wife Roxanne Steinberg in which I along with Myra was providing the live improvised music. Myra was playing almost entirely prepared piano. That was also a deeply satisfying artistic experience and one in which I felt that Myra and I developed even more of a rapport in an area that wasn’t covered in her own band. But Peggy and I hadn’t played together since we were both in Vinny Golia’s Large Ensemble, which is where I first heard and met her. I had heard things she had done on other people’s recordings and her own, but beyond what I knew would be her obvious ability to play the written music I wasn’t entirely sure of what would be the most appropriate or comfortable setting for her to be in as a soloist, so that took a bit of risk-taking on my part. Once we started rehearsing, I asked her about a couple of sections: ‘How comfortable are you with this? I’m not sure this was working' and she told me what her feelings were and I wound up making some modifications to allow for a greater comfort level for her and to present her in a more balanced way.

But beyond that still everyone has to work together, and my intuition about this stuff tends to be pretty good. When one works as a drummer playing to accompany other musicians, the drummer really should have a good sense of how people play and how they could work together because I think it’s implicit in their role to be the bus driver/gatekeeper/liaison who is able to tune into everybody’s individual musical energies and synthesize it and make it all work in some ensemble way. So I was basically following not only my own instincts…and happily it absolutely worked like a charm. This was a group that had never worked together, that had never played the music in concert—in fact, no one had seen any of the music until I e-mailed it to them a couple of weeks before the session, so that made me a little bit uncertain, and its different experience going into something where you have a clearer idea what to expect and what its going to feel like on an interpersonal level.

Happily, the two rehearsals and the two-day session all went so effortlessly and smoothly compared to so many of the projects I’ve done – even with people I knew really well and had been playing with for years – that it was a little freaky for me. And very gratifying, because not only did it work the way I hoped it would, it worked better than I hoped it would work—particularly once we got into the studio and the musicians started doing what I wanted them to do, which was take the music where they wanted it to go. I don’t write all that much heavy written material. It’s not overly complex or demanding music in that way, but it does need to flow from event to event in a seamless and logical way, and at the same time I intended it to be open enough so it doesn’t have to follow a predictable course…Typically in rehearsal that doesn’t happen because people far more are concerned with getting the notes right and the road map down and in my music, as some people will tell you, for the longer pieces it tends to be important that one knows where one is at any given time. You have to know where you’ve been and where you’re going or it can be a little disorienting. But when we got into the studio, people were saying ‘I want to do this’ and making it happen.

Peggy Lee

That must be a nice validation after such a long hiatus as a leader: That your instincts hadn’t calcified in any way, that they were right on the money.
I guess! I’m really personally interested in the balance between composition and improvisation, and I’ve been told by musicians on most if my projects that they at times find it hard to tell what’s notated and what isn’t, that they don’t know where the one ends and the other begins….To me that’s a sign of success. Really what I want is it to be something where the flavor and the atmosphere and the intent of the piece of music remains consistent, but within that there are all these areas of improvisation for the musician to interpret what’s happening that's always going to come out differently, always going to be a new and hopefully fresh experience...This is why when I listen to Continuation, I can actually enjoy it. [Laughs] Sitting around and listening to one’s own project is not something one wants to do very much. But because I am so utterly taken with and enthralled by how everyone played on the CD—the soling, the interpreting, the interacting—it delights me endlessly. Myra and Peggy, the two musicians I had worked with the least, turned out to be the most consistently surprising and therefore thrilling for me, because they were two of the people who really at times had their way with the music, and felt comfortable and free enough to do that, and the rest of ensemble responded to it.

Myra Melford

You mentioned there’s some older material on Continuation. What are some of the oldest pieces that saw the light of day?
The back-burner stuff was the two long pieces: “SubMerge” and “On the Bones of the Homegoing Thunder.” The original impetus for the latter piece goes back to the late 80s-early 90s and a section of that piece uses material that I had lying around since the 70s, which is the melody that Jeff plays in what I refer to as ‘the ballad section,’ a melody I had sitting there since probably around when we started Quartet Music. Then the other long piece, “SubMerge,” the basic idea for that piece had dated back to the Alex Cline Ensemble days, probably the 1990s, between the recordings of Sparks Fly Upward and The Constant Flame. Both pieces are pieces I pondered doing with the Ensemble but neither of them had presented themselves as being very ideal pieces for that group…especially since that ballad section of "Thunder" was originally supposed to feature a setting of one of the poems of Thomas Merton. I really envisioned the setting of the Merton poem as being sung by a male vocalist. [But] who was I going to get to sing it? Thinking about it, I realized that I could still do the piece if I changed some things around. I changed that section to one that employed that ancient bit of material, which fit right in, and bailed on the vocal/words idea, thereby realizing the piece in a new form.

I’ve noticed that the sequencing on all of your records is very well thought out – they seem to have almost a narrative arc to them. What is your process for that?
When I did the first two Crypto CDs, I wasn’t entirely sure what the finished sequences would be…My uncertainty came from not knowing how long these pieces would wind up being when they were performed and recorded. But in the case of Continuation, I’ll preface it by saying that the way I compose…that is part of my process is that I actually conceive of the entire piece of music in my head in its entirety, the shape of it, the events, even the tonality of it…I conceive of it in this large gestural sense and then I go and do a process of essentially filling in the blanks, the actual notes, the material, and in that process, frequently for the longer pieces, Peter [Erskine] always made jokes about how I am “the master of the long form” which was I think also his way of suggesting I might want to write a shorter piece once in awhile.

Well, you did came of age in the late Sixties!
[Laughs] Yeah. For this record, by the time I was ready to do it I had such a clear idea of what the music was and what I thought would be the approximate length of the pieces, I actually knew what the sequence was going to be before I actually recorded the records. I already figured it out, partly because I wanted the flow of the musical events to be a certain way so it could tell a certain story, sort of a micro and macro-cosmic journey aspect employed, and I always tend to think of CD projects that way. When we finished recording, Jeff asked me, ‘
[engineer] Rich [Breen] is going to make CDs of all the roughs, if you have a sequence in mind you can tell him, otherwise he’ll run them in whatever order he wants,’ and then after a brief pause he said: ‘You probably already knew what the sequence was before we ever recorded it’ and I said, ‘Exactly.’ I did run the thing though in my head and it did thankfully work that way.

Speaking of ‘narrative’ and ‘telling a story,’ your music has invariably been called ‘cinematic.’ Does this have anything to do with being raised in a company town?
It’s funny. Growing up in the proverbial ‘center of the movie business’, Nels and I used to always hear people say, ‘Wow, everybody in L.A. works in the biz!’ And this was totally not our experience growing up here. We hardly knew anybody who worked in the biz, rarely met anybody who worked in the biz, even though we were aware that our dad, when he taught at a junior high school in Westwood at a time when celebrities still sent their children to public school. He would occasionally mention that he was teaching so-and-so’s son or daughter, or later he would tell us ‘Oh I had her in my homeroom’ after someone had made a career in the entertainment world. It wasn’t until I became a parent myself and started meeting other parents in my daughter’s preschool or the charter school she’s at now that it seems like an amazing majority of the parents here have some connection to the industry.

But it had absolutely no influence on me whatsoever. I don’t think I even got into films as an art form until I was in high school, when I’d go and see noncommercial European films, and that was during the early 1970s, when even American films were pretty innovative and interesting and challenging, so it was kind of a golden age for really interesting and uncompromising artistic films...Frequently, like many people, I am very taken with any really beautiful and effective film soundtracks, one of things I like about film soundtracks when it listen to them without the films is how uneventful they are, because they don’t have to be ‘exciting’ all the time, especially the kind for the films I like, which are films that many people seem to find hideously boring. [Laughs] I like the fact that soundtracks can be so simple and yet so effective, because simplicity is a quality that I appreciate and have come to feel okay about in playing my own music. It took me ears leading up to the nervy move of becoming a composer/bandleader to be comfortable with a simple idea to be okay.

I suppose this was inevitable, but what are some of your favorite film soundtracks?
I like many of the soundtracks from these films—Zbigniew Preisner's music for [Krzysztof] Kieslowski's films, Ton-That Tiet's music for The Scent of Green Papaya, the music for Princess Mononoke—at least till the last few minutes, when it suddenly turns unbearably schmaltzy. I like a lot of Thomas Newman's scores: The Shawshank Redemption, Flesh and Bone, In the Bedroom; Newman can go from subtle to active and still have it work well. There's the first two scores that Mark Isham did. I think he revolutionized film soundtracks with those first two: Never Cry Wolf and Mrs. Soffel, which actually features Lyle Mays on piano. And of course a lot by Toru Takemitsu: Ran, Black Rain, Woman in the Dunes. There are a LOT more. I have to confess that I think one of the all-time greatest and most appropriate movie themes is Jerry Goldsmith's music for Chinatown. A favorite music-related documentary of mine is Heima, its subject being Sigur Ros, one of my favorite bands.

Do you have any non-musical influences on your music?
The other two Crypto CDs I’ve done have a bunch of music that is dedicated to people or to their memories, and this is a sort of a key to understanding where some of my ideas come from that are not necessarily musical, because I want to pay tribute to somebody’s artistry or presence who have inspired me or moved me or transformed me. While I didn’t do that completely on the new CD I couldn’t avoid it altogether, although it is interesting that two of the pieces that are dedicated to people are two of the older pieces, and maybe that’s telling, I don’t know. I decided I really wanted to memorialize Dan Morris because he was such a close friend of mine…it also has to do with the fact that some of the more recently composed music on Continuation really came out of my considering and responding to feelings and events during the year 2007 and 2008, just before we recorded the CD, that includes the death of Dan and the death of my mom, which were in days of one another, and goes back to becoming a parent in 2004. I also becoming officially a student of a particular Buddhist teacher, whose teaching has helped change my life for the better…I guess this is a long way of saying that I despite the considerable challenges of my life now—particularly that I don’t really have time to practice my instrument any more—I can truly say that I am happier now than I ever have been. That may factor into Continuation in some way as well. Because for many years I have been someone who has been concerned with not only artistic and emotional matters but quote-on-quote ‘spiritual things.’ That aspect of life always had some sort of influence in my music making. So while that doesn’t mean that I’m going to suddenly start making ‘religious’ music, it does mean that one of the consistent ideas or principles that unites the artistic, emotional and spiritual depths of my life is an overriding concern for the concept of beauty, and by ‘beauty’ I don’t necessarily mean ‘pretty’; in fact, I don’t mean ‘pretty’ at all. I mean ‘beauty’ as something reflecting or suggestive of what we might call ‘truth’, or something that transcends our very limited perceptions of life and ourselves….Therefore ‘beauty’ in this case that somebody might listen to and describe as being ugly but I think you can't have day without night. You can’t appreciate something like ‘calm’ without having to suffer the turgid confusion and aggravation that precedes it—you wouldn’t know one if it wasn’t for the other, so that tends to inform the terrain of a lot of the musical areas that influence me and at times forms the flow of musical events, how I ultimately decide to present them.

How would you put that into the context of Continuation?
A lot of those considerations are all over this recording. For example, the piece for Dan, that piece is sort of a combination/juxtaposition of my personal feelings of loss combined with what is essentially an improvised duet between percussion and cello. I think [that song] was designed to be both playful and painful; the title “Fade To Green” is a reference to not only the end of a life but the fact that green was Dan’s favorite color. And then the opening pieces, “Nourishing Our Roots” and “Clearing Our Streams” are inter-related. Both were written around the same simple harmonic region. The titles are taken from what could be called themes that are presented as the Lunar New Year ["Tet"] every year in my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition, which is Vietnamese. And every year he comes out with two sort of themes to take with us as material to work with throughout the year, and for the year 2007, which I already explained was a significant year in terms of my compositional ideas and my feelings, were titled “nourishing our roots” and “clearing our streams.” I thought they had particular significance during that difficult year.

“Nourishing Our Roots” has not only to do with nourishment but creating a system of support to strengthen the roots, to ensure solid and flourishing growth, and what I was thinking about this piece I was thinking of roots in the sense of the way of our ancestral roots, not only my own roots but my daughter’s, my daughter being Chinese…So the piece is really based on a simple pentatonic melodic idea that functions both as a chant and an overture to the rest of the record. The music is partly chosen to reflect the roots in our trans-continental family unit, hence the slightly modernized but largely characteristic Chinese-ish sound of it -- although that basically pentatonic scale is common to other Asian music as well as, of course, the blues.

Upon pondering "Clearing Our Streams," I thought about how clearing our streams, or purifying that which flows through us or for us, could mean heavy labor--moving big objects, masses of debris, old crud -- as well as simple cleaning I was reminded of how the idea of healing in Chinese medicine is the freeing of obstructions/clearing of blockages in order to get energy, or chi, to flow freely through the meridians, the energy "streams" in our bodies. Bearing these thoughts in mind, I began the piece...with the idea of building up momentum, resolve, and intensity toward this end. As the piece moves from tension/release, some dark terrain, and some concerted introspection, it gives way to a unified effort as things become more "labor intensive." Work becomes unified [and] shared effort, becoming almost like a dance, ultimately becoming celebratory, with flow finally being restored. Also, it seems to me that in order to "clear our streams," we must also look deeply into ourselves and face directly into that which impedes our own freedom--fear, pain, regret, bitterness, discrimination--making this process a deeply internal process as well. The "green" interpretation of this title is fine, too!

That's WAY too much explanation. I suppose I could have spared you all this and simply answered your general question to me as "I get inspiration from my life"!

NEXT UP: The Downbeast Interview with Nels Cline