The reason I'm asking about Monica Vasconcelos is
that the musicians you surround yourself with seem very sympathetic to your
way of musical thinking, or feeling. There's a lot of emotion inside this
music, yet none of these players over-emote. So, how do you talk to the
musicians in these settings? With these pieces, I assume they're improvised
in part.
What
I tell them depends entirely on who they are 行 if they're working
musicians, well, it's a very different discipline; for example, if I work
with jazz musicians, they can tell me more about my chords than I can. And
they're very quick with that stuff.
And what I try and do
is, I try and prepare what I want them to play on, in such a way as it's a
good enough guide to let them do what they do, and then I would sort of
trust it. I mean, something Miles Davis said, it may be apocryphal, when he
was asked how he worked out his arrangements, he said, "My arrangement
is the musicians I choose." And somehow, there's a lotta good tenor
players, there's a lotta good bass players, good singers and so on,
trombone players, but I found a sort of little bunch of friends who 行 I
tend not to work with them together, I tend to work each separately, and
I've gotta do the whole thing just at their pace, in their way, so it
depends entirely who it is.
I mean, I was rather
apologetic with this one to Annie Whitehead [trombone] and especially toGilad Atzmon [sax and reeds], who's a soloist, you know, a straight-ahead
jazz musician, he's a bebop man. I said look, I just want you and Annie to
play chords that I might have otherwise played on keyboard. And he's really
nice, he just loves to play, he said, We'll do this. And that's what he
does. But he just gives it that physical and human edge; I just wanted kind
of meta-physical objects in it, on this record.
I do also like to give
everybody their moment; not just to be kind, but when I'm listening to a
record, my favorites are Ellington and Mingus, 'cause they know they just have...a
flute player, that soloist 行 everybody in the band somehow steps forward as
a character in their own right. And that identifies them. I love that with
Ellington, that he'll have three or four trumpeters, and I thought I knew
who they all are, and, some of the tenor players and stuff, and with Mingus
you have that. So that's one thing I learned from those two. I wouldn't put
myself in the same bracket in terms of technical skill, but just why are
these the most wonderful large-group records [laughs], considering they're a
wonderfully large group? And I thought, that's it: Everybody there is a
character.
And so at first I try
as much as possible to organize it so they do know what the song is
already. I do more or less everything as a solo record 行 my fallback is
that it could be if they don't turn out always that good. I make sure I
actually could do it all myself, and then that way I feel safe. If they can
enhance it and bring the chorus to life or bless me with a little virtuosic
solo somewhere or something, then all the luckier for me.
The horn arrangements all over this record are really
outstanding.
Well,
thank you very much. I mean, I sort of heard them, how it worked, and I
sort of sheepishly said how it is to Annie and Gilad and indeed to Yaron
[Stavi], who played quite a lot of bass; and there's a young woman named
Seaming To, from Manchester, but her parents are from Hong Kong; she plays
clarinet, and she's got this Theremin.
Sometimes, within that,
once I got it tight 行 I've always done this, ever since Rock Bottom 行 I really almost present
them with a solo piece by me, with all the piano chords I put in, or how
the voice goes, everything, and then say, "Could you cover these
chords here and stop there," or whatever, and chop it together later.
And if you're lucky, if
you choose the right people, they go with it, and not only that, they kind
of enhance it and bring stuff out, if you've got the right people. Like
with Gilad, he loves to play, and he loves to make suggestions, and he loves
to track his own parts, like "How about I add a tenor part here?"
or whatever. And he and Annie, there was one or two chords I had where they
said, "I hear what you want here, but I think it should be voiced like
this," and I would listen to what he said and know if it would be
right and I would go with what they said.
So I said to Gilad,
"Do you want arranging credits as well?" And he said, "No,
absolutely not, I'm simply playing what I hear you want me to actually
do." Very nice man.
Very nice guitar by Paul Weller on that, too. On the
track called "AWOL," it's intriguing how you've got the horn
parts twining with the bass line.
With
that, actually, it's like with film, in filming where in the end it's down
to the editing, where I make sense of it all, chop and change and move it
all around, and lift some things and put them down, like a cross between a
film editor and a conductor, in a way.
When I get together
with Jamie [Johnson] the engineer at the end of the recording process, we
try and make a record out of this. With that particular one, I actually had
them all playing all right through it, I mean original takes of that, I've
got about eight of Yaron playing the whole thing just on bass; but at the
end you only hear a little bit of that, quite early on, just overlapping.
And then I had Annie and Gilad play the all chords all the way through; and
only once I'd got it all recorded did I decide to just have Annie here, and
then I'll bring Gilad there, and so on.
Gilad did about five
completely different solos, he ended up doing a kind of Turkish clarinet
thing; but he also did some kind of little bagpipe thing, he did all kinds
of different things. Then I just sort of listened and listened and
listened, and then the Turkish one just sounded right.
That track also features Dave Sinclair on piano. He's
one of my heroes from way back, from Caravan and Matching Mole days, and
all those tasty fuzzbox Lowrey organ solos.
Oh,
yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Dave. You know, he lives in Japan now, he's married
to a Japanese woman, and I hadn't seen him for, I don't know, it might be
20-30 years. But we got on really well; he was a bit freaked out by what
happened in Matching Mole, with that total improvisation coming in, he was
uncomfortable with that, so that's why he's more into a structured
song-base thing, and I worked through my improvisation and drum thing with
other people. But I've known him since he was a schoolboy.
It was great, he just
turned up. He just came on a rare visit to England, and he came round just
when I was sort of working on that song, and I said, Dave, would you do the
piano on this? And bam! Which we recorded here at home. He just played so
simply, so gracefully and so authoritatively, you know, and it was so easy
to take that take into London and just get Yaron to do his double bass and
Annie to add her baritone horn.
And I should say that I
had them going all the way through all of it, and then edited it right
down, for arranging reasons 行 and in that case it served the arrangement.
But what are you singing about in that one?
Yeah,
Absent Without Leave: It's to do with the anger that you feel, the hurt,
really. You think, "There you go, we're a pair, we're an item, and [laughs] come back
immediately!" It's bad-mannered if you think someone's had an affair
with somebody, but that's what really that's about. Alfie wrote the words,
that's all that I can say. You'll have to get what she's on about then.
In the second act you have a song called "The
Here and the Now," where you say it's "a beautiful day...but not
here." Why not?
Well,
it's funny. It's a joke. You know when you're going out shopping 行 I live
in a small town, I know most of the people I shop with, and you know people
talk about the weather and or they complain about the rain and so on, and
they say, "Isn't it a horrible day?" And I say, "No, it's a
beautiful day, but just not here." [Laughs] It's just a line that stuck
in my head.
In
"Be Serious," you sing, "Feel so sad and lonely, no one to
tell me what to do." Is that with regard to religion/identity
politics? Or you say, "Do us a favor," implying "just shut
up." Or you flat-out say, "Leave me alone." What's going on?
You're ornery.
I
am, aren't I? It's a kind of bad-tempered thing there, because I'm not
really saying there that religion is useless, I'm just saying that as well
as not being able to join in any of your religions, it doesn't help me if
you say, "Well, that makes you a sinner and you'd better say sorry and
行 " Look, no, no, I can't do that, because don't you understand, I have
no one to say sorry to. It's not there in my head; you can't say over and
over again and make it in my head if it isn't there, you know.
So it's just
exasperation, I think. Grumpy old man. I have my loyalties. I believe in
Charles Mingus. [Laughs] No, I don't apologize to him, or thank him or pray to him
for rain. I'm glad he's here, that's all.
I
relate to that lyric in a strong way.
[Laughs] Well, that really just
flooded onto the page, like a flood of tears into a tissue, you know.
Who is the protagonist in "Mob Rule"? And
what is his attitude?
Yeah,
well, 'cause a lot of that third section is really about the kind of
exasperation and amusement of living in England, you know, whether it's
walking around a rather boring little country town, so on and so on. But
there's two versions of town life in England, and the one that I really
like, which is this kind of time lapse that you sometimes get in cities,
which is sort of represented by a [duo] between Gilad on tenor and Orphy
Robinson on steel pan 行 the steel pan has that kind of connotation, and
that kind of rikkity raggedy drum beat reminds me maybe of the kind of drum
beats you get when you get a lot of schoolchildren, you know, their natural
raggedy beat.
I love that; I love
coming across those things; not just in London, but whether I'm in Spain or
anywhere, I think, "Yeah, this is the human life I like. This is
humans at their best. I love this."
So that's one way to
community, a beautiful thing. But then we're suddenly enclosed with a local
council meeting, of advisors, talking about what's the best way forward for
the community and stuff like that. I've been to a few council meetings
here, and I tend to participate in local politics, and they're so dismal,
the kind of formal procedures, and the words - they just suffocate you in a
kind of archaic fog. In the case here, there's a sort of pseudo mystical
organization called the Masons. It's a bunch of kitsch romantic imagery,
can't call it a religion, it's just a cult, but an old one; people in high
places here, whether they're priests or policemen, turn up a lot in the
Masons. Which is fine, none of my business, except that when in public
office, you never quite know what their motive is for allowing one person
to have a shop sign outside his door and another person can't. And
sometimes the only answer seems to be one person is a Mason and the other
one isn't.
And then it's not
tragic, but it's irritating. And I use the analogy of a mob because it has
kind of traces of Mafia, and Mob Rule is a pejorative term for democracy,
isn't it?
"A Beautiful War" was written with Eno. I
suppose there's a kind of irony built in to something like that, so pretty,
and such hopeful lyrics. But is irony the right word for it?
It
is, and irony is something I really worry about. In principle, I wouldn't
think anything I do ironic, because it's hard enough to understand what
anybody's saying anyway without them deliberately saying the opposite [laughs], but sometimes that's just
how it came on the page, so "This feels right, here we go, I better do
this."
Yeah, it is irony, and
it's just sort of someone else, I don't even know where it came from. I
don't even know how I feel about this person. We have to be grateful for
the great bombers in the second world war 行 you know, it's the curse of the
Good War; we had a good war once, so you can't always say it's a bad thing.
I live in Lincolnshire,
which is called Bomber County, large tracts where the British air force
launched bombing raids in the second world war; it's quite resonant around
here, and you get romantic pictures around the local shops, you know, from
an airplane height, looking over the beautiful valleys of England as they
fly off to bomb a foreign country and so on.
So what can I say? I
missed the second world war, I don't know what that's like, and they sure
were brave 行 I mean, they'd come back absolutely...if they came back, they were
tired, and they were young men and doing their best. You can't argue with
that.
But since then, the
English-speaking people have bombed about 20 countries 行 if you work it
out, about one every two years. And I think it's getting to be a bad
habit...[Laughs]
We're cheating these young
men by telling them we're defending our country, telling us everybody is a
Nazi horde about to take over Western civilization. This is kind of turning
into a lie, really. And it's not fair to these young men to abuse their innocence further.
Here in America, it's seen as an employment program
for underprivileged young people 行 an opportunity.
Yeah!
I understand that, and you won't see ever in an advert for the armed services
行 they'll tell you about how you can become an engineer and make, like,
friends, if you go to other countries and kill people. And they'll try and
kill you. They would never say that.
We have a romanticized
view of war as a subject. It doesn't end there. There's always this sense
that if you just bomb enough people, just kill all the bad people,
everything will be all right. But the people have sons and daughters, and
they're gonna want to get back at you someday. "The sins of the fathers..."
This isn't the way to end things; it may be the way to do
some things, but it doesn't end things. It just takes you somewhere else.
How much does ambiguity figure in your musical
thinking 行 how not to be too literal about the emotions, political views, etc.
Like
with irony, I don't look for it. I don't want to hide behind a thing, you
know, that "I'm an artist, I don't have to make a decision here."
I really do try and think clearly with as much scientific precision 行 my
mind is untrained 行 as I possibly can to work out what's going on and what
to do. But even then, in the end, the further I get with that, I'm left
with this paradox, this insoluable paradox, and so that's how it ends up on
the page.
But I don't want to get
into this "us artists are above certainty, we're in a higher
realm," I don't feel that at all. People ask these questions, and
sometimes people do find answers, and they get it right, and I'm full of
admiration. We've got a whole generation of kids now who are so tuned into
global ecological problems, since people like Naomi Klein have alerted
people to things, and a lot of kids go out to do brave and tough work in
different parts of the world.
And there's another
thing that's happened in my lifetime, which is that, although I think
there's just as much racism in the sense of dividing the world up into good
guys and bad guys, the kind of day-to-day color prejudice that you took for
granted when I was a boy has almost evaporated here. And most places I see,
it isn't an issue as much, I mean it is if people don't speak the language
or they're associated with a particular event or paranoia at the moment.
But on the whole in
England, there are people in all kinds of colors in all kind of roles in
society, and it's just sort of taken for granted now, it's not even an
issue. And that's a beautiful thing that's happened, so it'd be really
cruel and ungrateful just to say the world's going to hell in a handbasket,
'cause it isn't.
I think Trotsky said,
you know, there are two sides in this, always, there's two great powers:
one is the government and the other one is the people, and there's more
people than the government. So, get a grip here. [Laughs]
I hope that the same will be true for the Arabs and
Muslims in England and elsewhere.
It's
seen very different in America than it is here. We in Europe have a large,
significant Muslim minority, and I know that there's one in the States,
too, but it's not as established as it is here. This goes back a long way
with us.
It is definitely a very
complicated relationship. And here, it is definitely a love-hate
relationship. Whereas my impression from people who live in America, people
are completely baffled as to what's going on there. We sort of just go,
when somebody blows something up, and says, "This is a war of ideas, a
war of the worlds!" you know, we think, "Oh, come on, this is an
8 1/2-year-old's way of looking at things; what you have here is a bunch of
dreadful young men doing dreadful things; they're criminals, find 'em, catch
'em, put 'em in prison." It's a mad young men crime-management
program, not a global idealism. To turn it into...to play the game of Bin
Laden, of turning it into a global ideological war 行 he's the only person
who's to benefit from this, you know, because he gets people to see it that
way. He's crazy.
I mean, I know
Palestinians and Arabs, they're much more sophisticated and varied and
pluralistic than you would know from news broadcasts. I've got great
friends all over there, I mean obviously Gilad and Yaron are from Israel,
you know, so they sort of keep me up to speed on their side of things. In
fact, there's a friend who, without my help, runs a website for me, and
he's from Israel. But I also work with Israeli Arabs, and I've got a
friend, a Palestinian refugee who lives here, and it's a much more kind of
personal, complicated thing here.
There's a lovely young
artist living here named Karen Russo, an Israeli who's working in London,
and she was in the Defense Force, and she's a bit embarrassed to speak out
here, because that kind of us-and-them thing is part of London life; for
them that's very difficult. I don't get the impression that it's a part of
the fabric of life in the U.S.
Not quite yet. Yet so much suspicion and fear has
been raised in recent times, I'm just afraid for those people, that they're
not going to be able to live their lives normally, without having to deal
with this kind of distrust.
Absolutely.
But there are long-running discontents, and I don't think the people in the
U.S. understand the humiliation and hurt that was felt at not the
foundation of Israel but the way it was done. I know that the Palestinians
had had years of colonialism under the Turks; they thought, "Right, at
last we'll be free of the Turkish empire," and then suddenly the
powers that be say, "Well, no, you don't get that, we need your
space."
A deep kind of
unwitting racism was felt throughout, and the sad thing is, in those days,
life there wasn't particularly religious, it was just a lot of liberals
left and this kind of stuff, and there still are, but in the end the only
people who've got that kind of blind certainty are the extremely religious
people. It puzzles and embarrasses a lot of Arabs that this has happened.
And the reactions of the West at the moment are like trying to put out a
fire by pouring gasoline on it.
Suppressing people is
not the way to make them like us. I'm just trying to gather together the
various things here, but I have some good friends on all sides of this
stuff, I haven't got the right to come to a definite conclusion, certainly
not to come down to dictate the answers to these things. It's not I'm being
an artist and aloof, it's just I don't know what to do.
Back to the album. Again, the structure or arc of the
entire thing has its own very personal symmetry, I guess you could call it.
For example, why'd you choose to close with a song sung in Spanish?
It
was kind of an exit strategy from being an Englishman in our times. And to
dissociate myself a bit from the culture that I'm a part of, to remove
myself in some way, and step outside it. The last section is to do with
exit strategies; the first piece, for example, is done in Italian, and it
seems to be a kind of strange mystical mixture of feminism and fatalism,
but it's all gonna be all right in the end because women keep having
children and they regenerate life, and so it's a glorious thing.
And I love the feel,
the sound of it, and that's one of the things 行 that it goes
somewhere. That's an exit strategy. It's not nihilistic, it's not like
suicide, it's like really finding somewhere else in your head.
You
reference Garcia Lorca in this final section as well.
He
was a classic surrealist, and as an added poignancy, he was killed by
Hitler. He was homosexual, which wasn't a good thing to be at the time, and
so on. But his were classic surrealist strategies for poetry writing. It's
funny that he's so popular in Spain, because his writing is impenetrably
surrealist. But he's still taken as a kind of war-hero poet.
Then I had Orphy
Robinson playing a kind of controlled free jazz 行 in fact, it wasn't free,
because I actually put a grid there for Orphy to play to, then I took the
grid away.
Let's keep our fingers
crossed for Latin America. In Chile they have a prime minister who was a
torture victim during the Pinochet years, so that's a nice exit strategy
for that; another country has an indigenous Indian elected premier, so
that's a first, and that's a kind of survival strategy which I hadn't
expected or hoped for.
So I look for these
moments, and you have to be skeptical that the world's going to be a better
place because of that, but that's my Che Guevara moment. I really, really
need them. [Laughs]
Irony might be an inadequate term, but surely an ode
to Che done in 2007 feels different to one done in 1967.
Oh,
of course. I'm showing my age. I'm in my 60s. And this is all our exit
strategies, as was free jazz kind of the new wave of art. A good detective,
an Agatha Christie character, could tell my age just by checking through my
nostalgic references for exit strategies. [Laughs]
It's a thrill to hear you continuing to do such
unique, great music.
It's
so nice to hear that from the other side of the world. Believe me, I really
need that.
Well, we're going to try and make you a superstar in
America.
[Laughs] I don't think I'd look one.
I'd have to go on a diet for that.
This piece just may do it.
[Laughs] I just need to keep on
making a living at this stuff. I don't have a pension, you know.
I wish you good health.
Thank
you very much. Someone told me I was easy to talk to, but I don't agree,
because I tend to ramble and switch from one thing to another. The only
thing I think I can ever get right is the music, and then people ask me to
talk about it. I will, but I can't do it in the same disciplined way. It's
so hard to put things into words which at the point of doing were beyond
words anyway.
